My Heaven

The day after fallen bird day, Bryson and I went on a motorbike excursion across the northern part of the island. Only five minutes from our beach, we discovered a whole cluster of temples, dominated by a sky-high sculpture of a Hindu God-- Shiva, I believe?-- with arms in every direction.



A wide, still river ran through the area, crisscrossed by bridges. The water was teeming with more fish than I'd ever seen. For ten baht, or a quarter, we could buy a bag of fish food, and when we dumped the kibbles in the water it resulted in an insane feeding frenzy, with catfish and oscars and who knows what else flopping all over each other.



Barefoot, we strolled from temple to temple. There's nothing more delightfully paradoxical than an Asian temple. The decor can be squintingly garish, yet there's no denying the exquisite peace hanging around such places. All were set among gardens, alive with flowers and butterflies. Walking back to the Hindu shrine, we suddenly heard a yapping. Skipping around our ankles were four or five puppies of every color. It reminded me of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, where the narrator explains that in your heaven, anything you desire poignantly enough will eventually appear. When she misses her dog, she wakes up the next morning to a garden filled with puppies.



I don't know about multi-armed plaster gods, but in my heaven might look something like this: gardens and butterflies, a river bubbling with fish, sun glinting off the mosaics, and puppies. Definitely puppies.

For Under a Dollar

Next stop was Maenom, a beach Bryson found so familiar I had to follow him from bungalow to bungalow, in hopes of finding the one he'd stayed in four years ago. It must be an odd feeling, coming back when you never knew you would for certain.

The beach was narrow, shaded by coconut palms nearly up to the edge of the water. These palms were the low, Belizean kind. I'm terrified of the tall ones, littered around the roots by fallen coconuts. What if one fell on your head? It would crack your skull. When I was younger I read about Brazil nuts in the Amazon falling and cracking people's skulls, and I've had a phobias ever since.

Anyway, it was a nice place to lay out and attempt to eradicate the burn stripes I'd developed in the last couple hours at the temple and on the motorbike, when I was wearing a small backpack, a bikini top, and a tank top. Not a pretty picture. The water was perfectly warm, and when we sifted our feet underwater we discovered all kinds of things to dive and get. Most of all, there were sand dollars. The purple, hairy, living kind.

I remember a time a friend of mine gathered some from the ocean floor in Carpinteria, and set them down on her towel. Despite my protests she didn't throw them back, and I watched as they turned from purple to grey as they suffocated. Bryson and I have always been the throwing back type. We won't even kill most bugs, except mosquitoes and ants that won't be shaken out of backpacks.