On week­days I would re­turn home from teach­ing at a local school to my apart­ment com­plex, a short mo­tor­bike ride, and find my land­lord perched on a bench be­side a ce­ment table, cig­a­rette bal­anced be­tween his wiry fin­gers, out­side his mod­est first floor apart­ment.  More often than not, the table was cov­ered with small dishes of food and his glass filled with beer and ice, sweat­ing with con­den­sa­tion in the Thai hu­mid­ity.

He kept com­pany with neigh­bors and fam­ily, gos­sip­ing about the com­ings and go­ings of par­tic­u­lar ten­ants, the chat­ter punc­tu­ated by the grat­ing rep­ri­mands he dealt out to his 4-year-old nephew as he ran through the ad­ja­cent park­ing lot, hid­ing be­hind cars and pick­ing off un­sus­pect­ing ten­ants with an imag­i­nary pis­tol.

I would seat my­self be­side him, and we would pick up where we left off, con­tin­u­ing an in­ter­view that I an­tic­i­pated to last only a few min­utes.

The in­ter­view ran through days, weeks and months. It ran through the sea­sons: the sti­flingly hot, the hardly cold and the tor­ren­tial mon­soon. It ran through the hol­i­days, mine: Thanks­giv­ing, Hal­loween, Christ­mas and his: The King’s Birth­day, Loy Kra­tong, Wan Awk Pansa. It ran through school se­mes­ters and the sum­mer hol­i­day. It ran through count­less bot­tles of Sang­som Whiskey and Leo beer, ash­trays over­flow­ing with acidic Falling Rain men­thol cig­a­rettes. It ran through a po­lit­i­cal up­ris­ing, from the fes­tive be­gin­ning to ten­sion-filled stand­off to the vi­o­lent end of a Red and Yel­low color war played out in the streets of Bangkok and media out­lets world­wide.  

The sub­ject of the in­ter­view was my land­lord, one of the first peo­ple to speak to me, the farang - for­eigner - who had con­spic­u­ously taken up res­i­dence in the build­ing he looked after for his brother-in-law on the out­skirts of Phit­san­u­lok, a city in the cen­tral plains of Thai­land.  

Tourism in Thai­land ex­ists mostly on the fringes of the coun­try. Ca­coph­o­nous Bangkok is the entry point to the pop­u­lar is­lands that pep­per the deep south and to Chi­ang Mai and Pai in the north. The cen­ter of the coun­try is only seen by most for­eign­ers through the win­dows of trains, planes and buses.  My pres­ence in this cen­tral province at­tracted at­ten­tion, but mostly from a cau­tious dis­tance. But this awk­ward buffer zone was non-ex­is­tent to him and, only a few days after set­tling in, the en­thu­si­as­tic “Mr. Tim!” be­came his fa­vorite greet­ing and a segue into the next seg­ment of our in­ter­view.

He was a small man, stand­ing a lit­tle over 5 feet, his linen fish­er­man pants tied tightly around his thin waste, wa­tery eyes dis­torted be­hind cir­cu­lar tor­toise shell eye glasses he cleaned with an ob­ses­sive fer­vor on his shirt. Al­though 65 he ap­peared much older, the prod­uct of the un­re­lent­ing South­east Asian sun and a life lived for a long time day to day, try­ing to get by. I re­ferred to him as pee chi, older brother, a term of re­spect and one that was al­ways met with a laugh from vis­i­tors.

I pep­pered him with ques­tions. Food, Bud­dhism, Thai pol­i­tics, sports, lan­guage, movies, cus­toms, the Viet­nam War, sur­round­ing coun­tries, su­per­sti­tions, music, at times, I imag­ine, I was as both­er­some as his nephew tug­ging at his shirt. But in par­tic­u­larly un-Thai fash­ion, he an­swered my ques­tions un­guarded and openly, prac­tic­ing the Eng­lish skills he had learned while a physics teacher at the Chris­t­ian Boys’ School in Bangkok.

The ca­dence of his speech re­flected a gen­eral pace of life adopted by those who were for­tu­nate enough to suc­cess­fully move out of the ex­haus­tive and mea­ger pay­ing agrar­ian rou­tine still so com­mon in that part of the coun­try.  It was a sense of ease and en­joy­ment, mak­ing up for time lost.

He spoke slowly, his sen­tences filled with long pauses that orig­i­nally made me un­com­fort­able, but from this came three pieces of wis­dom that I wrote down, re­peated to oth­ers and wrote again.

1

“When you are old, you don’t leave. Peo­ple come to see you.”

 Rel­a­tives and friends cy­cled in and out through the day, bring­ing with them food and bits of news. Even an oc­ca­sional po­lice of­fi­cer and the post­man took time chat, but he never left, al­ways re­ceiv­ing with smile, but rarely even ris­ing from his bench.

In many ways this wasn’t much dif­fer­ent from my own grand­fa­ther. Sure the scenery was dif­fer­ent, a porch on Long Is­land not a table in Phit­san­u­lok, but the prin­ci­ples were the same. See enough your­self, do enough and peo­ple will come to see you.

The prin­ci­ples, un­for­tu­nately, have faded in the United States. Older gen­er­a­tions are being stowed away in re­tire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, looked upon as fam­ily em­bar­rass­ments. In Thai­land, there has been a slow and grad­ual ero­sion of re­spect for el­ders as West­ern views en­croach on the once staunchly held tra­di­tions.

2

“Don’t marry a woman like your mother. Bad idea.”  

He shouted this to me, shak­ing his head and laugh­ing as his old­est niece and boyfriend bick­ered in the park­ing lot late one night, their fight dis­solv­ing into a de­press­ing af­fair of sobs and slaps.  

“Al­ways fight­ing. No good,” he went on, telling me of his tu­mul­tuous first mar­riage and re­it­er­at­ing his first line with an ob­ses­sive fer­vor, until I agreed with a smile, never, ever to be ro­man­ti­cally in­volved with any woman who re­minded me of my mother.

We had talked about women be­fore. He had jok­ingly tried to set me up with a local 7-11 man­ager who lived on my floor, in­sist­ing that she was going to do big things, but this ad­vice had se­ri­ous­ness to it, a tinge of per­sonal re­gret in his in his de­liv­ery that made dark­ened his con­stantly light tone ever so slightly.

3

“Don’t eat durian and drink whiskey.”

“Ex­cuse me?” I asked, puz­zled.

“You eat durian and then drink whiskey and then you die,” he said it just like that, a sim­ple mat­ter of fact state­ment that every­one al­ready knew or should know, com­mon sense.

I found durian to be of­fen­sive to all of my senses: a fes­ter­ing stinky blob of a fruit that tasted like a stag­nant air in a pub­lic bath­room stall. My chances of per­ish­ing from this sup­pos­edly lethal com­bi­na­tion were quite lim­ited. The state­ment, how­ever, fas­ci­nated me. I asked my other peo­ple about it and they all told me it was true with con­vic­tion, de­scrib­ing some­thing to do with the heat of the durian and the heat of whiskey mak­ing a fatal cock­tail.

In many ways this line summed up much of what our best con­ver­sa­tions had been about: a mix of per­sonal knowl­edge and local lore passed on to me with a sense of pa­ter­nal pro­tec­tion.

There are facts and there are ex­pe­ri­ences and some­where in be­tween, where the two meld, there is wis­dom. To cre­ate your own takes time, and there is per­haps noth­ing as ig­no­rant as fail­ing to bor­row other’s along the way to­wards your own.