Quarter Year

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.

Sam believes that genetics, essentially, make black people less intelligent. He called it “instincts,” but he implied that these “instincts” couldn’t be overcome, so I thought of it as genetics. He said instincts, like how Jews are two-faced and women are untrustworthy, are “hidden” in people and there’s just not much anyone can do about it.

In America it’s an unwritten rule that people have the same capacity for intelligence (happiness, pain, love, compassion, etc) regardless of their race (sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc). Another unwritten American rule is that you don’t openly question the first rule. Don’t worry, this post isn’t going there.

This story is beside the point, but it will illustrate Sam’s dedication to Buddhist practice. Sam lived with a nagging, painful neck injury caused by a car accident. Finally, eleven years to the day after the accident he decided to get rid of it for good, so he sat down and meditated for three consecutive days. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t move from the spot upon which he sat. He focused all his attention on his neck, visualizing it healed. When, 72 hours later, he finished the meditation, he could move his neck freely – he twisted in either direction to prove it. Healed. Hearing this story before the questionable comments, I thought, “Wow, to meditate that much means this guy must be a river of compassion!”

Sam’s phobias seem inconsistent: Buddhism teaches you to love others unconditionally, I thought, so how does he reconcile the practice with the lack of respect? (Well, there are plenty of people who manage to hate despite their loving leaders, so perhaps Sam is to Buddha as America’s anti-gay Christians are to Jesus and the Taliban is to Muhammad).

Sam asked Ali what he believes happens after we die. Ali responded that he feels this is it – there’s no afterlife. Sam said, “So you don’t even believe in re-incarnation?” (which, I suppose, is an afterlife scenario halfway between “this is it” and “there is a heaven”). Sam does believe in reincarnation, obviously, in which one’s karma determines their station in the next life.

So I wonder, Does Sam believe a person’s race is determined by karma from their previous life? In his beliefs, would a good dog be reborn as a Jew? Would a bad Eskimo be reborn as a Latino? It all seems ludicrous to me, but who am I to judge? I have no evidence either way.

I never asked about racial hierarchy as dictated by karmic law because I wanted to be polite: I was in his house, after all. The more relevant topic to come out of this exchange is how a guest should relate to their host. I was brought up to be polite (which in our culture means not talking about touchy subjects) in someone else’s home, but that could be just as much a culture-based practice as the one about not questioning racial equality.

About being a challenging guest, one view is that we travelers can claim “ignorant’s license,” which allows us to say or do things that might be rude in the town we’re visiting but can be written off as cultural differences. For example, Ali suggested that Sam’s hellion of a son (my words) needs more attention from his father, especially considering that Sam splits time between his two families in different cities. It would be inappropriate to say such a thing in England or America, but Sam doesn’t know that, so it might as well be said and written off as a cultural difference. And to be fair, we don’t even know if such a statement is inappropriate here in Thailand. So Ali chose to say what he was thinking and put the onus on Sam to blame the cultural difference if the statement does prove to be insensitive.

(I have a British client who says, “I don’t know why American parents are always gushing about how much they love their kids… I mean, my kids are alright. They’re just kids.” Who knew parental gushing/pride was cultural?)

Anyway, back to the story at hand: So, can a guest challenge their host’s opinions? Mathew says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (Sam’s in his late 50s), so you might as well just listen politely and even goad them, then later blog about how fucking crazy that guy was. To all the old dogs reading this – can you teach an old dog new tricks? Have you been open to major philosophical changes as you’ve aged?

I’m coming to the conclusion that if you can manage to cleanse your argument of judgment, then these topics are fair game. The key – as is the case with any communication – is to avoid taking anything personally and think about whether you’re making unfair assumptions when you’re speaking. For example: ‘having unconditional love for all people’ and ‘thinking that Jews are two-faced’ aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Here’s the argument that won me over: I’ve spent 30 years wandering among millions of people on this planet, starting on North America. Sam has spent almost 60 years wandering among millions of people on the opposite side of the world. Finally, after all this time and all these people, he and I have come together for one night to talk face-to-face on his porch, and it will never happen again. The odds are astronomical that we should be here! With that in mind, it seems like a waste of an opportunity that politeness prevent us from discussing important topics. To me, the devil is in the intent.

As for Sam, his views are consistent with Buddhism in this way: he says that they all come from careful observation. I imagine (assume) he’s dealt with a few Black people he found to be dumb and a few Jews he found to be two-faced. We asked him whether he would ever visit America and he said that even if he was given a free ticket he wouldn’t go. “Too dangerous.” He’s afraid of the guns (of course) and thinks Americans hate people from other cultures (he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan). In response, Azure showed him pictures of our house, our chickens, the Demeules’ lake house, our friends cooking and smiling, and Sam said, “You must live in a really nice part of America.” Well, yeah, I guess we do.

Either way, it’s hard to trust the opinion of someone who learns about the world through observation but would refuse a free ticket to a place they’ve never been. Not that we’re even close to understanding how his version of the world operates, but is his observation of race so different that he had to ask if Obama was as smart as Bush?