I will tell you a 26th birthday story...
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My student's text message Dear Kelly! Happy Birthday!!! Wish you happy everyday!!! bleeped in my ear waking me up to a day that was the same as the day before only, perhaps, slightly cooler. A knock at my door left a card full of tenderness from my new teammate out in the crisp morning air. I took a deep breath, the world felt clean.
The highlight of the morning's class was teaching the phrase 'couch potato' to the stunning delight of all my students. What does a potato do, class? Nothing Ms. Kelly. Then don't be like the potato.
I met a student at the school gate and we walked across the street to buy an assortment of snacks that made me smile at their Tibetan normalcy: orange juice drink, rice cakes, bland cookies, sunflower seeds, jello cups. Birthday lunch.Three years ago I had met her at the same school gate for the first time and we shyly, bumblingly went to have butter tea and communicated only through glances and smiles. This was the girl whose long, black braid remains stained in my mind as an image prostrate before a golden statue. She had broken my heart then, and won it countless times since.
Our bag of goodies arrayed on the grass between us and we sat in a corner of a small park blessedly quiet. We sat snacking, chatting, dreaming, and looking at clouds. When a grouchy gardener made us get off the grass we moved to a bench instead to continue our time together. I learned the Tibetan word for relax.
The sky went gray and we walked slowly back. In her dorm room decorated by eight girls worth of stickers, she handed me a small bag. I thought a long time about this gift, she told me. I thanked her without opening it and left.
Inside the bag: a picture of our two faces in a frame decorated with teddy bears and scrawled with: I will always miss you my best friend... a letter labeled 'Ms. Kelly's birthday card' and inscribed with, among other sweet things, two wishes: I wish that 1. come true your dream 2. come to Tibet again.
Oh that wishes were as easy to come by as cups of tea.
Three years ago I met a monk and, finding out that he didn't have a birthday, gave him mine. So we became very good friends. As I waited for instructions on where to meet him for our shared birthday dinner the phone rang: Ms. Kelly, today is your birthday! Are you busy now? I want to have birthday dinner with you... when I explained to my former student that I already had plans he responded breezily, oh but I am Tibetan I live in now... no matter, another time.
We got into a taxi whose driver was from Shigatze and thought it was hilarious that I asumed he could then play the dramian. He couldn't. When we got out of the taxi we were in an alley in the middle of nowhere on the east side of the city and the birthday monk rushed outside to greet us.
Too much food was ordered and the room slowly filled with an odd assortment of birthday guests to the amusement of the waitresses clearly straight from the countryside. Two current monks, a former monk, a Chinese couple, and two foreigners shared a meal, then shared too many songs, then shared laughter, then shared a taxi, then shared a mango chocolate cake I had made back at my house, then shared photos, all on a shared birthday. As the evening got late, the monk who shared my birthday gave me a gift wall hanging of a lady and yak and mountains. Oh Kelly it took me a very long time to think of this gift, he bemoaned. Three languages which have become the subtitles of my life, filled the margins since everyone who had joined the party wrote birthday wishes on it.
In English, the birthday monk had written: If you were born in Tibet, then your mother tongue is mine, your culture is mine... but these are different from yours. Anyway I'm very happy to know you in Tibet. Happy Birthday Kelly.
It is now hanging on my wall.
They left into a night dark and damp with rain.
They left saying, call us soon Kelly.
I returned to a tussled living room and a plate smeared with cake remains.
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The rain no longer lashes the windows, and my cup of tea is dry, that was my 26th birthday story and I don't know its ending. There is no moral, no theme that I know. It is a story of just life and a day unraveling and a single additional step towards a Father on a path with no map.
So many of these days are just that.
