Exiles use technology and cyberspace to kill time and bridge distances.
In many ways, we live to read email, buy a phone card, send text messages, or do a webcam.
From a line of a poem I got from the email about a mother and her two sons, age 4, and who met a road accident on Highway 109, I came up with a rewrite: The angel walks the beat everyday on the higways of our lives.
The kernel of that rewrite is this line from the poem, the line written in fine print by a policeman who prepared the accident report: "The angel walked the beat tonight on the Highway 109."
I do not know who is the author of that poem.
But the poem tells of the boys' deceased father taking them both away from the crumpled car while their mother kept on praying to God to spare them, spare them, no, not my kids, oh God!
I try to reflect on this from the perspective of the exile.
The exile is always on a journey, a constant to-and-fro, a constant presence on life's roads, roads that are bumpy, unpaved, sometimes with open manholes.
While on this journey, he meets many things, peoples, angels, and God.
He must meet God, his God.
He must find God everywhere, see through the many events of his exilic life and see from these events the myriad signs telling him of the the need to hope and hope some more.
For exile is hoping: Hoping for the best that is yet to come.
Hoping that the search for the better life is going to be realized.
Hoping that tomorrow is going to be a better day.
Hoping that the spirit of life will take care of him, guide him, feed him, nurture him with the sacredness of that hope that never dies but springs eternal.
The exile hopes: He hopes that the angel walks the beat everyday on the highways of his exilic life.
A. S. Agcaoili
Torrance, CA
Began June 8, finished June 9, 2006
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