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<div style="font-family:helvetica,arial;font-size:10pt;color:black">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Jaime R Vergara <pinoypanda2031@aol.com><br>
To: editor <editor@saipantribune.com><br>
Sent: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 7:00 am<br>
Subject: For June 20 from Jaime<br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><b>Goodbye, America</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">I should title this
article as <i>Goodbye, Columbus, </i>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">The Columbus retinue
included my second wife <i>(er lao po) </i>with
our daughter and her younger brother, both diagnosed ASDs. She will turn 22 this August and he was 19
this April. <i> </i>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">My group coming from
outside Chicago included my eldest daughter from my primal spouse <i>(yi lao po) </i>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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 6</span>th<span style="vertical-align:baseline"> grade class in PSS’
valiant attempt to mainstream their learning, that to add more would be an
overkill.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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, <i>c'est la vie!</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4">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. <i>Paalam! </i>Goodbye! </font><i style="font-size: 18px;">Zai Jian!</i><font size="4"></font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><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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