All good things have to come to an end some time, don’t they? After almost exactly ten years in Thailand, maybe it’s time for me to move on to other things, or maybe not. Since the Thai government seems to at least want to roll back the avalanche of ‘Farangs’ that have flooded into the country for the last fifteen to twenty years, maybe we should get a clue, or maybe not. Certainly if you’ve got you’re papers in order and have a good reason to be here, such as retirement, then it’s done easily enough. Considering that you only have to be at least fifty years old to retire, that’s not draconian. The $25K you have to deposit in a local account is a fairly serious means of testing your viability, but in times of low interest the actual loss of interest is not great. In times of decent interest it’s a thousand bucks a year. More than that, it’s a commitment, not so easy for someone who’s still traveling and exploring. Frankly if I didn’t have a relationship to maintain, I’d have probably been long gone before now, i.e. been here done this. Only next door Cambodia is alive and fresh and undergoing a renaissance. Their women don’t look bad either. Then there are other attractive locations around the world, both known- Peru, Dominican Republic, Spain, Morocco, and unknown- Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Egypt, Greece, and Central Asia. But at heart I’m as much a worker as a traveler, and that defines my decisions. I have to work, and it’s nice when I can combine travel and work. The hardest part is living in two places, which is what I’ve been doing, having never cut my ties with the ‘real world.’ It’s been pretty hectic the last couple years, the back-and-forth increasing as I make motions ‘back home.’ Fortunately there’s no statute of limitations, so I can always come back, right?
I’ll miss family the most, the in-laws and my dog. My wife’s son and I have had our scrapes, but nothing that time can’t heal. Time heals all. The ma-and-pa-in-law are pretty cool, if a bit superstitious. He’s a star reader. When he read mine before his daughter and I tied knots, he told me that Thai women were not in my stars. He may have had an axe to grind. I thought his old ticker was on its last legs last week, but he’s bounced back. I didn’t know he’d been out digging pits to make charcoal. He needs to work, too. I tell them he and his daughter should do a massage-and-fortunes double act, but they won’t listen to me. They’re always skeptical of new ideas until someone does it and succeeds. Then they copy like kitty cats at a row of tits. For every individual doing someone creative in Thailand, there are ten copy cats and another ten making jokes about it. For most Thai people to copy a known formula is to succeed, like the human juke-boxes on stage. Pa’s got clients nearly every day, queuing up to see what the future holds, rather than simply going out and creating it. Mae’s okay, too, if a bit domineering. If Pa’s the one doing the lion’s share of physical work, it’s Mae calling the shots. I’m the only one who dares offer a dissenting opinion. She makes pretty good northern Thai food, too, if such is your pleasure. It’s an acquired taste, best when done with herbs from the yard, worst when over-stoking the spicy, salty, or sweet taste buds. There is no taste bud for greasy fortunately. Mae also names the cats, creative names like black one, gray one, white one, etc. They use similar names for the kids, like first one, pretty one, etc. So does everybody else.
I guess I’ll miss my dog most, man’s best friend and all that, though my laptop runs a close second. Joey’s a yellow dog, which is what all dogs would be if allowed to breed freely away from man’s artificial selection. Yellow dogs are best anyway for general all-purpose use, hybrid vigor and all that. He’d talk if he could. He tries really hard. He likes to wander up to the big road and chase big cars, better than the tame action down the soi where we live, like dullsville man. He was a temple dog, dropped off to fend for him self. That’s where we found him. He tries to imagine himself the Alpha male of the neighborhood, but the other dogs just laugh. He can hold his own, but so can they. Mae claims to hate Joey, but I notice she likes to make him omelettes and curries and such. I’m surprised dog food in Thailand doesn’t have such elaborate flavors. Many dogs fare better than the poorer classes of society. Joey’s so spoiled now that he won’t touch regular dog food unless he’s really hungry or just has a hankering for bar munchies. We used to have a cat named Bang, but he disappeared about a year ago, and it still hurts. He was a miracle cat of sorts, from the temple with Joey, but barely big enough to be viable at the time. He learned to crawl up the steps really quick to get in the bed with us where it was warm, though. That was right after the tsunami. After about a year he finally got his growth spurt and his balls, turning into the prettiest sweetest most loveable cat you’ve ever seen. He could never get rid of Mae’s rival cat, though, that tortured him constantly. One day Bang just disappeared, never to be heard from again. About half a dozen people were shell-shocked. Cats do things like that. They go off to the woods to die and such. I used to have a litter of four at my cabin in Mississippi almost thirty years ago. Then suddenly they started disappearing one by one, about a week apart, until the last one was gone. Then I left, too.
I’ll even miss the big fat multi-colored gecko that’s become an uninvited guest in our home. I have a friend in Arizona who makes ceramic psychedelic lizards that I always thought were purely works of imagination until I met these geckos in Thailand. They’re surreal, right out of a Dali painting or something, pinks and chartreuses and turquoises blended geometrically precise. They’re not bad house guests either, hanging by the lights ready to eat bugs by the billions. They can even remain unmoving for hours if threatened, like someone’s Hawaiian souvenir on the wall. I’ll even miss the silly Thais standing up at attention to pledge allegiance every day at eight in the morning and six in the evening as every bus in the terminal comes to a complete stop and even cars on the street. At first I didn’t know if they were more like Nazis or school children. Now I do. I’ll even miss the short attention span and relentless consumerism of Thai culture, always looking for the Next Big Thing while simultaneously invoking tradition and divine descent. Sensations are primary in Thailand, sight sound taste touch of course, but especially and surprisingly, the sense of smell, as if straight from an ol’ factory tradition. I’ve never seen so many inhalants in use. Of course they have different words for good smells and bad smells and the act of sniffing itself. My wife sniffed me all over before we ever touched lips, weird. Maybe we should stay. But I won’t miss the cloud of smoggy haze that hangs over northern Thailand this time of year simply because people would rather burn the wild than enjoy it, along with their morning trash. Nor will I miss the superstition and old wives’ tales that pass for health advice while people pop pills and drop like flies. Still they have life expectancies almost equal to those of Europe and America, and reasonable hospital rates to boot. So I’ll be back.
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