some wisdom
Yesterday we made our escape from the city.
I know nothing of Thai geography, so I had no idea what to watch for out the bus window—when the city might ascend to suburbs, then country. But the city just sprawled on and on, another big and bright car dealer every few kilometers, rising over the rice fields. Farms and malls piled on top of one another, neverending. It’s all frontier here, to my eye, everything at the sloped edge of wildness, a step or two away from a street-corner hustle and a campfire.
I passed a thousand homes, more. Laundry flapped from high rise balconies and teak shacks shuddered on stilts over still water. It’s self-absorbed, but the word I thought of was anonymous. These lives would always be nameless and blank to me. The night before I’d dreamed of home, of all of my homes: South Dakota, college, Connecticut. Those homes are probably anonymous, too, to these millions. Who will take the same bus ride, past my house in Mississippi?
Back inBangkokwe visited the Jim Thompson House. The man was an architect and intelligence officer; he built a home a beautiful home in the city from traditional Thai teak houses. Then he disappeared in Malaysia.
Sometimes I imagined the bus stopping. I’d hop off in a town I’d never heard of, where I could stop being a tourist. Just eat the food and sit in a shack over a river. Grow old there, anonymous.
We visited a wat today, and there was Buddhist wisdom nailed there to the trees. Old age is no cause for regret, one said. Regret that one is old, having lived in vain.
