New Garden - TLC 78

Lucky shifted to a serene garden zone after sharing a house for two months with a sad young Filipino math teacher in the gated community of Alam Sutra.

The boy/man fathered a five-year old girl and left her with her mom in Manila Vanilla. His favorite expression was, “Let's Eat.”

Truth is powerful. You don’t have to remember what you said. Lucky mentioned choices and consequences. Math man didn’t hear, listen or care. Being a calculating teacher he figured a job with a decent salary in Amnesia was worth the emotional compromise cost.

A Hanoi survivor yelled, “Any fool can have a kid. It takes courage to raise them as independent free thinking individuals.”

In the new garden Lucky planted thirty flowers, red and pink roses, apple trees, deciduous shrubs, watercress, dill, oregano, parsley and thyme.

He refocused healing energies an hour west of Joke & Choke plus trolls tolls by taxi nightmare traffic due to poor urban highway planning. City pollution was a killer. It blasted throat and eyes. All east-west traffic passed through the city center. No ring roads. Duh.

“The center cannot hold,” said W.B. Yeats.

Air quality was refreshing in walled estates with tropical flora. Butterflies, songbirds, cockroaches, big brown beady-eyed rats and contemplative speckled frogs existed with copious little people.

Some homes were Mac Mansions. Greek and Roman columns with Ironic and Corinthian spiral decorations shouted, Look at my huge monster home. I made it. Empty palatial rooms collected dust as in China where it was all external appearances. Goes to show ya. Most homes in the gated communities were a bland 1-2 story cookie-cutter style. 

Everyone had a maid in Java jive some older than spoiled offspring. They cleaned two cars, swept dust, watered stone passages, cooked, scrubbed clothes and fed kiddies while parents were making money. It’s a job. 

Making money is a job. You need plates, ink, paper, press, a paper cutter, distribution system and government backed IOUs.

Illiterate slaves supported families surviving in a no-name village memory. A never-ending human supply system on an archipelago swarmed with 230 million hungry worker bees.

Food was cheap. Medicine and education were expensive.

Keep them poor barefoot and happy.

Favorite Jakarta sports were: 1) Driving huge 4x4s. Gas was $2.40 a gallon. Sitting in endless long traffic jams. Paying parking fees to paramilitary uniformed men blowing stainless steel whistles.

2) Wandering around enormous prosperous numerous say it fast three times vast shopping centers, huge playgrounds for brats.

Out-of-control kiddies expended spoiled energy. Families enjoyed A/C climate controlled conditions admiring Ankara-like dummies behind glass in a museum quality of artificial life filled with diversionary stimuli and unsatisfied desire.

The private Alam Sutra School named for a fictitious beatific saint had 1,800 students from kindergarten through high school. It began in 1993 when a Catholic priest from Yoga Posture escaping Interpol child molestation charges joined community leaders using a fake I.D. to promote formal educational tyranny and religious intolerance.

Five barbarian elementary English teachers complemented friendly local teachers. Oh, I just love your hairstyle. Your diamond-soled shoes are divine. Your handbag woven from creeper vines is elegant and eco-friendly.

Native teachers had seen colonial invaders come and go for centuries. Lip service.

The English supervisor was an anthropologist from New Hamster, Nova Scotia. Formerly a tenured professor in Malta, she left the job, house, marriage, mortgage, cars, airplanes and yachts for a meditative life. Her resume extolled extensive international educational administrative experience with time and space.

 

Eat fast or starve - TLC 8

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery. They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing. Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and Ankara dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' glazed befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus. It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

TLC

Every Day

The world is a village.

Your village thrives near rivers and pine-mountains.

You plant it. You nurture it. You harvest it. You eat it. You carry it.

Every day starts at 4:00 a.m.

You put food into a wicker basket, heave it onto your back and either walk to town or ride with other villagers in the back of a small diesel belching tractor or truck. Perhaps a tuk-tuk overflowing with soil smells, green life talkers. Maybe on a motorcycle as chilly winds blast your face. It feels good to be alive.

Get there early. Spread your treasures out on a rice sack near the curb. Cold winds refresh the street. Say hello to friends. Broken dawn breaks over eastern mountains shrouded in fast clouds. Mothers and daughters arrange labors of love.

Women arrive to unload bags of corn, dead civet cats, onions, greens, bamboo shoots, apples, and language. They grow rice, ginger, beans, peanuts, peppers, bananas, squash, sugar cane, corn, papaya, cucumber, and sweet potato. They only leave villages to sell to townies.

A smiling old man crouched on the corner wearing a green army pith helmet from a forgotten war sells bells and musical iron instruments for oxen and water buffalo.

An ancient shaman woman with a deep lined face bundled against morning displays roots, herbs and small bundles of natural remedies. People trust her innate knowledge. Her dialect and wisdom is older than memory.  

typewriter man

My office is outside the postal building. I am fast, clean and efficient.

People show up. They ask me to write a letter. They talk. I write. 

Sure I say. I roll blank white 8x11 paper into my heavy duty, all purpose magic machine and off we go!

Dear _______,

I am in Trabzon. It is on the Black Sea. It's really blue green. It's big, deep and cold. I don't know where the color Black came from. Perhaps from a lack of light or enough photons.

It is famous for hospitality, fish, jokes and ancient stories. 4,000 year old stories include pre-Greeks, Romans, Laz dialects, Marco Polo, Thespians, Ottomans, Herculean tasks, romantic voyages and 15 (anxious) brave intrepid university students majoring in medicine and engineering practicing for English speaking tests this week after having developed personal courage to open their head heart and mouth. Say ahhhhh.

I am lucky I found a writer. He is lucky I needed help to get it down now and try and make sense of it later. It was an overcast day and, as you can see he was free. I like free don't you? He was so happy to meet a complete perfect stranger he wrote down his name and address on a clean white envelope so I can send him this picture.

It's grainy. Don't ask me why. It's the camera's fault. Maybe the ISO was too high, in the 800 range. It's about 52 KB here and now. The texture and subject and composition is ok. It's not going to win a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism I can tell you.

You get the picture.

What else can I tell you in this letter? I already mentioned the weather. It was overcast but mostly blue sky. It rained one afternoon. Clouds assembling for a meeting gathered above southern mountains. They opened their release mechanism and gave us poor humans a drenching. Weather threw in some thunder for good measure teaching us a lesson in auditory significance. Someone said the sky gods were bowling.

Makes sense to me.

Other than weather the food here is various and tasty; fish, cheeses, olives, fresh bread, meats, lentil soups, tomatoes, manti-ravioli, salads and, can you believe it, they grow cabbages bigger than children. If I grow up I die said one cabbage patch kid. No lie butterfly.

After paying for all these words I will buy an envelope from the writer and then walk into the post office to stand in line for a couple of centuries and hopefully get a stamp.

I hope they have one with orchids.

The writer can scribble my General Delivery return address on the back so you can pen me a word. I'll be happy to hear from you. 

Take care of the broken walnuts.

Love,

Orphan

khmer life skills 101

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.