Snubbed by the Sun

I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as bad beach weather, but this weekend tested that theory to its breaking point.

I tagged along with friends on their trip to Pranburi, desperately longing for sunlight and turquoise water. What I got was wind and waves and the companionship of insouciant beach dogs.

Even without sun, the area we stayed in is lovely, and with sunlight is probably irresistible. I'll let you know next time I have the chance to run away...

standing in one spot

This is what I saw while standing still in one place in the middle of the city--one reason why I love Bangkok!

In My Hands

This is the cover of my book, photographed by the brilliant Nana Chen. This morning I opened a package from my publisher at ThingsAsian Press and those little faces were what was waiting for me.

In the past months while I waited for the printed book to come into being, I wondered how it would feel to hold it in my hands. Now I know.

It's exciting and joyful and a little frightening--a bit like holding your first child for the first time. And Nana's pictures, along with the talents of its incomparable graphic designer, Janet McKelpin, make this book beautiful.

There are more milestones to come--the first day that I see it in a bookstore, the first day I hear feedback--good or bad--from a reader, but nothing can be as surprising and wonderful as opening a package and seeing the faces of those two little boys. If anything can make this book sell, that photo will.

If You Can Read This Ballot, Thank a Thai Teenager

It's November 3 in Bangkok and I still don't have an absentee ballot. This means I'm relegated to an emergency ballot that I have to print out from a website graciously provided by my government. (Gee, thanks. I'd be a lot more grateful if I could cast a ballot at my embassy and have them send it home in a diplomatic pouch--but no...)

Since I don't have a printer, I went to an internet shop near my house, where a man who was mopping and remopping the floors switched on a PC for me. I found the ballot and tried to print it out--no luck. The balding floor mopper was apparently as techno-savvy as I am because he called into the back of the shop and out came a boy with trendy hair, a gorgeously ironed piercingly white shirt that would not have disgraced a CEO, and bare feet, who put the ballot on a thumb drive and, after a few false starts, printed the damned thing out.

Then I had to go to a Mailbox Etc (much faster and less crowded than a Post Office) to send it on its way--tomorrow, the clerk assured me, and would take two weeks. That is, of course, if it makes it through the various postal channels, and then god only knows if it will be counted at all.

It's my right and responsibility and duty as a citizen to cast my ballot, and I do believe that every vote is crucial , especially in this election. But damn it, WHY must the voting process be a matter of states' rights, why can't it be standardized on a federal level, and why can't overseas citizens cast ballots at their embassy? I do not understand why my right to vote had to be guaranteed by a barefooted Thai teenager in an internet shop--although I'm deeply grateful that he was there to ensure that I had a ballot.

...While I Kiss the Sky

The Clothes-Body Problem

I knew I was in trouble when I was coming in from the airport-- slightly bedraggled from my sleepless- from- Seattle flight to Bangkok-- and my cab driver asked me in serviceable English if I were a sister. For the past 16 hours I had felt appropriately dressed for travel, even a tiny bit professional, in black and white, only to discover that in the city I love best in the world I looked like a nun.

Nuns and I have never been friends, and their clothing has had much to do with that hard, cold fact of life. Even after Vatican II, when the sisterhood adopted civilian clothing, to me an invisible black habit still enveloped them in an aura of gloom. As I assured my obviously skeptical cabbie that no I was not a sister, I felt quite proud of myself for not bursting into tears, but inwardly I felt extremely depressed.

Seattle clothes do not translate well to Southeast Asia--even what laughingly passes for summer in that city still requires weightier fabric than is comfortable in near-equatorial humidity. I had brought the few things that I had to wear that weren't wool, but knew one of the first tasks ahead of me was to find comfortable garments.

Clothes in Bangkok are famous for being inexpensive and pretty--but in a city where the prevailing age is in the early twenties, and bodies are dazzlingly slender, I knew that my well-padded, almost sixty-year-old frame wouldn't be easy to shop for. To make matters even more challenging, I knew from past experience that women of a certain age dressed in a certain fashion and I was damned if I knew what it was after being away for seven years.

I'm fortunate--there are many more expat women here now than there were in the past and some of them are-- as we say--mature. I saw several of my own kind in a chain called Pena House, went in to investigate, and came away a happier, and only slightly poorer, woman. LL sizes in Pena House are my new holy grail for cotton tshirts, and there are even slacks that fit--proving to me that there is indeed a god and she is an aging female.

And although black is still the underpinning color of my wardrobe and my clothing still errs on the side of conservatism, I take great delight in the fact that in the past few weeks, nobody  has offered to direct me to the nearest convent. (I give full credit for that to my new shoes...)

Seeing What You Choose to See

Bangkok is definitely not a conventionally beautiful city, and when I first arrive, I'm always overwhelmed by the grubbiness of its streets, the grey gloom of its cement structures, the chaotic overcrowding of its sidewalks, and the truly hideous skybridges that festoon every street and have been painted a leprous shade of green many years ago.

At first I spend a lot of time looking at the sky.

And then after a couple of weeks I begin to notice small splashes of color and beauty in the middle of what at first seems relentless ugliness. My little soi is a good case in point. It has no immediate charm, other than the small children who emerge as the day begins to cool and play loudly and happily well into the night.

But there are flowers. The house below my apartment window has enough potted plants to fill a small arboretum, and many of them are blossoming bursts of color. I've begun to focus on them when I look out my window or when I walk down the muddy street. They make me look for other visual pleasures--a wall covered with a cascading vine of fuchsia flowers, the unexpected piercing white of blooming jasmine.

And I realize that my balcony, miniscule as it is, is the ideal spot for my own small collection of fragrance and flowers. As I fall asleep at night, I think of colors, living and breathing and growing, giving beauty to my tiny portion of a city that I love.

What Goes Up...

This time around, it's both easier and more difficult to live in Bangkok. Although my internet all too often moves at a rate that a glacier could easily outpace, I eventually can send an email that will reach its destination, can check my family's facebook pages and blogs, see news from the U.S. on my laptop, send photos downloaded from the digital camera that my sister gave me for Christmas, all things that were barely functional or not yet dreamed of when I lived here seven years ago.

And yet these are privileges that can catch me off guard and plunge me into a state of sadness in a millisecond--a violent yearning to see my sons in the same casual, spur-of-the moment "let's have dinner" fashion that we have done so easily for the past few years.

I'm lucky that Matt and Nick were both in the same city as I was until recently--I'm lucky that they're men I deeply like as well as love--I'm lucky--and I tell myself that when I'm engulfed in a bout of homesickness that comes as stealthily and inexorably as vertigo.

I remind myself that this is normal, and that it will never stop taking over on a semi-regular basis. I tell myself that I knew this would happen and to suck it up. I go out into the world and buy toothpaste and Kleenex and food and two Sunday papers. I take pictures to send them and plan to buy and send them the tee shirts that I saw yesterday with the logo for Red Bull that said Dead Bull instead. And I wait, for emails from them, for a good story written on one of their web sites, for this feeling to go back into its corner and wait to pounce out at me with no warning on some other day.

Books for Laos

Please take a minute or two to go to Jessi Cotterill's blog and watch the video clip that she has in her latest post, responding to Katia's questions about reading.
Jessi and her husband Colin (author of The Coroner's Lunch and four (to date--more to come) other wonderful mystery novels that are set in Laos--look for them! Read them!) are the instigators of Books for Laos. They buy books in huge quantities, take them to schools in Laos and put them into the hands of children.

The video clip is the perfect way to start your day--I promise it will keep you smiling for the next 24 hours regardless of what challenges may confront you. Do look at it--and go to Colin Cotterill's website to learn more about Books for Laos and how to contribute to it.

Reading, Always Reading

Questions sent from Katia Novet Saint Lot:

1. Do you remember the first book you ever read on your own?

It was Treasure Island, a beautiful, illustrated, slipcased edition, and I read it on my first flight from Alaska to New York City when I was six. It was an unforgettable experience, because I was allowed to read until I fell asleep--no "lights-out" on the plane!

2. Do you remember how you felt? If not, maybe you remember how you felt seeing a child read for the first time?

Nothing has ever been so joyful as entering that world for the first time and gulping it down as quickly as I could. I was a greedy reader from the very first minute and have had to learn to read slowly over the decades.

3. Do you remember a book that you read again and again as a child?

I fell in love with Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, about two children in post-World War Two London who created a garden in a bombed-out ruin. I read it over and over again, took it to bed with me and slept with it under my pillow, much to the detriment of the binding.

4. Why that book? Have you read it again as an adult? If so, was it like you remembered?

It was a book so far removed from the wilderness of Alaska that I grew up in--and yet Lovejoy and Tip became my best friends. They were street children, tough and prickly, who became unified in creating something beautiful in the middle of devastation. It had echoes of The Secret Garden, which I read much later, but unlike that classic, it contained hints of explanation about the inexplicable behavior of adults, who figure strongly in Tip and Lovejoy's fates--and the ending is one that has the satisfying conclusion found in the fairytales that I loved. Now as an adult, the book is much more sad than it was when I first approached it with a child's fearless, unsentimental, and rather savage point of view.

5. Why do you read?

I read to find connections with people I may never meet and with parts of the world that I may never see. I read for stories, ravenous for plots, racing through a book to reach the end and then returning to it over and over to savor its language and ideas. I read for the same reason that I write, to be able to carry on an ongoing conversation with the world.

Now--Vladimir , Kristianne,Alison, Matt, Nick, Katharine, Corinne, Jessi, and Cat--want to play? Tell us about your life in books by cutting, pasting, and answering these questions on your blogs???