It’s rather difficult to believe, but it’s been almost exactly one year since I left Japan and became an itinerant in Asia. That number, you may recall, has special significance for me.

It was 11 and a half months ago that the congenitally polite officials of Japan’s Immigration Office took offense at the length of my undocumented stay in their country (“incorrectly documented” is really more accurate) and invited me to take a one-year holiday somewhere – anywhere in the world, really, as long as it was outside the bit of squiggly lines on the map within which lies the word “Japan.” It was an invitation there was no declining. And so on June 5 of last year, I left my first Asian home with slightly less luggage than I’d arrived with, no plan to speak of, even less of an employment strategy, a well-worn-in pair of relatively new hiking boots, and a global recession to welcome me.

It’s been an interesting year. If you’d suggested at that time that in June 2009 I’d be living in Saigon and teaching communications theory at an Australian university to rich Vietnamese kids, I may not have laughed directly at you, but I’d have probably wondered why you were drunk at 8:15 in the morning.

My second semester as a slightly surprised university lecturer ends Friday. My third begins in roughly two and a half weeks. In-between lies the date on which my temporary banishment from the wealthiest, most industrialized, most stylishly eccentric and necessarily vain nation in all Asia ends. My persona non grata status will lose two Latinate suffixes. I will instantly transform from a prodigal son to a where-have-you-been-all-this-time one. The thuggish brutes at the entrance will lift the red velvet rope for me, intone to one another, “He’s on the list,” and usher me into the bright lights and blinking neon fantasy world of modern Japan.

If all goes as planned, I’ll arrive in Osaka International Airport via Malaysia Airlines on Saturday morning at 7:15am – exactly 365 days after leaving. To say I’m looking forward to returning is an understatement on the order of “Sex with that girl from Slumdog Millionaire might not be too bad.” Osaka’s not the prettiest city on earth, but compared to Saigon it’s Shangri La, Xanadu, Neverland and Utopia all rolled into one mouth-watering makizushi. And Kyoto is in point of fact the prettiest city on earth, or at least one of them. Plus, unlike Vietnam, Japan has the benefit of being home to a civilization that’s actually advanced beyond the Iron Age. That’s not necessarily a crack on the Vietnamese people (after all, men pee on the side of the road in both places). But it’ll be nice to spend a little time in a place where the tap water won’t poison you.

I know, I know: I seem to have fallen off the map lately; my star has plunged from whatever very modest heights of the blogosphere it had previously achieved. For a week now, visitors to this space have been greeted with only a photo of a winking, leering Bible-thumping, bile-spewing, oil-drunk right-wing demagogue (for which I deeply apologize). But it’s been an especially busy week.

As some of you may know, I’ve recently returned to the ranks of the full-time gainfully employed. As of October 6, I am a Professor of Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam. Better known here and in Australia as RMIT (not to be confused with plain old MIT), it’s sort of a training ground for the new breed of Vietnamese: an English-only campus of a Melbourne-based university offering degrees in business and accounting, multimedia and graphic design, IT, commerce, and – with the new term beginning Monday – in Professional Communication.

Enter yours truly, who has been tasked with teaching a course called “Visual Language” to fresh-faced hopeful future communicators. It’s a basic course in visual literacy, offering an overview of the way people use images and non-verbal visual narrative to convey meaning in art, film, graphic design, consumer messages, and marketing. Basically, it’s an entire class dedicated to the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words.

How the very smart head of the department got the idea I was qualified to teach this class is somewhat mystifying. Desperation comes to mind. I may also have had some part in it during our interviews. But teaching it I am, and I’ve been submerged up to my eyebrows for the past two weeks in terribly academic-sounding subjects like sight and visual processing, symbolism and semiotics, narrative and expression, spacial organization, aesthetics, propaganda theory, and phenomenology.

It’s also been a crash course in learning how to read and write in British English, in which organisation and utilise are spelled with an S, not a Z (that’s a “zed,” by the way), and colour, flavour, and centre are all words whose relation to modern life appears tenuous, as they all seem to have been lifted directly from The Canterbury Tales or Love’s Labors Lost.

Until last week, my days in Saigon were mainly occupied with drooling onto my new laptop (which has now been stolen, but more on that miserable tragedy later), drinking coffee, and tutoring English three hours each evening at a small private school.

A week and a half ago, however, I was chucked headfirst into the boot-camp-style orientation for new instructors here known as “induction,” a word that can only derive from the way it “induces” ulcers and paroxisms of anxiety about being unprepared to teach your course because of all the time you spend in it. From 9am until 4pm each day, I’m subjected to a barrage of workshops and seminars on HR policy and procedures, IT training, library database searching, work permits, health insurance (Oh, Joy), counseling services, lesson planning, building Powerpoint presentations, measuring student learning, and time management.

It’s a long way from journalism. Though I have found one common area of overlap: the preoccupation with plagiarism in the academic world is at least as obsessive as it is in the world of publishing. (Did you know they have software that can spot plagiarized material? I’m assuming for the moment that those students whose beer money comes from a busy schedule of report writing on commission, as mine did in college, remain safe.)

It’s also a different life from the one I’ve been leading for the past 15 months. I’m now working roughly 12 hours a day. I have an office, a salary, a boss, a passel of health benefits, a legion of wildly international colleagues, and a purpose.

Colour me satisfied.

This tidbit of local news is ever so interesting for several reasons. First and foremost, herein we learn that the Vietnamese prime minister’s name is Dung. That’s his first name. We can bitch and whine about either or both of the candidates running for president in the U.S., but at least we’re not going to have to deal with a chief executive who’s named for fecal matter.

Secondly, an urban rail system in Saigon is good news and all, but given the rate at which most construction happens in Vietnam, I think 12 years is optimistic. I’ve watched (and listened to) the new home construction taking place on both sides of my house for about a month now, and I’m not terribly impressed. The work ethic is there, to be sure, but the technical end is still a little out of date. The scaffolding, for example, is made of wood. I’m not talking about two-by-fours, either, but pieces of wood recently ripped from trees – limbs, branches and such. I do not kid. Also, if you think government contractors are slow in America, you should see them move in a Communist nation. It’s like watching crippled snails procrastinate.

Finally, whether this will actually solve the traffic woes in HCMC is debatable. There are 80 million people in Vietnam and 40 million motorcycles – in a nation the size of California. Assuming the rate of population growth is greater than the annual rate of death by motorbike (a family of four was killed on a motorbike near where I live last week, and twice in the last three days I watched crowds of spectators form as two-wheelers burned in the middle of the roadway), those numbers will be a lot higher in 12 years. Maybe our beloved leader knows something I don’t, but I plan to keep my expectations firmly in check. If Dung has any sense, he will, too. Otherwise he could find himself in deep doodoo.

Vietnam plans $15 billion for city railway systems

The Vietnamese government said today it plans to spend billions building two urban railway networks to help ease the ever-worsening traffic congestion in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung approved a US$14.8 billion plan to build commuter railway networks inside traffic-choked Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City over the next 12 years.

Hanoi will receive $7.3 billion to build seven railway lines, including sky trains and subways, according to a statement released on the government’s website on Sunday. Of the total cost, $5.5 billion will come from foreign investment.

Ho Chi Minh City will receive $7.5 billion, of which $6.3 billion will be foreign invested, to build six urban railways and metro lines.

Prime Minister Dung has asked officials to speed up preparations for the elevated and underground railway systems and focus on attracting overseas aid and loans for the projects, according to the statement.

“The project will help to ease congestion which happens everyday in the cities and has become chronic,” Nguyen Van Cong, chief administrator at the Ministry of Transportation said in a phone interview with Bloomberg Monday. “It will also help limit traffic accidents and improve cities’ environments.”

The other day I was shit on by a gecko. I was sitting with a friend at a Vietnamese pizza place, eating pizza that tasted very little like real pizza, and a suddenly a little turd blossomed on the crook of my elbow, like a hairless, slightly watery black mole that had appeared on my arm in one second flat.

Observing this, my Vietnamese friend tried to convince me it was a happy event. “That’s good luck,” she said.

“Sure, it is,” I replied. “For you. You weren’t just shit on.”

To be honest, I didn’t actually mind that much. It didn’t land in the pizza – not that I would have noticed. And, fortunately, it was a one-wiper.

Geckos are ubiquitous in Southeast Asia. They’re as common as South Carolina palmetto bugs, but less disgusting. Like their bigger cousins the garden lizards, they pretty much ignore you until you get within grabbing distance. Then they disappear in a frantic graygreen blur. They seem to pop in and out of existence like tiny illusionists. One moment they’re there, the next they’re not.

They’re also more playful than bugs, if you can call a dozen of them chasing each other around the sun-smacked walls of a café ‘playing.’ What looks to me like frivolty might actually be a life-and-death battle royale for mating rights or territory. Or a complex traffic control system in which they’re calculating critical pooping trajectories. Meanwhile, the big-brained primates below them are patronizingly attributing all this activity to random luck.

Once, in a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia, as I lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling, I counted thirteen geckos on the walls of my room. I didn’t realize there were that many until I spotted several and decided to do a full inventory. And who knows how many were hiding behind cabinets, curtains, and framed, slightly crooked paintings of the Angkor Temples at sunset.

That’s a lot of little reptiles to be sharing a room with.

I found that these guests didn’t unsettle me the way thirteen of some other creature on my walls might – rats, for example. Or cockroaches, or spiders, or even houseflies. Thirteen tiny snakes in my room and I’d have been looking for another guesthouse in a pounding heartbeat. But for some reason I was perfectly ambivalent about sharing my sleeping quarters with a baker’s dozen or more of Hemidactylus frenatus.

A superstitious person might have found some dark meaning in the number thirteen. Not being superstitious, I didn’t have to worry about that. “There’s no such thing as a black cat,” somebody suggested to me the other day, in a line that I loved, “only cat-shaped holes in the universe.” I’ve never been much of a believer in luck, or its supernatural cousins fate and destiny. What I believe, what I know for fact, is that a few billion years of evolutionary biology as both predators and prey have made our brains predisposed to attribute anthropomorphic forces to random, undirected events. It’s perfectly natural. But that’s all it is.

It’s not that I haven’t considered the more tempting alternative. But if God has a plan for everyone, how does He choose? How does He select who’s rescued at sea and who contracts ebola and dies in bloody agony? Or who becomes a Hollywood celebrity and whose Cambodian child is tortured to death in front of her parents by Khmer Rouge prison guards because her father is a teacher?

Maybe He has their souls draw straws. Random chance. It sucks to be an unfortunate soul, I guess.

Of course, there will always be people in the world who think it’s good luck to get shit on.

We all think like geckos some of the time. I know I do. The oldest parts of our brains are the parts we share with reptiles: the ancient, atavistic regions that are at the wheel of our central nervous systems and our behavior at its most primitive: aggression, reproduction, self-preservation.

These regions lie darkly at our brain’s center like a pit in a peach, deep beneath the fresh-off-the-showroom-floor thinking machine we know as the cerebral cortex, below even the relatively newfangled amygdala and hippocampus, wherein lie the levers for fear, anger, memory, and identity. They develop before any other part when we’re in the womb, and they predate all other gray matter in the fossil record.

Here, in the shadow-filled basement of your brain, that most primeval part of you still sends out reconnaissances – chemical emissaries speeding toward the hinterlands of limbic and neocortical borders like winged messengers, bearing dispatches from your brute past. Eat! Run! Fight! Fuck! Don’t forget to breath!

Down at the very bottom, our reptilian brains are the uncharted zones from which dreams bubble up and nightmares stalk. Here, we all chase each other around walls.

*

One Saturday night shortly after I arrived in Saigon, I found myself with a small group of friends in a local bar popular with the young backpacker crowd – not the sort of place I’d normally hang out, but they served beer, and there were no signs of a drunken brawl breaking out near me in the immediate future, so I stuck around. Pretty quickly I noticed a girl looking at me. She was sitting at the bar, alone and lovely, sending me postcards with her eyes: wish you were here.

Topped off with liquid courage, I walked over and took a seat next to her at the bar. Close-up, she was even more striking. Half-lidded, gently slanting eyes with lashes like wet palm fronds, a tiny faux dimond peeping from one side of a button nose brushed with freckles the color of warm milktea. A tiny mole bobbed in the ocean of her nape like a lost soul, caught in the perilous cross-currents of her bosom and her throat. She smiled shyly with that rarest of Southeast Asian gifts – perfect teeth – and the room lit up.

I can’t remember her name, but she was a hooker. I realized this about one minute after I’d taken a seat, which was about 60 seconds longer than it should have taken me. Beautiful girl, very well-dressed, speaks good English, sitting alone late at night in a bar full of lonely young tourists: in what world could this girl not be on the clock?

We talked for about ten minutes, but my interest nose dived after minute one. Seeing this, she made to intercept it.

“You live near this?”

“No,” I said. “I live in District 7. Long way.”

“Not too far. We go there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks, though.”

She frowned. “You want go hotel room with me?”

“No,” I said, standing up. “You’re very pretty. I have to go.”

“We can only for one hour, if you wish,” she said. “Very nice. You like.”

Vietnam lacks much of the basic social infrastructure and capital assets of more developed nations, but one area where this country is fully invested is in its prostitute resources. There’s no shortage here of what expats euphemistically call ‘working girls’ to save themselves the embarrassment of having to consort with whores.

I’ve never been very good at sex without affection, and any small capacity for it I may once have had has vanished altogether in my middle adulthood. I also have zero tolerance for phony and feigned attention from other people, which is what these girls specialize in. Taken together, these qualities make me a poor target for the prostitutes in Vietnam, who are numerous enough to be able to populate a small country and set up a decent government, if they ever got together and did something about it.

Walk into most any club in Ho Chi Minh City frequented by tourists or expat foreigners, and the first thing you’re likely to notice is that you are a Star Attraction among the ladies, for whom Western = rich, caring nothing for the niggling distinctions we foreigners assign to levels of wealth or its lack. The next thing you’re sure to pick up on is that almost any given one of them wants to leave the club for your house or a hotel within minutes of meeting you. This can be heady stuff for a guy looking for an excuse to believe that he’s Special.

These are attractive women. Very attractive. They look like the same kind of girls you see at stylish, cosmopolitan nightclubs anywhere in the developed world: sleek as gazelles, hard-eyed, soft-bodied, purposeful, and dangerous, like sharp things swaddled in velvet. And they speak excellent English, at least compared to your Vietnamese.

The typical lizard brain is no match for weapons of this caliber. With their practiced hands they can slip right through the locked doors of your frontal lobe, knocking down traffic cones and pushing past the police tape at your limbic regions to lay a perfectly manicured finger right on the shuddering center of your most primitive defenses.

Yet just as, in our American pseudo-realities, there are gradients of western wealth, and many of us are aware of not even being able to see the lowest rung, so too are there gradients of interest in it here among women. There is the short-term interest, which can be lucrative in a hurry, underwriting stylish outfits and manicures and perfect teeth. But for at least as many, possibly more, there is the longer-term interest.

In the U.S., the American dream inspires millions of people to work themselves numb in the entrepreneurial ideal that anyone, no matter how humble or poor, can become a cigar-smoking, Mercedes-driving, suburban-home-owning millionaire. In Vietnam, achieving the American dream means marrying an American.

There’s a girl who works in the lobby of a hotel near where I live. The lobby also has a chain coffee shop with wifi and a small supermarket in it, so I’m in there a few times a week. I’m nothing special to look at: middle aged, receding hair, invisibly thin blond eyebrows, bags starting to form under my eyes. But when I started going to this coffee shop, every time I walked through the lobby this girl began pulling faces as if the video crew from Fashion TV had just walked in. It took me a while to realize this was for my benefit, because it’s been quite a few years since I could motivate that kind of activity, and even then it was as rare as a planetary transverse of the sun.

We became friends. Her name is Hai. She’s 22 years old, and she wears the long, flowing traditional Vietnamese tunic called an ao dai for ten hours a day, seven days a week, in the lobby of the hotel, escorting visitors to the elevator behind her. Hai can only speak a few words of English, and she doesn’t have a phone of her own, but she asked for my cell number anyway, scrawling it onto the back of her hand like a prayer inked in Henna.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a cryptic text message on my cellphone from one or another number I don’t recognize.

“You ok? Today you go to world 11am you me coffe ok? Hai.”

If I’m free, I’ll go to the coffee shop and Hai and I will sit awkwardly and fumble with our coffee and steal glances at each other like schoolkids, and I’ll crack bad jokes in English that she doesn’t understand, but she’ll smile anyway.

It’s a kind of courtship, I suppose.

If I’m not free, there’s no point in replying to the text message, because whoever the owner of the phone she borrowed is, he or she generally ignores any message I send, as if they have no idea someone had borrowed their phone. For all I know, Hai sneaks a complete stranger’s phone out of her pocketbook while they’re all standing at the elevator and dashes off a text message to me before slipping it back home as the doors open. She’s never offered an explanation, and she doesn’t speak enough English to understand me when I ask her about it anyway.

But one time, someone did reply. I’d received a garbled text message from Hai, whose broken English encryption I couldn’t crack, no matter how many times I read it. An hour so so later I replied with a quick message asking for more detail. I received a quick response.

“I do not know you.what you name?why are you know number telephone of me?”

I wrote back. “I replied to a message sent to me from this number. Did Hai use your phone to send me the message?”

The answer was fast and, it seemed, furious.“Dua vay thoi.ban hoc gioi tieng anh qua m kohieu.ban ko noi ten m ko noi chuyen dau!”

Whatever that meant, I decided to cut my losses.

“I don’t understand Vietnamese,” I wrote. “Only English. Sorry for bothering you.”

I got a reply immediately. “Where are you from? Im really sorry.I hope to understand to me.”

“I’m American,” I replied. “It’s ok, don’t worry about it.”

Almost as soon as I’d hit send, another reply arrived. “What are you doing?How do you do? How long have you been vietnames? Can I make friends with you? I was born vietnam.I am poor so I have to do part-time job in restaurant hotel. Did you have lunch?are you feel about people vietnam?do you marry?”

What human heart lay behind those words? Chasing something, anything, across the walls of her life. Blind, heedless, hopeful. Before I was even finished reading it, another text pinged my phone.

“I am name Loan and you?do you think about girl vietnam?do you teach the school?do you love someone?“

*

If you ever manage to catch a gecko, you have to take care with it. One of the most interesting things about them is that if they’re in a tight spot with a predator hoping to make a meal of them, they can drop part of their tail and scramble away while the tail continues flailing about, flopping madly as its owner watches from a safe, secret hideway. Eventually, after a long time, the tail grows back.

But it’s always shorter than it was to begin with.

My mom was a lovely women, but she had a terrible hangup about having her picture taken. You could trick her into busting out a smile for a camera, but only if you snuck up on her and gave her no chance to think about it. This was a person with roughly the spontaneity of a philodendron.

Yet in most photos of my mother, she’s cracking a funny face. This was rarely deliberate. Her discomfort with photographs stemmed from the fact that she was afflicted with a genetic disorder known as unphotogenecity. It’s a common affliction that causes otherwise perfectly attractive, even beautiful, people to take horrible, ghastly photographs. In picture after picture, my mother has got her eyes closed, or she’s peering off-camera with a confused look on her face, or she’s in the middle of blinking and chewing with her mouth open at the same time. In person, my mother turned heads at the supermarket or the nearby bar and boat landing that qualified as a yacht club on James Island until well into her fifties. But in photos, she often looks like a cast extra from an after-school special about mentally disabled kids – the one where you find out the kid’s mom is a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, too, but she’s still a good mom, goddammit.

I can personally attest to the fact that this disorder is an inherited one, as can, I suspect, my sisters. The only person in my family who ever managed to take a photo that was worth a damn is my father, who is, ironically, the one person among us who cares the least about his appearance. Isn’t that always the way? The greatest gifts are wasted on those to whom they mean the least.

My mother also had this infuriating habit of pretending not to know the answers to questions her children asked her, instead sending the querulous child – who meanwhile while was mentally punching him- or herself repeatedly in the face – to the bookshelves in the living room. There, we knew, with a certainty born of innumerable trips past, we could find all 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia, bought from Time Life Books at a special discount rate through Reader’s Digest, a subscription my mother had picked up at a bargain-basement rate by mailing in the proof-of-purchase labels from 12 cases of Tab with a hand-written letter about how much weight she’d lost drinking a diet soda product that tastes like the carbonated tears of unhappy, chronically obese people.

To us kids, this always seemed like a cop out. It would be a simple enough question, often just an offhand musing-out-loud during family TV hour: How did Klinger manage to get all those snazzy dresses when the rest of the M*A*S*H unit couldn’t even get a regular supply of antibiotics and Hawkeye had to brew his own booze? Next thing you knew, the TV was turned off and the petitioner was being directed to the hated Encyclopedia, volume K-L, to enlighten the family with a 20-minute dissertation on the Korean War. It got to where my sisters and I were afraid to ask any kind of question at all. We didn’t really care whether John-Boy could have left Walton Mountain and become a WWII fighter pilot with prescription eyeglasses. But my mother could see the skepticism brimming beneath our adolescent eyes, and some unlucky sap would be sent to the WBE for a riveting discussion of Charlottesville, VA during the Great Depression.

My mother died eleven years ago today. My father was a huge influence on me, as fathers always will be. It’s him I have to thank for being such a sentimentalist, and also for being a writer who struggles daily with a weakness for rationality. But it was my mother who shaped my character – the singular lens through which I view the experience of life. I miss her as deeply as I would miss, if it were possible, myself. She breathed in life like oxygen, and sometimes she breathed too deeply. She allowed herself to be as battered by the world as she was by her own fears of it. Yet she was also a fearless student of experience. Her own mother died when she was 13 in a car accident, and she ran away from home four years later, rather than submit to a stepmother. She saw, and imagined, a side of the world that only the rarest, luckiest among us catch glimpses of, and she did her best to share that vision with her children. At my very best moments of observation, I have but a fraction of her gift for seeing the spark of truth in the artificial, the wonder of perfection in the mundane, and the majesty in the small, the unseen, and the overlooked.

The other day I ran across a short essay I wrote about my mother shortly after she died. It was never published, which was probably for the best. But this seemed like a good time to pull it out, dust it off, and lay it down on the table again for a look. She couldn’t take a picture if you gave her money. But pictures are for fools without memory or imagination.

I love you, mom.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the worst situations often have a weird tendency to bring about wonderful things.

This has been on my mind because it was four years ago this week that my mother died. It wasn’t a sudden death, which was both a blessing and a tragedy. It was one of those difficult, extended deaths that one hears about-worse than some, but also easier than many, I imagine. No matter how you look at it, though, it was the most difficult thing I or anyone in my immediate family had ever endured. To say nothing of her.

When she was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996, my mother, whose name was Carmen, was given only a few months to live. She’d been in Louisiana for several months caring for her own parents, who were both quite ill with heart disease, and she had ignored the signs that something was wrong with her own body until she found herself in the emergency room, panic-stricken, alone, her insides a wreck. When she arrived at the airport in Charleston a week later, my father, my two younger sisters, and I were waiting for her.

It was the first time for us together as a family for many months: not only had my mother been in Louisiana for almost a year, but she and my father had been estranged for several months prior to that. The reasons were many and complex, and we children were the least likely of anyone to be capable of understanding them. But it was every bit as real as her sickness, and we hated both the cancer and the division between my parents with the same bitter lack of comprehension.

She emerged from the gate red-eyed and weak, her abdomen distended with ascites as if she were eight months pregnant. She cried at seeing us, and we cried at seeing her cry and at the fear we all felt. We huddled together for a little while, a little ball of family, crying together, drawing strength from each other and trying to pass it on in equal measure. But the terror crept in among us, bubbling up in that group hug as if our closeness was all the permission it needed.

“I’m going to die,” she cried into my and my sisters ears necks. “I don’t want to die.”

“Don’t be silly, mom,” we cried back. “You’re not going to die. You’re just scared, and that’s okay.”

Yet inside, we all suspected she was right. The doctors in Louisiana had been clear: advanced ovarian cancer, not yet metastasized but almost certain to do so without extraordinary luck.

But what could we say?

Even after my mother was admitted to the hospital and her doctors told us the cancer was still treatable, she knew her chances were slim. But she grasped at that sliver of hope with the astonishing strength that only nearly hopeless people can muster. And she did it with such grace, such consummate eloquence. I lose my breath thinking what that must have cost her.

But my mother was a rock, unwavering in her conviction that she could beat the thing that was killing her if she wanted to badly enough, unwilling to give in to the numbing fear that would cause most ordinary people to withdraw into themselves like beaten animals, people who remain uncaring and unaware that the overwhelming beauty of the world and the people in it persists, even if they themselves do not. My mother poured her heart into her friends and children, and we spent as much time with her as we could, which was, for my part at least, hopelessly inadequate.

She was living in an apartment, which my sister shared with her many nights. Still, she kept my father at a distance. Sadness leaked out of her in silent waves when we spoke of him, but she was unrelenting.

The doctors finally gave up on the chemotherapy. It was doing her about as much good as a warm glass of gasoline each morning, noon and night, and it was a lot less pleasant. She didn’t despair but rather continued to hope that an alternative therapy might be found. My father spent the majority of his waking time calling physician friends, researching new or untried therapies on the internet, sorting through the thousands of snake oil peddlers and legitimate medical programs across the country, none of which would ultimately prove a salvation in any sense but in the hope that one might be. But we prayed, and my mother prayed, and my father prayed perhaps hardest of all.

In August 1997, my father announced that he and my mother were traveling to Houston to participate in an experimental procedure at a hospital there.

“It’s a little unconventional,” he told me, “but there’s a real chance it could do the trick.”

Somehow, I allowed myself to be persuaded that this was not a fantastic exaggeration. My sisters both knew the truth, of course: experimental procedures exist only for those who have exhausted every other possible medical recourse. They are the straws at which refugees of modern medical science clutch in their last, desperate hopes.

Yet I was too weak not to believe him. I knew I’d been neglecting my mother in recent months, unwilling to believe she could possibly die, afraid to confront the anger that festered in her toward my father, who, in her less lucid moments, she accused of causing the cancer. I had buried myself in work, pretending that I was too busy to make time for her,

About a week before she died, my mother was lying in bed, so weak she could hardly speak or even turn her head to look at us. Her eyes were sunken deep into her face like flickering bruises, her head hairless but for a few stray wisps, her skin colorless and wan. She wore a mask that fed her oxygen in a regular whish whish of air gurgling through humidifying water beside the bed.

It was an exceptionally good moment for her; she was sitting upright in the bed and smiling, looking around at us as if seeing us for the very first time, a surprised, slightly entranced smile playing across her face. She stared at my sisters and I with wide open eyes, soaking up the glory and the unspeakable magnificence of these things she had created, and she smiled with the happiness of all that. And we all felt it. I will never forget that look for the rest of my life. At that moment, she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

My father was there with us, standing beside her, holding her hand tightly. As he had been for weeks. He suddenly leaned down, whispered something secret to her, and pulled the mask slightly aside so he could give her a quick, reassuring kiss. Somehow, my mother managed to raise her hand, tremulously, and place it on the back of his head, pulling his face down to hers, where she kissed him for what seemed like an eternity.

And it was.”

I have a not-so-secret fondness for a subject that ordinary Americans tend to avoid talking about in public. This is not because they fear getting arrested or anything (although it’s happened) but because doing so too often results in an argument. One of the nastier results of the so-called culture wars is that what used to be a perfectly manageable list of topics best avoided in casual company – God and politics – has ballooned into an encyclopedia-sized catalog of unmentionables, mainly because one group (I’m not naming any names) decided to conflate the two original items on that list, after which all hell, so to speak, broke out. These days you can’t use the noun “choice” without somebody calling you names and threatening to pitch a drink in your face. And pity the fool who mentions Parkinson’s Disease at a cocktail party.

My not-so-secret fondness – actually fondness is too mild a term, but it falls short of flat-out obsession – may rank among the dorkier ones out there. Yet despite this, it’s also one of the most currently inflammatory: evolution.

It’s not the sort of subject you want to bring up on a first date or, say, in the dentist’s chair, attitudes being what they are these days. But this is not new. Darwin put off publishing “On the Origin of Species” for 20 years because he knew that once he did, what followed would be the cultural equivalent of a giant record needle scratch sound effect. And he was right. And that sound was followed by the din of all Christian humanity screaming at the top of their lungs.

Curiously, almost exactly 150 years later, theyʼre still screaming. Why this is, is a mystery to me. In 1859, you could understand the reaction. Here he was, overturning thousands of years of institutionalized belief and dogmatic conditioning. He was lucky not to have been burned alive, as he most certainly would have been just a few hundred years earlier. Galileo, who pulled pretty much the same surprise on this gang in 1610 with his notion that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, was forced by Inquisition thugs to take it all back, and even then he barely escaped with lifelong house arrest instead of the stake.

It took the Catholic church 382 years to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe Galileo had had a point (this was 23 years after the first moon landing). So maybe it’s not too surprising that so many Christians are still resisting Darwin’s genius. If the past is any measure, they’ll be throwing fits about evolution for another 233 years before finally coming around.

In the meantime, appalling numbers of people continue to pretend that the cornerstone of modern biology and the fundamental explanation for the staggering diversity of all past and present life on earth is nothing more than a conspiracy cooked up by scientists designed to separate people from their religion. Polls show that more than of Americans believe the world, mankind, and all creation came into being in a divine puff of smoke a few thousand years ago, and that none of the creatures in it, particularly us, have changed one iota since that moment. They attribute the entire fossil record to Noah’s flood, wave away radiometric dating as too complex to make sense, and explain vestigial limbs in whales as God’s idea of fooling around.

Many of them are convinced that in order to acknowledge the incontrovertible physical evidence of evolution in the fossil record and in the DNA of all creatures (and it is incontrovertible), you also have to become a card-carrying atheist. But that’s just plain silly. Many of the the world’s most intelligent, eloquent spokesmen for evolution have mused on how the wonder of Darwin’s revelation, in its sublime beauty and elegance, makes them more likely to believe in a Creator, not less. And I ask you: how much more amazing is a God who set into motion such a remarkable process than one who merely snapped his fingers and called it a day? Even the Catholic church, that paragon of scientific enlightenment, recently noted for the record that as far as it’s concerned, Genesis and evolution are as compatible as milk and cookies.

The genius of evolution by natural selection lies not just in its simplicity but in its simple plausibility. It’s not difficult to grasp, at least not in its fundamentals. And when you do understand it, it makes perfect, beautiful, exquisite sense.

Yet deniers persist, even flourish. Ideology turns out to be much stronger than scientific evidence, at least when that evidence is twisted, suppressed, ignored, unseen, or willfully misinterpreted, as it is every day by people who feel their own ideologies are threatened by the fact of evolution. Part of the problem is that, the Pope’s copasetic attitude notwithstanding, lots of the more fundamentalist brand of Christians feel that learning anything at all about evolution would be like having dinner with the Devil. As far as they’re concerned, the less they know the better. As a result, there’s a frightening gulf of ignorance among people about just what evolution is and how it works.

Also, there’s the inconvenient issue of the Bible having its own version of how things got kicked off, a version literalists tend to take, well, literally. If the Bible contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence and the world’s entire scientific community, to them that can only mean the scientists are either all wrong or all lying.

“Evolution is only a theory,” they like to say say. Well, sure, but in scientific terms so is Relativity. E = MC² = “theory.” That’s the way science works. Scientists are always open to the idea of somebody finding hard evidence that changes the whole ballgame, so they’re unwilling ever to sound too positive about anything. But you don’t hear Christians questioning the scientific validity of what will happen if a nuclear bomb is dropped on their head. That’s only because the Bible is strangely silent on the subjects of Relativity and quantum physics. If Genesis had suggested the sun was made of the fiery flatulence of heavenly angels, you can bet that today we’d be arguing over whether to teach astronomy in public schools. “Nuclear fusion is only a theory,” they’d say.

So I’m gratified beyond words when I see people standing up publicly for reason, common sense, and the willingness to actually use the mental faculties that we’ve been endowed with. One of my favorite of these people is Olivia Judson, the author, journalist, and evolutionary biologist who’s been writing a weekly column for The New York Times since January called The Wild Side.

One of the great things about Olivia is that she’s not preachy or didactic; her columns are usually about the wonder and the majesty and, yes, sometimes the mystery of the evolutionary process, from its business at the very bottom of biological systems, at the level of DNA, to its operation at the top, at the level of hungry crocodiles, intestinal parasites, blind salamanders and serenading humpback whales. But yesterday’s column was an exception, and a welcome one. In it, she argues for the critical importance of teaching evolution in schools, for having the courage to pit 3.8 billion years of irrefutable evidence against blind ideology and see which one emerges victorious. I’m pasting it below so you can read it (and please, for all our sakes, do) without clicking all the way over the The New York Times’ website. I hope they don’t mind.

My hometown friend Ida Becker is traveling the globe on a personal mission right now. She’s asking people everywhere she goes to tell her one thing they believe with all their heart. “With no criteria or requirements for participation,” she asks, beyond simply stating “something that particular person believes to be true.”

Ida’s a long way away at the moment, in Thailand, and she’s not likely to be in Vietnam for several more months. But I’ve thought about her challenge for a long time. And I’ve often thought that if I were asked to choose one thing that I believe in with my entire body, heart, and mind, it would be that evolution by natural selection is the single most marvelous, transcendent, influential, beautiful, paradigm-changing, life-affirming idea ever conceived by a human being. Bigger than fire, bigger than the wheel, bigger than sliced bread, Darwin’s revolutionary epiphany lifted humanity to an entirely new plane of intellectual and spiritual existence and, at long last, told us where we had come from. Evolution is the best and most important thought ever thought.

Yet as Judson and many others have observed, the field of evolutionary biology has made astonishing progress since that first light went on 149 years ago. In the intervening years, thousands of people have refined, elaborated upon, and transformed that most excellent of thoughts into an entire new realm of scientific inquiry. The understanding of evolution today has about as much in common with Charles Darwin’s original idea as an F-18 fighter jet has with the Wright brothers’ first flying machine.

Incidentally, you might ask where God fits into all this. The answer is, anywhere you like. Not least of the wonderful things about evolution is that it doesn’t require God – but it doesn’t preclude Him, either. And that’s fine with me.

******

Optimism in Evolution

By OLIVIA JUDSON

Published: August 12, 2008

LONDON

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America’s science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It’s discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught – indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes – for at least three reasons.

First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. The astonishing variety of nature, from the tree shrew that guzzles vast quantities of alcohol every night to the lichens that grow in the Antarctic wastes, cannot be probed and understood. Add evolution – and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions. All of a sudden patterns emerge everywhere, and apparently trivial details become interesting.

The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve – and fast. And I’m not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person. The impact we are having is much broader.

For instance, we are causing animals to evolve just by hunting them. The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago. Fishing for grayling in Norwegian lakes has caused a similar pattern in these fish. Human trophy hunting for bighorn rams has caused the population to evolve into one of smaller-horn rams. (All of which, incidentally, is in line with evolutionary predictions.)

Conversely, hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct.

Thus, a failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In short, evolution is far from being a remote and abstract subject. A failure to teach it may leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence – or indeed, evidence of any kind – has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. (This is not to suggest that science is never distorted by the ideological left; it sometimes is, and the results are no better.)

But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.