From today’s LA Times. I can’t even begin to express how much it scares the bejesus out of me that this person could be the leader of the free world…

Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago — about 65 million years after dinosaurs are known to have become extinct — the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, including DNA research and prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,” recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

“

What with one thing and another, it’s been tough finding time to cook up anything worthwhile for this space in the past couple of weeks. As you’ll recall, hometown amigo Ida Becker blew into Vietnam exactly that long ago, storming ashore like a hurricane. But loss of life has been minimal, the feared storm surge failed to materialize, and the winds she brought with her have carried with them lots of juicy tattle from the old stomping grounds in South Cackalacky. Overall, a refreshing change for this monsoon-soaked Southerner.

Ida also claims to have been busy – though as best I can see this entails daily spa treatments**, drinking lots of coffee and juice smoothies, hunting down a pirated box set of the first two seasons of The Tudors, going for mid-morning jogs in the park, and trying not to become too exasperated with non-English-speaking local restaurant owners who don’t know what “vegetarian” means. I suppose we all have our own ideas of what busy is.

She certainly hasn’t been shy about pumping the local population for her U-Truth project. In fact, I mentioned Ida to one of my adult English classes last week. The class is pretty evenly divided between bored Korean housewives and hardscrabble Vietnamese who understand that any chance they have at ever earning more than about $300/month rests on their ability to learn English and find a career abroad. The Korean housewives were intrigued at the shopping opportunities a year-long trip around the world presented. The Vietnamese students, however, found the idea of traveling around the world for a year at least as extraordinary as an American would find the notion of traveling around the moon for a year.

“Is she a millionaire?” they wanted to know. “How does she have so much money to fly to all these places and have daily spa treatments in them all?”

“That,” I replied, idly fingering my secondhand belt and fraying shirt cuffs, “is a question only Ida can answer.”

Naturally, then, when I mentioned the idea of having Ida come in as a guest speaker, the whole class found it fascinating. This she did last Saturday, when over the course of 60 minutes I learned that Ida’s philosophy of English-language instruction is curiously close to my own: speak non-stop for an hour, pausing for breath and the occasional halting question, and hope the students absorb something by auditory osmosis.

Actually, it was a good session, and Ida knew exactly how to work the room. We’d spent some time as a class earlier in the week talking about the idea of a Statement of Truth, and cooking up our own, so the students were nervous but prepared. In our second hour, each of them spent a few minutes alone with Ida in an empty classroom, where she grilled them on their personal philosophies toward life. One by one they disappeared, quaking, into her classroom, then emerged 10 minutes later looking like airplane crash survivors. Jackpot, Becker!

Last week also involved a move from the sticks of District 7 into new digs in District 1. Basically, this has meant a change from a bedroom in one posh Saigon home to another, this time smack in the middle of the motorbike-choked central district. But central Ho Chi Minh City is also awash in open-air cafes, a million and one kinds of storefronts selling pirated and reproduction merch, detailed hand-made furniture and home accessories, atmospheric restaurants, and all the other things lacking in the desperate hinterlands of the outlying districts. So even though it now takes me 30 minutes of shoulder-to-shoulder motorbike traffic to get to my school in the afternoons, it’s worth it for the time being.

The home I’m living in actually belongs to an old Charleston friend who’s been living and working here since 1999, Steve Mueller, a fellow Bishop England HS and Clemson University grad, though he’s a few years older than me. Steve and his family are vacationing for a month in the U.S. right now (in Charleston, actually), so I’ve got the whole four stories of the place nearly to myself. I say nearly, because I’m sharing the house with the live-in housekeeper and the nanny, neither of whom was apparently deemed indispensable to the vacation itinerary. They’re both unmarried, aged somewhere between 30 and 60 (it’s hard to say), and about four and a half feet tall. They dress in hand-sewn, two-piece outfits that look a little like pajamas – the same uniform that virtually every middle-income Vietnamese woman wears everywhere, every day, cut from what looks like a single bolt of fabric and just one pattern for everyone. About the only English words they know are “yes,” “no,” “you,” “hello,” “here,” “eat,” and “bye-bye.” This makes lengthy conversations challenging, as you might guess, but you’d be surprised how much meaning a person can convey with this modest lexicon and a lot of body language.

Often I’ll come downstairs to find the two of them sitting on the kitchen floor, a bowl of rice between them, along with another of tiny seasoned fish and a tureen of boiled greens, both of them belching contentedly.

“Hello! You eat!” they’ll cry, smiling broadly as they get up to fetch me a plate. Usually I’ll have at least a few bites of rice dunked in pungent fish sauce and a mouthful of greens. Never turn down food from a belching woman in pajamas who’s sitting on the floor, is what I say.

Without much to do in the way of housekeeping and nannying, the two ladies seem to have decided that I’m the only project available to them. My bedroom is cleaned at least twice a day, and if I happen to leave any item of clothing on the bed or floor, it’s whisked away at once to be washed and ironed to within an inch of its life. If I cook for myself, which I do fairly often, I’m forbidden from washing my dishes or throwing away my trash. This was made clear shortly after my arrival, when one of them caught me scrubbing a pan in the sink. Dismayed, the tiny woman  pushed me away from the sink shaking her head. She took the sponge from my hand and shook her right hand back and forth in the universal Vietnamese sign language for no. “You here!” she said, smiling, pointing at the dishes, then at the sink.

“Okay, okay, I got it,” I said. “No washing the dishes. I’ll just leave them in the sink. How about the trash?” I asked, moving toward the back door and the trash can just outside. “Can I throw this stuff away?”

“No,” she said, closing the door with finality and pointing at the countertop. “You here. Bye-bye.”

They spend most of their days cooking fish and rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sitting on the front stoop of the house with their bare feet in the alley, gossiping, laughing and shooing away stray cats with the housekeepers and nannies of the neighboring houses.

This alley is a hive of activity. Besides being home to an entire ecosystem’s worth of wildlife, from cats, rats, and geckos to mutant cockroaches the size of coasters, it’s a big thoroughfare for strolling vendors who walk around the neighborhood shouting or singing about the wares they have for sale, advertising their businesses using methods that were probably popular in ancient Egypt. Most of the time they’re pushing bicycles bearing huge baskets full of unidentifiable stuff. But sometimes they’re just walking along, hands in their pockets and a cigarette dangling from their lips, repeating over and over again a Vietnamese-language litany that even I can now recite by rote. What are they selling? Even the shoeshine boys carry a bag of tools or something. (By the way, never give a Saigon shoeshine boy both your shoes at once. Trust me.) I have no idea what it could be. Massages? Courier services? Good conversation? It’s a mystery, as I’ve never seen anyone in our alley stop any of them for a business transaction. It looks like a deeply uneventful kind of work to me, but somehow they manage to look busy.

Maybe they’re just walking, talking advertisements for spa services. I suppose we all have our own ideas of what busy is.

** Ida has pressed for a clarification, and seeing as she’s holding painfully embarrassing photos of me getting a haircut, shave, and nasal hair trim from the world’s most thorough street barber in Nha Trang today, I’m inclined to indulge her. For the record, she has had only four (4) spa treatments since she embarked on her global journey six months ago. My observation was in no way meant to suggest that she is on an extended tour of the world’s poshest salons and spas. I can attest that she is a hardened traveler wholly uninterested in being pampered, unless it’s by a fruit lhassi or a bowl of museli, fresh fruit, and yogurt.

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.

Vietnam, you might want to sit down for this.

I’m not sure whether to file this one in the ‘It’s a Small World Department’ or in the ‘Curious Coincidences Department,’ but I’ve learned that longtime Charleston friend and fellow international traveler Ida Becker is directing her jet-setting self at Ho Chi Minh City this week, scheduled to drop in on Thursday. She’ll arrive here exactly halfway through a year-long trip around the world, a milestone it looks like we’ll be celebrating together. Her trip sounds grand in the Victorian tradition, but it’s not exactly a pleasure cruise. The whole shebang is part of her cleverly conceived documentary U-Truth Project, which I mentioned briefly in a post here a couple of weeks ago. She describes it better than I can:

In an age when neighbors are disconnected and societies are fractured due to religion, creed, politics, race, geography, socio-economics, and countless other markers, the U Truth Project seeks to discover commonalities within the human drama that supersede surface differences.

Armed with little more than a camera, a laptop, a copious supply of anti-malaria pills, and a tentative route, adventurer Ida Antares Becker is circumnavigating the globe and asking the people she meets to share one statement of truth.

The U Truth Project is a web-based photo documentary that chronicles the responses.

Join the journey here.”

How long she’ll be in Saigon is either classified or TBD, but I’ve been told to keep my travel schedule open and my sightseeing clothes at the ready. I’m particularly interested to see what kind of wardrobe Ida’s bringing with her. She’s a high-octane Charleston fashionista who does not suffer style refugees like me gladly. Unfortunately, I’m still sporting backpacker duds while I wait for a package of clothes my old housemate Will is sending from Japan.

She’s going to scream when she finds out the only shoes I own are flip-flops and a pair of hiking boots.

* Ba-dum-bum. Sorry about that headline. I was in a rush and it was too good to pass up.

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’m not a big fan of starting blog posts with an apology for not having been more attentive since the last post. Nothing sets my eyes rolling like some hack with a readership in the middling double-digits who starts off with a pretentious mea culpa about having been away for a few days. Who gives a shit? Do real authors apologize when they take three years to write a new book? No, they just put out the book and keep their traps shut. Bloggers as a species take themselves way too seriously. But who am I kidding? That’s why they’re blogging to begin with.

So while I recoil at the preposterous idea of apologizing for not having stuck my head in the door here since August 22, a small part of me feels obliged to, seeing as a snarky post about a child molester has been the only greeting to anyone who stopped by for more than a week. Please accept my condolences in the unlikely event that you lost sleep over any of this. But you need to toughen up.

While the Americans among you are almost all tucked into bed at the moment, sleeping off the exhausting patriotic fervor of a mid-campaign Labor Day, I’m well into one of Vietnam’s biggest national holidays, the generically-named National Day which seems to be mostly a celebration of this country’s ability to manufacture balloons in the shape of pigs with little folding paper feet they can bounce up and down upon. Cute, I agree, but hardly reason to stage a national holiday.

Unlike Labor Day, and all similarly strategized American holidays, National Day falls on a Tuesday here. I couldn’t figure why this was until I had the presence of mind to do what we in the journalistic field call “research.” Using advanced, highly technical journalistic research methods that involve Boolean variables and the world’s largest internet search engine, I discovered that National Day does not always fall on a Tuesday but on September 2. It’s a celebration of Vietnam’s declaration of independence on  that date in 1945, when, standing in Hanoi, which at the time was essentially a French spa, Ho Chi Minh read his declaration and set into motion the chain of events that eventually led to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the independence of the sovereign communist nation of Vietnam, and the entry of the words ‘Swift Boat’ into the English lexicon as a verb .

The business that National Day commemorates is also the reason why all museum displays in this country refer to U.S. soldiers in the long conflict known here as the American War as “the capitalist invaders” or “the American attackers.” History, as they say, is written by the conquerors. Or at least the winners by default.  Draw your own conclusions about how Iraqi museum displays will read in 30 years.

In its overall aesthetic, Vietnam’s independence day celebration seems a lot like that of our own. Streetlights thoughout the city are hung with festive banners, crowds gather in public parks, and shouting kids swing from the arms of sweating parents like lanterns. The details are a little different – the festive red banners are emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, for instance, and the statues in the parks are of Vladmir Lenin and Ho Chi Minh. Also, nobody’s barbecuing here today, probably because many of these people spend their day-to-day livelihoods cooking fish and meat and snails over actual coal-burning brick stoves on the side of the street. Maybe the irony’s just a little too much for them.

There’s certainly no shortage of beer here. The preferred brands are Tiger, Saigon, 333, and the freshly brewed draft known as bia hoi. If you really want to send a message that you’re an epicure of taste and refinement with money to burn in your cookstove, you drink Heineken. By far, the most widespread activity in the city today seems to be sitting in a plastic chair on the sidewalk, drinking beer and smoking unfiltered cigarettes while watching traffic for hours on end. Of course, this seems to be the primary occupation of most Vietnamese people seven days a week, year-round, so that sort of dampens the sense of patriotic zeal.

As for this capitalist invader, I’m going to get out there and do some Nationalist Day celebrating of my own. I’ll drink a bia hoi, buy a pig-shaped balloon, and offer up a toast to Uncle Ho. Without apologies.