Blog Tour and Book Giveaways

The blog tour for Footprints on the Ceiling has begun.  I have 17 willing bloggers on board and each one will do a giveaway of one copy of Footprints, so the more you visit and comment, the better your chances of winning a free book.

Here are the first three:
Monday--Donna McFarland blogs at Duck and Friends and did a very nice review today. She is a mom, author, music teacher, and fun person to sit beside at book events.

Tuesday--Jenny Smucker.  Yes, my daughter, who loves me and likes my books even though I write about her and her oozing cookies and messed up muffins.  She blogs at Dreaming of Dragonflies.

Wednesday--Christine Weaver blogs at Shall Run and Not be Weary.  I don't think we've met, but she seems like a lot of fun and her big family--some of whom are adopted--always seems so lively and fun as well.

Thanks for your interest and I'm sure you'll enjoy these blogs.

Looking ahead, here are the upcoming stops:
[you might have to copy and paste the links]

November 13--Bethany Eicher--About My Father's Business -- bethany-aboutmyfathersbusiness.blogspot.com
November 14--Mary Ann Yutzy-- Stepping Out-- maryannyutzy.wordpress.com
November 15--Gabrielle Marcy-- Project Paperie-- www.projectpaperie.blogspot.com

November 17--Miriam Iwashige Prairie View miriamiwashige.blogspot.com
November18--Joanna Hendricks-- What's in My Teapot?-- whatsinmyteapot.blogspot.com
November 19--Shari Zook  shari.zooks.us  Confessions of a Woman Learning to Live
November 20--Keri Lewis-- Keri Recommends-- www.KeriRecommends.com
November 21--Martha Glick--The Kitchen Cookie-- www.thekitchencookie.blogspot.com
November 22--Gina Martin--Home Joys-- www.homejoys.blogspot.com

November 24--Penny Toews-- Quintuplicate Mom-- quintuplicatemom.blogspot.com
November 25--Crystal Kupper--crystalkupper.net/blog
November 26--Anita Yoder--Tis a Gift to Receive-- lifeisforlivingbook.com
November 28--Mary Ann Kinsinger-- A Joyful Chaos-- ajoyfulchaos.blogspot.com
November 29--Dawn Harshbarger -- Little Shack in the Boondocks little-shack-in-the-boondocks.blogspot.com
 

November's Letter from Harrisburg

Some new growth just needs time

 

By Dorcas Smucker

For The Register-Guard

Nov. 9, 2014

I almost gave up on the camellia bush.

As one of those determined, low­-maintenance plants that makes people like me look like far better gardeners than we are, the camellia bush filled my office window with a view of sturdy branches and thick, shiny leaves. As I recall, the leaves never dropped off in all the 14 years we’ve lived here, even as the plant grew some 12 feet tall. It bloomed in an explosion of pink early every spring. It reassured me that if, God forbid, our daughter Jenny or any other child fell from the upstairs window, they would land safely in those dense branches instead of on the ground.

Independent, reliable, pretty and multipurpose — that was the sort of bush I wanted for a friend.

Last December we had a cold snap, the temperature dropping into unheard-of frigidity — single digits, then zero, then seven below.

Well into January, with the weather back to normal, I noticed that the camellia leaves were dropping off the bush, making a thick layer of dull leaves with curled-up sides, shrunken and sad.

Oh dear.

Surely this was a normal response to extreme cold, I thought, Nature taking care of her own, and the bush would revive and bloom in February like always.

I saw one bud in February. It snapped off when I touched it, a dead relic of the previous spring. The bare branches scratched my window through March and April and May.

Was it dead, or not? Brittle twigs broke off in my fingers. The only green on the entire bush was a bit of moss. A dark eyesore on the north side of the house, stark and naked among all the greenery and growth around it.

But I had a horror of cutting it down if there was any chance it would revive. So I waited.

Meanwhile, daffodils and tulips bloomed, and lilacs and fuchsias and daisies.

Surely it was dead and ruined, and we might as well cut it down, burn it, replace it with a new shrub. But I still had an inner urge: wait. 

Give it time.

I think it was August when I saw the most improbable sight. All around the thickest part of the trunks and up into a few limbs, stiff green leaves were pushing out, point first, through solid wood. They kept growing, emerging whole and fresh, followed by stems and still more leaves.

It was soon obvious that every branch over an inch thick had survived, so I whacked off everything smaller. Then I watched it through the office window, an increasing green, a growing population of leaves.

 

I was so glad I had waited.

Looking up from the computer at the camellia bush’s progress, I would think of other dilemmas, most of them far more significant than shrubbery, and this recurring decision. 

Do I give up or keep hoping? Am I waiting on something impossible? When does hanging on become ridiculous? When is a situation all rattly branches that will never bloom again? How long do I wait to find out? Is it time to saw that difficult relationship off at the roots? Should I ask the failing student to drop the class? Is the troubled young person a lost cause? Will I ever influence this organization? Will that person ever understand?

And, less weighty but still of import: Should I give the maddening smartphone to one of the children, give up on technology and go back to being Amish?

 

The smartphone was a hand-me-down from our oldest son, Matt, who is an engineer for the Navy and relentlessly optimistic about my tech-learning capabilities. He has coaxed and coached me through cutting and pasting paragraphs, opening new windows online, backing up documents, signing up for Facebook, and a hundred other screeny skills I never dreamt I was capable of grasping.

And countless times, when I was in complete despair, he calmly told me to turn the computer off and back on again, and then everything turned out all right.

Despite Matt’s optimism, I’m almost ready to give up on the smartphone. How can such a nifty device take five separate steps to call my husband, when my old flip-phone took only two, with only one hand, and I didn’t even have to look — that’s what I wonder. 

As my daughter Emily says, “It’s like you buy a new Kitchen–Aid mixer, but then you get rid of all your spoons, and then all you want is to mix up some scrambled eggs.”

“Give it time,” my friends say. “Pretty soon you’ll think you can’t live without it.”

Matt, as always, believes in me. “Just keep using it,” he says, cheerful and confident.

It’s an interesting message from a son who once seemed hopeless. A mom is never supposed to give up on her children, but I remember a dark stage when I was sure that my relationship with Matt was doomed to disaster and so was his life. He was 13, angry and irritable, fighting me on every front. I was, I realize now, far too obsessive and picky. We were constantly in conflict.

Our lowest moment was when Matt and his dad left for a weeklong trip, and Matt refused to hug me goodbye. I was sure he had been born to the wrong mom, I was a failure, and all my hopes were frozen leaves dropping in a wilted pile.

How could I have seen, back then, the green shoots pushing impossibly from a black bough just a few short years later?

I remember a Christmas party when Matt was a junior in high school. He came up behind me and tilted my chair back to scare me, and we laughed together, a moment of healing and success and hope restored.

Matt was my guinea pig, I tell him now, and his five siblings benefited from everything I learned at his expense. He forgives me, he says, and adds, “I was a tough kid to raise.” Then he shows me how to back up my email account.

It’s OK to give up on the zucchini recipe that won’t work for this family and the hot-glue-and-coffee-filter project that will never resemble the Pinterest original.

It might even be healthy to give the smartphone to an eager teenager and go back to a flip phone and a good pen.

But with people — family, students, friends, and the many who circle into my life for a season — I sense an inner urge to wait. 

Give them time, don’t give up yet, keep hoping. 

We see only bare and black and hear the breaking snap of twigs, but there may be fresh green leaves about to push triumphantly from hard dead wood.

Footprints on Amazon

Footprints on the Ceiling is now on Amazon.

 Right here.

Special thanks if you leave a review.

Trivia, Stuff, Bits, Pieces

The blog tour of Footprints on the Ceiling starts Monday, November 10th.  There will be a book giveaway with each post.

*********

 I have been teaching the junior Sunday school class, a squirrelly bunch of 10-year-olds who talk a lot more than I did at their age, I think, but I am not going to contact my dad to verify this.

We have been wading through lots of Old Testament kings going off to battle.  There is much of the Old Testament that I don't understand, and much more that is difficult to relate to ten-year-olds.  The most practical application --we Mennonites love the term 'practical application'-- seems to be about how to face big obstacles and fear.

One Sunday I said, "Ok, we're going to go around the circle, and first I want you to tell me something you're thankful for, and then we'll go around and you tell me something you're afraid of."

One boy piped up, "For me it's the same thing!  My dad!"

I decided that was not necessarily a bad thing, considering.

Another child, asked to say what she's afraid of, exclaimed, "Satan and the dark and spiders!"

I thought, yes.  That about covers it.

Spiders seem to be a recurring theme, in addition to Old Testament kings.  I'm surprised how many of them, boys and girls alike, are seriously afraid of spiders but not of snakes.  I am the opposite, and despite my fears of tall grass, I think I have it easier than they do.  Snakes do not make nests in the ceiling light fixtures, at least not here in Oregon.

Jehoshaphat sent people into battle with a choir singing praises.  There's something powerful about that.  Try it next time you encounter a spider, I told the kids.  Or the dark.

The enemy armies were going to be coming up the gorge at the Cliff of Ziz, Second Chronicles says, and I think that is the most wonderfully Dr. Seussian phrase in the Bible.

Last Sunday I reseated everyone to try to cut down on the talking.  Boy-girl-boy-girl, despite the protests, and one boy exclaimed, "You're the preacher's wife!  You're supposed to be nice!"

I laughed and laughed, but I intend to keep on being mean.

*******
So, ever since the Bible became a slick and marketed item sometime in the 90s, there's been a special Bible for every slice of humanity.  "The Medical Worker's Bible."  "The Women's Devotional Bible."  "The Farmer's Bible."  "The Safeway Grocery Sacker's Bible."  You get the picture.

I have written before about the strange mail you get when your husband is the school principal.  On Sunday, this was in our box at church.

I thought that was very odd, in addition to taking the specific-audience Bible marketing much too far.


I opened the envelope.  Then I rolled my eyes and exhaled in a long OhForeverMoreYou'veGotToBeKidding, like I do when I finally get Emily's terrible puns.

It uses the term "Bible" in the sense of "a publication that is preeminent especially in authoritativeness or wide readership"--Merriam-Webster online.

It offers descriptions and pictures of thousands of drugs so Paul as principal can identify what he finds in backpack pockets, I guess.

Praise God this is not something he's had to deal with, so far.

************
Today I spoke to the Junction City Garden Club, a group of 44 women, many of them in their 80s, who take on ambitious beautifying projects such as planting daffodils all along the railroad tracks.

I usually put this demographic to sleep, especially if I don't have a microphone, but they were engaged and awake and were actually able to hear me and asked lots of questions.

So I had lots of fun.

I suggested they take on Bruce Witmer's unfinished project of planting daffodils all the way from Harrisburg to Halsey, but somehow they weren't leaping out of their seats to volunteer for this.

************
Last week my friends Bonnie and Rita showed up with an overloaded "Thirty-One" tote bag full of groceries, cards, gift cards, and other gifts, all from the church, for Pastor Appreciation Month.

It was unbelievable.  In fact, digging reverently through it, I repeated the word Un.Be.Liev.A.Ble about 25 times.

I also cried because it was just so amazing.

Your pastor and his wife would be greatly encouraged if you did the same, just so you know.

************
Matt is growing potatoes in a plastic tote in his new apartment in Washington, DC.  This makes me happy.

************
My college kids, Ben and Emily, keep finding errors in their professors' work.  Ben's teacher wrote a quiz question about a situation that is physically impossible, involving two balls on pulleys in water with a layer of oil on top, and the density of the one ball was supposed to be.....well, that's all I remember, but Ben says it can't work because the pulley can only apply pressure up, not down, and the pressure of the ball would keep it half in and half out of the water.  Or something.

Emily's grammar teacher says that "Dani was the girl who was chased by the dog," is incorrect, and "who" should be "whom."  Emily feels this is incorrect.  Other examples have much more blatantly violated everything Emily was taught in high school.

Neither Ben nor Emily feels free to express their concerns to the instructors.  I am being a good mom and letting them figure it out.
 **********

Quote of the Day:
"If I make coffee, it wakes you up.  If Mom makes coffee, you have to wake it up before you can drink it."
--Steven

New Book

Yesterday Paul went to Con-Way Freight in Eugene and picked up my new book.

All 2025 lbs.  And all 3240 copies.  I feel somewhere between brave and insane, frightened and elated, and very dependent on the goodwill of readers.




So, Footprints on the Ceiling is officially on the market.

 
If you'd like a copy, send me a check for $15, which includes postage.
Dorcas Smucker
31148 Substation Drive
Harrisburg, OR  97446

Discounts are available for larger quantities and for bookstores.

I'd like to do a blog tour again.  If you have a blog and would like to review the book and do a giveaway, please send me an email at dorcassmucker@gmail.com

Eventually, I hope to have the book on Amazon in both paper and kindle form, but that is a project for another day.

Meanwhile.  We have a whole pallet of books waiting to make new friends.

Thank you for your interest in this project.

October Column in Register-Guard

Note: After a few months of writing for the Register-Guard every three weeks, I'm back to writing once a month, but still rotating with Bob Welch and Carolyn Kortge.  Apparently, readers wanted to know exactly which Sunday they could expect to read each of our columns.

Letter from Harrisburg

Are we all busy, or just confused?

By Dorcas Smucker

For The Register-Guard

October 19, 2014

Mostly, I listen to birds.

A truck shifting gears far away and an irate dog nearby, but otherwise the still, early-morning air in this Thailand neighborhood is full of chirps and twitters and coos. Over there a sharp choppy caw is answered by another, and a deep-voiced hammering sounds to the south.

Constantly, over it all, a loud, clear bird-call seems to come from everywhere, sounding urgent but kind, like mothers calling children, with a strange tone that reminds me of bubbles rising, as though the warm, heavy air were actually water, and the birds’ friendly calls across the neighborhood were bubbling upward in the thick humidity.

I sit at a little round table on a tiled balcony with a white rail. Two trees — one like an overgrown rhododendron, the other with fern-like leaves — obscure much of my view, but between them I see a line of single-story houses with red-tiled roofs and simple iron gates across the driveways. Miniature temples sit on elaborate posts in the corner of the yards, fresh with colorful streamers, giving off a hint of incense.

The jungle seems close here, even in town, and one gets the sense that if you turn your back for 10 minutes, it will take over again. Trees arch over the fences and far into the streets. Every untended area looks dense and overgrown — the neglected yard across the road, the swampy area between fences. Huge bougain­villia flowering in an exotic purple peeks through the trees down the street. At another property, snake-like leaves of a roof-high plant drape themselves over a 5-foot-high wall.

Doves with tiny heads and speckled shoulders pause on one of the 10 electric wires going by between me and the ferny tree. A small bird, maybe a hummingbird, buzzed into the neighborhood not long ago. Others are exotic black birds with white shoulders that swoop across the street in pairs or little sparrow-like birds that burrow with frantic rustling into the leaves.

Some time ago, when I felt like I had more going on in my life than I could possibly handle, someone told me to define what “rest” looks like for me.

Now I think: It’s actually happened. This is what rest looks like. This is how it feels.

Our oldest daughter, Amy, moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, last January. She immediately began taking Thai classes and learning to teach English as a second language.

Paul and I try to visit our children wherever they scatter, for both their encouragement and our reassurance. Paul was asked to speak at a youth conference in Nepal in October, flying into and out of Chiang Mai, so it was the perfect opportunity to spend time with Amy. Since her house is tiny, she arranged for us to stay nearby in the home of generous friends who were away for a month.

In the weeks leading up to our trip I cooked for seven people every day, hosted guests, canned green beans and 81 quarts of grape juice, watered flower beds, put a new book together and got it off to the printer, and took 10 children camping at the coast, returning less than two days before we left for Thailand.

I was home alone for less than an hour between mid-May and well into September.

Now and then, I wondered how this happened, this constant rush, the flood of responsibilities, the default answer of “busy” when people asked how I was doing.

“The glorification of busy,” some call it, theorizing that we choose too much to do because, in our culture, it gives us a sense of importance.

“Most people that are really busy are actually just confused,” says my neighbor Anita, and I suspect that’s the case with me, since it never feels like a deliberate choice. How could I have known in June, when I planted a late garden and took in my dad for the summer, that the green beans would coincide with grapes and guests and galley proofs of a new book? Rather, it seems the responsibilities just show up, usually in the form of blessings and loved ones, and I could never tell them to go away.

So the way to stay sane through this stage seems to be in choosing time away, making it happen, giving it priority. We observe Sunday as a day of rest, technically, although for a minister’s wife it’s often as taxing as any other day.

I hunted in the Bible to see what it says about rest and found it presented as both a command, to be chosen deliberately, and a reward, given unasked, which is what this trip has turned out to be.

While Paul is off in Nepal I sometimes ride across town on the back of Amy’s motorbike with the sun burning our arms and the hot wind whipping by. As we roll past cement trucks and buses close enough to touch, I think, “I might die, but what a fun way to go.”

I wander down the street and buy iced coffee while Amy is in class, and then we zoom off to lunch at a little open-air restaurant and go shopping in the garment district with its endless fabric pieces rolled up on long tubes set upright on the floor.

Despite the exhaustion of a day among wild traffic and sights and smells, I feel my soul unwinding.

But mostly, it’s the time alone that has proven the sweetest. That first morning, I opened a door and found this inviting little balcony, waiting for me.

“Come ye apart, and rest a while,” it said, paraphrasing Jesus’ words long ago.

So, recognizing a priceless opportunity when I saw it, I have been going out every morning with a pot of tea. I watch the morning light spread over the greenery and the tiled roofs. No one speaks to me, no phones ring, no messages beep, no one knows I am here.

In the Beijing airport, almost hidden among shiny shops full of expensive perfumes and thousand-dollar purses, there’s an area, beautiful but not ostentatious, featuring subdued colors, two large lily ponds crossed by a pretty angled bridge, gracious pagodas with little wooden tables and chairs, and two little tables offering squares of red paper, a bowl of ink, and two long paintbrushes for practicing your Chinese writing.

I sat there and drank coffee and felt nourished in senses and spirit. It seemed the structure, like my delightful balcony, had been built with exactly that purpose in mind.

Maybe we busy Americans need to do this, I thought. Not to disdain our work, but to see stillness as necessity rather than luxury. Maybe we each need to create a little place in our lives for deliberate beauty, for intentional rest, for bird calls rising, for restoring the soul's capacity to care and work and invest joyfully in all the people and opportunities that come its way.

The Real Thai Dinner

Going to another country makes you evaluate what you do and why you do it.

For example: what it takes in terms of space and furniture to host guests.

And: how you prepare food, and why.  And why you use the eating utensils you do.

Amy and Kimberly have a cute but quite tiny house with two bedrooms, a living area with a small couch and  small table, and a little kitchen.

One evening they invited a bunch of friends--staff from the local university plus one husband--to cook a Thai meal at their house.

[Pause: Amy, feel free to get into my account and edit all the things I wasn't sure about or got all wrong.]

I was also invited, so there were eight people all together.  At our house, that would mean two leaves in our big dining table and all our rather bulky dining chairs plus the two green ones I got from Paul's mom.  Quite a lot of cubic footage in all.

Kimberly wrestled a big rolled-up something out of the corner and proceeded to lay it on the floor.  It was a big woven mat.  The food was placed in the middle, plates were placed around the food, and we all sat around that, with plenty of room.  They could have accommodated a few more this way, in fact.

I thought: Hmmmm.

But first, of course, they made the food.  They arrived with lots of fresh things--broccoli, cute white mushrooms, green onions, and tomatoes, which were washed and chopped and soaked in salt water with great busyness.  Some were briefly cooked, and then the water was tossed out the back door rather than down the drain.  I don't know why.


 

 

Just like American tomatoes, except they don't remove the green core thing at the top.

 A number of ingredients were included purely for flavor and not intended to be eaten: lemongrass, which has a woody texture, tiny hot peppers to rival anything in Mexico  and a green leaf that I forget the name of.

I learned the hard way that these are not actually for eating, first crunching through a slice of lemongrass and then biting into a bit of pepper that sent searing flames shooting out of my nose and ears, and tears out of my eyes, while everyone offered their solutions and the nice lady to my left got me ice water and Kimberly said that where she teaches, the children are taught to eat a fresh vegetable if they bite into a hot pepper.

We had two vegetable dishes, quite similar except one was cooked, with noodles, and one was stir-fried, without noodles.  Normally, the stir-fried one includes meat, but one of the group was on a meat fast for a month so it was left out for her sake.

Stir-fried on the left, cooked on the right.

The soup was tom kaa gai with a coconut milk base and a distinct lemongrass flavor.

Then there was the interesting offering of pork sausage stuffed into pieces of squid.  The squid part, it turned out, was actually supposed to be eaten.  I took one small bite and found it quite rubbery and terrible, like chewing on the fat rubber band on a bunch of broccoli, with a fishy flavor.

 

Thai mushrooms are just cute.

It was a fun group.

 

The standard utensils in Thailand are forks and big spoons--what we use as soup spoons in the U.S.--for most food, and occasionally little dipper-like spoons for soup.

The forks are used as pushers and the spoons are for scooping and eating.  Usually the meat is cut into small pieces so no knife is needed, but if something needs cutting, such as the bony chicken pieces in the soup, the spoon is used.
It seems a bit uncouth at first, but it's an efficient way to eat.

Depending where you eat, you use chopsticks, but not very often.  I suspect it's for foods that are more Chinese.

Edit: Amy says, "Chopsticks vs. fork/spoon depends more on what you're eating than where you're eating. Often places will have both available, and if you order a soup with noodles you'll use the chopsticks and short spoon, and if you order something else you'll use the fork and long spoon"

When you sit on the mat to eat, it seems it's ok to bring a soup bowl up close to your mouth to eat, but the plate stays on the mat, and there's a definite art to spooning up the rice and noodles and toppings and veggies while sitting up straight, without leaving a trail of dribbles across the mat and up your skirt.



 
Later that evening, Amy's young friend Kim also came over, needing help with two assignments.  One was a paper on human trafficking, in English, which seemed a terribly difficult assignment for her level of English.  Amy and Kimberly thought I would be the perfect person to help her, so she and I went off to Kimberly's room and waded through that.

The other assignment was to prepare a demonstration on the difference between European and American table manners.  She pulled up a video on her iPad showing an American woman at a fancy dinner table showing us how to use all three forks and two spoons and numerous knives. 

It all seemed kind of silly, considering how polite and tidy the Thai guests had been with one fork and one spoon.

I told Kim the main difference is that Americans switch the knife and fork after they cut and before they eat, and Europeans don't.

I got some silverware from the kitchen, including a sharp vegetable knife since I couldn't find a butter knife, and demonstrated until Kim felt capable of demonstrating to the class herself.

Typically, I forgot to put it away, and Kimberly was a bit unnerved to find a big knife on her bed after everyone left.

She laughed when I explained, since she finds it easy to laugh at things.

It was a good evening.

This Doesn't Happen in Harrisburg

I needed a few groceries one day, so when Amy left for her Thai class, I hopped on the back of her bike and she dropped me off at Big C, the supermarket a mile or two from her house.

I would walk back when I was done shopping.

The store wasn't open yet, and several uniformed workers sat around outside, waiting.  I saw a "9:30" on the door among the Thai writing, so I had about ten minutes to wait.

Finally the doors opened and I walked in.

Big C has two stories.  The ground floor has restaurants--including Dairy Queen, where you can get ice cream with corn in it--and also clothing shops and purse displays and lots more.  And a few ATM machines, which is where I headed first.

But three uniformed men were working on a machine, pulling out black boxes, so I decided to get my groceries and come back later.

I took the escalator upstairs and turned into the main Big C store.

I noticed a group of employees by the entrance but figured they were just having their morning briefing like they do at Walmart.

But then I became aware of a line of half a dozen employees, dressed in white, on my left, all of them smiling and "wei"-ing--the praying-hands, head-bow greeting--as I came by.

"Swa-di-kaaah Big Ceeee," they said.

A bit flustered, I did one wei in return for all of them.

Then I realized there was a line to my right, doing the same thing.

I wei-ed them too.  Dear me, what was going on?

Past a lotion display, and there were more employees, and more and more, probably 40 in all, left and right, a long gauntlet I had to run, and it was like they were all doing a Wave, hands together and heads down just as I came close, smiles and smiles, and an echoing, "Swa-di-kaaaah Big Ceee....ceeee....ceeee."

I wei-ed all over the place, feeling more and more ridiculous, and by the end of the ordeal I was starting to giggle, which was probably not culturally appropriate.

And then I was through the hallway of people and could do my shopping, assuming that the first customer every day got this same treatment, although no one I talked to about it had ever happened to be there when the doors opened.

Then when I went downstairs to use the ATM, the uniformed "Brinks" guys were still standing around.  When I started using the machine, they whipped out a camera and started taking pictures of me.

I have no idea why.

This stuff does not happen to me in Harrisburg.

That evening Amy and her roommate Kimberly and I sat on the couch and watched "Roman Holiday," the old Gregory Peck/Audrey Hepburn movie.  Hepburn plays a princess, and toward the beginning of the film she walks into the ballroom and everyone forms two lines and bows and curtseys as she walks regally along.

I exclaimed, "That's exactly how I felt at Big C!"

Later I was told that the wei is all about rank, and if a person of lower rank wei's you, you put your hands together to receive the wei, but you don't bow your head or, I gathered, be quite as effusive as they.

So I'm guessing I would have been considered higher in rank and could have gotten by with smiling and briefly putting my hands together, rather than repeated and full-blown head-bows and swa-di-kah's in return.

Of course there were plenty more things that don't happen here, such as the aforementioned gecko tail dropping down in front of me and riding all over town on the back of a motorbike.  Then there was the beauty pageant I attended, and the dinner on the floor, but those deserve a post of their own.

The Ever-threatening Jungle

"Didn't you get the sense that the jungle was a living thing, and if you turned your back it would pounce?" Emily asked me last night after we were all at home and sitting around the kitchen catching up with each other.

It was especially fun to compare notes with Emily, who had been to Thailand to see Amy just a few weeks before we went.

I said, "Yes!  I got the feeling that if you turned your back for ten minutes, the jungle would move in and take over."

Oregon is lush and overgrown compared to barren places like Wyoming, where it seems you'd have to coax things out of the ground, but Thailand is exponentially more so.

Looking out from a building at North Chiang Mai University.

It seems like not only do plants grow everywhere, even in the city, but they leap out of the ground, spread their tendrils, claw their way up and sideways and through, like the streets and houses were put there entirely without their permission, and they're determined to get their territory back.

This little side street near Amy's neighborhood was being taken over by undergrowth.  As I walked along, two cars met right at the narrowest spot.  They both had to stop and maneuver.

The swampy strip behind the house where we stayed was full of huge overgrown weeds and trees and vines.  The vacant lot down the street was three feet deep in impenetrable greenery.  The matted grasses grew out into the streets.  Plants grew uncontrolled between fences and along canals and behind little shops.

A vacant lot, just down the street from where we stayed.

Amy's "mooban" [neighborhood] with the university behind.

"Our" street.

These grow along the street close to Amy's house.  A lady in a nightgown comes out every morning and sweeps up the leaves on the ground.

These were also between "our" house and Amy's.

Every time you go out into the city you see workmen whacking back foliage, filling trucks with palm leaves and weeds and fronds and vines and stems.

Beautiful but dangerous--that's pretty much how everything is in Thailand.

Beijing

We are in Beijing.
Actually, we're in the airport, a gigantic structure with an intriguing slatted ceiling, way up there, and yellow flying buttress things holding up the curved walls of windows.
Everything is gleaming and glassy.
This seems to be the fad in Asian airports
There are also multitudes of shops with expensive perfume and purses and watches,  which also seems to be a fad in Asian and Middle Eastern and African airports.  Seriously.  56,000 yuan for a purse. 83,000 for a watch.
6.297 yuan to the dollar today, the young man in the Cathay Pacific shop informed me.
I prefer the Powell's Books store at the Portland airport.
One gets the sense that the cleaning ladies here are paid to watch you.  They are everywhere in their blue uniforms, wiping down the glass walls, squeegeeing the bathroom counters, refilling the paper towels.
I went in the restroom to redo my hair and brush my teeth.  The little cleaning lady squeegeed the counter, slowly coming my way, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.
I thought, Please don't rush me.  I am dirty.
She squeegeed the counter on the other side of me.
Then she hovered and waited.
Finally I finished and gathered my things.
The cleaning lady smiled.
We got in to Beijing at some terrible hour and, compared to Chiang Mai, it was freezing cold.  But we slept anyhow.
After I woke up I went searching for tea, with my little tin travel teapot in hand.  Behold, a little water dispenser that sent forth hot, cold, or warm, your choice!
I pushed the buttons like it said.  The hot water didn't come.  Four or five people lined up behind me, waiting.  Finally a tall young Chinese guy reached around me, pushed this button once, held that one longer, and there came hot water and soon I had hot tea.  I was very happy.
Later, Paul wanted to take ibuprofen since he's still kind of sick, but he didn't have anything to drink.  I headed back to the same dispenser, since there were little cone-shaped paper cups and a drinking fountain right beside it.
I filled a cup.  Not enough to properly dissolve two ibuprofen, I was sure.  Since you can't set down a cone-shaped cup, I held it in one hand  and tried to yank another cup out the bottom of the two-foot-tall dispenser on the wall with my free hand.
Four cups came.
I pulled one off and tried to push the others back up the way they had come.
The entire dispenser lifted off the wall and started falling.
I stopped it with my shoulder and, with too many people watching, got it back into the slots on the wall with my one free hand.
The extra cups fell to the floor.
Another little uniformed cleaning lady quickly picked them up.
I carefully carried two cups of water to Paul, who took his ibuprofen.
I might have to send this to Jenny to post for me, since I can't open my blog here. And speaking of being watched...I get the feeling our internet use is closely monitored.
We can open Pinterest but not Facebook.
CNN but not MSN.
Emily's blog but not mine.
Word Counter but not Google.
Over among the purse and perfume shops is a lovely Chinese area with pagodas you can sit in to drink coffee, and an angled bridge over large lily ponds, and little tables with pretty squares of paper and a bowl of ink and two long brushes, where you can sit and practice your Chinese writing.
It is pretty and restful among all the opulence.  My sense is that places like this are spiritually as well as culturally significant in China.  Maybe Christians should borrow this practice from Buddhism, of making a place that is deliberately and intentionally beautiful and restful.

Quote of the Day:
"The film length: 10 minutes.  Along with the sowing."
--the sign on the little "4D Motion Square" movie booth to my right