My husband's best friend lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We have been keeping up on the military coup there. Life seems to be a sort of mix of really normal and really weird for him right now. He takes his kid to school and does all the things he usually does, but he can't get CNN any more, he can't go out after 10pm, and all the ministers in his government have been taken to undisclosed locations.
He wrote saying nobody he knows in the US appears to give a twit (his word) about the situation. I wrote back that not only do I care deeply, but I feel he and I are brothers in arms right now. Here's why.
My husband and I recently spent an idyllic and relaxing weekend in St. Orres, a wonderful retreat place on the Mendocino Coast. We really sank into a quiet weekend in a romantic little cabin among the redwoods. To give you an idea, we could actually see the pacific ocean from our bed! Also the bedsheets were plainly of a much higher quality than our own, and felt like sleeping in silk. Such was our appreciation of them that we bundled them up in our weekend valise and took them home with us.
We drank mimosas on our little deck, and ate chocolate. We each secretly brought a bar of chocolate as a gift for the other. My sweetie shared his with me. I ate all of the one I brought for him. That is the kind of person I am. The thing is, after a couple of mimosas, I lose all chocolate inhibition, and he was busy doing manly things like lighting the fire and reading Andrew Weil's 8 Steps to Optimal Health, so I felt it was sort of a favor to him to eat the chocolate, thereby saving him all the inflammation and rheumatism in his fingers that too much sugar is causing.
Thus, in the end, I think you will agree that I come out of this the more morally upright of the two.
A wonderful thing about the weekend was that there was no cellphone or internet service. This served three important purposes:
1. Made me really relax.
2. Made me completely crazy as I realized how addicted to checking email on my phone I am. No service. No service. STILL NO SERVICE!!! WHY??????????????????????
3. Caused a hold to be put on my credit card when I put a $1 charge on it making a credit card call to our daughter on the landline in the little wooden booth in the hotel. The credit card company thought the $1 was a suspicious fraudulent charge and froze my credit card. This is the kind of thing that happens when you try to go away for a relaxing weekend off the grid with no emails or cellphone coverage. On the way home, I was unable to purchase mountains of taffy at Taffy and Kites in Bodega Bay because my credit card was refused. When I came home, there were thirteen messages from the credit card company on my home phone asking if I had put a $1 charge on the card, or had my identity been stolen, meaning they would cancel my card, freeze all my assets, and force me into the witness protection program.
But I need to get back to why my friend in Thailand and I are brothers in arms. His country has been put under martial law. He is looking out his old army uniform, and probably polishing his 1980s-era soviet-style AK-47 as we speak. Me? I was recently stopped at a police checkpoint! On our way home from aforementioned idyllic romantic weekend on the Mendocino Coast, we rounded a bend on one of the loneliest spots of Highway 1 only to encounter a 20-car backup. First we thought, oh no, accident. But it was a police checkpoint. Terrorism? Triple homicide on isolated coastline? No. It was the Fish and Game police checking cars for evidence of illegal/unsafe abalone diving.
We have recently been watching a lot of Hawaii 5-0. Thus, our imaginations were running fairly wild. We thought maybe the battered F140 up ahead was concealing dead bodies in the trunk. We expected to see some bulletproof-vest-clad special-ops guys belay down the cliff to search all the vehicles at gunpoint. In fact, a few trucks were being pulled into a side road. They probably had arms caches under the chassis. The whole illegal abalone fishing rap was just a decoy.
Anyway, when I came home, I wrote our friend an email saying "good luck with the martial law thing and just know, having been through what I went through at that checkpoint, I feel your pain." I hope he has not been putting suspiciously small charges on his credit card, otherwise we may all end up living together in Caspar Wyoming with no vestiges of our former lives remaining.
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