Mon school in Burma

Seattle

Green and urban was my first impression of Seattle.  Nonna, fearless as ever, drove a 24 foot moving van from Albuquerque to Colin’s new home in Seattle, while I followed her in Sarah’s Toyota, accompanied by Ono, their one year old Golden Lab puppy.  Ono was great company, sitting quietly in the back seat, occasionally leaning forward to rest her head on my shoulder and poking her nose into my ear at unexpected moments while I was listening to a gruesome murder mystery on the radio.

We took our time on the drive, stopping the first night in Moab, the second night in Twin Falls, and the third night in Yakima, and arriving at Colin’s house around noon on the fourth day.  He and Sarah found a house in Discovery Park, a hundred year old white clapboard duplex in an old closed Navy base which is now a huge park on the edge of Puget Sound.  The location is perfect. 

Sarah flew to Seattle with Oran, who will be two next month, and he seemed amazed to find his dog, his cat, his grandparents, and his toys in a new house so far away.  He hadn’t seen his dad for six weeks, and when he came off after work the look on Oran’s face was pure joy, the kind of absolute emotion that only a child can show.  Oran, Ono, and Tibby spent the next few days exploring and getting their pecking order established.

To me Seattle seems like another new beginning, another fresh start.  Seattle is new to me; I have not spent hardly any time there, and I am eager to explore both the city and the country around it, the coffee shops and brew pubs, the Olympic Penninsula and the wheat fields in eastern Washington.  I want to hike and take lots of photographs, and then get a printer and start printing in black and white, and when I am tired with that I want to start to write, to finish my memoir of Greenland, and then to take classes and visit museums, and to watch my grandson grow up.  This coming September I am planning a trip to Bhutan, and I want to photograph there; and I want to return frequently to the Southwest US, to the best light anywhere.  And it is still hard to retire, to quit practicing medicine, to stop doing what I have been doing for forty plus years.

I look at the photograph on my desk of my mother on her high school graduation day and I wonder what her life was like growing up in a small town on the Oregon Coast, a place she said she couldn’t wait to leave,  leave for an education and for adventure, but instead she got married, had children, had polio, and watched her dreams slip away, dreams that must have included traveling, writing, photographing, and certainly included watching her grandchildren grow up, grandchildren she never got to see because she died before they were born, and so I think that I should go ahead and in spite of the huge emptiness inside of me continue to chase my dreams.  I owe it to her.  And I owe it to Derek and Colin, and maybe to myself.

Hong Kong Pictures, Jan 2013

 

Mira

Friday our cat Mira, whom we adopted as a tiny kitten nineteen years ago in Kazakhstan, died, the result of acute on chronic renal failure.  She fell asleep, as they say, in Nonna’s arms, in the arms of someone who truly loved her, about as good a death as anyone can hope for.

She was a good cat, an indoor cat without front claws, unable to protect herself if the need had arisen.  As a kitten she loved to wait in ambush, then run and jump at the wall behind us, placing all four of her claws at our eye level, as if to let us know that she could have had us, if she wanted to.  As she grew older her athleticism slipped away and she became more of a couch potato, but always glad to see us, always trying to climb into our lap if we sat quietly long enough.  In her last years she became blind in one eye and seemed to have trouble seeing out of the other eye. Her teeth started to fall out and she developed  high blood pressure and Nonna faithfully fed her medications daily.

Goodbye Mira; we will miss you.

Macau Temple

Hong Kong - influenced by Rothko

Ponnatee Resort

The air conditioner is going flat out and I almost feel cold, the first time in weeks I’ve been anything but warm or hot - and this is winter in Thailand.  It even seems to get warmer when it rains here.

Yesterday I visited three villages inside Burma – Halockanie, Baladen Pite, and Tee Wah Doh – and today I am in a very nice air conditioned room a thousand miles and a thousand years away, or so it seems.  The people in the villages live in bamboo houses, or wood houses if they are well off.  There is no glass, no tile, and no concrete in their homes, and if there is a fire everything burns – everything except their knife and cooking pot.  They live without electricity or running water, and not all of them have latrines.  Dogs, pigs, and chickens are more numerous than people.  Little kids run around half naked, playing with simple toys, but they look well cared for and most of them appear well fed.

We visited several schools and held mobile clinics in each.  I saw several children with congenital abnormalities - one boy had severe scoliosis (curvature of his spine); a little girl had a strange abnormality of her eyes so that they appeared to be constantly bobbing; like two corks in the ocean.  One mother was sitting on the front of her house holding her severely retarded fourteen year old son in her arms.  He cannot talk, walk, or feed himself, yet he was clean and appeared to be very well cared for, a testimony to the power of a mother’s love.  I don’t think he would get that level of care in any institution in the U.S.

Most of the villagers look happy and interested in what is happening around them, only a few of the poorest seemed apathetic.  The school kids were clean and working hard at school.  No one was ‘goofing off,’ the way we did in school.  The teachers are very young and hold very important positions in their communities; in their culture teachers are held in very high esteem.  I was very impressed by them.

On a different note, today I learned that Terry, my friend of more than fifty years, died quietly last night after years of fighting Parkinson’s disease.  I met Terry when we were freshmen in high school in Portland, half the world away from here.  He was on the reunion committee for our high school class and this year will be our fifty year reunion – I’m sorry he won’t be there.   He lived a life of honor and courage and he will be missed by so many people.

Often I talk with my son Colin on Skype.  This week he drove over miles of snow covered roads to get to Seattle where he is starting a new chapter in his life.  It is exciting and I’m sure things will work out for him; it’s just a bit nerve wracking in the beginning –a new city, new job, new people.  What a different lifestyle we live compared to those people in Halockanie.