Moments

A small victory

At the little market store where I go for a weekend treat of Coke and potato chips, I just about floored the checker when I not only had a member card, but I could recite my phone number (which you input when you don't have your card) in Thai. It was the first time I've been able to do so despite being well familiar with the numbers (the difference between receptive and active knowledge being that I can hear numbers and understand them, but to recite one without the proper inflection is essentially blowing a linguistic raspberry, and a ten-digit phone number feels about like sightreading a piece of music that utilizes limbs not customarily associated, let alone coordinated, with one another).
It's not much of one, but at this point I'll take and run with any victory that comes my way.

On... something.

Repairs had to be made on the flagpole. From what I could tell, the top section had to be replaced. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what happened and how. This is one of those things you learn not to question as a farang: the present reality is that the flagpole needs fixin' and if you're able to find someone who understands your repeated queries of "what happened to the flagpole?" the most careful response still might make someone look bad, so the best thing for the local to do is say, "dunno, dunno" and the best thing the farang can do is let go of such confounding queries. Don't ask about what they plan to do about it, either. Here is the present; this is reality; accept it and like it enough to not make a fuss, okay?
So there were six guys working, three on the ground and three on the top floor of the admin/elementary school building, right outside the G6 classrooms. It's a good thing Thais have no concept of awkward, conspicuous, disruptive, or awareness of shame: a westerner would've been about crippled by the thousands of staring eyes.
After much screaming, getting tangled in the tree providing a shady workspace and a drop of under ten feet, the pole was lowered with fraying ropes. There was more shouting and students appeared carrying desks they slid under the pole after it was hoisted back up, this time by the vice-principal standing at the beheaded end and displaying his considerable physique in a singlehanded deadlift.
There was a great deal of shouting and many trips to a truck parked in another zip code--don't know if that says a lot for the driver or not much at all for the workers--before the new headpiece was produced, then a great deal more shouting to get more desks. Once the pieces were lined up, they were welded together (remember that there are thousands of young eyes plus the teachers and administrative staff, not to mention the workers themselves, and nobody's wearing so much as sunglasses), tested, and hoisting commenced.
Problem: remember that tree that snared the pole on the way down? Well, they're still under it, in the same fall line, and the pole is ten feet longer.
Delay hoist.
Lasso tree, drag limb out of the way, leave Worker T to hold the rope while the other two with the vice-principal get back to helping hoist the pole.
Laugh--universally--as Worker T beats the others to the pole while not letting go as the limb swings back to position.
Eventually determine that the VP is the only one stout enough to hold the limb back.
But now there's not enough muscle to hoist the pole enough for the guys on the third floor to pull it up with their ropes.
Considerable shouting as one of the guys from the third floor runs downstairs to help hoist. If they get it up above the limb, the guys remaining up top will be able to at least hold, if not hoist, and then the VP will be free to help hoist again.
Which almost works, except that once the pole clears the limb and the VP lets go to run upstairs to help hoist, everyone is getting pretty tired and the pole goes crashing back into the tree before VP can get to the top floor to help hoist.
More yelling. The guys who've sat in the shade to watch are called to the top floor to help.
The extended flagpole is too long to fall all the way down, but now it's stuck in the tree.
Meanwhile, all academic activity has stopped. The show is just too good. And then the rope snaps.
someone runs back to the truck. More yelling and flights of stairs before the pole is re-harnessed and the end of the new rope is back with the guys on the 3rd floor. But they couldn't get the rope out as far, so they need people on the ground to hoist.
Three new people run down and the VP takes pole position to hoist.
It is tremendously exciting and there is great laughter as the pole passes vertical and the workers and VP jump aside as it falls into the building.
Even more laughter when it ends up back in the tree.
Two hours after the project started, the flag is hoisted.
Long live the king.

On Muscles and Memories

I went for a massage in a place I've never been, an off-track and very local sort of place: three cots along one wall, each cot wide enough for the Brunhilda-sized woman currently sitting on one to sit and massage an only slightly-less robust person like the woman currently wincing and groaning while Brunhilda tries to connect the poor woman's knee with her opposite ear, each cot padded by a thin coconut husk mattresses under what I would've called beach towels if I didn't know them to be the local form of a heavy blanket, and a pillow. On the opposite wall, a TV blares the news and fans circulate un-conditioned air.
I walk in and there's a kerfuffle of shouting and my fate walks out from the back room: a lady with buzzed brown hair on an oversized head, the body of Brunhilda, but the stubby legs and digits of someone born somewhat askance.
On the one hand, it was an interesting session because I now have enough Thai to get through the basic biographical questions, and I realized that after 16 months of living in a non-English speaking part of the country, I understand the language and can communicate with it about as well as I would be able to if I went to Germany having learned only the numbers. Whether it's a matter of the commonalities of western or differences with eastern languages, it came as quite a surprise how little I've learned in that time, especially with the amount of work and sense of accomplishment therein.
It was also an interesting massage because she did not go, "Skinny farang, better lay off." She attacked, and as is typical, was surprised that legs so skinny could be so strong. It was impressive, though, as muscles strained and stretched and sweat broke out, and I was the one doing nothing but get a massage--she was doing the work.
There was a bad moment, though, when she reached the right foot. It's had a pretty rough go of things lately--first the pinkie toe sacrificed itself to save the ipad from a tile floor, and by the time that swelling had gone down enough to fit into my normal work shoes, that ankle had blown a pretty substantial edema which had pretty well subsided--along with the residual multi-hued bruise--by the massage. I didn't think anything about it until she grabbed the foot and did a deal somewhat like wrapping the pinkie toe around to meet the inside of the ankle. Everyone--the masseuse, Brunhilde, the lady groaning with pain as Brunhilde hoisted her by one ankle while wrapping the other thrice around places it should never reach, and most especially me--was surprised by a loud noise reminiscent of a rather large firecracker set off just down the block. The masseuse jumped back as far as is possible for someone sitting crosslegged (fine, she jerked her arms back), and asked, very meekly, if it hurt. I replied, with surprise to equal her timidity, that no, it did not hurt. She held up the foot and we all watched a hematoma spread. Really, it didn't hurt, and it hasn't swelled, it just went POP in a big way.
A surprise came when it turned out to have been a 2 hour massage. I've never submitted myself to more than an hour, but the lady whose prenatal conditions would've earned her the American career path of Goodwill, at best, had worked smoothly and intensely enough that I hadn't noticed.
THE CRAZY BIT
After the massage, during which I had my turn of bizarre contortions and wrenching stretches of the sort that drew screams from my neighbor (if I had a lady like Brunhilda trying to tie me into a knot, I'd scream, too), I didn't even think about it until I was halfway up the staircase to my room and realized I'd been taking the steps two at a time. This was my custom from time immemorial until the first month of Thailand wiped me out, and, like reciting my phone number, it was a sad sort of cause for celebration--great, I can do it, but how unfortunate to celebrate such a basic act.
Still, I'll take anything I can get.

On Survival Phrases

One of the things language books should have on the front cover, right below "Where is the bathroom?" is how to say "Occupied!"
And you would think that the head of the (Thai) Mattayom English Department would be able to realize that a bathroom is locked for a reason based on the intestinal fireworks coming from within, or distinguish a farang's "WAIT! WAIT! NO! OCCUPIED!" from what a student might say in the communal bathroom abutting the teacher toilet, but I'll bet a whole lot she'll never forget what she saw when the sixth key finally proved to be the right one.

XYZ

When I buy my breakfast, the guy who collects my money has gray hair, gnarled and leathery hands that look delicate next to feet perpetually scruffing around in flipflops, a green apron with coins, 20s and 50s in one pocket, 100s in the other (most financial transactions in this country involve a till of either an apron or a plate for coins and tupperware bin for bills), jeans or something of similar nature that have bleached and ripped and darned and mended and bleached and ripped to the indefinite style and shade of his hair, and one of two longsleeved shirts in similar condition. His teeth give the impression of post-armageddon picket fences, and they are on regular display: if he's not running full-tilt to take care of a songtau load of tech school students wanting syrupy tea with deep fried pork on sticky rice, he's smiling and laughing, and his eyes never lose a bright flash--they're the universal deep Thai brown, but they stick in the mind as bright green or the flash of sun-on-snow blue. I usually think of him as the offbeat uncle--there's a ma and pa team, each in early midlife, a crew of kids of indeterminate relation, and an uncle sliding down the backside of midlife.
So ma whips up my pau lau--a handful of maple-like leaves probably collected from her yard, a few slices of liver, spleen, intestine, bowel, and tongue, and a couple ladlefuls of the cooking stock (she knows I'm not big on the cubes of congealed blood, so she gives me extra segments of intestine) and, and....
And I just realized that I'm sunk. If there was an ihop across the street, I would go there to douse my homesickness in synthetic maple syrup and pasteurized butter byproduct but I would keep on with the pau lau (which you say like the pow in "POW-WHACK" if Batman was falling off the building, and Lau as in "allow" if you were timidly asking "is this something you'd al-low?") as regular breakfast.
So ma passes over breakfast and I pay Uncle Lou and leap--almost literally--at the chance to cross the street with almost no traffic. Halfway across, I hear, "aey aey aey, youyouyou!" Usually I avoid acknowledging these because if I did want to go for a ride on the taxi/songtau/ripoff express, I would seek it out. But this was coming from the breakfast crew, so I turned around as soon as I was reasonably clear of traffic.
Uncle Lou is running out into the street. When he sees that he has my attention, he plants his feet in the male's universal stance and lifts his apron with one hand. He's shouting something, and I'm thinking he's snapped and I'm going to see something I really, really could live the rest of my life without regretting even conceiving of, but in the nano before traffic starts blowing past and honking at him, his free hand starts wiggling up and down and I realize he's in the middle of a lane of commuter traffic, shouting "HEY! Your fly's down!" at the farang.