Yesterday was a story of such desperate sadness, extreme exhaustion, unique momenthood, and tender joy so mingled I fail to think of an adequate opening line, or a description full enough to be genuine, or a possible meaning for such a collage... stories, days, can be frustrating that way... but tell them, live them, we must.
When the old man drinking a Coke, like it was the most delicious thing he'd ever ingested, while people in bathrobes meandered around, grinned at our company it was clear he had no upper teeth. I had to physically restrain my desire to hug him. So toothless old people are endearing to me.
This is him. You'll probably want to hug him too.
He sipped his Coke and didn't know that we had arrived at the school gate to meet our eager and hilarious students, who had come equipped with a duffel bag of snacks, at six-thirty that pitch black morning only to wait nearly two hours there for the sun to come up and our driver, who was willing in that clever driver way to pile eleven people in a van that only seated five, to arrive.
He scratched his ankle with a wrinkled hand and couldn't have imagined that the van wasn't able to carry two foreign teachers and eight giggly girl students energized from hours of singing up to the first monastery we visited that day. So some of them got out and walked. And I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have realized the bile that rose and lodged in the back of my throat surly mirroring the tears in their Creator's eyes as eight beautiful Tibetan girls prostrated before hunks of metal and faded photographs and the morning turned into afternoon.
This old man slid over on his concrete bench and had no idea that I had fallen asleep on the shoulder of a student who insisted on holding my hand as she transformed herself into an unceasing jukebox and had woken up to this nunnery nestled in the filthy garbage laden crevice of some mountain like a return to my first trip out of Lhasa three years ago. I was greeted by yak climbing crumbling stairs, emaciated mangy dogs staring listlessly at bones, crippled nuns, and an odd assortment of semi dressed people crowding into two frothy hot spring holes.
It was a refuge for refuse. And so we found ourselves in the company of this old man.
He let out a belch that flavored the air and made my typically shy student with hardly any English at all burst into peels of uncontrollable laughter and didn't know that we would end up as guests in her family's house after a long drive back through the barren mountain passes on a bumpy one lane road. He couldn't have understood the honor of being poured one more cup of bland butter tea from the calloused hands of a damp eyed father or the tenderness of being served heaping plate after plate of meat dumplings surely costing this farming family a small fortune simply because I had made it known at some point in the distant past that they were my favorite food.
He tilted his head to one side and stared at me as he finished his Coke and had no idea that we would be visiting one more small monastery after our profusion of gratitude to my student's family that came no where close to being adequate, nor could he know that it would be deserted except for the untold horrors of watching eight beautiful Tibetan girls go into ecstasies over being touched by a reincarnated lama who was really just a man like any other. I shuddered and couldn't watch lest I collapse under the weight of despair and the sun set casting long shadows in the small, paint and butter stained courtyard.
This old man blinked hard in the glare of a sky white with clouds and vanished through a splintery door and never could have guessed that such a day was shared and to be shared. A day of baby goats and rippling streams, of vulture cries and sweet tasting bushes, of laugher and translation and pictures, a day of songs and sweat, of idols and bondage, of illusion and evil, and a Holy presence as small as the squeeze of a student's hand in mine.
All the things he didn't know, couldn't have known...
I dare not consider all the things about this day that I don't know... though surely therein lie my most throbbing, heart wrenching hopes for this people, these students, and this dear old man.
