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December 12, 2013

Alice, the innkeeper of Peacock Lodge, in Mandalay offers me the option of staying an additional day and I accept … one of the advantages of having flexible time and believing in guides. I also alter my travel plans on Alice’s suggestion to break up the long slow train ride to Lashio, so I am only doing the viaduct leg by train. I’m eager to go to these places, but for today just cruising around this city I almost feel familiar with seems the perfect thing to do. And doing yoga, reading, relaxing, writing, and getting onto the Internet, are all so much more acceptable on the road than at home. Mark that revealing fact, Mr. B.
Anyhow, from the time I step out the door of the Peacock my day is just enchanted, beautiful, wondrous, and, yes, even divine. I snag a ride in a pick up on a side road outside the guesthouse where I’m staying and somehow actually find myself where I wanted to go, the pagoda at the top of Mandalay Hills. Interestingly, I remember nothing about the pagoda or the hilltop although I was here w Joy less than a year ago, but each encounter I have with the physical environment evokes a pleasant memory and a warm feeling in me.
I’m sincerely invited to join a luncheon picnic with a half dozen young men and women seated on a sheet on the tile floor outside the pagoda that looks delicious but which I decline. Then, on a wooden bench working a poem, a robed monk in his late thirties sits down next to me, asks in broken English where I am from, and wants to know about my travels in and impressions of Myanmar. So there we are just chatting away fabulously, his English is actually not that bad, he’s simultaneously helping me with my Burmese, and I’m being as frank and probing as I normally am, given the restrictions imposed by the language impediments. Turns out learning English is one of his ambitions, he’s a serious student of the language, has read some Shakespeare and Dickens and a number of monks at his monastery in central Mandalay are studying English together. When I ask if I can visit his monastery with him, he asks what day I had in mind, I say today, and just like that we’re in a little blue pickup truck taxi on our way to the ShweYaye Sung Monastery compound behind the big Maha Mani Buddha statue in the middle of town.
When we get to the monastery U Ke Tu, for that is his name, insists on paying my 4$ taxi fare, but relents when I remind him he is a poor monk living on alms he collects begging in the morning and the grace of his parents. He takes me to his room inside the monastery. He introduces me to monks we encounter saying, “This is my friend.” He lives in a room with three other monks on a straw pallet on the floor. The room is cluttered with mostly books. We sit on his mat and practice English and Burmese. A half a dozen other monks join us. We laugh a lot. One of the monks asks what my “ambition” is, but it turns out he meant what was my work. I say that at twenty I was a soldier, at twenty-five an anthropologist, at thirty a farmer, at thirty-five a hospital administrator, and at forty-five a lawyer, which I still am today although mostly retired. We try to define retired, and “mostly retired.” I correct their pronunciation. We spent a lot of time on the “sm” sound of smart, and on differentiating between p and b, between d and t. Ke Tu, to test out his language skills, sings a beautiful pop love song in English that I am vaguely familiar with and that I understand about half of what he is saying. (“I am sailing, I am sailing, cross the ocean, passed high seas. I am flying …”). I play them Joy singing her song about her mother, and then play Jimmy Durante from music I’ve downloaded on my laptop singing “Make Someone Happy.” The words seem particularly apt, even profound in a Buddhist monastery. We try to talk about Buddhism but it is impossible. I say something about my spiritual “ambitions.” We try to talk about the difference between religion and “spirituality,” but the word “spirituality” doesn’t even appear in the English to Burmese dictionary we refer to, and its definition of “spirit” is more confusing than helpful. I am invited to dinner and decline. I’m also a bit unsure about this, but I think I was also invited to bathe, which I also declined.
We’ve been sitting on the mat at least two hours. I say I have to go. Ke Tu tells me it was his “lucky” day that we met. I say it was “magical,” and “exceptional,” and that it has made me very happy. As we are leaving the monastery we run into the head abbot who I am introduced to and to whom I say in pretty poor Burmese, “It is a pleasure to meet you (tweiya da wan thaba de), which evokes a huge laugh. The abbot just laughs and laughs. It is contagious. I have a few photos of him. He is the most Buddha look a like person you have ever seen. Ever. (See photo above)).
Ke Tu and I continue toward the street. Young monks are bathing with buckets of cold water pulled up from a well. Naturally, they are laughing. Ke Tu takes may hand and we walk hand and hand together. He intertwines the fingers of his right hand with those of my left. We are both aware something out of the ordinary has been shared between us and while our separation and my departure are the most ordinary and familiar of human experiences, there is a poignancy that makes it very hard for me to separate, knowing as I do, that like many of my experiences on these travels and towards the end of my life, they are not likely to be repeated or reencountered, that they exist only in the present and in memory.
Ke Tu insists I ride back into town on the back of a motorcycle “taxi,” which I do without helmet and aware of the risks, but when in Mandalay … The taxi deposits me after dusk at a downtown market. Men are playing some kind of board game I have never seen before. I am asked if I play. I say, “No, I play checkers,” as I pull out my traveling checker set to show them what I mean. An older man in the crowd says with a big smile and good humor, “Ha! I am checker champion. You play? Winner get one thousand chat?” And there we are playing Burmese checkers (far more interesting than the American checkers I grew up with) right on the sidewalk under a streetlight as a decent sized crowd of men gathers. When I am forced to jump a piece of his he says, “You eat!”
In the first game I make a rookie move and it is all over. In the second game we agree to a draw. And in the third game, in a moment of checker brilliance I’d like to repeat some day soon, I see a number of moves down the board and force him into a fatal position that neither he nor the kibitzing crowd of more than twenty onlookers sees until it is too late, and when I make my penultimate move which forces him into an obviously fatal position I pump my fist once up in the air and the crowd literally cheers and claps, good naturedly teasing the “champion” on his defeat at the hands of this foreigner.
At times I feel as though I can only take so much more pleasure, have rarely been this ecstatic, am really enjoying my travels, all in part a tribute to my truly favorite guide, Sacajawea Joy, the prophetess of the notion that it can and will just keep getting better, that we can attain and tolerate more and more pleasure and a feeling of excitement and delight as a dominant state of mind and being. The word Joy uses is euphoria, by which she means a utopian ideal of emotional bliss. I’m in favor of that. It’s just a little exhausting without practice. But you just had to see this monk laughing.

It’s not an everyday occurrence that two formerly Jewish guys around 70 years old, born in New York City, who went to the same high school a few years apart and didn’t know each other, who went to the same college, overlapped a few years, and didn’t know one another, love the Museum of Natural History in NYC, are not afraid to wear longjyi and sandals walking around together for a day in Mandalay, have unmarried sons taller and far different than they are, each son with a half sister who shares their father’s paternity, an Asian girlfriend, biblical names, and each man a six foot two inch tall Buddhist with multiple cardiac stents who found the sex trade in Thailand appalling and have been traveling separately in Asia for around three months, ending up in Myanmar for different purposes, but manage to get together for a few days at the end of each man’s journey in Myanmar, to criticize monotheism and come to visit the Burmese town of Shwebo in Sagaing state, where crowds of Burmese people young and old gather to stare and smile as the men wander about, marveling at the pale aliens’ ability to walk and say “Minglaba” at the same time, as well as to say “thank you,” and “nice to meet you” in Burmese.  No not everyday.

Steve and I arrive in Shwebo on Tuesday afternoon and check into the Winn Guesthouse Hotel, more green walls, no decent lights or lamps, entire generations and lineages of old garbage and dust under the beds (well who told you to look, I say blame it on doing cobra in yoga), but with reasonably priced rooms and reasonably quiet.  Afterwards we stroll the streets, I think of it as sauntering, of a decent sized town, smaller and dustier than Monywa or POL … and absolutely devoid of any foreigners, which was the major reason why I’d picked it, other than it’s 4 hour proximity to Mandalay. 

Before long, it won’t surprise you, Mr. Ko Kyaw Minn, who says he is a retired primary grade English teacher, which may explain in part why the Burmese kids here speak such poor English and can’t sing “Old MacDonald,” Ko Kyaw’s English is that poor, that unintelligible, his ability to hear English and understand it beyond primitive, that Mr. Ko Kyaw has adopted Steve and I, kind of like how leeches adopt people.  Do we mind if he wanders around town with us, and do we want to visit his home where he lives with his mother, son, and sisters, his wife apparently having decided within the passed few months that one Ko was more than enough Ko, something I understand quite soon, although Steve is a bit more forbearing, so I’ll call him Steve’s guide, not mine, an innocent enough retired soul, looking for entertainment in a small and dusty town, and a free pastry or cup of tea if that should happen, who genuinely wants to be of service, and inevitably is, recommending restaurants, getting us directions to the Internet café, translating for us, introducing us to at least a dozen people each of whom he says is his “best” friend, and telling us each repeatedly –to me annoyingly – that he will never forget us. 

Naturally, when we tell Ko we want to visit the pottery making villages along the Irrawaddy River, about twenty miles east of us, the next day, Ko is quick to offer to find us motorcycle taxis who will charge us what he says and what sounds like a reasonable fee … and he does, showing up in the doorway of our room before 9 A.m., one of the motorcycle taxis being his son’s motorcycle, which Ko so obligingly will be driving, “if that’s okay,” which of course it is, especially if Steve is his passenger rather than me, as I find his constant ingratiating narrative just a bit too much, preferring the strong silent types in my two legged featherless guides

The immigration service … Steve’s line about tragedy or farce

The women at the pagoda building fund drive

The guesthouse owner in Kyauk Myaung

And the pottery villages are nothing less than spectacular.  I mean spectacular.  Abundant with special soils of red and yellow clay, dozens of amazingly talented potters, throwing immense pots, larger and heavier than I can lift, moved about with specially fitting harnesses, carried between the shoulders of two men, brought to wood fed kilns, that burn for close to 48 hours straight, some of the massive kilns capable of holding eighty to one hundred of the big pots as they are being fired, before they are moved on beds of straw by oxen drawn carts down to the river for shipment south and beyond.  We watch a three-foot diameter pot being thrown.  The skill of the potter who works in tandem with an assistant is otherworldly.

Back in town we revisit the graphic silkscreen t-shirt producer who does shirts as business promotions and had refused to sell  some feed company shirt but said he’d make me a shirt … and when I get back 24 hrs later he has 2 shirts for me that he gifts to me … and refuses to take any american or myanm money, but does accept it when I take the shirt off my back- shiva

Inle Lake is surrounded by steep mountains, and dozens of traditional Burmese, Shan, and Intha villages that cannot be reached by means other than boat. And pagodas that cannot be reached other than my foot. The lake rises and falls depending upon the season and the grace of the gods, goddesses, and “nats” of water and rain. Some of the village houses stand on stilts in the water whatever the height of the lake. Others are seasonal or on wetland or at the very base of roadless mountains. All trading and travel needs are met with the use of boats. The scenery includes young boys riding water buffalo, men and women washing clothes, field workers and children waving, fishermen with nets, dugout canoes being paddled while standing – using one leg to move the long thin paddle through the water. Harvesting watercress, tomatoes, squashes, and corn being grown on floating islands made of river silt and river muck created over the centuries by people with nothing more than their backs and their shovels who do not greet you by asking, “How are you?” but rather, “Are you happy?” This is a bipedal human aquatic culture practicing aquatic farming with ecological awareness on small footpaths and busy boat lanes with bamboo dams, wonderful woven bamboo retaining walls, bamboo stakes and ties, bamboo houses and fences, And bamboo’s consciousness of strength, flexibility, versatility and utility in a land of earthly industry, of farming, weaving, carving, craft, and of diligent labor.

There is a floating restaurant named “Nice.”

And equally surreal, amazing, and somehow ordinary is this immense floating wooden temple and home for monks whose name translates to “Jumping Cat Monastery” and which actually has jumping cats. You are invited to come here to see and contemplate people who do not walk or run except inside their houses, whose entire terra firma is often only twelve square feet of bamboo flooring filled with mats, bedding, a wood cooking stove, some pots and pans, family photographs, potted plants, posters of soccer teams from England, clothes drying on hooks, and bells ringing.

I had wanted to leave some of my nephew Mile’s ashes with the jumping cats, relatives of whom once lived in his home, but wasn’t sure what the monks would want, so I just eased ashes of him into the lake to become one with the fishes, and the silt, and the floating islands which support the plants that feed the people who grow and live and thrive and die here, and who ask when you enter their waters if you are happy.