Back to Work

I'm in for the long haul--coast to coast--the moon shot. Actually, just a second year, but halfway into the first. . . Schwedegon Pagoda still my constant point of reference, tonight in a golden haze on a humid night, under a full moon. The trains pass still under my window. Tourists came for a time, and with them the touts and moneychangers and begging children, and then just as quickly they left. High season doesn't last long here. As if to celebrate the end of the tourist season, the POLICE returned to the courtyard of the abandoned railway headquarters next door--six trucks. They stand indolently in pairs on the sidewalks and at intersections, not all all threatening--mere reminders that we are still in Fairyland. On my walk to work, I pass by a military barracks, though that is too grand a phrase. More uniforms, a three-story decaying building with laundry hanging from the window, and soldiers going to and fro, mostly it seems engaged in their own business. I sometimes stop and admire the vegetable garden that one soldier tends, between the fence and the dirt road. I point at the onion stalks emerging from the sandy soil, and smile, and he smiles back as he wields the water can.

I went downstairs to the Tokyo Bar for what was, for a time, my nightcap--a double scotch, one ice cube. They seemed pleased to see me, of course, for I am almost always their only customer--and greeted me with an English phrase I hadn't heard there before: "Long time no see." Funny--someone taught them how to speak intentionally broken English.

Tomorrow, I begin language lessons for real--5:30-7:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. If I weren't staying another year, I'd already be thinking about returning--about career, my mortgage, about coffee in bed with my beautiful wife in my beautiful condo in a lovely frozen sunny nordic city, about the fog settling on Tomales Bay, about proud and sly Coyote, and the white owl at Bull Springs who tried to tell me of my father's passing. But. . . another train is passing under the window, northbound this time, this time the train to the second city of Fairyland, where I will spend my second year.