Christmas in Self-Appointed Exile

 The sun set over Thailand.  The air was warm, liquid, bathing me, calming my spirit seeming lost in a strange land.  The seeming I think because I wanted to identify myself with familiar surroundings.  I had been battling with this desire for several days.  Longer really.  It wa a test.  For I believed that the spirit lives here.  With me, among me, and in me.

Sure, I was thinking of home.  Thinking of friends, of family.  I saw the snow in my mind's eye.  I could feel the cold on my skin and the warmth of the clothes I did not wear.  There was also the warmth of the homes and people's smiles.  There was the food and the colours and the lights, the wine and the excitement.  I wanted to taste the wines and the sweet breads.  I wanted to hear the voices discussing the children and laughing with old friends.  I wanted to rub the cold out of my cheeks as I stepped into the house.  I wanted to bundle myself up in a coat and scarf to go visit the neighbours.  I wanted to see the fire dancing in the wood stove.  I wanted to see moonlight dancing in the snow.  I wanted to see the stars sparkle.  I wanted to see the magic of the blues and greens and yellows and reds of the Christmas tree lights.

The United States army invaded Panama that day.  I watered the young trees around the house.  I got a sunburn, too.  I tuned up my motorcycle and adjusted the exhaust valve.  I went to Ladree's place and helped her plant squash.  This meant hoeing, sprinkling fertilizer in the holes where the seeds were planted, then planting the seeds.  All by hand.  Dusty, hot, and dry.  Then Ladree and I ate rice together.  Something didn't make sense when I heard the global news, when one of the American soldiers in Panama said, "We are the soldiers of the little people," and this was heard around the world on radio.

Christmas came with a little soft brown lizard darting back and forth on the wall searching for insects.  Christmas with classical Thai music drifting across the rice fields, coming from the temple only several hundred yards distant.  Christmas with a large brass bowl filled with drinking water, clear and sweet.  Christmas with cigarettes, matches, and a small collection of poetry called Names of God.  Christmas with a wooden floor, a single bare electric bulb, and the walls covered with tapestries of dragons and wild beasts from the forests.  Christmas with five large envelopes stuffed with letters from home.

Christmas in exile?

No.

Christmas with my heart both at home and there, wishing the best for everyone and holding them all in my open arms, giving my love as frail, poor, simple, and far away as it was, but giving all the same.

Villages and Cities, Rice Paddy and Cars

 I look at this thing and I call it a village.  Made up of bunches of little things.  Like wood houses on stilts, dirt paths, woven baskets. Also children’s voices.  And buffalo and rice and glyricidia trees and paddy and the wind.  No rice without a village.  No village without rice.  One and the same thing.

            I look at this other thing and I call it a city.  Made up of a bunch of different things.  Like concrete sidewalks, motos, canals, and overhead wires.  Also light at night.  And music and cloth and colourful flags and diesel.  No neon with cities.  No cities without neon.  Pretty much in any country you know.

            Villages and cities change.  People live and die.  Families come and slowly go. Hearts are broken. Joys are found.  Stuff is built up.  And stuff is undone.  Villages and cities are kind of the same.

            And somehow different. Because we can see the entire physical village, because we can easily walk around its circumference, we think it is uncomplicated, simplistic.  A city is very big.  Strolling in the midst of streets and buildings, we are content because we believe we understand the colossus surrounding us.  Complex and sophisticated.

As though a village is not complex.  As though we can build a fish.  Or a buffalo.  As though we can build a village which was there for, perhaps, a thousand years.   To build an automobile, if we are lucky, sticks with us for twenty five years?

We are failing miserably as a species to understand the distinction between the complexity of a village and the complicated quality of a car.  The production of a car consumes some fossil fuels and some minerals.  The operation of a car burns them up in running.  Spits them out.  Rusts.  Ends.  For all intents and purposes, only one species, humans, involved in the entire process.  This is simplistic, complicated if you like, but not complex.

In ten square meters of rice paddy, you have maybe 1,000 different obvious species of insect, plant, bird, and many things living, using and reusing quite some minerals and materials… and then they do this interactively with humans, who also live with buffalo and trees and chickens and infections.   Seems kind of complex, especially since we do not even know how these things really work together.

 So I wonder how do we believe that we, humans, define this world?  Why not that we are defined by this world?  Instead, my people, my education taught me to believe that things ought to be this way or ought to be that way.  Somehow, I was told that my two cents mattered.  That we can fix problems and make things work.  I have been taught to believe how a human world matters.

Yet, when I sit in the village, under the shade of a thatched roof, watching two children play in the dust, surrounded by nothing but rice paddy, the soft wind, and a straw munching buffalo, for the first time in my life I am humbled.

The village is such a humane world.

And so little upon which it depends is human.

From Sombong's Laundery

Rainfall

A crowd of shopkeepers gathers at the little tables under the awning in front of Sombong’s laundery.  They babble, point, and guffaw at the shenanigans the rain brings to their street.  Motorcycles brought under cover.  Shoes left on doorsteps soaked already, unceremonious sacrifices.  Who cares!  Oh ho!  Your shoes are wet!  Ha ha!

The rain spatters furiousl.  Wet darkness swamping down in sheets.  People.  Absolutely soaked!  Rickshaw drivers continue peddling, changing only the bend of their heads to allow water to run off their brows.  Lights of cars and trucks dancing in the murk, swushing wheels beeping sopping engines roar by dull come again gone.  Two young men hop under an awning, to another awning, store front to store front, their white shirts pasted to their backs and their black dress pants hanging heavily.  They hop one last time to the awning at the nightclub - ah, ushers.  The girls who work there, too, laugh when they open the door to let them in.

Now black as pitch, streetlight piercing, taillights red streaming past, pounding water from the sky, swashing sounds.  Damp drafts nudge the heavy air hanging in the laundery.  Little tables littered with glasses of thick coffee and cigarettes.  Bodies sitting, some clothes wet and dank, others dry.  All eyes turned to the yawning black square, the storefront looking out at rainfall in Ubon.

The Laundromat

The shop is deep by eight metres and wide by three.  Racks of clothes, baskets of clothes, two ironing boards, three dryers and a washing machine clutter the space.  A ceiling fan swirls above, obliviously swirling, swirling, while people cloth baskets food smiles anger come and go.  There are two patterns of linoleum on the floor, one marked with orange squares and the other spattered with blue blots.  This is Sombong's shop.  She is twenty-eight.  At the moment she is out.  She zipped away on her motorscooter to tend to last moment business before the rain fell again.

Thud-crunch tinkle.  Silence.  An accident on the street.  Excited chatter and bodies rush past the opening of the shop.  Chatter turns to laughter, so the accident not serious.  A child stands still at the entrance to the coffee shop.  Eyes staring wide after where all the people went.  Her hair and little dress buffetted, flickering in the wind.  Her face and shoulders relax.  It is not Sombong.

A fellow who had got knocked off his motorcycle by a truck is now sitting on a chair just inside the shop.  Some ointment is applied to his foot and then a bandage by the woman who was driving the truck, a friend of Sombong.  He is sent on his way smiling with ten dollars in his pocket.  Sombong arrives, grabs a bag of clean laundry, and leaves again.  Two other friends arrive, wearing tight jeans and flowers stitched into their jackets.  They ask for Sombong and decide to sit and wait.  An empty tv squats on a nearby table and watches the women listlessly, waiting for the rain.

Outside, grey evening darkness.  A swushing wind threatens rain.  In the shop, we are glamourless, two fluorescent bulbs casting grainy light, the in-here distinguished from the out-there.

The rain falls.

Rainy season laundromat.

The Amway Gal

She slides in out of the rain, sits down, and says she that she is Sombong's friend.  She's got a sparkling, delicate watch, bands of silver on her other wrist, a ring of gold on each hand, whopping huge earrings, hair curled in a permanent, a pretty face.  She, she believes, has got Sombong sold.

She has handed Sombong a pamphlet with lots of sharp pictures of pots and pans and cosmetics and household cleansers and other assorted etceteras.  Each page is colourful and the items are neatly arranged.  Some pages have a blue scheme, some have a pink scheme, and some a vibrant yellow.  The pamphlet has just so many pages, not too few.  Short written descriptions tucked neatly in columns to the side.

Without a breath in between she slips Sombong a card.  Explaining this and that.  You use this for that and that for this.  Use some here, or there, oh everywhere!  That is for some of the time, this is for all of the time.  So many places, uses, applications.  Hardly costs a penny.  Oh!  And this is for that and so and so used that once for this, over there, over here.  The air around her filled up with pots and pans and visions of non-detergent hands.  Out comes a sharp, leather notebook.  And this is how much I am making!

Sombong places the open pamphlet to the side of the ironing board and, keeping her eyes on the pictures and her ears on the Amway gal, she reaches to the left for another basket of her many customers' clothes and pulls out a shirt for pressing.