DIFFERENT SPEEDS

He was there again last night, Tom, the Khmer kid who hangs around the Galaxy Web Internet cafe, hoping to sell some newspapers.

I'd already read what he was selling, so I just chatted with him for a moment or two, his English broken and hesitant, but good, all things considered. Great, in fact.

He's a short kid, like most Cambodians. Guessing their ages is always tricky. My first instinct said: He's twelve.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Fifteen," he said.

Me, half-surprised, half-not: "fifteen?"

"In Cambodia, people small," he said.

True, but that's not only Cambodia. In Japan, too, people are short, and hell, I'm not that big myself. Here, though, it ain't necessarily genetics, though that plays a part. Most Cambodian kids and teenagers have stunted growth.

I did some teaching for awhile at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (www.futurelight.net). A lot of the kids were from the countryside, where their meals mostly consist of rice, rice, more rice, and rice. You have kids that are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old that look nine and ten. It's unnerving at first, but like anything here (or anything in life), you get used to it.

They grow at their own speed, that's all. Then they stop. Simple.

We all do. Some people are tall at eleven years old, towering over the hopscotch courts. (Do kids still play hopscotch anymore?) Some are short until nineteen, then bam, it's Kareem Abdul-Jabar time.

I would like to think it's the same thing in life, too. I'm not sure about that; it's just one of those strange theories of mine that refuse to go away, like the mosquitoes in my room at night. Things I've learned in Japan and Cambodia over the last five years are things that some kids, kids whose parents are aid workers, or missionaries, or just really-rich-and-powerful-embassy-type-people, would have learned by age seven. The allure of foreign lands, the confusion that results when you are immersed in them, the gradual unfolding of peoples and cultures that can envelop or smother you -- it too me by surprise at age twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five (and still does, at twenty-nine), but maybe embassy kids go through all that before adolescence. (Me, before adolescence, I was mostly going through Spider-Man.)

We all move through life at different speeds. Where you are now -- in your job, your family, your (hopefully) life -- is not where I'm at. We started at different places. We rested at alternative points. You got a bit of a lead, and I'm still catching up, and vice versa.

Tom, the Cambodian boy who sells the papers, he's hustling out of bed at five a.m., going to make some bucks. He's fifteen and too poor for school and chasing down foreigners for the 500 riel cut he makes from each and every sale. (That's about twelve cents, U.S.).

He started at a place far different from me, in time and space, and, let's face it, plain old luck. My position's better than Tom's, and Tom's is better than the kids around the corner, the ones you see with their mothers, rummaging through the garbage at night. I'm a bit ahead of him -- in terms of comfort, occupation, sustainability.

I still have some bumps (craters?) in the road ahead of me. I can't see the next time I'll be knocked to the canvas.

I hope Tom somehow, in the face of all rational logic and plausibility, catches up to me, if only for a moment, a second, an instant. I really, really do.