Morning Fog,
Steaming Bell just emailed me that he's in the hospital in Chiang Mai now. He got into a real bad fight and got hurt pretty bad.
Of course, no fight is good, right?
That is why he isn't there yet.
I will look into his conditions more and tell you more later.
But yesterday I ran into this old man we heard about in the camp. I heard him here, too. His name was so loud, I heard it in every corner of our community here for years. And one time I even saw him running in the soccer field but just didn't get to meet him.
Well, it so happened that the other day he came to knock on my door after various friends and relatives spread the words around that I was giving out free smelts--one gallon bag each person.
My little girl--you know, that little girl I've been babysitting but not my own?--she looked out the second floor window when the door bell rang. We normally don't open doors to strangers. So, we checked thoroughly each time before we opened the door.
"It's a man, dark hair. Short in shorts. Old. He has a phone in his hands," she said.
I couldn't tell who that was.
"And there’s a car parked on the street, not in the driveway."
"I don't know who that is," I said.
But I decided to open the door anyway.
True enough, it was that man you, Steaming Bell and I had heard of there. We had heard of many but this man’s story is unique at the time.
Yeah, that man. I don’t know his real name. And he didn’t introduce himself, because he thought we all already knew who he was. I acted like I already knew, too, just so I wouldn’t offend him.
Back there, he was in love with a girl that his family didn’t approve. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the girl; they didn’t want him to get married yet. That’s because he was a loser—every time he played soccer, his team would lose. Two times that he wasn’t with the team, they won. So, his family and many people took that to be his luck or ability or something.
The family felt he would flunk at life and they would then be responsible for his wife’s funeral and raising his children if she died before they. And she would die before some of them anyway, right?
So, they didn’t let him marry her. But in order not to offend him, they said they just didn’t approve of the girl. They even went so far as to say her family didn’t have a good background to match theirs.
You know how it is in our culture: the parents and relatives must do the wedding or you don't get to live together. So, he didn't get to love publicly, even when both wanted to marry each other and she was already pregnant with his doing.
Two days later, they couldn’t find him but a note on his bamboo bed.
“I die if I don’t marry her,” he wrote. “You won’t see me again.”
A cousin carrying a wooden crossbow returning to camp from a hunting trip said the cousin just saw the man sitting by a tree behind those little hills pass Lake Ber up the stream.
That’s near where the older girls would be washing and pounding their clothes each afternoon.
So, his father rushed everybody to the tree. He was sitting with a rope, looking at the tree. He was either still thinking up how he could get the rope to form a noose down from the branch or whether he should really do the hanging.
“Son, don’t do it. Come back, we will get her for you,” his mother scream in tears.
Wedding had, two kids born to them were brought here with them. But then he divorced her “like throwing away trash,” a person here said.
He then insisted on marrying another woman, whom he later tossed out with no feelings, too.
By the time he came to my door, he had already married his third wife—this one brought from Laos, now with two kids.
"I was around the block at relative's," he said. "They do shaman today. I'm walking around and I'm thirsty. Can I get some water here?"
I realized he could have just walked back around the block for water but chose not to. So, there must have been another reason he knocked on my door. Then the smelts came to mind. Words must have gotten around the block, too.
I invited him to sit down. I poured him a glass of my distilled water--the kind we used to wash high school biology lab equipment with but that is now allowed for drinking.
We talked and talked. He said he knew martial arts, too, and that he liked my nunchuck set on the wall.
"This is a secret," he said. "Don't tell anyone. But I did Karate back in the camp and I was very good at this nunchuck. There were only four of us who got Karate black belts.”
I honored that achievement so much, I offered to watch him demonstrate some nunchuck moves to me.
I handed him my set.
He said he didn’t want to do it yet and that he would do it another time.
Then I said he could have mine as a gift.
I handed it to him.
He turned down my offer.
“One day when we meet up again on more official terms, I will take it,” he said.
But I gave him some smelts and he looked around my place before leaving. He didn't just leave right away, because that might suggest to me he came just for the smelts with no interest in my friendship or something.
I don’t know what other times there would be for us to meet again. But I took that to mean he didn’t know how to use the thing.
So, let’s not tell anyone. Let’s keep his secret for him: he doesn’t do Karate and he doesn’t know how to do nunchuck moves.