Hot. Dusty. Blue sky -- all day, every day. Rain, not a chance. Wind, if you're lucky. Cool on your cheek, a reprieve, however brief, from the sun.
Cambodia in November. Late November.
Back home, an Ontario fall, close to winter.
Seasons here don't change. They shift. One moment it's raining each and every day in the late afternoon for forty minutes on end, hard rain, driving rain, and then, click, the channel's changed, the rain's gone, the sun is back, minus the wet, and the long lazy day can begin once more.
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Reading fiction from home takes on a different weight in a foreign land. One minute you're immersed in a Canadian short story, a familiar story, a domestic story, complete with frigid weather and frigid people, and then you hear a sound, a laugh, up you look, and there you see: casually pedalling cyclos and slowly shuffling women with food balanced on their head and groups of motodops sitting on the side of the road, enveloped in a game of cards, the only game in town, kneeling beside their bikes, all of them leaning against one another, leaning forward, the men and the bikes, and down go the cards! SWAP! When Cambodians play cards, they play, each hand thrust down as if they are sure that this is the one, and then you tilt your head down, to the page, and you're back, back home.
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An ode to courage, daring, ambition, stealth: Alexander the Great, quoted:
My friend, if by deserting from the war before us
You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,
We would do it; I would not fight among the first,
I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.
But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us
In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,
Let us go.
Which I take to mean: Unfortunate, yes, but Death is here, there, above, beyond us, around us. So live, now. Fight. Revel in glory. Commence.
