Baking beneath the hazy Bangkok sun, my knobbly-kneed six-year-old self was busy slaying dragons. Continue reading “Memento Mori III – Or, The Gecko on the Sidewalk”
Category: Memories
First, Fireflies
I survived twenty-nine years without having ever seen fireflies.
That’s not to sound ungrateful. Some things I have seen: the ruins of Ayutthaya, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the raw majesty of southeast Asian monsoons. Other things I have not seen: the northern or southern lights, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Statue of Liberty.
Before reaching age eighteen, I’d encountered king cobras and tokay geckos and weaver ants in their native habitats, which I realized not everyone had done. So I never felt particularly put out about the fireflies until it came to my attention that some people reach adulthood without ever having seen cockroaches. Continue reading “First, Fireflies”
Mud
Here’s one from my personal archives. I wrote the original at the end of 2010, and have edited it for clarity and length.
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In the beginning, there was mud. There was light, too, and water, and dirt, and the roiling mass of magma bubbling below the earth’s crust. Before living creatures crawled the planet, there was mud. Ooey-gooey thick pasty stuff heavy with clay, thin sandy sludge, sticky goop rich with nutrients—mud was the primeval womb of the physical world. Continue reading “Mud”
Uno Inherits the Earth
In mid-February 2005, I was seventeen years old and headed home to Bangkok, Thailand after a ten-day school trip split between Finnish Lapland and Helsinki. Our party—roughly 25 international high school students and our two teacher-chaperones—had run afoul of the airline scheduling fates, and was stranded overnight midway between origin and destination. Continue reading “Uno Inherits the Earth”
Crystal Witnesses Wonders 