Differences between Goffstown and rural Thailand

Dear Diary:  May 15, 2014

Two nights ago Chunky, being totally good-Thai to the core, got me to go to a hundred day memorial service (party)* for the mother who had died of one of her girlfriends (never married) from childhood.  I know it was important because I said “no” at first and then fifteen minutes before she was to leave, she said “come.”

So the place was down a one-car-wide broken cement road and ended up in a clutch of run down Thai houses that I think would underwrite Appalachia, Cannery Row and probably Ethan Frome’s neighborhood.

It was getting dark when we arrived.  A plastic wat-chair was produced and I sat in the dirt yard watching a thirtyish woman hunkered down and chopping up foot and long fish.  A liter of beer was produced, and I felt OK.  

 As it got dark I noticed there were two large birds in the tree above the house.  Beam, I said to my six year old granddaughter who was paying rapt attention to the fish being beheaded and gutted, there are birds in the tree.  She looked and said, “Guy [chickens].”  I’ve never seen chickens climb trees, so I said why are they up in a tree.  It was getting dark and someone, I don’t know who, said, “So the snakes won’t get them.”  I was sitting in the dark bushes and tall grass and felt vulnerable so I stood up.

I was ushered to a five foot square platform under a thatched roof that had a sixty watt bulb hanging from a beam.  I sat there alone sipping a beer until I heard something (a rat?) scuttle across the roof.  I got up and move to a chair a yard way, at the edge of the dark, and drank.

A few people over time, God know not many, came and sat on the table.  One mom had a smart phone and was surfing the web.  Boom, another daughter, spelled my name, and gleefully this dimly lit, bespectacled woman held up my Face Book page for six or seven people to see –victory!

This is not the first time my wife Chunky has dragged me out to a wedding, a funeral, a Bo pat (a new monk’s party).   She did it to me and Peter when he was here – out in the middle of a field that even NASA satellites couldn’t find. 

I feel privileged to have grown up in Goffstown, NH which was so very different, but, after my grumbling and my OMGoshes are done, I feel privileged to attend these parties, too.

*  The Thais have a funeral, which is a week long, thena one-hundred day memorial service, The actual serive was in the morning of the next day - I did not attened- but my wife and family did.