Mary, Mary

 Mary Wesley is on my mind as I wake up, nine books in a rapid row and then she said she had nothing more. She used her own life cannibalistically, but shrouded it in plot and character. Her life was her material.

I’m approaching the age when she began to write as a serious business. Her children were grown, many of the men she had loved were dead, so were her parents. She was estranged from her sister, and her good female friends were not the sort to care if they found their scandals revealed in a novel.

She was knitting sweaters to keep herself alive until she found that books would do that and much more lavishly too. She had learned to be frugal, and her children were provided for by her first husband’s estate so she became generous toward people of straitened circumstances, whether she was close to them or not. Her papers were filled with letters of gratitude, waiting for her biographer to find after she died.

She was beautiful to the last, more and more as she aged. She was described as small and finely drawn when she grew old and she indulged herself with cashmere and silk and good shoes, as soon as she was able to afford them. She loved a broad brim on a black hat and was photographed frequently in profile, displaying a firm little chin well into her old age.

Robert Bolt loved her enough to leave Sarah Miles for her, until he found that Mary was no longer the marrying kind but a woman who refused to submerge her own talents in the more demanding ones of a husband, a state that she knew far too well. He was twelve years younger than she but that wasn’t the problem. In her eighties, Mary flirted outrageously with a lover of a woman who was her age; the man was twenty years younger than either of them. She pouted later that she wanted a young man too.

She and her best friend were predators when they were young. “They hunted in pairs,” a man who had lived to tell the tale observed, and a photo of the two of them, sprawled full-length on a lawn surrounded by men and looking triumphant, bears witness to that statement.

She was often photographed in a two-piece bathing suit that bore little resemblance to a bikini but was ragingly daring in the 30s, with its bared midriff. Her figure looks almost statuesque with long legs; although Mary was a tiny woman, she had great presence and style. A photo of her after a court presentation, dressed in the robes of a peeress and holding a cigarette, her husband clipped out of the picture, just about sums her up.

It never occurred to her not to be a householder, in true British fashion. She was rooted in England and having her life flower under two world wars certainly did a lot to keep her that way. At least twice her second husband was given good jobs in Europe, and once Mary joined him there, in Berlin. But his mad first wife destroyed his career and that was the beginning of near-poverty and the death of travel.

She was desperately poor after that husband committed suicide. She had been keeping the household going until his death and then she fell ill. She had put her Dartmoor cottage up for sale and a prospective buyer found her there in bed, a sixty-nine-year-old woman who was too ill to speak, alone in a perishingly cold house. Unable to speak, she waved him on in his exploration. Instead he stopped and saved her life. “Double pneumonia” a doctor diagnosed and she was helpless with it for three weeks.

That improbable rescue was only one event in an eventful life that had to be tempered into credibility if it were to be put into fiction. Ten novels, all wicked fun except for the last which was dark and vicious. Then she stopped writing, having perhaps found layers that she no longer wanted to publicly explore, and died a woman who entered a whole new phase of being alive in her seventies, one that was of her choosing and that used her talent to the hilt.

Shopping, Twentieth Century Style

 Here is how far my world has sunk. I went shopping at Bellevue Square and survived. Not only that, but I almost enjoyed it.

My kind of shopping is more like hunting for food. It’s focused and purposeful. The last time I did it was when I was on a quest for shoes, which took me on a fruitless tour of downtown stores and finally to Anderson Shoes, a venerable institution that's surrounded by hospitals and caters to nurses who need useful footwear. Eureka--I came home with the ugliest and most comfortable sandals that have ever been on my feet.

This time was an even more utilitarian search--all-cotton underpants. I usually buy these in Bangkok but my last trip was too emotionally fraught to accomplish this. The synthetic fibers in the underwear I found in a Hong Kong street market finally did exactly what had made me turn from them many years ago and I needed granny panties.

What I found in the handful of stores still left in downtown Seattle were polyester and spandex, occasionally blended with cotton. A more upscale alternative was cotton and bamboo--after all, if bamboo works for toilet paper why not underwear? There were alluring little scraps of what was supposed to look like silk and used to be found only in Victoria’s Secret, and many derivatives of Spanx that looked like a slightly tweaked version of the panty girdle that we all wore in the days before pantyhose were invented. 

I came home drenched in gloom and went online, purely for investigative purposes, in search of stores that would have what I wanted. The internet produced several possibilities, all in stores that had abandoned downtown and were now only found in malls.

In Seattle malls are gone, except for one that’s a depressingly long bus ride away. However Bellevue, once a bedroom community for people of means that’s now becoming a city for tech workers, has a stunning assortment of them and was only a swift bus trip away. It’s a weird place where malls are staples and buildings look as if they’d just survived a neutron bomb, pristine and apparently without human life. The streets are quellingly empty and on my few forays into this place, I’ve come home feeling very tired, all of my energy drained away.

This time I wasn’t a tourist. I had a good reason to be there so I entered the closest mall with a strong sense of purpose. Ignoring everything that usually set my teeth on edge, I began my trudge toward the stores that supposedly had what I needed. Unfortunately this place was too upscale for them and I knew I didn’t have the strength to search for where they might be hiding. Instead I plunged into stores I usually never enter, ones that left Seattle in 2020, apparently never to return.

None of them had what I was looking for and I began to think of buying men’s shorts and be done with it. But on every floor of this mall was a place that I thought was dead and buried. In separate pieces but still attracting shoppers was Macy’s.

My experience with Macy’s has always been on West 34th Street and I accepted no substitutes--until now. In the segment that held women’s clothing, I headed for what Macy’s calls Intimate Apparel. In the company of two other women who looked as though they might be older than I am, I searched through racks of underwear and then--at last--I found packages of Jockey underpants that proudly asserted what they held was made only of cotton.

Imbued with a sense of victory, I clutched my quarry and began to hunt for the closest exit. When this took me to Macy’s Housewares section, I saw a little blender at a price I could afford and in a burst of serendipity I bought that too. When I began to look at pillows, sanity prevailed and I went off to find the bus that would take me home.

I’ll never be a mall walker, although I certainly covered a lot of ground when I was in this one. I’ll never wander through one as a window-shopper. But if I have to make a choice between buying online or going to Bellevue, there’s no question. I’ll vote with my feet.

The Morning After

 

Nobody has solid figures on how many people filled the Seattle Center’s 74 acres yesterday. The Seattle Times, with its usual arrow-sharp reporting, says “thousands.” The organizers of the rally said 7,000 people had registered for it. I was there half an hour before it was scheduled to begin and the grounds were already packed solid. 

It invigorated some. It depressed me. The signs made it clear how many parts of our democracy have been violated since January 20th and the massive crowd pointed out our impotence. Half of the country could mobilize the same numbers on the opposite side with the same passionate fervor--and they’re the ones who control our government. 

Our numbers yesterday accomplished nothing. Milling around in a city park, carrying signs--it was Protest Lite. We could have shut down the city if we’d marched through downtown. Instead we showed off our clever signs and tried to hear the speakers who were kneecapped by a lousy sound system. 

At best this felt like going to church. At worst it seemed like performance art. Do you feel better than you did on April 4th? Not me.

Maybe I’m a jaundiced old woman and maybe I’m still reeling from the effects of a wild case of claustrophobia. Maybe I’m pierced by the fear that even when our economy goes into the garbage disposal and Russia is our only ally in the world, the other side will cling to the lies that they’re fed every day and blame it all on Biden.

This morning’s headlines from the BBC and the New York Times report that a federal judge’s order to return a man who was deported without cause is being ignored by the White House and that a third Presidential term is gaining plausibility. What might have been millions of people across our country who turned out against these issues and far too many others is only a sideshow.

To cry or to vomit? That is the question.

Cherry Blossom Revival

 “It’s a cliche,” I kept telling myself, “the cherry blossom viewing at UW doesn’t even belong to this country. We stole it from Japan.” Yes, I went there with my family on our trips from Alaska, but that was when we were tourists. It’s the equivalent to going to the top of the Empire State Building.

But here’s where social media comes into its reason to live. There are few non-political posts on my pages and I’m hungry for splashes of joy, wherever they may be found. When cherry blossom photos began to appear, I was glad to see them and when a sunny day appeared, I set off to look at blossoms.

The University of Washington campus apparently isn’t confusing only to me and reassuring signs giving directions to the trees had been placed along the way. Suddenly a cloud of pale pink appeared and soon I was immersed in flowering trees.

There were many of them, forming avenues along narrow paths that were filled with people, with their babies, with their dogs, and everyone with some sort of camera. One girl wore a full-skirted pink dress, looking like a human cherry blossom, while others wore kimono and variants that looked more like cosplay than Japan. 

What struck me and went straight into my spirit was that all of us were there for only one purpose, to revel in beauty. We weren’t only soaking up the perfection that came from thousands of petals, we were being saturated with happiness.

I came home feeling as if I’d gone through detox and that feeling is still with me this morning. After being under the trees, I stopped at the University Book Store and had a brief and delightful conversation with Brad Craft, in which politics never arose. I came home with two books that I hadn’t expected to find and my dreams last night were full of a chaotic sense of excitement and discovery.

I’ve been killing off my vagus nerve, that integral part of the body that’s nourished by communion with living beings. After being fed yesterday, it’s clamoring for more today--and damn it all, if it finds sustenance in tourist experiences, then I say bring them on. 

Discovery and random moments with strangers--these may be small adventures but without them I was beginning to shrivel. Ferry rides, festivals, farmers’ markets--whatever it takes to bring joy back as a staple, sign me up. I've been mourning the lack of a revolution when what I really needed was a revival.

Where Truman Capote Never Traveled

 A month before my first Bangkok Thanksgiving, I’d spent time at the infamous Peachy Guesthouse to visit a friend and met the equally infamous Jim Eckhardt. When this gentleman discovered I’d be spending the holiday alone, he immediately took charge of the situation.

“Come and join me at Bourbon Street,” he said, “It’s owned by a guy from Louisiana who used to work on the oil rigs, and he knows how to do this right--turkey with all the trimmings--just like home.”

On the evening of this All-American feast, I was thoroughly unprepared. I’d been living in total immersion for almost three months, with few sights of a Western face and eating Thai food at every meal. When I got to Bourbon Street, the smell of roasted turkey and root vegetables hit me like a hammer. The room I entered was full of western men with no trace of Jim. 

Stopping the only woman in sight, I asked the hostess, “Jim Eckhardt?” “Next room” she barked, in tones that made me think her day job was probably spent as a conductress on a non-air-conditioned Bangkok bus. 

The noise from a crowd of men, all speaking English, and the smells of a traditional American Thanksgiving were making me feel just a trifle faint and I stepped outside to recover my equilibrium. But the minute I was back in the hot and steamy air, I started walking. I didn’t stop until I found a cart where the vendor sold squid salad. Sitting at a rickety table on a metal chair, I realized Thanksgiving in Bangkok couldn’t possibly be better than this, and I was thankful.

*****************************************************

My friend Victor is Canadian so his concept of meals on the last Thursday of November is undoubtedly far from what I remember and the dinner I shared with him may have been one of the more peculiar Thanksgiving meals I’ve ever had. The minute Victor and I sat down, we were given our beer, a bucket of ice and two little dishes with fresh vegetables and salad cream, which is one of the worst things the British have done to the world—a mayonnaise substitute that is a lot like Miracle Whip with five times more sugar. That was quickly followed up by two big plates of potato salad, heavy on the hard-boiled eggs and of course drenched in salad cream. Then came two beautifully arranged plates of sliced white meat (no skin), a generous scoop of mashed potatoes (real--not instant) with gravy (from a packaged mix), and stuffing that had never seen the inside of a turkey. All of it tasted like a school cafeteria lunch—except for the green beans which were perfect—fresh and obviously cooked just before they were put on the plate. Oh--this was accompanied by a big chunk of what looked like a baguette but was clearly a portion of someone’s pillow. Dessert was the best part—a slice of steamed pumpkin covered with a caramel sauce.  That was delicious but had been dusted so heavily with canned ground cinnamon that I could smell it long before our servings hit the table.

The lady who owns the restaurant was dressed up, quite gorgeous, and friendly. She had lived in Las Vegas for thirty years and misses the annual turkey extravaganza so she does this every November. She was so proud and happy with what she had prepared that I did my best to clean my plate. I tried not to reflect on the absence of the restaurant’s friendly dogs, who usually come and linger and look wistfully at what’s being eaten—but not last night. They came, they greeted us, and quickly left us alone with our steam-table delicacies.

The setting was beautiful, lots of trees draped with lights for the King’s birthday on December 5th, and the beer was abundant. Victor’s friend Tom is not a drug dealer, as I’d speculated from what I'd been told. He was a connoisseur of worldwide natural consciousness-transformers and he kept the conversation from being ordinary.

He had recently given Victor salvia for the first time several days before—a liquefied form of a variety of the flower that is grown in Mexico and sold online (legal in forty states.) An altered state that lasts for under an hour after three drops are put under the tongue and then melts away with no side effects, it’s, according to Tom, different each time you try it. Victor said he had his eyes closed through most of his experience but when he opened them, the night sky was dark emerald green.

But that, Tom assured us, was nothing. He had just returned from Gabon with a beer bottle full of a powder that was first used by the Pygmies and was brought back home by the Egyptians early on in their civilization. Through it, the Pharaohs discovered Osiris et al. Apparently it led Moses to find Yahweh in a burning bush—and for that alone I thought that powder should stay right in the beer bottle. But, Tom said, it is indeed a substance that will make the user find God, in an experience that lasts for three days and evokes past memories so clearly that you experience every detail once again. (No thank you.)

It’s illegal in France, he told us and my respect for the French immediately soared.

This powder is closely akin to another that’s found in the Amazon and is used only by people who want to change their lives. Since I was quite happy with my life as it was, both the Pygmies and the Amazonian Indians had no reason to fear that I would deplete or desecrate their drug supply in any way but Victor was looking quite intrigued by the idea.

“If I walk into Orchid Books and find Victor is a man who has found God and abandoned beer, I will find you and hurt you very badly,” I told Tom with a fair amount of sincerity. Victor is a guy who helps to makes Bangkok diverting. A Canadian bookseller from the North, he lost a leg in a brutal motorcycle accident when he was seventeen and has never let that slow him down. He’s lived in Saudi Arabia as well as Thailand and is a grumpy, kind, thoroughly helpful human being. He carries all of ThingsAsian Press's books although only three of the titles sell with any regularity, and refuses to let me take the non-performers off his hands, because he says the minute they leave the shop somebody is going to ask for them. (As a former bookseller myself, I know that’s true. I call it the First Law of Returns.)

He’s lived in Thailand for twenty years and has passed the sixth-grade examination for reading, writing and speaking Thai which has me in awe. He’s my buddy and if he took the Gabon powder and found God, life would be considerably less fun. Fortunately Tom planned to leave soon for a ten-day stint of meditation at a forest temple in the South of Thailand and then on to India so perhaps he won’t have time for Victor’s change of life experience.

So—my generation. What happens to old druggies? They just find more exotic drugs in a variety of global venues. Tom was extremely familiar to me the minute he sat down—I used to go to parties on Chena Ridge in Alaska back in the olden days where guys like him were in every corner of the sauna. He’s like a nice version of Hunter Thompson, and he certainly added a whole other dimension to Thanksgiving Dinner Table Conversation.

From a culinary point of view, I tried hard not to think of the Habanero-brined chicken that my son Nick said would feature on his Thanksgiving table as I chewed on sawdust, and although the steamed pumpkin in caramel sauce was good, it will never replace pie with pumpkin from a can. But to find that sort of meal in Bangkok, I’d have to go to a hotel restaurant and be surrounded by expat families—more fun to sit in a garden and drink beer with other eccentrics..

The detail of last night that most surprised me is that drug trips never change—before Victor was given the salvia, Tom tied a Tibetan prayer scarf around his head and tucked two feathers in the headband, one to help him fly and one to bring him back home. Suddenly Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda were sitting at the table along with memories of hippies I have known and I felt thankful that this was a momentary flashback, not a feature of my daily life.

One thing that has changed is the vocabulary—nobody said Wow or Far Out and that gave me another good reason to be grateful.

How Do You Cancel a Dead Man?

 Distractions are essential right now but the current literary scandal seems absurd. A man in his mid-years meets a sixteen-year-old beauty who’s been severely damaged. Her family won’t talk about it and neither will she, even now when she’s in her sixties. Her father becomes violent as a result and she’s put in foster care, where her nubility in houses with unlocked doors puts her in more danger.

She’s a voracious reader and she recognizes Cormac McCarthy. Bringing him a battered paperback copy of a book he's written, she asks him to sign it. McCarthy, not yet in his years of fame, is charmed and attracted to this girl who carries a pistol and knows his work. He begins to write to her and eventually the two of them run off to Mexico, returning to the states after she turns 18. She’s the one who leaves but they continue a deep friendship that's still in place until he dies, even after she sees herself cannabalized repeatedly in his novels.

This has all been revealed in a Vanity Fair article because McCarthy’s archive will be opened soon and Augusta Britt decided to tell her story in her own way before it’s revealed in those papers. She contacted a Substack writer whose take on McCarthy was one she liked and she gave him her story. He, of course, is writing a book about it and judging by his turgid sentences in VF, it’s going to be what used to be called a howler.

This is all being scrutinized by 21st century moral standards and words like “grooming” are being tossed about. Pardon me while I yawn. 

I was a sixteen-year-old girl with a traumatic childhood. The edges in my family were blurred where my father slowly lapsed into full-blown pedophilia. Physical attention and parental love were tangled in my mind and, alone in Manhattan, I yearned for both. As callously as any hunter, I chose someone who would give me that, a deliberate and calculated act.

When I think of Augusta Britt, carrying a book and a pistol, accosting a man lying near a swimming pool, I recognize her. She was doing her best to survive her history and McCarthy helped her when she was in peril. What would have happened to her during two more years of foster care?

In the small town where I grew up, a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were incurably alcoholic married a man who was in his early thirties. They grew old together, and their love for each other was palpable every time I saw them. This sort of thing tends to erode “moral standards.” Their example has done a lot to ensure that I have none.

And yet, when I was in love with a man who was young enough to be my son, I couldn’t maintain a level of physicality with him. I stopped the affair and cherished the friendship. But that wasn’t a moral decision. It was done out of love. That man would never have a full life if we had gone on together, the life he found afterward with a young woman.

Augusta Britt never found that life. She lives alone with letters and memories. But without the love she had with McCarthy, one that prevailed between them after she left, what would her life be now?

A Requiem for Magazines

 

When I went out to look for the Vanity Fair with the article on Cormac McCarthy and the girl he loved, I was certain I wouldn’t find that issue in a bookstore. Anyone who had ever heard of this writer, or saw a movie adaption of one of his novels, or had read even a portion of his impressive body of work, would have snagged a copy of this magazine the second it hit the stands. In a city as literary as Seattle claims to be, I knew better than to expect to find it in Elliott Bay Books or the University Bookstore.

My best bet was probably Hudson News at the airport but because I enjoy a good quest, I decided to take to the rails. The light rail runs between a branch of Barnes & Noble and the airport with those two bookstores located on stops along the way. I could make this a tiny journey and hit all four of these destinations if necessary. I was only sorry that three other primary bookstores weren’t on my route.

It’s a dispiriting trudge from the light rail station to one of the few surviving Barnes & Nobles in this city. It was once in the middle of a shopping center that surrounded a large mall but when the mall died, so did most of its satellite stores. Plans for a park, a sports center, and apartment buildings all halted during covid, leaving fenced-off construction sites that are still empty. It’s a shrine to dystopia with a smattering of chain restaurants and stores that are more depressing than the lunar landscapes of vacant ground.

Barnes & Noble lies near the end of this eerie stroll and it was almost cheering to walk into its light and warmth. Its fame is partially because of its immense selection of magazines and I began to make my way through the looming array of shelves that displayed hundreds of periodicals, catering to every conceivable interest. On one of the last was a double display of Vanity Fair--from the month before. Since we’re now midway through November, finding the October issue in this bailiwick of print was almost as depressing as the area that surrounded it.

Back on the train, I got off at the stop near the University Bookstore and braced myself for more disappointment. This store had been redefining itself and I wasn’t at all sure that they still carried magazines. But there gleaming front and center with Vogue and its counterparts was the magazine I was looking for, which should have restored my faith in human literacy.

But it didn’t. That bookstore serves a large university with a flourishing department of English. It’s been in place for over a century and has a highly literate customer base that is devoted to it. Back when I was still a bookseller, that sort of issue would sell out immediately and we often had trouble reordering it because the same thing happened at bookstores across Seattle. By rights I should never have found what I wanted on that shelf, in this place.

I’m a dinosaur. So is the friend who told me about this article. So are the scant number of surviving magazine stands that lurk in a few bookstores and in airports.

Many of the newer, smaller bookshops don’t carry magazines. The supermarkets and drugstores that still have magazine racks fill them with the cheap, poorly produced variety that have proliferated in the recent past. There is no place in downtown Seattle where I can buy Vanity Fair, or the Atlantic, or the September issue of Vogue. 

I grew up in a house where five different magazines arrived in the mail. I receive one that once was weekly and now comes twice a month, because I’m hopelessly addicted to the smart, snarky journalism of New York Magazine. I used to buy fashion magazines from a stand to cheer me up in the depths of winter and the Atlantic when I felt I could afford it. Now a copy of Vanity Fair is as expensive as the Atlantic or the New Yorker used to be--god knows what a magazine worth reading costs now. 

My desire to read literary gossip cost me eleven dollars. For just a bit more, I could have bought a book that would have sustained me for a few hours, not the matter of minutes that it took to read a badly written article.

No wonder magazine readers have taken to the internet for what they once held in their hands. Next time I may just pay for online access. After all if it’s good enough for the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s certainly good enough for Vanity Fair.

River Towns

 While drinking my morning coffee and scrolling through Facebook yesterday, I came across a friend’s photos of Bangkok’s river and tears immediately began to prickle at the bridge of my nose. They blindsided me and I couldn’t stop them for almost an hour, not sobbing but brimming. My throat ached with my longing to be on a boat in the Chao Phraya with no destination in mind, simply succumbing to the pleasure of being a river flaneur,drifting on a current, seeing what I could see.

I grew up near a river, in a place so tiny that this was its only claim to fame. From the days of my first memories I was fascinated by its motion. Its currents and eddies led straight to a branch of the ocean, where stretches of sand held shells and seaweed, the only playground in town. 

Every summer our little “wide spot in the road” filled up with people from all over Alaska and beyond, drawn by the king salmon that made their way down the Anchor River to Cook Inlet. The glassed-in refrigerated display case in the grocery store held fish that were often bigger than I was, some weighing in at fifty pounds. Then the dead fish went off with the people from other places and the summer carnival came to an end.

When I first arrived in Bangkok the Chao Phraya seemed like a carefully guarded secret. It flowed through the entire city but was annoyingly difficult to find, unless you were one of the lucky few having tea at the Oriental Hotel. When I finally found my way to the dilapidated piers and on the deck of one of the many commuter boats that traveled for miles, I felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city.

The Chao Phraya was alive with traffic, all of it utilitarian. Barges, small and colorful cross-river ferries, the longtail boats that were the riverine equivalent to motorcycle taxis and traveled up the canals, and the large, clumsy tubs that went up to another province almost clogged the river in a water parade that I loved.

The last time I was in Bangkok, I stayed at one of the riverside hotels that didn’t exist when I first lived there. The Chao Phraya traffic now included “tourist boats” for sightseers with an abbreviated route that stopped near the Grand Palace, smaller boats made of teak, gracefully taking hotel guests to the upscale shopping areas, the dinner cruise boats that appeared after dark with their flashing lights and blaring karaoke-esque music. The piers were more substantial than before, offering coffee, souvenirs, and touts. The river, always a commercial lifeline, now is a major artery of tourism.

When I first came to Bangkok, there was a story in the Bangkok Post of how an overcrowded floating pier had sunk, carrying a number of commuters to their deaths. Later I was on one of the large commuter boats when a squall blew in from the western bank and every passenger, man, woman, child, and monk rushed to the eastern side of the boat. It listed in a menacing fashion and I got off at the next stop. These events have always made me well aware that once I was on the river, I was at its mercy. I’d lived in Thailand long enough to be positive that there weren’t enough life jackets aboard to go around and the ones that were available probably had holes in them. Since I never learned how to swim, once I got on a boat, I was doomed in any emergency.

But even with that in mind and with the pounding noise of the boat’s engine and the stabbing shriek of the boat boy’s whistle and the smell of the exhaust that filled the air on the rear deck, I would get on one of those boats in a Bangkok second if I were able to right now. And although I flirt with the idea of seeing other countries, I know damned well that my travel mantra will always be Thailand First. See you soon, Chao Phraya–I hope.

Monsoon Satori

 Living in Alaska for the first third of my life has given me an insatiable hunger for hot sunlight. When I moved to Bangkok, I became addicted to its temperatures that typically ranged over the full spectrum between 90 and 100 degrees; only the city’s thick humidity made me stop my walking once the thermometer went past the century mark.

Later when I returned to the States and visited my son in Tucson, the combination of high heat and aridity that greeted me was delightful. In this outpost of the Sonora Desert, 100 degrees felt cooler than Bangkok’s 95. Although it took time for me to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sprawling Southwestern city, its sunlight had me hooked immediately.

Most people head off to Tucson in the winter. Not me. As soon as the weather reports predict temperatures of 100 and above, I start looking at airline tickets. The highest heat I’ve enjoyed there is 108 and I relished every second that my skin was warmed by sunlight. 

People who live there love the monsoon season, with its raging thunderstorms and its gifts of rain. This is mercurial weather that comes without warning and has no predictable duration. Several times I tried to catch it and failed, my attempts filled with dryness and brilliant skies, until the day I walked out of the Tucson airport and found the bright air held weight.

There were no thunderstorms and no torrential rains waiting for me on that visit, although the sky was often sullen and spitting rain teased without delivering any real release. When a friend took me on a little road trip, we stopped the car and stood on the roadside to watch the vicious currents and the deadly rush of a monsoon river,  spilling  over a bed that was usually a dry scar on the earth. But Tucson’s river held only a few mud puddles and the low growls of distant thunder never made it in our direction.

I left with no understanding of why my friends long for the monsoon and with a firm resolve to avoid that time of year. But one of the Tucson people I love best persuaded me to come for this year’s monsoon time. It had recently battered the area with large hailstones and uprooted trees, a dramatic assault that made her invitation irresistible.

Once I arrived, I still didn’t get it. The heat was several degrees lower than what I usually walked through in this city but the humidity made it seem much more intense. The sun darkened my skin after the first day and my phone went black within minutes of exposure to the scalding light on the rooftop terrace. The clouds thickened at the end of the day, allowing only a thin stripe of sunset and obscuring a view of the stars. 

In spite of the moisture held in the humid air, I carried a little water bottle that I drank from every few minutes, like a hobo clutching a jug of Thunderbird. My hair began to straighten and my steps were slow. In a city where it was easy to walk eight miles a day, I couldn’t go beyond five. My favorite cliche came to mind--”What fresh hell is this?”

I found the answer to that on my second afternoon when I set off on a pilgrimage to what may be one of the best photography galleries in the U.S. I took a wrong turn and walked farther than I needed to. As I retraced my steps, the sunlight tightened around me like a vise and the final blocks were an endurance test. When I reached the gallery, I sat in the merciful coolness of air conditioning for at least ten minutes before I began to explore the photographs. This heat was beyond anything I’d ever felt before, a threat and a punishment.

I left the gallery a couple of hours later, bracing myself for more time under a scorching sky. Instead I walked out into the pale grey of heavy clouds and a strong breeze touched my face. As I walked, I was certain I felt a raindrop and I longed for that to be true.

The clouds thickened and the humidity was like an anvil. My friend and I both wilted under its weight, wishing  for the clouds to burst, and retreating to the relief of air conditioning. “Text me if you see lightning,” I begged before I went to bed.

I awoke a couple of hours later to the noise of thunder directly above my room. Kneeling on the bed to look out the window that faced the mountains, I saw thin slivers of lightning cut through the darkness, jagged and almost cartoon-like. Greedily I stared at them until one came so close that I was positive a spark of it touched my windowsill. After that I watched flashes of light on the wall while lying on my bed, wincing happily with each thunderbolt. Suddenly there was a new sound, one I hadn’t heard since Bangkok. A tropical rush of rain torrented in a curtain of noise and when I looked outside all I could see was a cascading veil of water.  

And then I understood what comes with the monsoon. I left Tucson with a reverence for its gift of relief and when I woke up to rain in Seattle after my return, in a city where this is a frequent and often annoying occurrence, I felt grateful. It took a taste of the desert’s monsoon to make me honor rainfall and recognize the sacrament of water with its renewal of life.

Sacred and Profane

 Tall golden spires sprouting from tiered concrete domes jutted above the ramshackle border of New Petchaburi Road, and the thought of a temple’s beauty and tranquility made me yearn to find this one. Google gave me a name, Wat Phasi, and an address which I gave to one of the motorcycle trio on a morning when a thin but determined veil of smog hung over the city and the air was flat and sluggish. He looked puzzled for a minute and then corrected me. Google had given me an address that didn’t exist. Once he’d cleared up that misconception he took me on a short motorcycle ride to a corner of the city that existed out of time.

Temples in Bangkok almost all follow a set pattern of curving rooftops with eaves curling into serpentine shapes, bristling with white pillars and painted in brilliant shades of blue, red, and gold. The buildings in Wat Phasi were butter yellow with dark brown trimming. Their heavy, blocked shapes turned into graduated tiers.  Carved wood rose to the peaks of their roofs which were crowned with the golden spires that had lured me here.  They reminded me of the Iron Temple, Loha Prasart, in Rattanakosin, where the buildings were patterned after ancient temples in India and Sri Lanka. 

The trunks of decapitated trees, massive and tall, surrounded the temple buildings. They held a wild clutter of objects that had been placed against them, small Buddha statues, wooden apsaras, clouds of plastic orchids, tiny lanterns, spirit houses, figures of lovely girls poised in the grace of classical dance, an army of fierce little figurines dressed in clothing from a past century,  a scattering of brightly colored prayer flags. Gold statues of the Buddha and revered monks were scattered about with what looked  like haphazard abandon and a statue of Phra Phi Ganet was prominent among them, sitting on a throne and flanked with life-size statues of white cows flanking him. He was jet black.

A school lay on one end of the grounds, with a sign saying it was bilingual--English and Thai.. Following a driveway on the other side, there was a little barnyard, with chickens, a rooster, and a roofed enclosure that held at least four white cows. A sign told visitors not to feed them rice, bread, or roti because that made them bloated and  sick. 

I left enchanted by this sacred and rural secret in the middle of relentless ugliness. And then I remembered what my best friend had told me about the heart of his city, “It’s not for travelers.” Wat Phasi was a refuge for people who lived and coped and struggled with Bangkok every day. To walk within it, I needed to earn it and that wasn’t going to happen in a few weeks. 

At the end of my stay I went to Silom Road which  been spared the blight of shopping palazzos and high-rise condos. It still had wooden shophouses and shopping centers that rose only a few stories above its sidewalks. There was even a sprinkling of street vendors and a few surviving food carts spread down a block that had once been thick with an exuberant banquet. A clump of tables near an umbrella-shaded cart made me approach with tentative optimism and there I ate one of the two meals that made me happy--gao mun gai, chicken rice with a sauce that had more flavors than I could pinpoint, eaten on the sidewalk in the company of strangers. 

Then at the end of the street where Silom dissolves into a subway station, was a tiny stall festooned with signs handwritten on pieces of cardboard, both in English and in Thai. “Tough time create strong men.” “Be humble. You won’t stay fresh forever.” “The world is full of nice people. If you can’t find one, be one.”

A man wearing a face mask, his eyes smiling, stood behind a little table that was covered with metal Buddha images, amulets, tiny Phra Phi Ganets, and many little animals. Long ago I’d seen those same animals in the window of a Bangkok antique shop--opium weights--and didn’t have the money to buy them. Now, as I picked up a little brass cat, I felt that same heaviness and was instantly overjoyed. Someone had cared enough to find the molds for those weights and replicated the figures, with detail and care. 

I chose one for me and several for my family, each figure carrying what I loved about this city that once was my home, where I was now a stranger.