FIFTY MILES FROM HOME

This was in Skuon. In Cambodia. Where the ladies wait for the vans to stop, the buses to stop, the tourists and workers to stop, so that when legs are stretched, and knees are popped, and ligaments are creaked and cracked after hours of immobility, they, the ladies, can offer their wares. Their sizzling, steaming plates of tarantulas for the hungry, noon-time lunch-time dinner-time horde. Clumps of black, crispy, multi-legged tarantulas. Come one, come all. Sample the local delicacies. Go on. Have a spider. The big one, there, in the middle. Open wide. Bet you can't eat just one!

Ah.

Travel.

While looking for a place to stay, we wandered around the dusty brown town, wondering where a good, cheap guesthouse might be found. I chatted with a local, in that aimless, amiable nontalk that strangers in a foreign land feel obligated to babble.

"You're from here?" I asked.

"Yes, yes," he said. Smiling. That Camobodian smile. Warm, gentle, reflexive.

"You've lived here your whole life?"

"Yes, yes," he said. Laughing now. Of course he'd been here his whole life. Where else would he go? Where else COULD he have gone? Madrid? Manchester?

Another village, another time. This one an hour from Phnom Penh. On the way back our car would break down in the heat of a Cambodian afternoon, but that was later. The next day.

This was the previous day. Things were steady in the heat. Full of Cambodian life. I would break the haze by swimming with village children in the brown and murky water, forgetting about potential, waterborn amoebas waiting to annhilate my immune system. After, blindfolded, I would try to smack a makeshift pinata with a long, wobbly wooden pole. Three times, I would swing. Three times, I would miss. Then, sheepishly, I would tug off my blindfold, and smile, and the dozens of villagers would howl with glee at the silly foreigner. And, later still, the old ladies of the village would would sit next to one other, waiting to be doused with ice cold water. Some kind of ritual. Alien to me.

A Cambodian afternoon.

The university student who invited us would introduce his cousin, sixteen, seventeen, pretty and shy in that gentle manner patented by the Khmers.

"Her English, very good," he said. "She study very hard. But university, far. Cost, very much. So." He shrugged. Smiled. Offered us a Coke.

Very far.

An hour, tops, by car.

Very expensive.

A few hundred bucks.

This young girl, like most of the villagers, young and old, weak and strong, had never been to Phnom Penh.

Probably never would, either.

And I thought of a visiting professor, American, lecturing at the university. Telling us that most of the world's inhabitants never ventured more than fifty miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.

Absurd! I thought. (My tendency being to scoff at practically anything that anybody standing at a front of a room tells me.)

Then I thought.

Me, more than middle-class, Canadian, from the country the UN had judged the best place in the world to live a few years back. Who, aside from yearly jaunts to the cottage a few hours north, and Myrtle Beach here and there, rarely travelled more than fifty klicks from St.Kitts in the nineteen years I lived there.

Almost never, really, aside from vacations.

I mean, shit, Toronto, whose skyline shimmered across the lake from my bedroom window, beckoning, was exotic. Distant.

An hour away.

If memory serves, I ventured there twice during high school: once with my friend Eric to watch Spike Lee speak at my brother's school, the University of Toronto, and once again as graduation loomed, to watch a triple bill of cinema in the big city. (Before heading back the next day to write my entrance exam for the film program at York.)

And Fort Erie, my parents' hometown, thirty, forty minutes from St.Catharines. Hundreds of times, I went there, but it was another world. A different culture. Small-town: intimitate, enclosed, insular and warm.

And in high school, meeting new classmates who actually lived by the Pen Centre. I mean, fuck, that was, what, a good fifteen minute bus-ride across town. No man's land, practically.

And now, thinking of my family, my classmates, my old friends. With the exception of my friend Eric, teaching high school Drama and English in Australia, everybody I grew up with lives, if not in my hometown, only an hour's drive away.

Back to the spiders.

In Skuon.

Nasty-looking mothers.

("I'll pass, thanks. I had a black widow for breakfast, actually, so...")

Held aloft by poor and smiling ladies in that little town. Under that hot, blinding sun. Watching pasty-white 'barang', foreigners, come and go, day by day. By van and by bus. Big-bellied and cooked pink.

Did they wonder, these ladies, where we were from, or where we were going? Could they have guessed that we were a little more than fifty miles from home?

But maybe only physically. Maybe, inside, we were still wandering the streets of our hometowns, wondering how we got from here to there, and if we could get back again before day turned to dusk, and dusk fell to night.

Not that any numerical distance would have mattered much to them, I suppose. The ladies, that is. Or us, I suppose. Once you're away from home -- whether it's out by the Pen Centre, or all the way to Fort Erie, or living in freakin' Asia -- away is away. Miles are miles, and distance is distance. You are not home? You are here? Oh, you must miss your country. Your family. Your place.

They held up their plates. Fresh, sizzling. Their currency for the day. They smiled. Hoping for money for the baby. For their nighttime meals. Chicken and rice that will be eaten, enjoyed, forgotten. A day's work, a day's wages. Well spent. Today was today and tomorrow was tomorrow and never the twain shall meet. Best to enjoy this day, now. This night, here.

They were there, in Skuon. At home. The dark would come and the air would cool. The travellers would leave and they would stay. We were far and they were near. They knew that. They understood that.

This was their place.

THE VATICAN AND ME; 10 DOWNING STREET AND THAT RATHER ORDINARY DOOR; STONE'S WISDOM

How cool would it be to have a Vatican passport?

Not that I have an abiding interest in the Catholic church or anything. I'm just saying. Imagine the possibilities.

Besides the fact that it's the world's smallest country, the Vatican also has the distinction of being virtually impregnable. Nobody really knows what goes on behind those doors. (I'm not sure which doors, exactly, but there must be some doors there.)

So this means you could sit on a plane on some trans-atlantic flight and casually whip out that Vatican passport and let the good times roll. The person sitting next to you is bound to say something, right? I mean, shit, how many people have actually ever even seen a Vatican passport? So you can sit there, pretending to be checking your pages, your stamps, your expiry date, whatever, and the person sitting next to you might say:

"Wow, I've never seen one of those before."

"Yeah, not many people have," you can say. Smiling patiently.

"Do you live there, or work there, or..."

Then you pause. You nod deeply. You look out the window (if you have a window seat), or stare vaguely towards the front of the cabin (if you have an aisle seat), and you say: "I can't really say..."

Then you pause, slightly, before stating:

"I'm sorry. My head's, well, in the clouds, so to speak. Things just haven't been the same there since dad passed away a few years back..."

Then you head off for the bathroom, excusing yourself profusely, leaving your seatmate to wonder if you are, in fact, what he suspects you are -- the illilegitmate son (or daughter) of John Paul II.

These are the kinds of things I think about at night. Others count sheep; I imagine being the pope John Paul's bastard son, and flaunting my passport in the process. Sue me.

I also wonder:

Can you order a pizza from the Vatican? Would they deliver it up to your room?

These are the important questions in life.

************************************************************************************

Whenever a reporter on CNN is reporting live, from the White House, it's always late at night, and they're always a good, I don't know, forty, fifty, a hundred feet from the front entrance. If not further. (I've never been good with distances.)

But I watched Robin Oakely (the European Editor on CNN) the other day, and he was reporting from 10 Downing Street, in England, the home of the British P.M., Tony Blair, and I swear he was not more than five, ten feet from the front of the main door.

And here's the thing.

It is a door.

A black door marked with a gold 10 on the front.

The type of door that looks as if you could just wander in off the street, knock politely, and wait for the maid to answer. The type of door that looks ready-built for visitors strolling by for a cuppa tea with the big guy.

I'm sure that's not the case. There must be a shitload of security, fences, or landmines that lead to that door. But I'm calling it as I see it. And I swear, the other day Mr.Oakley was saying Blair-is-pulling-the-troops-out-of-Iraq-bla-bla-bla, and the door opened, and this yuppiesh-thirtyish-stockbrokerish dude came trotting out carrying his briefcase, waving a hand good-bye and laughing as if he just let off the biggest whoopee-cushion joke of his career. And the door slowly swung shut. And, get this, there was a single, solitary, bored-looking bobby standing, almost slouching, by the door. Yawning.

Somebody get them Brits another alarm system, is what I'm thinking.


*************************************************************************************

Oliver Stone ends his brilliant film J.F.K. with this epigraph: "To the young, in whose spirit the search for truth marches on."

I saw the film when I was young -- younger than young, in fact, just-turned sixteen, but I never quite got what he was saying.

To a gent of eighty-five, me, at thirty-one, might still be considered young, I suppose, but most of my co-workers are much younger than me, and my students are often born in years that I swear just clicked by a day or two ago. I'll ask students when they were born, and they'll say "1993" or "1995" and I'm like: "Are you on crack? That's impossible! That was only --" And then I stop, and do the math -- which takes a while, me being mathematically dyslexic -- and I'll realize that they're right. They're young.

So what was Stone getting at, with that rather odd, generic dedication?

I'm starting to realize that Stone was right in another case as well, in his introduction to his novel A Child's Night Dream, which he wrote at nineteen and revised, then published, thirty years later. So much about aging is maintenance, he says. Now I kind of-sort-of get it. The daily grind of living often leaves our adolsecent dreams and ideals somewhere tucked away in the basement of our souls. We forget what we once stood for, hoped for, lived for. We have to fight for the audacity of our younger selves, and hope that it can emerge once again.

Watching my students, I see a lot of hope, and curiosity, and integrity, and intent. They want to know things. They want to be things. They believe that that's possible. They haven't been scorched by the ugliness of unwarranted, unjustified cynicism.

Maybe that's what Stone was getting at.

I'm not sure.

But it's a hell of an idealistic movie, J.F.K. is.

"Let justice be done though the heavens fall!" Costner yells from courthouse steps at one point.

I loved that line at sixteen.

I love it now, almost sixteen years later.

I hope that means something.

WAITING

"They put a microchip in his head," he said.

"In whose head," I said.

"In his head, the pilot's head!"

"Right," I said.

We sat.

And waited.

The day was warm and the room was full but it was cool. Many slightly sweating people waiting for their passports to be stamped. Waiting while the overhead fans did what they were built to do. Twirl and whirl. Then repeat.

"The fucking C.I.A. put the microchip in his brain," he said. Iranian, he was. Mid-sixties. Forty years in Canada. Four or five now in the Philippines. "They put the chip in his head, and then they fucking flew the planes smack dab right into the Twin Towers. The C.I.A. did it all, right from their control room."

I nodded.

He leaned closer, his voice a soft whisper.

"And did you know, get this, that the C.I.A. told four thousand Jews not to come to work that day. Four thousand. Phoned them right up. Told them to stay home."

I nodded.

"Number 28!" somebody yelled.

I checked my number.

Not 28.

"And these Americans here," he said, rolling his eyes. "Fucking missionaries. Yeah, right. Missionary, my, ass. Fucking spies, is what they are. Fucking recruiters."

"Right," I said.

I looked around. Mostly Filipinos. The odd Korean. A few North Americans here and there.

"These people," he said. "Let me tell you."

"Right," I said.

The rather large American women in front of me chatted about the differences between regular and diet.

"Regular has all that sugar," the brunette said. "But the diet stuff has that, what do you call it, that aspartame gunk. That's even worse, they say. Worse than the sugar."

"I get half-and-half," the blonde one said, shrugging, smiling shyly. "So I get screwed both ways! What the hell, right?"

They laughed. Invisibly high-fived each other, while their husbands sat, glumly, silently sighing.

I scratched my chin.

"Number 29!"

I checked my number.

Not 29.

"This fucking country," the Iranian-by-way-of-Canada said. "You know what's keeping me here? The women. That's it. Only thing good here."

"Right," I said.

"They're innocent, these people are," he said. "They eat fucking dogs, you know. It fucks with their brain."

"Sure," I said.

"When I got to Canada, we used to say 'Canada'? 'Can-I-die!"

"Why did you say that," I said.

"Because it was so great, we thought, shit, can I die here, or what?" He shook his head. "Now, though, America is four thousand pounds. You know what Canada is?"

I shook my head.

"Two ounces. That's all. Two fucking ounces."

I nodded.

"Number 30!"

I checked my number.

Not 30.

Canada came up again. Cancer came up. He was old. He'd thought about it a lot, I guess.

"You leave her, you're fucked," he said. "Karma's going to kick you in the fucking ass, you leave her. You watch. Right in the ass."

"Right," I said.

"Number 31!"

I checked my number.

That was it.

"Nice meeting you," I said.

"Sure, sure," he said.

I left him there, waiting.

For what, I can't say.

ISAAC NEWTON'S QUOTE SUMS UP MY OWN VIEW OF LIFE QUITE WELL -- EXCEPT THAT HE, YOU KNOW, DISCOVERED GRAVITY, AND I, UM, DIDN'T

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-- Isaac Newton

NOSTALGIA AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

During a lull in class, mulling over how I was going to write this particular post, the one on nostalgia, I flipped through one of my student's English-Korean dictionaries, and my eyes came across the word 'crepitate', and suddenly I was there, then, twelve or thirteen years old, writing a story.

My memory tells me that that the story was written in Grade 8, and I needed another word for 'scary', or 'disturbing', or 'frightening', or something like that -- a spooky word, in other words. And so I somehow found out (probably through Roget's Thesaurus) that 'crepitate' means something close to fear, and so I stuck it into the story, and, later, my teacher called me on it -- underlining it in red, with a question mark. As in: "Listen, you're twelve years old, so what are you doing using a word like that?")

I realize now that she was probably right, because I was young enough then to believe that a big word, a strange word, an unfamiliar word, was infinitely better and more sophisticated and more literate than a word that people actually, you know, know. ("Never use a fifty cent world when a ten cent word will do," as somebody once said. Hemingway usually followed that advice; Faulkner, well, not so much.)

I can't remember, for sure, what 'crepitate' even means. I haven't seen that word since I was twelve, I'd bet.

And yet there it was, in the dictionary, staring up at me. Waiting to be found. Eager to take me back.

I'd been thinking about nostalgia and all that it means for a day or two, even before I came across 'crepitate', mostly because I had read a recent quote by Norman Mailer (for my money the best living American writer). When asked if he misses the way that his city Provincetown used to be, he noted that 'nostalgia is for adolescents'.

This struck me, at first, as a rather odd thing to say. How can adolescents be nostalgic? They haven't lived long enough yet to be nostalgic about anything!

However. Given that this was Norman Mailer, whose offhand remarks contain more elemental wisdom than the whole of Wikipedia combined, I thought about it some more.

And I realized that he was, as always, spot-on.

Growing up, I lived for nostalgia. Even then, as a kid. I was nostalgic about stuff happening even as it was happening. Stand By Me (based on the Stephen King novella 'The Body') may have brought the baby boomers back to their youth, but for me, and my friends, it was our youth, now, with a different soundtrack and shorter haircuts, sure, but we were living it step-by-step with the characters, and the film made us realize that there was something special going on, right there in our own suburban lives, something that we would remember. (If we were lucky.)

But it didn't stop there. Stephen King's wonderful novel of childhood and adulthood, IT, peformed a similar magic trick, making me feel more attuned to the mystical childhood world that was daily, almost hourly, merging into adolescence. Francis Ford Coppola's underrated, marvelous adaption of S.E.Hinton's classic novel The Outsiders hit me over the head with the crimson sunsets of youth. The Wonder Years, too, provided a guide for exactly what I was experiencing, with a convenient voice-over to highlight the stuff that would play itself again and again in the VCR of my aging brain. (This was before DVD, people.) George Lucas's pre-Star Wars classic, American Graffitti (another stunningly underrated film, I think, even though it's gotten its fair share of props over the years), hinted that the high school years were the simple years, the pure years, and that everything that would follow might somehow recede in comparison.

The point is, I realized that adolescents are more attuned than most to the sweet and gentle lull of nostalgia. They experience everything for the first time, and are more able than most to chart its passing, if only to themselves. They sense that the world is a complex place, but they're not sure how this is so, or why this is so, so all they can do is keep heading forward while saying good-bye to their toy cars and Barbie dolls, as action figures give way to driver's licenses, and toy guns are traded in for Polo shirts and electric shavers.

Probably my favorite scene in probably my favorite movie, Oliver Stone's Born On The Fourth Of July, encapsulates these ideas beautifully. We have Tom Cruise (pre-Nicole, pre-Katie, but not pre-Scientology) slowly walking through the hallways of his house, the night before he's heading off to the Marines, the night of the prom. We watch him as he watches his house perform its innocent hum, as he walks the hallways of his home. We can hear the rain falling. His parents are watching the news on TV in the family room. His little sisters are sitting on their beds, chatting, giggling. His teenage brother is gently strumming 'The Times They Are A-Changing'. And then Cruise (as Ron Kovic) goes to his room and prays to the Jesus on the wall, and he cries, and he wonders if he's doing the right thing. And all of this is so heartbreakingly real and potent and positively bursting with the simultaneous, contradictory merging of nostalgia and momentum, the urge for change with the demand for normalcy. We sense that he senses that everything he knows is going, if not already gone, and he wants to imprint the simplicity of this serene family existence onto his brain before he heads off into the uncertainty of war. (Some could call this scene over-the-top, sickeningly obvious and unbearably coy. Me, I can only shrug my shoulders and call it as I see it: archetypal. Mythic, even.)

But best, I think, to leave nostalgia where it belongs -- in adolesence, and the films and books that so skillfully chart its rapid, rocky rise. As much as I'm still a sucker for nostalgia -- in movies, literature, life -- the danger is that we could constantly believe that the best is back there, years ago. The hazards of photo albums and Flickr sites is marginal, true, but the past is always there, tempting, and if we fetishize it, we forfeit the future, in some way. After all, forget the doubts and confusions, the tears and the tantrums, and remember only that golden sun, sinking, and us just ahead of it, bookbag in hand, wondering what's for dinner.

It's a formula for inertia. The future is uncertain and shifting and downright terrifying, but to retreat is to surrender, and to surrender is to crawl back into the blankets of our youth when we should be preparing the framework of our future. To sink back into the past too much, even lovingly, can run the risk of immobility.

Best to keep going. Best to build new nostalgia, if need be, but not to wallow in the wonders, real or imagined, of our invisible, disintegrated youth.

At any rate, these are some of the thoughts that flashed into my head when I spotted that word, 'crepitate', in my student's pocket-sized paperback dictionary.

Didn't have long to think about it, though.

Soon they were done their work, impatiently waiting for me to check their answers.

Ever forward, the clock was ticking, audible, insistent, and I had a class to teach.

SAVING FACE

Gather ten to fifteen Korean kids. Ages nine to sixteen, roughly. Add a daily dose of their morning chocolate and Coke. Stand in front of the room. Mention Japan. Anything about Japan.

Then wait.

Call me crazy, but hearing nine-year olds spout political propoganda about how Japan is terrible, the Japanese people are terrible, the country itself is horrible because it's trying to overtake and eradicate Korea itself kind of gets on my nerves.

Irritating, not necessarily because they have negative opinions about Japan; after all, Korea was a colony of Japan for thirty-six years, so how could these kids not have absorbed some anti-Japanese sentiments from their parents and educators?

No, what kind of pisses me off is hearing any political opinions from nine year olds.

When I was nine, I was watching Back To The Future (repeatedly) and Diff'rent Strokes and reading The Fantastic Four (delivered to my house on a monthly basis, wrapped in snug brown paper, and oh how I can still remember its smell, its texture, its possibilities). These kids are telling me about World War II atrocities and how Korea's future depends on Japan not buying up Korean businesses.

Living in Asia for the past, gulp, eight years has been quite an education. Namely, an education in how most Asian countries are deeply fearful, distrustful and downright hostile towards one another. Put bluntly: They fucking hate each other, alright? Especially China, Korea and Japan. The animosity displayed between these three nations on a somewhat regular basis is astonishing in its intensity. Nobody trusts each other. Each is using the other for their own individual ascendancy. And noone is backing down.

The point, for me, is that kids are being fed political propoganda by their teachers and their societies that has no real balance, perspective or objectivity. The issues raised by my Korean students' clear hostility to anything and everything Japanese point to a larger issue: how do we teach the past? How do we tell kids that countries did bad things, horrible things in the past, but we have to move on and reach out and learn from each other now, in the present, and not focus so intensely and violently on what has transpired before?

In Asia, though, the past always informs the present. Hell, it overwhelms it. China and Japan and Korea have all added and subtracted from each other's civilizations over the past few thousand years, in art, language, music and culture. The past one hundred years, though, have been a little, well, rough. (To say the least.) Japan's WWII behavior was, let's just say, not exactly, how do I put it, humane. And memories last a long, long time in the Far East.

But it's not about history, I don't think. It's not about what Japan did then, in World War II. It's not about the colonization, the prisoner-of-war-camps, the Rape of Nanking. These days, today, in Korea and Japan and China, it's about face. Saving face. An essential component of Asian culture. Not losing one's dignity. Not bowing before the might of others. Not giving in, or giving up, or admitting that you were wrong.

So you essentially have three major world civilizations that will not concede anything to each other. Korea will not forgive Japan for its WWII transgressions because it's not politically beneficially now to do so. China, today, would rather bring up that awful war today, repeatedly, because it prevents any significant examination of their current humans rights abuses. Japanese prime ministers continue to visit Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, at which certified war criminals are buried, in order to appease the nationalist sentiments of the Japanese right wing.

And on and on and on.

How do we teach kids the negative points of our own countries? How do we maintain our perspective on the past, yet head forwards into the future? How do we move past grudges the bear the bloodstains of millions of lost lives?

I don't know.

But I try to tell my students that it's perfectly fine to disagree with a country's government, but don't take a swipe at the people themselves. The world is too big and small for that.

And who knows?

Perhaps times are changing.

A lot of my Korean students are actually learning Japanese. Despite what their parents and educators say, WWII was a long, long time ago, and has little relevance to their lives now. One of my students even lived in Japan for most of his childhood, the best time of his life, he said. Japanese women are going ga-ga over Korean soap operas and movies with their romantic, sensitive storylines. The Chinese language is forcing salarymen in Japan and Korean to bone up on their Mandarin skills.

My hope is that not that each country forgets and forgives each other's past atrocities and current altercations. My desire is that each country can at least pretend to be civil with each other, and judge each other, if they must, on an individual basis.

Not likely, I know.

Naive, certainly.

But still.

When you're a kid you believe what you're told, for the most part, and I hate to see kids of any ethnicity blindly swallowing the nationalistic kool-aid their schools are pouring down their throats. I'd rather the students go to these countries themselves, and read each others histories themselves, and meet each other's citizens themselves. Then, go nuts -- believe what you want to believe. But base it on first-hand reading, experience and intuition.

Because I mean hey, at age nine, I think it's far, far more important to have your mind stretched by The Fantastic Four than it is to know exactly when and where colonization began and ended.

Then again, that's just me. I'm Canadian. I've never been colonized, or had to think about any of these issues in any real depth until my mid-twenties. I've never had the luxury of cultural indifference.

Which might mean something, come to think of it.

Or even everything.

ANCIENT CHINESE EXPRESSION

The best time to plant a tree is a thousand years ago. The second best time is today.