Olegra

She is black, she is low to the floor and wide, and you would give way to her if she was comiing at you from the other side of a door. She is vivacious and beautiful and her body parts move to the rhythm of music with the studied, independence of a great jazz drummer. Her name is Olegra. She's a regular at a bar that becomes electric every Friday night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It's a bar attached to the motel we landed in on our first night out of Portland - the first stanza of our trip. A and I were both drawn to Olegra's incredible gyrations and A, not being able to resist the magnetism of rhythm and motion, gave in to it and joined Olegra on the dance floor. I'm jealous of A's spontoneity - love it and admire her for it.

Olegra and this crazy Friday night bar were the right thing at the right moment, althouugh not a place we would seek out. This move to another country, another culture is exhilarating, but the mechanics of it, the long period of waiting for it to happen and the mechanics involved wind the mind-spring taut. It was great to find a vigorous diversion along the way. We escaped our anxieties in a room packed with people shedding anxieties, gathered to dance, to touch one another and perhaps even get laid.

Tomorrow we ride on airplanes. The trip is a tedious drudgery fraught with dozens of things that could go wrong (but usually don't). Olegra tired us out and she and her pals gave our minds a couple of hours of rest before the long journey.

It's goodbye to the icy, holiday decorated, statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow outside our door. (copyright 2005 AKP) 

Bones Of Intention

We are sitting in a barren apartment in Portland, Maine. It's not easy to shovel away one's mountain until all that remains are the contents of four lumpy suitcases, but we've managed it and it's exhilarating. A few more days to wait out the electric anticipation filling the empty space we've called home for the last two years. We've both experienced the endless days preceding large, life-changing moves, so there is nothing unexpected here - no anxieties - only the barren refrigerator, a coffee pot and the small stream of close friends who sadly cheer us away from their warm and loving circle into the unknown.

Not truly unknown... 'A' was in Thailand breifly in the seventies and I've lived there off and on over the last six years. We're headed for Phuket Island, a name generally recognized these days because of the 2005 tsunami. We arrive January 23rd. The heat, the humidity, the beaches, a waiting family of wonderful friends and the warmth of the Thai culture will greet us. We are steeled and ready for the physical and mental shock of the sudden change from shiver-to-sweat temps and Puritan-to-Buddhist ethics. It will take about 25 hours and the change always flips you upside down.

This blog is not about us. Well... it is and it isn't. (Is it possible to post thoughts and observations so publicly and deny that there is no ego involved?) It's a notion, but, as with most notions, there is no way of assessing its value. It is a personal entertainment; an activity of no more value than putting together jigsaw puzzles, or polishing silverware. I have no intention of writing a history, or a travelogue, or a "what I did during the last years of my life" essay. It's about the joy of observation and maybe even about the danger of typing in public.

This journal will be candid, but hardly earth-shattering. A number of A's wonderful photos are sure to get peppered into it and perhaps one of my short/short stories will be inserted from time to time. But mostly, it will sport simple, unsophisticated observations of a couple of expats relocated in a foreign culture for the long stay; stilted, inaccurate and subjective as they may be... nothing more... no apologies. You will not read about frustrations or criticisms here, only observations, some sad, some upbeat.

Life is funny, unpredictable and crazy enough when living in the culture you are born to, but societal quirks are magnified a thousandfold when you place yourself in a tradition totally alien to your way of knowing. We've both done it before a number of times - it injects a special zing into our lives. It's not for everyone, of course, but it's been our particular lifelong pattern.

With luck, these entries may be mildly entertaining, or they may be a total bore - doesn't matter - it will be fun "writing down the bones," (to use a phrase Natalie Goldberg made a bunch of bucks with), and what could be more fun than interpreting a random throw of the bones? No matter how much careful preparation and assessment precedes making a choice, in the end, every decision and every action is little more than a random throw of the bones. We're tossing ours onto an island in the Andaman Sea. It will be interesting to see how they land and what the bones will have to say.