lucyoncolorado

In which I chat about free will with a woman from Wenatchee, Thailand...

I'm sitting in the living room of my childhood home. It is a Heathrow waiting room. A Thai woman, about my age, sits with me. She looks a lot like G's wife- short and cute with black bangs framing her smiling face. We chit-chat about our travels.

She is returning to Thailand for the first time in twenty years. She has repeatedly overstayed her visa but has managed to get extensions each time so that she's never been illegal in the UK but she will be illegal from the point of view of the authorities in Bangkok. She's not terribly worried about this; she'll just have to pay a fine to enter. She's far more concerned with how Thailand has changed in the years she's been away. She feels she's more British now than Thai, but with the Brexit vote, she'll have to return home.

I've been to Bangkok more recently than she has, and she asks my impressions. We talk a little about the city, and she tells me she's from a lakeside village in the south. She says it's the most perfect place in the world.

What's your village called? I ask her.

Wenatchee, she says.

Wenatche? Like the town in Washington?

Yes, the same. Not too far from Lake Chelan, she answers.

But that's not in Thailand, that's in the US. I'm very confused.

No, it's in Thailand, she insists.

I tell her that my best friend lives in Seattle and that we've visited Lake Chelan. It's definitely in Washington state. She maintains that Washington state is actually in Thailand, and she points out that my best friend is married to a man from Bangkok. I'm astounded that she knows this, and I'm suddenly confused. Perhaps Thailand and Washington are connected somehow? No, that makes no sense.

I'm pretty sure that Thailand and Washington are two different places. I've been to each.

Americans are always trying to explain things to me about my own culture, she responds. I grew up there after all. I know a little more about it than a tourist.

Well, that had to be true. Still, it just didn't settle well with me. I tell her that I don't mean to be a know-it-all but I'm really confused. She asks if it would be helpful for me to look at a map?

We walk over to the center of the room where a dozen featureless two-inch tall figures stand around. They are round and lack any anatomy at all- just blobs of people. They have large faceless spherical heads connected to cartoonish limbs that look like gobs of play-dough rolled into cylinders and stuck onto round torsos. These clay men are shell white and animated.

They don't have to worry about anything because everything is going to happen exactly as it always was, she says. She balls her fist and smashes one of the figures into a flat lump of clay. It was his time.

Are you saying we can't escape our destinies? I ask.

There is nothing any of them can do about it. It's just a fact that at some point, they are going to each be squished into a giant featureless mound of clay.

I can't argue with the logic of that. Of course it's true. That's exactly what is going to happen, eventually.

So we have no free will? I ask.

She laughs at me. Everything is going to happen in a certain way. No escaping that. The only thing you can do is decide how you feel about it.

The little men run around the floor of the airport. The Thai lady and I stand up to go back to our seats, and on her way, she steps on one of the clay figures. It sticks to the bottom of her shoe. She scrapes it off, and there is now dirt in the clay. Bits of it sticks to the airport carpet.

In which there is a rat snake in my garden...

I ride my bicycle up into my driveway to find a circus trailer parked under the large pecan tree in my front yard. I walk around to the front of the trailer and see a fat bald man sitting in speedos juggling ceramic whiskey jugs. As they fly in the air in a circle around his torso, a snake's head peeps out of each jug. A very tiny woman dressed in a pink ballerina costume spins on her toes next to him, her arms arched above her head.

What's going on? I ask the man.

Juggling, he answers.

What are you juggling? I ask.

Juggling jugs, he answers.

Why are there snakes in your jugs? I ask, starting to get annoyed with him.

Because they're enchanted, he answers.

I'm exasperated at this point. None of this makes any damn sense.

What the hell are you doing in my front lawn? I ask.

He stops juggling. He lets the jugs fall to the ground where they break. Dozens of small rat snakes slither from the broken ceramic pieces and scatter about my front garden.

The fat man and the tiny ballerina pack up their trailer and leave.

I stand outside for a moment and watch the snakes, then I realize they must be babies. There is probably a mother snake somewhere nearby.

Suddenly I see a thick rat snake slowly slithering up the middle path of my front bed. She has her head lifted as if she is ready to strike, and she flicks her tongue at me. She's long enough that she could strike me in one rapid flash. I slowly back up my front porch steps and open the door without taking my eyes off her, then I hurriedly let myself into my living room and shut the door behind me. Even though she's just a rat snake, I don't want to feel the force of her bite. She's huge and terrifying.

I stand at my front window and look out at her in the garden. Her eyes glow red as she stares at me. I've never seen a rat snake behave this way.

Then she slides over to my house and starts zigzaging her way vertically up the tiles towards my roof. She finds a small hole near the eave of the patio cover and flattens herself so that she enters my attic.

Oh! I think. Fantastic! She'll eat those damn squirrels!

In which I stomp across a farting bean field in the nextdoor neighbor's backyard...

I jump the fence into my neighbors' backyard and am surprised that I land in shallow water. They have converted their entire yard into a rice paddy. Instead of green plants protruding to the surface, there is a layer of dried white rice carpeting the ground beneath the water. As I slosh through the field, hard rice sticks to my feet.

I look for a path to their backdoor that will cause the least damage to their crops. About halfway through their yard, I notice that I'm now walking over dried black beans also submerged in water. With each step, gas bubbles rise up to the surface and then float up into the air where they pop with a loud toot. They stink like farts. This is hilarious to me, and I start sloshing through the been field tooting up a smelly ruckus while singing, Beans, beans, the perfect fruit, the more I stomp, the more they toot!

My neighbor steps outside. What are you doing?

I freeze. I look at her. I lift one foot into the air, then stomp it down hard through the water to smush a bean beneath. A single bubble rises to the surface then pops in the air, releasing a green smelly gas. I giggle. Get it? I say, They're beans! And they cause farts! I laugh hysterically, out loud with my mouth open.

My neighbor just stares at me. She has a butterfly tattooed across her face, its wings spread open across her eyes as if it were a party mask.

Is that a real tattoo? I ask her. I can't believe she'd tattoo her face permanently. I look away, pretty convinced that when I look back at her, her face will be different. I just barely perceive some feeling that somehow, the appearance of things can be changed if I just will it to be that way. I can't quite remember why this might be true, but I'm pretty sure I can do it. I stare at my feet through the water and think really hard about her face being different when I look back. But when I look back at her, no; there is still a butterfly tattooed across her face.

It's real. Do you like it? The work is undeniably beautiful, but I can't get over the fact that there will now be a giant butterfly across her face forever. I try to get used to the idea.

Face tattoos are all the rage in Ohio, she says.