Monkhood + Accident (+Coffee) = A Wordy, But Good, Love Story

The title of this piece mangages to sum up what this true-to-life tale portrays. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

This morning I wouldn’t have drank those three mugs of black coffee – the ones that threw me into a bantering wild woman spouting broken Thai, the ones that left this darn stain on my white linen pants (why I even bother wearing white, I don’t know), the cups-of-joe that inevitably have left me with the jitters of a caffeine addict unable to even conceive of being productive with office work – had it not been for the trip to the emergency room at 3 AM.
And no, no, not on my behalf (because I know that's what you most likely figured, with my track record and all), but in accompaniment with a new friend of mine, Tu (pronounce with a "dt" sound and like the word "dew").

Yes, theoretically, it all began with Doe's (pronounced like Homer Simpson's ever popular "doh" when he hits his head with a hammer or such) right of passage into manhood by doing what nearly every good Buddhist boy does post the age of twenty-one, and that is to become a monk for a short spat. Now, traditionally such a spat involved a few months living in the wat, studying the Buddha’s Sanskirt scriptures and fasting and so on, but due to the modernizing world (most notably jobs not permitting such a long leave-time) the typical short spat has been condensed into one week at the wat. And depending on which wat establishment and its monk managerial practices, this spat not only involves Sanskirt scripture chants, but can also include personal chats via mobile phones, along with the pleasentries of mp3s, movies, etc. – again, thanks to the modernizing world. (It has also been rumored that monks these days may enjoy the occasional barbeque in the evening, rib-eye steaks, corn-on-the-cob, the works.)

So to the wat Doe did go. That is, of course, after two days worth of ceremonial happenings of blessings, feasts, shavings, drenchings in yellow and pink perfume waters, enrobing in white and orange swathes, a music concert and a parade. Yes, it was great fun to learn the step-by-step-guide of how one becomes a monk, and though interesting as monkhood all is, I digress from the story I'm trying to tell.

Thus, to the wat Doe did go, leaving Tu (remember her?, name rhymes with “dew”) – his beloved (yes, there’s the connection you were looking for) – to her own devices during his week of absence. Now, it’s incredibly important to note (for the sake of this being a “good” love story, as opposed to just a plain one) that Tu and Doe have some honest to goodness real deal, nearly a decade now, love between them. He serenades her on his second-hand guitar, which is missing one string, but sounds lovely because of his tender strum and hum. She surprises him with roses propped against the rice-cooker, after his long days of work as a clerk at the chicken farm. All sorts of cute exchanges like these go on between these two very caring – and very good looking I might add – people.

And whereas a week doesn’t sound like much to most, it certainly was enough to prompt concern in the both of them, particularly because it has come to my attention that nobody in all the country of Thailand lives and/or stays alone (except of course for us crazy foreigners who claim to need something rather foreign to Thais, known to us as “our own space”). Thus, Tu arranged for overnight guests for the week, and I offered to stay last night, the night of the accident.

I first met Tu nearly a month ago when she hollered out from across the market place, “Hey, where you come from?” Such words may sound plain, but they were absolutely a delight to my ear, for they were in English. You see, Tu is the local English teacher of village children, and her English abilities (most of which are impressively self-taught) are such that we can actually get the gist of what matters most across. It is a far cry from fluent, but it is a hell-of-a-step-up from my Thai talking abilities with everybody else. And so it was that Tu and I became pretty good buddies.

Our evening was a quiet and quite nice time involving a slide-show of the monk ceremonies, the eating of pork stew – which while it wasn't my favorite it did kind of taste like roast beef, and I like myself some roast beef, and it was definitely a far more enjoyable dish than the pig-head soup I had ate at the monk ceremony (for that was rather oily and having witnessed the making of it – off with the ears, nose, cheeks, the whole kit-and-caboodle of the head – really left me not wanting to eat it). But again, forgive my caffeinated rambling, I again digress.

Following dinner we did something I never imagined doing while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer, and that is to have an honest-to-goodness movie night, the pick flick being Bridget Jones Diary. What a hoot. We enjoyed it considerably, and afterwards had ourselves some chatting and laughing and getting to know one another better time until nearly mid-night, and really time to try to sleep.

It was after restlessly lounging for a few hours, due to the sticky heat that absolutely never subsides here – especially when up on a second-floor – that my body jolted up off the floor's mattress, out from beneath the pink Winnie-the-Pooh mosquito-net and rambled as quickly as it could down some rather steep, narrow and no guard-rail wooden stairs, only to find my friend Tu splayed upon the hard ceramic floor, wincing in the utmost of pain and calling in earnest, “Help me Shelby, Shelby help me,” in her sweet Thai accented voice. (Apparently she had gone too fast down the stairs, and missed about six-feet worth of them on her last step.)

The light switch was flicked on, and the blood – oh the blood – upped the seriousness of the situation. Fortunately though, the seriousness subsided some when I found a cut on her forehead to be the culprit of the blood, as it has been my experience that those things – no matter the size – spurt like crazy. Yet, poor Tu did not know from experience. In her 29 years, she had never experienced such an accident, or witnessed one either. Yes, for all she knew during that terrifying moment at 3AM, she was going to die in a bloody pool at the base of her stairs, and without – oh the thought of it – without Doe there to save her. Just imagine, one of just a few nights, in ten years worth of nights together, and this was the night she fell – the night she needed him most.

But nope! She had me instead. Me who was spilling out a slew of words in a language not native to her tongue: "don't get up" "stay still" "you're okay" "it's not bad, it just looks bad" "hold this hard, very hard", I said the latter as I grabbed a dish towel and covered up the half-inched wound. After that I dashed up and down those darn scary stairs a few times gathering the phone, the purse and the wallet that had fallen out of the purse. Family was called and they arrived on the scene within minutes. And, well, the story actually fades in interest for a bit, as we piled into the pick-up and drove 30k to the hospital (all the while me compressing the cloth to Tu's head), and she got herself a couple of stitches, and we all went back home and napped an hour or two.

Then it was up’n’at’em at 6 o'clock A.M., for Doe was on his way from the wat. Not to come back home (he wasn’t even aware of his beloved’s accident), but to stop by the house while on his route to collect his daily monk alms.

Soon he and two other monks clad in their orange robes were standing at the door with bowls stretched out. Still in my pajamas, an unnoticeable blood stain on the black shorts, I placed a bag of tropical pink fruit onto the lid of Doe’s bowl, which FYI served as a tray because women are not permitted to hand anything directly into the hands of a monk, and so an ‘in-between’ object is needed be it a tray or cloth or even another man as the bridge between the two. And, Tu, also still in pajamas, (though in a clean pair) scooped rice into each of the monks bowls. Such a scene sounds uneventful, yes, but within the heads of the beloveds, it was anything but. Tu had so much stirring within her – mostly remnants of fear from the evening’s event – and Doe had immediate concern and curiosity aroused as he took in the sight of her shaky hand spooning rice and her bandaged, bowed head. It was apparent that Tu was averting eye-contact with every ounce of self-restraint she had, for she didn’t want to worry him any more then he already was by showing him her tear-filled eyes. Doe thus made eye contact with me, and gave me a slimmer of a smile – as Thai's smile in nearly every situation, with many meanings attached to said smiles – and I discerned that this particular smile, from this particular monk, had the basic meaning of "what the bloody hell happened here?"

The last that I know of what happened with the two is this. Once Doe finished his alms collecting, he hustled back to the wat and called Tu from his mobile right away. (Note: I had left Tu’s house by this time, and promised to come back at lunch time check-in, which I did, and which is when I heard this last bit of an end to this story.)

The comfort of Doe’s voice on the phone prompted Tu to confess that she’d been crying for most of the morning, both sobs of confusion and fatigue (probably more of the latter though, as for the whole prior week she exhausted herself with monk party preparations and excitement and such). Listening patiently to her quivering voice and picturing her tears, Doe calmly told Tu to go to the top floor – minding the steps, of course – and look out the back window. The window that just so happens to overlook the wat. The wat where he was, and at which he had strategically placed himself in a perfectly framed stance from the window's gaze. It was as if he had planned the exact spot with a geometric equation. An equation that solved the problem of her needing him most. An equation that equaled love.