She Laughs at the Days

Dear little boy,

 One year ago I was reminding myself that I couldn't possibly be pregnant forever, and that eventually you would be born and my poor ankles would shrink back to normal size. Then you came so quickly that it was hard to believe you were here already.

Now you are 1. You've been here a whole year!

Being a baby in Thailand is pretty fun. It's a pretty baby friendly place. Everyone wants to be your friend. Everyone stops to greet you. They say, "Chah aye." It's a sort of rough guttural sound and it's literally, just baby talk. It's how you greet a baby here, along with a big smile and leaning in close to pat a cheek. When you are 40 I think, even if you haven't been in Thailand for a very long time and someone says that in your hearing, you will wonder why that phrase is so familiar. It's because you heard it every day for your first year of life.

You are so easy going though. You smile for everyone. You look at Asian women and sm…

When I was younger I went to one of those church leadership types of schools that had no grades and was basically a series of week long seminars. There were people of all ages, from many different parts of the world, and we lived in a motel near the church, 3 to a suite. (In my later years I think that money would have been better spent on a plane ticket over seas, but that would ignore the fact that I did experience a great deal of personal growth during this time, mostly through my interaction with some of the people who were there.)

One of the things that we did as part of our "ministry training" was go out and spend time talking to all the street kids that flocked to that city in the summer. There was one little Quebecois kid with giant dreads who was a great musician and we thought he might enjoy playing with our group of students who often had fun impromptu jam sessions in one of the motel rooms. So we invited him to come over and jam sometime, and by we, I mean me and…