Talking Turkey

Unlike Loy Krathong, Thanksgiving is a holiday Jip can get behind. It’s the one day of the year when she agrees to vary her routine—or at least to trade one routine for another. Eating yams baked with rosemary has become our tradition.

Yesterday we took that dish across town to the home of a colleague, where a few folks from work gathered for the traditional feed. Jip didn’t have any turkey or pie, but she did enjoy the conversation around the table, just as she liked going last year to a gathering of people who all graduated from my college--she felt the banter was more interesting than what she usually hears at home. She seemed at ease right away, even thought she had met only one of the other people before. Partly that comfort is a sign of our hosts being easy to know, but mostly it reflects how much more social Jip has become during the past year or so than she was when we first came back to Thailand.

With this mixed-age, international group she took the opportunity to share her standard advice about how to eat a balanced diet: “Mix colors.” Later in the meal it seemed appropriate for me to tell a turkey day tale that’s been making the rounds on e-mail.

Once again this year, there’s lots for us to be thankful for.

Loy Krathong in Nonthaburi

As usual Jip this year took a Scrooge-like attitude toward Loy Krathong, saying as she did in 2005, 2006, and 2009 that the holiday has been commercialized and romanticized. She’s right about that part. But here we are in new quarters, with a new place to float, so in the end tonight she went along for the ride and the spectacle was beautiful.

A big banana leaf snipped from the garden out back provided plenty of raw material for more than enough krathongs. Jip’s caregiver and I pushed Jip to a prime spot near the swimming pool where she could hear the frogs as they began to celebrate the evening. We thought we had the place to ourselves, but just as we launched the last of our floating candles, a neighbor family, walking toward the parking lot, noticed what we were up to.

I think the parents had planned to celebrate down at the river, but their children couldn’t wait. Soon the whole pool was illuminated by our combined efforts. The kids were squealing, the frogs were answering, the world was shimmering. Jip grudgingly cracked a smile.

Four Hands

The Angkor Wat half marathon is coming up again. In trying to get ready without getting injured, I altered my training routine this year to include massages on rest days. Considering that every other day is a rest day, you might call this schedule pretty decadent.

Guilty as charged… but I’m pain-free so far, so maybe the plan is working.

One complication I hadn’t foreseen: massage shops close early in our new part of town. At some of them, if you’re not in the door by 7pm, there’s a risk of being told to come back tomorrow. That’s nearly what happened the other day. I showed up around 7:15, figuring I was safe because I asked for just the one-hour, feet-and-legs-only variety. The three staff had plans to be somewhere at 8. No problem, I said, starting to devise my Plan B.

They beat me to it. “How about I do your right leg, and at the same time she does your left leg, and we wrap up in 30 minutes?” Deal.

Old Pals, New Script

Jip had a visit from a few college classmates over the weekend. This group developed strong ties 30 years ago through lots of late night bull sessions. Their interest at that time was student activism.

The political pendulum swung fast in those days. Democratic experiments alternated with direct military rule. Conservative governments were brought down by leftist protests, only to return with the support of large movements that were concerned about the spread of communism. Thousands of dissidents went into the jungle and challenged the government from there about all kinds of issues.

Thailand had been a strong American ally during the war in Vietnam, which was still fresh in the minds of the Thai public when Jip entered college. Many students resented that American airbases inside Thailand weren’t being dismantled.

Jip says she and the friends who came to see us a few days ago protested “American hegemony” in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. They also chanted over what they said were unfair subsidies given to American rice farmers, which made it impossible for Thai farmers to compete in world markets.

This weekend, they talked about other things. The first one to show up hadn’t seen Jip since graduation. I was surprised to find that he too uses a wheelchair. He arrived in a specially equipped van, with a caregiver in tow. It wasn’t long before he asked Jip about how she prevents bedsores!

His disability has affected his speech. I imagine that some people meeting him for the first time might have trouble understanding him, as happens with Jip. Yet the two of them seemed to catch each other’s words easily, never needing to repeat themselves. Jip’s caregiver and his caregiver when off in a corner to compare notes.

After the others arrived, everyone soon began joking and laughing. They caught up on who has changed jobs, been divorced, gotten which advanced degrees—the usual old stuff. Jip never said so directly, but I sensed that for her the most special part of the afternoon was the new stuff.