Note that this is not the first time that this has happened to me, this losing of post in cyberspace because blogspot is either cranky or plain nuts or on high maintenance, whatever this means.
And so this morning, I lost again the original of the "Letting Go" piece, the one that I wrote as my way of ruminating the events of our life as a family going through some form of a vacuity because of absence which is more on my part.
The burden of proof in this absence is on me.
By a prima facie evidence, I am guilty, your honor: I am guilty of wandering, of going to places other than those that I can call 'home'.
I remember that I had planned to go away with the family about eighteen years ago.
Life in Manila was not getting anywhere then.
There was the political crisis that made all of us teeter to perdition, to that fall from grace.
A man promising something better, some salving solution to the mounting problems of the day, came home but met with murderous bullets.
Another man decided to get sick while in power and so the gangsters surrounding him plotted to take control of his reign.
No one was spared in those days and I told the missus, Perhaps, perhaps, we could go away from here, go some place else, to Melbourne, to Perth, to Adelaide. My friends are going there, they are all running away. I have a student who has gone to Lovain--everyone is leaving this wretched place.
The son is young, she said.
He was, barely two years old, and getting on with a toddler's life, with his showmanship abilities that began with 'Only you' sang as if he was drunk with Yakult and ended with the same 'Only you' as if he had the hangover in the morning after a whole night of carousing.
Karaoke was yet to be invented at that time so it was the rolled newspaper, or the flashlight, or anything resembling a primitive microphone that he used for his daily rendition of the same song in that street in Maria Payo.
His audience was the great grandaunt of a teacher who called him 'my sweetheart'.
The rumor of a leader dying of a terrible disease compounded all the social problems in those times--and those times were becoming harder and harder as more and more money was being printed to fight off inflation by making the money in circulation get dizzy with circulation. Just that, as simple as that.
So what did he say? I emailed the missus.
Let him be, she said.
Let go of your children, the Holy Book said.
Your children are not your children, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet said.
And so today, I let go.
I pray for the first born and give him the blessing to decide things on his own, in his own terms.
I see the possibilities from a distance, from the vantage point of exile.
Like me, the children will one day wander, search for that which is meaningful to them, look for their piece of earth in their own sacred place, in their own sacred time.
Letting go is letting loose someone, with your prayer and blessing and hope and trust.
I let go.
A. S. Agcaoili
June 10, 2006
Torrance, CA
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