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<div style="clear:both">j'aime la vie
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<div><i style="background-color: white; "><font color="#000080"><b>Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!</b></font></i></div>
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<div style="font-family:helvetica,arial;font-size:10pt;color:black">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Jaime Vergara <pinoypanda2031@aol.com><br>
To: editor <editor@saipantribune.com><br>
Sent: Sat, Aug 24, 2013 5:38 pm<br>
Subject: August 29<br>
<br>
<div id="AOLMsgPart_1_d5af229e-6320-476d-aab3-f5809341e757">
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<div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The End</font></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">From the Internet:</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">As I was lying around, pondering the problems of the
world,</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">I realized that at my age I don't really give a rat's
ass anymore.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">… If walking is good for your health, the postman
would be immortal.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">… A whale swims all day, only eats fish, drinks water,
but is still fat.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">… A rabbit runs and hops and only lives 15 years,
while</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -96.3pt; "><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">… A tortoise doesn't run and does mostly nothing, yet it lives for
150 years.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">And you tell me to exercise? I don't think so.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Just grant me the senility to forget the people I
never liked,</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">the good fortune to remember the ones I do, </font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">and the eyesight to tell the difference.</font></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">I love the author’s
paraphrase of Francis of Assisi at the end.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">We are coming to the end of
our writing. As one of my soul mates who
went through chemo and now lives the struggle of a cancer survivor says,
talking of end things do not come easy.
Everyone avoids the subject of death.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">My theological awakening,
when the discipline was still considered the queen of sciences, occurred in the
60s when a strapping 18-yr old Pinoy lawyer wannabe chanced on an ecumenical
Youth Assembly at Silliman University in Dumaguete City (an institution started
by Presbyterians in 1901). I bump into characters
like the Nazi-executed martyr Bonheoffer (Freedom), biblical scholar Bultmann
(Question of God), theologian Tillich (You are accepted), and the ethical
visionaries Niebuhr brothers (Church as social pioneer), et al. We consequently teetered to the left.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">Add the opening of closed doors
and shuttered windows of the musty Basilica by John XXIII, and I found my mind
quickly in the expansive quadrangle of the monastic cloister contemplating
moves not even common to Jesuits. A sail
later, from Manila to SF’s golden gate, by Greyhound to the woods of Kentucky
across the prairie of the Midwest, I quickly entangled myself in the on-going
theological upheaval at the time, </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">buttressed by a youth revolution and a civil rights
movement with truncheons and live dogs.
Those were heady days to</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "> be playing attention to
one’s life.</span></font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">A decade later, an elderly
couple, a renowned Princeton University educator and head of Union Theological
Seminary in New York when the fierce winds of Vatican II were blowing wildly to
the Hudson, and his wife, decided to take on “the freedom of the Holy Spirit” with
an intentional overdose of sleeping pills at 75 and 80. </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">Euthanasia was the dreaded
term for the act, espoused as far back as Socrates downing the hemlock, restored
at the cutting edge of a Christology that saw Jesus not as a victim of Roman
connivance to Jewish defensive paroxysm but as a willful act of taking the
cross unto one’s entire being. </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">The Van Dusens
decided that the springlike burst of joy at birth and its muted wintry chill of
death can no longer be just left to passive resignation in nature. As increasingly a feature of birth, death had
become an item of choice.</span></font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">I was liberal but not that
progressive. Michigan was our vacation
State, with friends living in Flint when graffiti was still unseen in neighborhoods,
and Muskegon still elicited mirth and mystery from foreign lads like me. There was Jack Kavorkian in Pontiac, bringing
sanity to dark corners but later vilified in U.S. media as Dr. Death, sentenced
later to 10 years in prison (served 8) for practicing physician-assisted
suicide.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">My Dad at 57 rode a
motorbike to supervise his assigned territory in Cagayan, a province in
northern Luzon. One late afternoon, in
his desire to get home before sundown, he taxed stamina too far and ran head-on
to a bus. Medivac </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">to Manila and
subjected to the wonders of reconstructive surgery, he could not go through an
airport security without triggering off the alarm bell and flashing red
lights. Steel had been conjoined to his
bones. </span></font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Retiring early, he joined my brother in Hawaii. Later, in his late 80s, he would pray, “God
take me,” for the pains that ailed his body.
My last visit with him was when he was 92 at a nursing home, still smiling
but lost on figuring out who-the-hell I was.
He died at 94 after attempting many times to escape from the home, often
found wandering in the middle of the night on the busy highway, perhaps, hoping
never to be found alive again. </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Unhappily for him, one of his sons is a chaplain with
the Honolulu police department, so he would invariably be escorted in a
flashing limo of Aloha’s finest back to the ward.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">My mother lies in a nursing facility in Honolulu where
she is assisted to eat at appointed times; she sits and snoozes on her wheel
chair awaiting her turn to be guided back to her bed as caregivers are assigned
their numerous patients. She turns 94 in
September.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Ending is not something we decide. We would rather have someone else decide it
for us. Most of us would rather be on
automatic ride in the great roller coaster of life. To those who still reside in a two-story
universe, as my father did, we allot a lot of decisions on an external power we
call God.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Though the terms <i>hara-kiri
</i>and <i>seppuku </i>entered our
vocabulary recently, we are not close to contemplating their actual
execution. What we do know is that
setting endings is a glorious liberating thing.
We are bidding <i>adieu </i>to this
page and the island of Saipan. </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; ">Our 10-4 is not casual. It</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "> ends with</span></font><span style="vertical-align: baseline; "><font size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> a dot. Period.</font><font face="Times New Roman"></font></span></div>
<br>
<div style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; clear: both; ">Jaime Vergara<br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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