Aguantame or please have patience...

I apologize for not having time to write here but I'm really busy in school. Here is a story I wrote last month while traveling south.

I have a life list although now I think it is called a Bucket List. A lot on my list has been crossed off over the years such as seeing the Taj Mahal at sunset and the White Mountains in their fall glory. The list changes all the time as I get older too. I no longer care if I learn French but occasionally still work at trying to learn the piano. Some things on my list are small and don’t really deserve to be on anyone’s bucket list like my desire to make a good pot roast once, just once.
I’ve been to a lot of countries. Twenty-seven to be exact. I’ve also been to thirty-eight states including Maine, Florida, Hawaii and Alaska, the four corners which I think is kind of cool. Two more continents and I’ll have all seven before I die. These are all just numbers though, tasks, checkmarks. The important stuff is in the middle.
I saw the Taj Mahal. I touched it, watched the sunset on it. More interesting though and what is stained in my memory is that I watched an old woman sitting on the grass in front of me take a tiny naked baby, hold it up in the air, make a hissing sound and the baby peed right there on the grass in front of me, in front of the Taj Mahal. It was the coolest thing. When I look at my mental snapshot of that day, that old wrinkled woman with her hair covered up is wearing a red sari holding up a baby in the right hand corner of my Taj Mahal memory snapshot.
Although I love photography and tend to flock towards it at museums, it is not something I love about traveling. So many people spend their trips looking through a lens to capture a moment they want to remember forever. On safari in Africa we found a cheetah sitting near a tree stump with five little babies playing around her. My safari mates all grabbed their cameras to help them remember this moment later in their lives, a reminder of their free youths. My memory of that moment was the sound of cameras clicking and the twitch the Mama cheetah’s ear would do when it happened. She stood there for her photos, looking stoic and graceful and I felt uncomfortable being a part of this voyeristic scene. I wanted to leave her alone, take back the photos and apologize. My memory snapshot of seeing a cheetah in Kenya with babies has an audio attachment that sounds a lot like paparazi, and a camera lens sneaking into the bottom corner.
A few nights ago we went to a small festival of sorts in a border town near Yuma. The plaza had a playground, taco stands and families milling about listening to a man singing love songs on the stage. My kids ran around the throngs of children playing on swings and slides of questionable construction. Some of the older girls noticed Ryder but he was too busy hanging upside down on the monkey bars to notice them. It was dark outside so each one of us took a kid to be in charge of. Mine was Ryder. He headed to the slide where a zillion children were going backwards, upside down, in groups, screaming and laughing all the while landing in a dirt pile on top of eachother. All of them were at least a foot smaller than Ryder and all of them cut in front of him. He realized he would have to play with them if he wanted to go down the slide. He used the tickle method to gain entrance into their game. The littlest kids were in awe, surprised, scared and downright hilarious at their response to him. He laughed, chased, hid, tickled up and down the slide while screaming love songs played loudly and the smell of tacos wafted around us.
Then we took a picture. The flash stopped the kids in their tracks. We had ruined the moment trying to capture it. My mental photoshot of that moment is a huge grin on my son surrounded by tiny kids laughing and running from his tickling hand. The photo is of a bunch of kids standing in line behind a slide, in the dark. What was more important was that without knowing the language or rules of a game,
Ryder got these kids to include him. A proud Mama moment better served in my memory snapshot album instead of an actual photo.
About ten years ago we were in Thailand on the tail end of a long around the world journey. We had done work trade on various farms for bits of time while traveling. We found a work trade farm in a rural area of Thailand and decided to spend a few weeks there while we got used to living in Thailand. We took buses, trucks and finally a small boat to get to the farm of Loong Bob.
Bob was a retired school teacher from the States. He had traveled the world, taught school in Indian reservations in the States and abroad and finally at close to eighty years old, he had now lived on this farm for over ten years. He had just enough of a pension to keep his farm running and buy food to get by.
There was no way to get ahold of Loong Bob to ask permission to come to the farm so you merely had to show up and hope it all worked out. In the village upon our arrival some small children walked us to the river we would need to cross to get to Loong Bob’s farm. They guided us across the water on a crazy hole ridden boat and then led us through cane field until we arrived at a kind of odd looking lean to under giant eucalyptus trees.
Bob was a very healthy older man with long white hair he kept in a braid down his back. He never wore shirts or shoes, did Yoga all day and loved his land like a person. He was proud to show us the trees he had planted and called his land an island as he was surrounded by cane fields.
Our accomodations on the farm consisted of a wooden platform with a tin roof. Our showers came from a giant clay urn with a ladle surrounded by bamboo walls on a dirt floor. It was actually kind of nice on hot days. The farm had a few dry fields for rice and several ponds covered in floating rafts for growing vegetables. Loong Bob was a big fan of trying new ways to grow everything.
One of the first projects we did was to pull up the hyacinth floating in the ponds and make large stacks of them. In the sides of the stacks we planted tomato plants. Being that we were in the tropics, those hyacinth decomposed within days and heated up the roots of the tomato plants at the same time. He had a lot of success growing tomatos this way.
One of our favorite projects from Loong Bob’s was to water his vegetable garden. It took two of us to successfully pull it off as he had a bicycled powered water pump. I or Steve would ride the bike and the other person would water the garden. It was an ingenious way to get work done by volunteers wanting to experience an alternative farm in Thailand.
I did a lot of cooking while there as I was fresh off of cooking courses in India and had arrived with spices. Loong Bob taught me how to kill and de-feather a chicken wherein I made chicken masala soon thereafter. We ate well and had many a great conversations into the night at the farm.
Loong Bob said to us at one point that he wasn’t interested in talking to anyone anymore unless they had something to teach him. He was getting too old to waste his time and he only wanted to learn and try new things. We were like every other traveler coming his way and probably didn’t have much to offer. Everyone had either just come from Australia or India probably traveling around the world in the process. He wanted new experiences as his days were numbered. He planned to have his body buried under a jacaranda tree on his land that he was giving to his Laotian girlfriend.
We spent three weeks on Loong Bob’s farm and I can still picture the layout of the land. I can only guess that Loong Bob is now under that jacaranda tree after finally learning his last thing. We have no photos of our time on that farm and I honestly don’t care. I would never forget his face or the ponds or our shower. It’s a mental snapshot that wasn’t touched by the need to preserve.
I think of Loong Bob and his own bucket list, wondering if he ever had one or even cared. My bucket list isn’t that important to me anymore because the experiences I crave now, I cannot conceive of what they are yet. I need to meet the people or have it happen to realize I always wanted to do it or that it is more precious to me than “saying I did it”. Finding a giant squid on the beach last year surely wasn’t on my list but goes down as a memory snapshot to never forget. I’m sure my today is on someone’s bucket list somewhere. I’m sitting on a beach with my family under clear skies, watching birds fly by and listening to the waves of the ocean with nothing needing to be done until dinner.