Friday was Sports Day at AMC (American Missionary College) or Srithammarat Suska or Sueksa or wherever it is I work. It turns out, the entire student body of 4000+ is divided into four colors—white, red, yellow, and violet. It also turns out that every student has a number within their class, and who knows how many other levels of segregation and differentiation—just as monks live in perfect harmony and equality and conduct every level of activity according to seniority.
For Sports Day, each color puts on the ritz with formal dress and dooded-up costumes to parade through town and into the Provincial Sport Stadium. For all of Friday and most of Saturday, the students have athletic competitions, cheering competitions, the parade is judged—all that's missing is the awkward homecoming dance.
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So I stood and watched from the pedestrian overpass—shady and less punishingly hot with more chance for a breeze—and made my way to the opening ceremonies at the stadium. I should've expected the hyperabundance of vendors, but I was still surprised at the non-food stalls. Of course there were deep fried whatnots of every variety, but there were also the trinkets and plushies and geegaws you would expect to see as prize rewards but without the interference of games to play—just give the guy 10B for the keychain, 30 for the plush fish, 90 for the stuffed bear.
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After walking through the vendors and not finding either my colleagues or a comfortable place to stand and watch the
proceedings, I took a cue from the youngest marching band and decided it was time to head back to air conditioning, but just as I turned around, my music teacher boss snagged me and waved me to join her for the opening ceremonies.
She is a mother of three, could be 40 or 60, well-composed with the grace of someone who teaches traditional Thai dance but the soft comfort of a mother of three or four and kindergarten/elementary teacher of a couple of decades. She wore a leather cowboy hat—a Stetson over here would be as ostentatious as a Ferrari back home—and a loose white long-sleeved shirt over the Friday getup of athletic pants and a school polo. She had a leather backpack and exuded bubbles as she walked—smiles, laughing, shoulders bouncing, extra giddyup in each step, not just a biological mother watching her kids, but one of the founding mothers of the English Program watching her beloved-as-children students perform and parade.
What can I say? Everyone loves a parade, and she was especially infectious. I didn't even think to consider that she's married to the director of the school—boss of bosses who answers to nobody—until we emerged from a four-flight stair climb into a VIP box where a girl was crawling on her knees to offer a silver tray of water and Sprite to a row of suited men sitting on a soft leather sofa.
Oh.
And the girl shuffles over to us who sit in the stadium seats behind the leather sofa. This is awkward, now isn't it? So I thought, until I follow my model and take a water bottle, open it, and swig gratefully.
Drinking from a bottle is not done, evidently. You drink from a straw. Always. And lo, straws are calibrated to be a couple centimeters longer than the bottle is tall, so you cap off the bottle with the straw inside and it pops up whenever you open the cap. Genius, no?
What to do with the empty, how to get another, whether to get another, these are mysteries best left for later, though the string of speeches and welcomings provides ample opportunities to ponder. For now, sit and smile while school and local press take photo after photo of the biggest of the bigwigs with me in the background.
Great—exactly what I was expecting.
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