Portrait of a Family

In my ongoing efforts to amuse and entertain sometimes I forget to mention exactly how we are doing here in Thailand. Life here is not all riding elephants, feeding monkeys, and playing with tigers, you know. So here is a dose of realism. Four vignettes of such detail and unimaginable psychological intensity that Henry James himself would be proud.

MEG

We all enjoyed the grandparents visit, but it was perhaps the most physically taumatizing period in Meg's short six-year history. First, she lost both her front teeth. Then, she was brutally assaulted on the waterslide by her brother, who decided that walking up the slide while other kids are trying to come down was a sensible idea. Meg hit his knee with her head, giving her an enormous black eye and a bump that still hasn't gone away. I suppose we can all be grateful it wasn't one some little Swedish kids that benefitted from Jake's thoughtfulness. That, plus the incident with the soccer ball and Dolph Lundgren would be after me for sure.
















JAKE

Many of you might already be familiar with Jake's philosophy: I touch, therefore I am. He touches dials and levers in the car. He touches furniture, appliances, and electronics as we walk through department stores. He touches expensive, breakable display items at other people's houses. It's very difficult for him to see something and not touch it (but at least he's stopped putting things in his mouth). If he ever gets lost in the woods during a Scout activity, we'll just hang something sparkly on a nearby tree and in ten minutes he'll be there reaching for it.

A few days ago while at the mall at the mall with a friend, Kaddi and the kids stopped for lunch at a restaurant. The only seats available were on one end of a long table that had a few ladies sitting on the other end. As luck would have it, Jake ended sitting near the middle of the table next to someone's purse. Of course, he immediately began to touch the bag, pulling on it, fiddling with the ties or zippers, completely oblivious that the bag's owner was sitting directly across from him with a look of subdued rage on her face. After a few minutes of this, the lady could take no more. She got up from her seat, walked around the table to where Jake sat, smacked his hand, grabbed her purse, and stormed out of the restaurant.

Oh...if only I had been there to see it.

KADDI

December has been a banner month for Kaddi. It began when the 1st counselor in the Bishopric called us into the office and asked us to organize the Sacrament meeting program for Christmas Eve. That seemed a sensible idea to me, considering neither of us are particularly musical and we don't know anyone in the ward. Then the 2nd counselor paid us a visit at home to ask us to be the nursery leaders. I love to hear people talk about the nursery...Oh, what a great calling the nursery is - I wish I could be in the nursery, the luckiest people are in the nursery, Ooooh, Ooooh...those precious children. I guess that's why every Bishopric has a waiting list of people who want to be called as nursery leaders, because everyone loves it-soooo-much! Have you every tried to get anyone to replace you in the nursery? Besides, the whole reason those kids are in there in the first place is their own PARENTS don't want to deal with them. Oh, sure...we try to put a happy face on it by singing songs and playing with puzzles and handing out crackers, but let's just call it what it really is - Toddler lockdown.

It seems pretty obvious that a Bishopric surveys their ward roster, selects the most naive couple they can find (usually someone who's just moved in and is optimistic about the ward) and slams them into nursery. Although in our case I think that one day someone just informed the Bishop that we were socializing, getting to know people, and feeling better about being a half world away from everything familiar. "Oh, they are...are they? Well, we'll put a stop to that!!"

(But I'm not bitter...)

SHANE

No Christmas post is complete without a tale of a boy and his bike. We Nichadans do a lot of bicycling, and so the community has built-in bicycle lanes on boths sides of the road. In addition to the painted lines on the margins, they've also set up orange road-cones to separate traffic between cars and bicycles. It's an apartheid transit system. There's even a string that runs through each of the road cones, to prevent us 2-wheelers from associating with our 4-wheeled superiors. Once in you're in the bicycle lane, you're generally locked in until the next intersection. The consequences of crossing indiscriminately can be...severe.

Saturday after Jake's soccer game at the school, the family headed home with Meg on the back of my bicycle and Jake on the back of Kaddi's. After picking up my driver's license and heading out the school gate, I noticed there was more shade on the other side of the street and thus did the unthinkable - I tried to jay-cycle my way across the street. It could be that Meg was distracting me with one of her 64 follow-up questions on topics such as "What's the thing that goes next to the other thing?", but more likely I was just lost in my thoughts (possibly planning the next great talent show production - Mack Strate and Jazzhands: the sequel.) Whatever the topic, I was so engrossed that not only did I not realize that I had driven over the sacred string boundary that separates civilization from chaos, I kept peddling until the string was wrapped so tight around the back wheel, we would need a chainsaw to get it free. Since both ends of the string were still threaded through the orange roadcones I had made a serious mess of the day's commute. In three minutes there was bicycle traffic backed up for miles.

The pure ecstasy of trying to pull string out of a bicycle chain in 100% humidity was immeasurably enhanced by the fact that this happened right in front of the school entrance. As dozens of parents drove out of the school parking lot, they could peer through the tinted windows of their Landrovers and Lexus' to see a small family camped around an entangled child's bike by the side of the road. We must have looked like an ad for a homeless shelter. I think Meg started quoting lines from Junie B. Jones and Kaddi just stood there with a blank look on her face that said "This is quite a life I have..." I made sure to appear disgusted and shake my head at Jake every few seconds in order to confuse people into thinking that he was responsible. In such circumstances it's standard operating procedure to pin blame on the boy.

Despite my best efforts I could not get us loose. If it had been up to me, I'd still be there on the side of the road. But, as so often happens here, someone took pity on us in one of our many moments of need. One of the 147 security guards that patrol fortress Nichada came to lend a hand, detached the string from the roadcones, and eventually succeeded in freeing us. After thanking him I fled the scene of my embarassment like a fish suddenly released from a fisherman's hook and dropped back into the river. I was almost home before I realized Meg wasn't on the back of the bike.