I am home

yay

I passed the final with ease. Homprang was delighted by my progress over the past three weeks and I made sure to express gratitude and tell her how much I’ve learned from her. This is from the certificate ceremony:

At the time I began writing this post I was sitting in a cat cafe in Bangkok, waiting to head to the airport to begin a full day of traveling back to America. There was an old orange cat named Jaochaii sitting next to me and I occasionally gave him a tiny spoonful of a creamy cat treat.

I’d like to tell you about a guitar from 1948.

When I arrived at the school in Chiang Mai I looked around for an instrument and found an old ukulele, probably a learning model for an elementary-aged student. Some people can write beautiful music on a ukulele. I haven’t discovered that side of myself. I wished there was a guitar. After the third or fourth day of class I was playing around on the ukulele when Christopher (Homprang’s 86 year old husband) walked by.

“Sounding good” he said.

I asked him if there was a guitar I could play and watched the corners of his face wince as if the question manifested a lemon seed behind his molars.

“I do have a guitar”, he began, “it belonged to my brother, Tony. He loved playing bluegrass music and was an incredible motorcycle racer. You see, he suffered an accident in 1965 that left him in a wheelchair. Several years after his accident he was living in Chiang Mai and was hit by a truck while crossing the street. He survived, but was in awful condition. This guitar is all we have left of him. It is an incredible guitar, a Gibson from 1948. But you see, it is just so terribly important to me that I don’t want anyone to play it. I do hope you can understand. I am so sorry.”

Context: Tony was Homprang’s English teacher back in the day. Christopher came to Thailand to help Tony after the second accident and ended up meeting his future wife, Homprang. Thirty years later they are still running the school they started from scratch on plot of land that was previously a rice paddy. Once they constructed a house on the plot, they moved in and brought Tony with them, caring for him until the day he died.

Needless to say, I understood his decision to keep the guitar out of reach. He has no idea who I am… if I can play guitar… if I will love it and care for it… or if I just want to get drunk and shout Wonderwall. So, I sat with momentary feelings of amusement and frustration in being halfway across the world and unable to play this nearby guitar. Christopher ambled away to his office, pausing in the doorway to look back at me and say “I feel so awfully bad about this, I am so sorry”.

What was I to do other than respect his decision? Wouldn’t you? What an incredibly special relic.

So it goes.

So I thought.

The next day I was preparing my lunch when Christopher came up to me and reached out to hold both of my arms. Meeting my eyes with his bright, youthful gaze he said in his ever-effusive lilt: “You know, I just felt so awfully bad about yesterday with the guitar.”

I stared at him with a blank face. Is this guy serious? Did he just come over to remind me of this beautiful guitar that he won’t let me play?

He continued, “I am going to let you borrow it and I ask that you take such good care of it. I don’t want anyone else to play it, and, in fact, please keep it in your room if you are not playing it. It is not just some strumming guitar. Meet me after class.”

A few hours later I finished class and sure enough, outside his office was an unassuming guitar case. He turned from his computer and told me he hadn’t opened the case in a year. I had no idea what to expect. Christopher doesn’t play guitar so this thing might be missing strings, horrendously out of shape, cracked, etc. I opened up the case to a smell that proved it definitely hadn’t been opened in a year. As I individually plucked the six, intact strings, they each rang out in near perfect tune. My heart sighed in relief. This was an extremely good sign for not having seen the light in a year, especially in tropical Thailand.

I gingerly removed the guitar from its faint, mustard-yellow bed to reveal a New York Times article about Bob Dylan, a bag of moth balls, and extra strings. More good signs. This guitar was loved.

I tuned it up, played Blackbird, and felt my body melt as I heard the sound come out. This guitar is an absolute gem. The neck had the look of polished obsidian in places where the crook of hands had clutched over the decades. The frets had dents where the strings had been depressed over, and over, and over again. The spaces between the frets had that familiar oval-patterned fade. At the headstock was visible where “Gibson” used to shine bright but was now barely an outline. On the inside was nothing. No sticker. No writing. Just an empty wood cavern. But as I squinted close I could see “45” and, after some research, found out that it must be “J45”. Bob Dylan played a Gibson J45, which explains the article.

When Christopher was explaining what happened to his brother, a familiar feeling came over me: one of absorption, pause, and deep internalizing. Sometimes people tell me a story and later reflect that my flat-faced affect confused them because they perceived me to not be listening. It doesn’t feel that way to me. Once I am deeply listening I tend to forget I have a face and all the normalized reactions society teaches us to do because I am tracking as much of what they are sharing as possible and it feels like all the little details are scurrying about in my body to find the just-right spot to nest. Listening for me isn’t about physically validating what the other person is saying, it’s about noticing what it feels like to listen and reflecting that back when the time is right. I feel like there are so many rote motions I’ve developed as a way of masking, of mimicking what I think is “normal” that it gets in the way of my listening because I end up hearing a phrase and enter my rolodex of “this is the face you should make when someone says this kind of thing”. Letting my face rest feels far more authentic.

Over the years, my capacity for listening has increased and my entire paradigm of what my responsibility is as a listener has shifted. I used to think a good listener was someone who could repeat back everything that was said verbatim. Lacking in that understanding is expressing how the listening impacts me. One of my favorite phrases is “I’m starting to feel saturated” when it feels as though someone is sharing and I get that oh-my-god-i-need-to-leave-immediately feeling. With enough practice I can pick up when the saturation barely begins and let the person know that I don’t have much energy for absorbing anymore. What is that called? ADHD theory would call it spoons, perhaps. Is there another term for the energetic exchange that happens when someone is imparting a story onto you? Into you? Do you ever feel anything like that?

Wasn’t I talking about a guitar?

When I listen to a story, it enters my body, transforms me, and I need to express that transformation in a healthy way. I sing to express and I can provide grounding with a guitar. Something feels right in my soul when that expression feels beautiful. It is as if I’ve made a vase for an experience so that it may live on a shelf but not run rampant in my emotional world.

If I do not express what is inside, those little tidbits nest, fester, and have the potential to make me feel really bad. It makes me wonder what stories are undiscovered in my bones. Do these stories have words? Are they just wordless experiences that need to be released? Is this why my hips are tight? Is there a tiny little spirit inside my left femur that writes absolute bangers on the ukulele?

I wrote two songs while I was studying in Chiang Mai and put out an EP. Track one, “dragon scales”, contains imagery of the guitar from 1948, the meditation room I recorded in, and the man that massaged our bodies with his foot aflame. Seriously:

The second song, “beloved”, was written for Schandra. We’ve never been apart for this long. I think the song speaks for itself.

I hope you enjoy the EP I made while I was in Chiang Mai titled moon roots.

During the last dinner we beckoned Christopher to the table so I could show him the songs I had written. dragon scales brought him to tears. He was so moved by the end of my playing that he promptly said “key of G!” and started singing some Joan Baez:

I’ll spend the next couple days cocooning and acclimating to the 12 hour difference.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.