A web site, my-planet.org had a photo contest.
They asked for trees. He sent them an Angkor Wat monster.
They said it was a spectcular angle. They gave it an honorable mention. Here it is.
Towering, the tree said, thank you to the sun.
Do you want to understand us, asked a Khmer girl.
Yes.
Ok. Here's a story every child sees, hears, smells, and eats in school. It says everything.
Once upon a time there was a hungry rabbit.
It saw a woman coming with a basket of bananas on her head.
The rabbit thought, I will play dead and see what happens.
The woman stopped when she saw the rabbit.
She said, “A dead rabbit. Meat. We will eat good tonight.”
She picked up the rabbit, put it her basket and continued walking.
The rabbit ate all the bananas and ran away.
What a clever rabbit.
She gets home. Her family is happy to have food.
"I found a rabbit. We'll eat good tonight."
She put the basket down. "O my."
Lesson? Don't put all your bananas in one basket.
An old friend of mine is coming to visit, my mother said one day, She’s bringing her son. She lived here during the war met a G.I. and had a baby. She was lucky. Luckier than us. She got out. She took her son to New York when he was two. This is his first visit back to his country.
His country. Mrs. Lin and her son Michael came for lunch. He was tall and handsome with long black hair. He was smooth and charming.
I work for a huge computer company in America, he boasted. Big man, small village. His mother had a large house in the village. He asked me out. We started dating. I did all the translating, all the necessary things. Michael played the big man, the rich Viet-American.
Local people resented his attitude, his lack of language. He had no humility.
I lived at home and my mother started in on me. Michael’s a good man. He could be your future, she said.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I had doubts. I still loved Robert. It was a typical mother conspiracy, his and mine. Working on us. His mother was mean, vindictive.
Finally one night we were both drunk and slept in his mother’s house. The next morning his mother gave us the silent treatment. Michael set her straight. Don’t fuck with us. We want breakfast, he said. She served us.
We slept late and partied all night. We were hot. He was a big, hot hungry animal and my body was his. He took me in every position and I loved it. Women want fucking, security and cash.
After six fast months he said, Move in with me. He told my mother and she said ok. Every little boy always asks for permission. I needed a man and Michael needed a woman.
My son and I moved in. My mother accepted the reality.
His mother treated me like a slave. Her spoiled boy could do no wrong. She hated me. He was an accident of her fraudulent passion. Nothing changed. She was mean, violent and alone. I put up with it for the sake of hoping the relationship would work out. People either want control or approval.
I played her game.
Ray Bradbury has passed at 91.
Venus transits the sun. Ray headed North.
“It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,” he wrote, noting, “You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.”
Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, among others.
He never went to college. His university was the library.
A very great and unusual talent.
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
Thanks Ray.
Don't you just love the name of a school in Cambodia?
It sings on a clean white sign propped against a brick wall along an endless red rutted swampy road.
Down the road from a pagoda wat where friends and relatives create a cremation. He was 70.
He survived the genocide. That says something.
The rainy season brings endless pleasure minus pain to natives and aliens.
Milling around is an art form here.
TRUST and SMILE.
Practice with friends and strangers.
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