Exile

Napoleon, Pablo Casals, the 14th Dalai Lama, Cicero, Oedipus the King, the Man Without a Country, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lord Byron--all are famous, in part, for spending time in exile. The Italian poet Dante, himself an exile for two years, describes it: "You will leave everything you love most: This is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You will know how salty another's bread tastes and how hard it is to ascend and descend another's stairs."

We asked NCR readers to share their thoughts on exile in our eighth "variations on a theme" feature.

We were the luckiest people in town. Our family of seven lived adjacent to an empty lot. During the winter months, it was the site for ice skating and sledding. In the summer, kids came to play baseball, basketball. Most glorious of all, when the carnival came to town in August every year, for 10 days it set up on our neighboring lot.

We had moved to the city two years earlier from a large wheat farm in the Northwest that was lost because of persistent droughts. The carnival was a revelation to us, especially the ferris wheel. It frightened us because all we knew of play before was pitching horseshoes and riding a pony. This year each of us decided we would spend a nickel for a ride on it.

Our day at the Carnival was to be the first Sunday after it opened, at which time Dad would dole out a dime to each of us just before we left. I wanted my dime earlier, on Friday. Dad said, "OK, but if you lose it, you'll have to sit on the front stoop until we get back." I said, "I'm 8 years old, and I won't lose it." Yet when it was time to go on Sunday, I couldn't find it, so I sat on the stoop as people from our town and beyond walked by headed for paradise. I might just as well have been sitting on some remote island.

In the late afternoon, I noticed a shiny object circling down from the sky in an arc. Whatever it was landed in the weeds that grew between the street and the sidewalk. Though forbidden to leave the stoop, I got up and discovered a dime. Snatching it up, I ran to find Dad at the carnival. He asked where I had found the dime. "In the weeds. It fell from the sky," I explained. He stared down at me. "OK," he answered in a way others would many years later whenever I narrated this experience. That evening when I removed my shoes prior to bed, a dime fell from one of them. The clink drew cheers from my siblings and a look of amazement from my parents, a look I would come to understand many years later.

MONICA L. ZABOR

Arlington Heights, III,

The first morning after I woke up in Florida, I felt like an exile. I thought surely this scary feeling of being where I wasn't supposed to be would pass, but it didn't. The first year or so, I would wake up crying. The feeling that I had been exported to a foreign country and given up my citizenship became more and more a reality.

We had made moves before but this time we came alone, leaving the six children behind. In many ways, my children were my visa. Suddenly, I became untitled. I missed them immensely, and we called each other daily. It was a terrible time to be separated from all my loved ones, my safety net, my security system. After being in Florida seven years, I was struck with cancer three different times and in three different areas of my body. I had my husband, and the children tried hard to make up for not being here by taking turns flying down. But everyone knows how it feels to be sick far away from home and here I was, and still am, 1,000 miles away from the familiar.

Will I ever feel like a native? It doesn't look like we'll be able to go anywhere else, maybe ever, so why not give in and become a Floridian? It's that last inch that I won't give up. When I'm asked, where I'm from, I quickly and proudly say New York/New Jersey without missing a beat.

SUE SEPPANEN

Boca Raton, Fla.

In 1997 a repeat offender drunk driver killed my sister's 10-year-old son. Jacob was with his dad, returning home from his hockey game, when the other driver crashed a stop sign and plowed into Jake's side of the family van, killing him instantly.

Through legal maneuvers, the driver tried to evade responsibility for this crash despite also having put a woman into a wheelchair in a crash he had caused while drunk 11 months earlier. Surprisingly, the day before his trial, he agreed to plead guilty to aggravated vehicular homicide. His sentencing was set for the week of Thanksgiving.

A large gathering of family, friends, and coworkers came to the courthouse for the sentencing to support my sister, her husband, and their 8-year-old daughter on what had to be a desolate morning for them. As could only happen in a smaller town--and in a pre-Sept. 11 courthouse--the accused came out of the elevator and faced a hallway full of Jake's family and friends, a priest, and even the highway patrolman who had been called to the crash scene. With remarkable restraint, we said not a word to him, nor he to us. He sat alone, with Jake's little sister not 10 feet away, watching him, knowing who he was, her brown eyes staring.