[Oe List ...] Salmon: in gratitude

[William Salmon via OE]

Jaime--
    For the duration of our relationship via OE/ICA, and more recently in your monologues on human existence, I am grateful as you fed my innards; understand that your human existence as a representative of Asia et al is certification that we live in a global society where we are nutured by the global village. 
    In the event that your insights are infrequent, please understand that the world is different because of your representation of what humane-life looks like. 
    Inner Peace,
    Bill Salmon
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: via OE 
  To: oe at lists.wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 4:03 PM
  Subject: [Oe List ...] Fwd: For June 20 from Jaime






  -----Original Message-----
  From: Jaime R Vergara <pinoypanda2031 at aol.com>
  To: editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
  Sent: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 7:00 am
  Subject: For June 20 from Jaime


  Goodbye, America

  I should title this article as Goodbye, Columbus, for the main characters in my recollection were folks who drove all the way from Columbus, Ohio to Fort Wayne Indiana to meet and share a meal together at Chuck E Cheese, for all the children and the adults.

  The Columbus retinue included my second wife (er lao po) with our daughter and her younger brother, both diagnosed ASDs.  She will turn 22 this August and he was 19 this April.   Along with them was a very competent aide who assisted my ex-wife to make sure that my daughter and son were cared for the midst of their non-normal neurological condition.

  My group coming from outside Chicago included my eldest daughter from my primal spouse (yi lao po) who drove with her two sons, one at 6 who is cavalierly brilliant, smarty suave, advanced in language proficiency, and an assertive 4-yr old brother who exhibits hyper-activity, extremely contrarian social responses, and repetitive behavior that qualifies him within the current diagnosis of ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder.  In total, there were eight of us that occupied rooms at a local Hampton Inn outskirt of Fort Wayne.

  For those unfamiliar with the characteristics of “autism”, they can Google the subject.  There is no shortage of attempts at enlightenment on the widespread condition, from the symptoms to the myriad prescriptions of dealing with it.  I had written enough about the condition and the local CNMI families with children diagnosed under ASD, along with my experience with a few SpEd students assigned to my 6th grade class in PSS’ valiant attempt to mainstream their learning, that to add more would be an overkill.

  I am using the Indiana meeting as the occasion for my intentional farewell to North America.  Yup.  T'was almost 50 years since I sailed for 20-days to San Francisco from Manila, taking citizenship 20 years later to deter immigration officers from detaining me for further scrutiny since it was unusual for a Philippine-descent immigrant to qualify to be a citizen and not apply 8 years later!

  My style of commitment was through covenants.  Three covenants of marriage with three American ladies made me a prime candidate for psychological profiles to determine possible "flaw in character".  Add four other "significant others" and we are definitely deemed unstable.

  I was also communally covenanted with some folks who took their churching seriously, their bodies on the barbwires of history, designing human development projects that simultaneously dealt with all the people and all the issues personal and social in a delineated geography, bringing to the enterprise the gifts of the 20th century scientific, and secular revolutions, and appropriating the gifts of the inner city, the urban center, the suburban spread, and the exurban green into the social demonstration.  The Ecumenical Institute in Chicago had enough sense to dissipate when the center would not hold in the mid-80s.   

  I had meant to drop in on Sheridan corner Lawrence in uptown Chicago where the Greenrise building is currently an urban demo but decided that my farewell would be a drop in the postal box of materials that might be of interest to the institutional archive.  I am done socializing.

  An off-shoot, the Realistic Living Institute, rigorously mapped the spirit in the last 30 years with the use of Christian symbols and metaphors; I bid them adieu as well in the wetlands of Bonham in Texas not too long ago.

  Appropriating the image of the "dead man walking", dead-and-resurrected, has me singing my "One Moment in Time" to be 86 years, leaving me with the last of the 5- phased 17-years each journey to consciously age graciously into the sunset of my years.  I began by writing a bio-profile early this year from the perspective of the other side of 86.  Not beholden or fearful of the mystery of the unknown future, I am lucidly covenanted to the 86-year journey of this body into human history.  Should it factually turn out to be more or less my statistical projection, c'est la vie!

  The price is emotionally taxing.  I am bidding everyone in North America physical and emotional "goodbyes", just leaving a window of connection ajar being only a mouse-click away on the other side of the planet in today's technology, but mentally, willfully, and totally raising the gates on heretofore covenants into my new covenant with my new circles of consciousness in China of my far east Asian continent.

  My genetic connection will be to four grandsons with the family of my two eldest daughters in Chicago and Oakland CA who have gleefully developed their own signatures with no shortage of flourish; it is to their children that I launched a seven-year-itch of writing.  

  The second layer of genetics will be the ASD world in Columbus where two children I was privileged to help bring into existence but defaulted in their upbringing; and a shy but gifted writer daughter in Pittsburgh who is gingerly nursing the blooming of a literary self-consciousness.

  I told friendly connections in several places that if we ever were to see each other face-to-face again, it will have to be in Asia and/or the Pacific.  Paalam!  Goodbye!  Zai Jian!



  j'aime la vie
  pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

  yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!


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