Writer, Publisher, Retired

Tag: Tradition

Drinking Beer with a Gunman in a Temple at a Funeral

As I walked through the temple to the kitchen area where the women were gathered preparing the food for the evening offering and meal on the third and final day of my mother-in-laws funeral rites, I noticed uncle Nim sat on the floor of the kitchen with two other men. One in his usual farming garb was Daeng from the house opposite my mother-in-laws, with his easy smile. The other I didn’t know. He wore cleaner and more expensive clothes and had several baht of gold, which was hanging around his neck. His nails were clean and he was clean shaven. They were half way through three big bottles of Leo beer.

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Sweeping Up

It is almost two years now, and I suppose it is time to record the actual true events before they fade or my memory decides to exclude such things that don’t fit with preconceived and taught ideas typical of someone raised in the rational and heartless late 60’s and 70’s. It also seems fitting as I sit once more, where I did that day, on the raised dot mypai with a pencil and cheap paper notebook feeling the breeze from the small green fan as the heat of the summer rises once more past body temperature.

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Holding Rice

The sky was darkening by the minute as the clouds turned from white to light grey to a darker shade, to charcoal and now indeed black with a rapidity rarely seen. A wind had suddenly sprung up. Starting as a light breeze with a vague hint of coolness. Then gradually becoming a more noticeable breath of cool on face and exposed skin. A stronger blast. And now strengthening as its power is rediscovered, moving the branches on the trees surrounding the village and sending out a siren of rustles and creaking wood as it further strengthens and trees start to sway and bend. The sound of a branch falling through the foliage to the fine red dry dirt on the ground breaks the whistles of wind now flowing through not only every open space but finding every gap between massed trees, the smattering of houses on the dirt red packed mud road, that they were built along. The red dirt from under the trees, the road and even the rice farmland down the end of the pike now becoming airborne and coating the floors of the rude wooden houses on stilts, passing into the communal areas and under the houses where the farm tools were now coated in red. Visibility falling as the black darkness seemed to descend around all. With the rise of the wind, now a crescendo of whistles, crashing boughs, falling tools and pieces of slamming houses. The air now filled not only with dust in the air but pieces of tree, house, tile and detritus. Doors not fastened blown closed and open, crashing in rhyme to the beat of the wind.

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