My mother told me about the dream she had two nights before, of her father and her mother and some relatives I didn’t know, particularly her twin brother, killed in action in World War II a month after I was born.

Her father graduated from teacher’s college at age 19, starting his first job in 1901 with a classroom of eighty students. He raised my mother and seven others with his wife who shared his bed until she was nearly ninety, in a house with an upstairs bathroom. After my grandmother’s stroke, he visited her bedside every day the year before she died. Not long after, he fell dead going up the stairs. The family thought he opted to stop living.

In 1918, the pastor of the Lutheran church in whose school he was teaching said the religion classes must be taught in German, the language of their Bible. My grandfather unsuccessfully argued for English, the language his students spoke with their peers. Though his seventh child was but a few months old, he resigned on principle, working that summer in a pea cannery and then two years in an industrial office until he was called to a Lutheran school teaching everything in English, where he spent the next thirty-one years.

In her dream, her relatives were all standing on the other side looking her way, but when she made a move to join them, they waved her off. She wasn’t ready, they said.

The clear plastic tube exiting her chest was thinner than I had imagined, considering how things had sounded over the phone. The gauze over it wasn’t bloody, just taped there with a little brownish yellow spot in the middle. I followed the tube into a plastic bucket on the floor, enclosed and sterile, holding amber liquid.

She told me she wasn’t afraid of death. She knew it was waiting in the hall, just around the corner, but she wasn’t scared. All the things she was afraid of, she had already met.

That’s what you taught us, I said. I’m not scared either.

She hung on until my brother and his wife got home from a trip. Then she just stopped living, sort of like my grandfather had, leaving at a time of her own choosing. She said once that she loved the moon. I think of her when I see it, full and rounded, the way her life was meant to be. According to what she told me, it was.

I’m going through the family history box, the one with pictures of people my mother labeled so as to tell us when she was gone, who they were. She made an album too, pictures of my ancestors on both sides of the family, with typed vignettes as she knew them to capture the spirit of the person. Is it because of the pictures that I remember them? For me, some are most themselves in her little stories.

One whose father died early began work at a coal company at age fourteen and later bought the place. Another raised six children as a seamstress after her husband died of smallpox at forty. An immigrant father said no to a son’s violin because violins were just for the rich, so the son made himself a banjo.

These people exist for my children only because their grandmother, whom they lovingly remember, chose to make them visible.

“My name is Somchai,” he wrote in my gray notebook, its cover blistered with sweat from my shirt pocket. “I like yellow,” he said, fingering his saffron robe.

Somchai, age 23, was the school principal at Wat Sirikanchanaram, a mountain temple outside of Kanchanaburi, half a day’s drive west of Bangkok. Six monks were responsible for the education of 150 novices in a new monastery built to perpetuate Theravada, the most ancient branch of Buddhism.

For most of the novices, Thai was a second language to their native tongue of Lao. They also needed to learn English and Pali, in its way the Latin of the original scriptures, plus math and science taught by community teachers. I was there with Carolyn to teach conversational English, one of a series of native speakers brought in by my volunteer group.  

“See you at three o’clock,” Somchai said as he dropped me off at the classroom with 30 junior high students at 1PM the first afternoon. Two hours and not much of a lesson plan, but I was the teacher.

I showed them pictures from home, sources of teaching words.

Daughter. Son. Wife. Son-in-law. House. Snow. Say again. Watch my tongue.

OK, let’s hear you describe your own families. Brother. Sister.  Father.  Mother.    

On my Michelin world map, unfolded with them crowding around the desk, we found Thailand and Kanchanaburi.

Washington DC. New York. L.A. They were elsewhere on the map, looking for places they knew from other classes, from the computer in the office, from talking with volunteers who had preceded me.

The tallest teen, in the middle of a voice change, challenged me. 

“How much you know about Buddhism?”

“Not much,” I said. “Some.”

It seemed that’s what he wanted to hear: another teacher going at English alone with them despite ignorance of their main subject, devoid of real control.

During class the third day we went birding, because I was out of gas teaching English by rote, done with holding up and describing pictures from home, exhausted of thoughts collected into stories written on the slate blackboard for them to recite back, finished with cheap chalk that broke under the slightest pressure and dusted over the desk, the floor and me.   

They looked through my binoculars, some crouching down to see better into the trees, some waiting a turn to write their names in my notebook, some drifting slowly into the periphery of novicehood, not long for the monastic life. Most were from villages in Laos, given the opportunity as early as seven to live in and be schooled by the monastery. Twenty was the age of decision: choose a monk’s life or return to lay society.

Sunee, our housing host with whom Carolyn taught English to a thousand middle schoolers elsewhere in Kanchanaburi, brought us into the street fronting her home one morning.

“We give food to the monks,” she said.

We knelt in the street with fruits and vegetables, offering them when the monks from their neighborhood arrived. We felt drawn in and yet distant, dropping food into the brass begging bowl of a monk about our age, saffron-robed, with thin-rimmed glasses, going about his rounds for his community.

“They cannot store up food for the next day,” she said. “Their food for today is what they receive. They eat early in the morning and at noon.”

Back at Wat Sirikanchanaram, the cars from the community arrived each midmorning. People carried food to an outside table and left it there, as if bringing potluck dishes and not staying for the meal.

And so I took lunch with the monks, or rather alongside them, sitting outside the refectory at a stone table beneath a tree, brought fruit and vegetables and some cakes as their teacher of the moment. I was to learn their way by watching, temporarily immersed in their community.

The chant before eating was startling, a blend of children’s, changing and adult voices, its clarity spilling from the two-sided hall beneath the newly leafed pho trees of a February spring. They ate in silence, only the clink of metal spoon on metal plate. Nothing but their clothing and what they ate each day was their own except what they learned of the practice, and even that was a received tradition in which they participated.

My last day there, I picked up a piece of the mountain and put it in my pocket for the way home. It is a small red stone, like all the others on the hillside I walked up every day on my way from the street. I took it along to remember the experience of being among them. And I left some of my heart.

The thing about overnight trains is that for a time while you’re on the road, you’re home. Your apartment is yours for the night, a little room with a view.

It was chilly on the November evening we left Gare de Lyon in Paris’ south end, our train sliding out of the station toward morning in Florence. We slowed for rows of evening-lit houses and headlights, stopping briefly in cities where people up late were there to catch the train.

I undressed and climbed into the top bunk between tightly stretched sheets. Carolyn was still reading in the bottom bunk when I fell asleep.

“You awake?” She was sitting on the edge of her bunk. “You have to see this.”

It was faintly light through the window below me. I looked at my watch, the luminous hands showing midnight.

Crawling over the edge of the bunk and letting myself to the floor, I peered out the window.

Snow, about a foot, fresh.

Everything went black. I sat next to her on the bed. She hunched closer. Her shoulder was cold.

“Just wait.”

After the tunnel, we ascended a snowfield patterned with farmhouses, muffled lumps in the silvery light.

To our left, above the crest of the Alps, rode a perfectly full moon the color of a Camembert wheel. We huddled on the edge of her bunk, holding hands, absorbing the immense silence.

Lately, we have begun to experience what Carolyn calls “subatomic network communication.”

She read about this somewhere.

Physicists, she says, are aware of the existence of this phenomenon but loath to discuss it. There is no way it fits into the calculations of matter, energy and other things with which physicists concern themselves.

What happens is this:

We’ll be in one of those protracted pauses of conversation that happen on trips, especially while driving through long stretches of landscape.

One of us will re-start the conversation on a different subject from where we ended. The other, not replying at first, looks over.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

We put it down to each of us having observed something along the road, triggering a mutual memory. I still think that’s mainly it, or trains of thought rolling around in both our heads until they arrive at logical ends about the same time.

Carolyn doesn’t think it’s that simple. Mystical, maybe; difficult to explain, certainly, unless our thoughts have grown closer by proximity.

I suppose our personal spaces have fluid boundaries now, natural riverbanks separating us as persons within a single landscape. Our tectonic plates may have softened a little at the edges, our borders harder to patrol the longer we live together. Maybe it’s just an intolerance of boundaries that happened to us that midnight, holding each other and watching the moon from the edge of a bed in a French train, crossing the Alps in our underwear.

In the autumn of 2000, iron straps corseted the tower at Pisa to prevent its collapse at the middle. Huge lead weights straddled the north base; guy wires attached to the top story went off in three directions. 

It was a smaller tower than I expected, a little squatter, but not less graceful. Even in its rehab suit, I liked it. Five weeks into retirement, conflicted feelings challenged my ongoing value as a person apart from work. I had announced my intention to become a writer, with little training and hardly a track record. My family wanted a more specific description of how my time would be spent. Travel and golf seemed short-lived, frivolous, escapist. 

Restoration in process by the authorities, said the plywood signboard, involved extraction of cores of earth from beneath the foundation. Their plan aimed to prop the tower back up to its tilt of three hundred years ago, when the degree of lean was relatively static. At that point the supporting apparatus would be taken off.

 Will it be like someone’s fractured limb, I wondered, from which cast and traction have been removed? Will it be thinner, weaker? Will it have to learn to lean all over again? 

What if I turned out to be no good at writing? Maybe I had done the wrong thing, leaving the working world without a re-entry plan. If I failed to deliver on my promise that retirement would be a new career, what would my friends and family think? Was my estimation of success or failure going to match their expectations?

Had the tower never leaned, there would be no magic in it. People have watched it lean for centuries against thin air, perhaps sharing a secret hope of being there when it actually goes over.

I remembered a story about Galileo dropping weights from its top, measuring the speed of falling objects. From this he dropped the weights? Couldn’t he find something taller?

No, perhaps not then. Perhaps not even now, actually. Nothing in Pisa is very tall. And the tower does lean. Still, I had in mind a height matching its iconic status. I envisioned something like the Washington Monument, maybe. Now if that began to lean….

For me, standing there confused in an autumn afternoon, the tower demonstrated the value of persistence, of resolutely hanging on. It proved that being out of kilter does not necessarily mean you will go down completely, that people will still love you if you are a little crazy.

Should I have hung on longer at my job? Should I be comfortable with my decision, realize that others would feel good about it if I did, recognize that learning a new skill would not be different in retirement from before?

It is probably for the best that they will not pull it up to vertical. Its value as a tourist attraction would be nil straight up. It would need some practical use, maybe as a destination climb for tourists to view Pisa and the surrounding countryside. Entertaining, but not the same. Quirkless, like other towers.

We walked back to the station through narrow Pisa streets and found seats on the train to Florence. A little wait, then a gliding sensation, then a clacking of rails as the train picked up speed.

I took out my journal and began to write.

They are absolutely huge and black, immense pieces of life, blowing snot. I’m supposed to feed them apples. I can hardly move. They’re harnessed, but not to anything. I’m sure I’ll get my hand ripped off. I’m probably six.

My father and his uncle Adolph are laughing, remembering how it is to be scared by the sheer size of something living. King and Duke, the two horses, stand there waiting, once in a while stamping or whooshing air out their huge glistening nostrils.  

I offer an apple to King, the horse on the left. He snuffles it off. I still have a hand.

I lay the second apple, small and yellow with reddish streaks, on the flat of my other hand and move toward Duke, who leans his huge head over and picks it off. His lips are slimy, his tongue rough. My dad has this proud look.

Uncle Adolph lifts the reins, motioning to my father. Dad gets this grin, takes the reins in both hands and clucks at King and Duke who walk past me toward the barn. I follow them in and watch Uncle Adolph and my father unharness these monsters who obey commands of people so much smaller than they.

Uncle Adolph wore bib overalls to work, which was out his back door, farming on Donges Bay Road in Mequon, Wisconsin. The land he farmed was down the road from the homestead my father’s great-grandfather Gottfried settled into, sometime after he arrived from Germany in 1839 at the age of 17.

Gottfried’s son Herman bought a farm and ran it with his wife Margaretha until he died of diphtheria in 1894 in his thirty-fourth year, leaving Margaretha with two sons, seven and three, and Rosa, who had just had her first birthday. Two other boys had already died of diphtheria at ages five and two. A seven-year-old boy, the eldest, Hugo, got diphtheria too, but survived with a weakened heart.

Not sure how Margaretha managed. Her son Hugo went to work in Milwaukee as a fourteen-year-old, clerking in the office of an uncle’s coal business, which he bought after his marriage. Her younger son Walter probably helped on the farm. Maybe Margaretha ran the farm or maybe she rented it out; at least she continued to own it.

That left Rosa, a year old when Herman died at 34. Rosa finished public school in 1907. Her Wisconsin Common School Diploma, complete with a silver ribbon beneath the State Seal, lists the subjects she completed.

She was fourteen. It was May, in the middle of the month, in time for spring planting.

It’s a pretty long list: Reading, Spelling, Orthoepy, English Grammar, Arithmetic, Geography, Writing, United States History, the Constitutions of the United States and Wisconsin, Physiology and Hygiene.

Orthoepy?? I looked it up just now. It means the correct pronunciation of words. In this case, English ones. Probably useful, German being the first language for many in Mequon at the time. Must have worked. I don’t remember her having a German accent.

She married Adolph Milbrath, making him my dad’s uncle. Eventually they took over Margaretha’s farm and she lived with them. My father spent his summers on Uncle Adolph’s farm from when he was five years old until he went to high school.

Rosa was a large woman, laughing every time I met her, and kind. We knew her as Aunt Rosie. We usually saw Adolph and Rosie at family gatherings in Milwaukee since that’s where my family lived. But once in a while we would take a Sunday drive out to the country to visit them. That’s where I met King and Duke. It mixes in my memory with the smell of Uncle Adolph’s cigars.

A 1930’s traveling photographer recorded him in a color photo, standing behind King and Duke who are harnessed for work. He seems serious, dressed in a denim jacket and pants over a light blue shirt buttoned up to the throat, with a felt hat. The limestone gravel driveway is white and dusty and the grass is dark green and he’s not wearing gloves, so maybe it’s summer after the dandelions are done. Probably his best work clothes, chosen for the picture.

The horses look huge, even though it’s just a photo with the inevitable foreground effect. And there’s Uncle Adolph, this elf of a guy between them in the background, reins leading from their jaws through their shoulder collars back to his hands, loosely clasped, waist-high.

King. Duke. English names, not the German ones I might have expected them to go by. Orthoepy spin, I suppose.

Power and family, that’s what they are. Not about to take the hand off a petrified kid feeding them yellow summer apples streaked with red on a sunny afternoon in mid-September.

Sunrise on the Ganges. Varanasi, the holy city of north India. A stream of people heading for the river: religious pilgrims, locals, tourists like us, threading our way along streets covered in urine, two and a half cows wide. And a cow, walking beside me.

We watch the hum at the water’s edge, people standing waist deep in the river washing themselves at the ghats, steps to the sacred water. Smoke curls from a cremation nearby, mixed with dawn hues over the river and moving spots of colorful clothing on the banks.

We set candles adrift toward the sunrise, boarding a wooden boat with our guide Ajay, a law student at the university. Oars thunk on the gunwales. Our boatman edges us into the river.

Ajay points out temples, ghats, cremation sites, one after the other, describing their historical importance. Amid the murmur and splash of bathers, our journey among floating candles collapses to silence in our pale green boat.

Gauze, a bundle, white gauze, a little body, floating just beneath the surface.

Probably set into the warm water by its young father, his hands resolute, its mother stone-faced at home with other children to care for, the body maybe nine months old, as young as her own body’s memory of it.

It had no spiritual debts, being just a child. It needed no burning, no special treatment. It had no entanglements on society from which to be charred loose, making its slow way in the current among other bodies, whole ones in the case of holy men who likewise had no need of cremation, amid ashes of its countrymen cremated alongshore.

In the afternoon we went a few miles north to Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon 2,500 years ago in the deer park. Hundreds of years ago, according to a handpainted information sign, beneath ruins of a temple complex someone was pulling up for stones to use in building a bazaar, a stone box containing human remains was unearthed. A proper Hindu burial was decided upon; the remains were placed into the Ganges. The inscription on the box was deciphered later: “These are the bones of the Buddha.”

It is best to proceed without thinking in this place.

Thinking brings you too little.

Not thinking brings you too much.

Freistadt, Wisconsin was settled in 1839 by immigrants from Prussia, a chunk of land in what is now Germany and Poland, next to the Baltic Sea. A history compiled for the village church’s 150th anniversary says their hard journey to a new home was a search for religious freedom.

 They apparently kept looking for it after they arrived. A few steps down the hill from the only crossroad in the village, on the north side of the road, lies the Buffalo Synod cemetery. It has a wrought iron fence, freshly painted glossy black, sheltering the remains of a few dozen souls who opted for their own spot, rather than the original Missouri Synod church cemetery right across the road. Their particular search led to a different conclusion, part of an internal Lutheran immigrant doctrinal dispute that began shortly after their arrival and continued until after the close of the United States Civil War.

Herman looks after the little manicured plot, right next to his own front yard. He tends it out of tradition, he says. Not his tradition, actually, as he goes to the church across the road and expects to end up in its overflow cemetery hundreds of yards south.

But the Buffalo Synod’s grass is in his neighborhood, which he takes to include the box elders and shaded turf overlying his alienated underground neighbors. There is always the highly unlikely possibility that an ancestor of his might be buried there, which makes it easier, though no one comes by to decorate the graves and Herman considers short grass plenty of recognition.

Neighborliness, that’s what it is. I hope if I end up in a neighborhood going on that long, someone cares about me the way Herman does. I’d be planted in a little plot with blackened gray stones reaching toward the sky, left by fellow ancestors adherent to beliefs lost on those living in the mere present. And Herman would drop by to cut the grass.

I’d enjoy hearing the weed whacker whizzing overhead. Herman might even care about me more than the guy on the riding mower in the original church cemetery across the road trying to make his way between the stones, the ones with names everybody recognizes as surnames on local mailboxes. I’d love the chance to give Herman the separateness he constructs for himself every so often, escaping from his world into our present, a quiet place, fenced and green, a little space of solitude shared by fellow searchers.

Heads freshly shaven, they kneel in rows, palms together, sitting on their heels. Some wobble, some shift their weight. None quit. A hundred fifty robes, monks in front, novices behind, no one over twenty-five except the elderly abbot leading the chant.

It is Makha Puja, the festival of the full moon of the third lunar month, commemorating the Buddha’s articulation of his basic teachings to twelve hundred followers. They chant in Pali, the language of early Buddhism. Nobody in the small group of worshipers at the rear of the temple can understand it. It’s a language of insiders, like Latin in the Christian church.

Carolyn and I are in the temple of Wat Sirikanchanaram this evening at the invitation of Niran and Sunee, our hosts for a month of volunteering in Kanchanaburi, Thailand as conversational English teachers. The Wat is a monastery on Khao Phurang, a mountain just outside of town. I scan the crowd of monks at the front looking for Chaloempon, a Pali teacher at the monastery school I have met while teaching here. I can’t find him.

One morning in the school office, Chaloempon had allowed that he would like “to talk.” He had no specific subject in mind, it turned out. He simply wanted to engage in the act of conversing. Well, that’s conversational English teaching, I realized. Novices hung around, watching their teacher have instruction. We played our way through a stack of English flash cards. The students drifted in and out of the office, watching another monk surf the web, listening to Britney Spears playing through the computer.

“How old is the temple?” I asked.

“About twenty-five years.” The abbot wanted a mountain retreat community and this is it, he explained.

“I checked the temple’s orientation with my compass the other day,” I said.

Chaloempon’s brow furrowed briefly. I produced my compass from a shirt pocket and opened it so we could watch the needle swing its way north.

“The temple is aligned east to west. The Buddha image is in the western end,” I said. “Christian churches traditionally have the altar in the eastern end.”

His face relaxed. “It is because Buddhism came to Thailand from the west.” West, in this case, meaning India.

Did I want to walk around the grounds of the Wat while we talked?

“Yes, that would be fine.” We paused at the door for me to put my shoes back on.

“It is a beautiful place,” I said.

“Yes, peaceful, away from the city. How you like Kanchanaburi?”

“I like it. Our host family is very gracious. The size of the city is like where I live in the United States.”

“Where you live in United States?”

“In Wisconsin, in the north, near Canada. Now we have much snow.”

“Ah, snow. I have seen snow in pictures. Very beautiful.”

“We have two seasons in Thailand,” he volunteered. “Hot and hotter. It will be hotter later.” He smiled.

It’s ninety-five Fahrenheit today in the grove of pho trees and it’s only Spring. Wonder what happens later.

“You like to see the temple?”

“OK.”

We entered below upturned eaves, brass bells tinkling along the roof in the breeze. Chaloempon opened a shutter made of coarse dark wood carved in patterns of leaves and flowers. Light spread across the floor, reflecting off polished stone. Birds called outside in unfamiliar voices.

Chaloempon smiled as if he were at home. I guess he was. He stood quietly, waiting for questions.

The men in the pictures beneath the Buddha image?

“The head abbot of Thailand, king of the monks. The other is the abbot of this monastery.” (Thailand has an actual king, so it seemed apt).

The Buddha image was seated on a white stone platform level with our faces. Its gold was fresh and lively. I had no more questions.

“We should respect the Buddha,” he asserted. I nodded.

Chaloempon knelt, motioning me to do the same, stretching his arms toward the image. His professorial glasses were rimmed in black plastic. I stretched my arms west, kneeling next to him.

“This does not interfere with your religion?” He was solicitous, checking in before going ahead. Even in the cool of the temple, it was hot. The notebook in my shirt pocket stuck to my chest.

What has a Lutheran boy got to lose by showing respect for his host culture? I thought it over. In the back of my mind a warning rang out, something about bowing down to graven images. Then I remembered a statue of Christ looming over the front of the church where I grew up. Christian churches had plenty of religious statues, not just of Jesus but of other people.

“Respecting” seemed the way to go, immersing myself in the culture. I liked Buddhism’s philosophy, but had thought of the experience more theoretically.

I was here to learn. He was trying to teach. That Biblical prohibition against worshipping “graven images” in the King James translation of 1611 was really an Old Testament thing, I decided. We were in the New Testament now. It was 2002. Go for it.

“No,” I replied.

Chaloempon taught me the three bows.

One. “I respect the Buddha.” He said it first in Thai (or was it Pali?), then in English.

Second bow. “I respect the Dhamma.” (His language, repeated in mine). “I respect the teachings,” he explained as we came upright, still kneeling.

Third bow. “I respect the Sangha.  I respect the community of monks and the people.”

Chaloempon rose and walked over to close the window. It was dim and quiet again. The gold of the Buddha reflected light coming through the open doorway. We walked out into the sun.

Let’s have a walk around the monastery grounds.

Sure, why not.

The path up Khao Phurang is not that long, but in the sun it seemed longer. I noticed a sign at the edge of the path, hand-painted blue letters on a white board nailed to a pho tree.

“Do not trouble the trouble,” it said. “If you trouble the trouble, the trouble will trouble you.”

There was no translation into Thai, nor for that matter into any other language.  Interesting choice of word, though, “trouble.” One word, almost half the words on the sign. For a Lutheran of German descent like me, “trouble,” the noun, is an invitation to add the appropriate form of the verb “to fix.” And as a verb, “trouble” inevitably raises associations of “guilt.”

I regretted not asking Chaloempon the meaning then and there. What is the “trouble?” Why is the sign at that place? Who put it there? Is it a Thai saying? A Buddhist saying?

“Let sleeping dogs lie” might be a parallel, but there was no way to place this into the monastic context. Maybe it was more along the lines of “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” or some other Biblical saying, translated into Theravada. Given our language barrier, I was happier to let the proverb settle into my mind as an idiomatic Thai/English reflection of something I already knew.

I guessed when we attended Makha Puja that we might be expected to do the three bows. Carolyn figured on skipping the bows. We aren’t Buddhist, she pointed out.

True, but I was bothered by “respect.” It would seem respectful of our hosts’ religion and culture to fully participate, but she was right. I was completely ambivalent.

There are at least twenty-five bows in Makha Puja, through which I sit upright. I become less and less comfortable, to say nothing of my legs. After an hour, the chanting ends. Monks and novices line up to exit the south door of the temple. I glance at Niran next to me. He smiles and makes a horizontal clockwise circle with his finger pointing downward.

“We walk around temple three times. Not talk. No shoes.”

The novices follow the monks processing around the building, trailed by a dozen or so of us lay people. We conclude our third roundabout but nobody’s leaving. I check it out with Niran. He says we’re half done.

Another hour of sitting and the chant ends. Novices follow the monks past us in a double line of saffron robes out the east door. Chaloempon is not in the group. Tomorrow we leave Kanchanaburi.

I recognize a fifteen-year-old novice from the M2’s, my first class. He smiles acknowledgement. I bow slightly, palms together below my chin. I’m a lay person greeting a monk, forty-five years his senior.

Standing on cool marble facing west, the only sound that of shuffling bare feet, I begin to understand, not think.

Regrets can be let go. It is possible to learn not to trouble the trouble.

The rest is simply religion.

Our Naxi driver from Lijiang to Dali was assigned this leg of our China trip because he has to see a specialist about a headache. En route he picks up a friend who gets off at the airport road south of town. Attempting to explain the detour, our driver settles for steering motions and mouth noises like a whistling engine. We can’t tell whether his friend with the small briefcase is traveling to Kunming on business or is supposed to pilot the plane.

Carolyn and I nod as if we understand. He goes back to driving.

In Dali, we meet our local guide Peter at the side of the road, called on his cell phone by our driver. As we look out from the ancient bell tower halfway through the city tour, Peter points out our next stop, a brand-new temple to Guan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, a favorite of the local Bai people. Yet another temple, in the long line of temples we have visited on our month’s tour.

Carolyn’s focus is off to the right, on a knot of people clustered around cooking fires next to a squat, ornate building. 

“Who uses the new temple?” she asks Peter.

“The government built it for tourists.”

“What’s that?” she continues, gesturing toward the picnic scene.

“Let’s go, then,” says Peter. He is into customer service. There are plenty of other government stops to keep the tour supervisors satisfied. We descend the steps of the bell tower and clamber over a stone wall into an open space fronting a ben zhu (local god) temple.

Twenty or so women from a neighboring village are cooking chicken and fried dough sweets in woks perched on stones over wood fires. Peter talks to them, then to us. They are here for the day, he says, to pray for the health of the children in their village.

Three colorfully-painted gods swathed in vermilion cloth fill most of the back wall of the tiny temple. One by one the women enter, standing to dictate their message to an elderly man sitting by the door. He brushes ink characters onto a yellow square of paper and hands it to an attendant. As each woman kneels before the central image, the attendant burns their prayer in a candle, sending it off with wood clackers, beneath temple walls and ceiling blackened with smoke.

They are older women, grandmothers of the village, perhaps great-grandmothers. One of them smiles at us over her sizzling wok of frying chicken, offering a plateful of fried dough and rock candy. She’s pushing the frybread but we pass, opting for the rock candy. Peter downs our portion of frybread.

She looks happy. So are we.

We have been welcomed by a community, simply because we left the tour.

I’m in a rented morning suit, minus the hat.

Looking down the slender nave of a church finished eight hundred years ago, with a man in a full suit of armor lying carved in stone one room over, I’m trying to get used to the idea that I’m supposed to read in here. Out loud, in public. We’re early, on purpose.

Tom, a friendly vestryman my age, takes me up the aisle to the place I’m to read from. It’s a carved dark oak lectern with two steps, halfway up on the right.

People on both sides will be facing each other across the center aisle, he explains, except where the lectern looks directly across at the wedding party. A bit further up is where the priest will give her message and officiate the ceremony. When the time comes to do the witnessing, the priest will escort the couple and their parents all the way forward to sign the documents at the high altar, above the handwriting of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

She asked me to read at her wedding, my niece, her godfather. We worked it all out by email. Of course! I would love to, I responded. It would be an honor! Where would the wedding be? At Christ Church Cathedral, in Oxford, where she and her fiance teach and study.

My wife and I were very excited. What a perfect opportunity to see Oxford, celebrate with family, tour the University, walk the Cotswolds.

It’s Henry VIII’s cathedral, actually. He took the place from the Catholic Church about 500 years ago when there was a lot of fighting over property and ideas between monks and kings. Like now, except these days it’s between political parties, gangs and governments. Besides, there aren’t as many monks around, and hardly any kings.

After Tom’s briefing, I got a short course about the stone knight and the cathedral from Sally, an interested congregation member. The knight was important, but the place wasn’t about him. It was all about Frideswide.

Frideswide was the daughter of Oxford’s ruler in the 600’s. She took vows, started a convent and seemed to be doing fine until a nearby king decided to take her in marriage by force. When Frideswide prayed for her safety, the king (and/or his soldiers, depending on who’s telling the story) was struck blind at the Oxford gate. Once it all died down, Frideswide agreed to restore everyone’s vision on the condition they fully repent, which of course they did.

She went back to running her priory. By the time she died, it had monks, nuns, a school and a convent church, the predecessor of this cathedral, in which they buried her. 

In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey dissolved Frideswide’s priory in order to build himself a College in its place. It would be called, not surprisingly, Cardinal College. Unfortunately for Wolsey, he had a job-limiting problem, which was that, try as he might, he couldn’t get the Pope to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

But Henry really wanted that annulment. He sidelined Wolsey, proclaimed himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England, had his own Archbishop Cranmer make the annulment, married Anne Boleyn and got himself excommunicated by the Pope. Personally. After that, he dissolved the English monasteries and took their property, including Cardinal College, which he renamed Christ Church. Which is where we are standing.

Back to Frideswide, continued Sally. In 1553, a former nun named Catherine Dammartin died. She was the wife of a Protestant divinity professor working in the College at Christ Church. They buried her in the cathedral close to Frideswide, who had by this time been a saint for centuries.

Bloody Mary (Henry’s daughter with Catherine of Aragon) took the throne that year. High on her list was restoring England to Catholicism. On that agenda, Cardinal Pole ejected Catherine (the deceased now-Protestant former nun) from Saint Frideswide’s church, dumping her remains into a manure pile out behind the stables.

Elizabeth I (Henry’s daughter with Anne Boleyn) was next in line for the throne when Bloody Mary died. Elizabeth was Protestant. Catherine was headed back inside. Her remains were retrieved from behind the stables and mixed with the bones of Frideswide, in what must have been quite a service, right here in this very church. They were re-buried together beneath the floor, the Catholic saint and the Protestant married nun, not far from the stone knight.

It would be a passage from the Song of Solomon, she said. She gave me the verses to rehearse. “Set me as a seal upon your heart,” the middle part goes, “as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.”

Wow.

I wonder if Henry ever read that. I hope so.

Love, death, passion, graves. They’re all here.

I need to get calm now. I’d like to read the words the way Solomon would have recited them, surely how the wedding party wants to hear them. Tom the vestryman is smiling. He sees I have the words typed out, slipped into a leather-like folder I can carry up to the lectern. I think he knows the folder will mask my shaking hands.

OK. It’s time.

Henry, are you there? I’m going to read now…

In: Travel Thru History >travel memoirs 2012