Chapter 12. The Road to Hopkinton

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It isn’t the destination itself, but what happens there that sticks with the traveler.

She was in a group of four. Under all other circumstances, I would have avoided them. They arrived at the same café for a late breakfast. They, unlike me, ordered as if they were at Friendly’s. I had the rice soup with pork. At first sight, there was nothing extraordinary about their appearance or behavior. They spoke a bit too loud and giggled, but did not offend or annoy anyone. Immediately, they brought me back to a class I once taught, one in the early morning with a bunch of chatty, yet erudite girls. Girls, as a whole outperform the boys in my classes, no matter what the hour of the day. Thailand is a repose from any remnants of a high school. What really stood out was coming across four teenage girls from the United States in Thailand, and Nong Khai in the north of Issan of all places. Few young Americans come to Thailand for an overseas experience. Even fewer make it as far as Nong Khai. It wasn’t their accent that pegged where they were from. They didn’t blather on about gossip from their home town, either. Rather, it was the grey t-shirt one was wearing that indicated their high school. From three tables away, I pulled up a chair and bid them good morning.
“Hi.”, the one with the aforementioned t-shirt replied. All four of them waited for why I would so abruptly join them. I tried to explain.
“I was wondering if you four could help me out. Your shirt, I saw it form over there and-”
“Yeah. That’s our high school.”
“We all go to school there.” a slender girl with lighter hair jumped in.
“Good” I countered. “Then maybe you can help me.” I opened my notebook and began to draw a very rudimentary map of their town, at the center of which is a classic New England green. My depiction of that was of an oval. All four heads studied my drawing. Their thick hair blocked out most of the sunlight.
Their attention was one hundred percent mine. Now, I tried to be as accurate as possible. I continued. “This would be the center of town, and here is”, I sketched a rectangular block just outside the green, “the police station. If I take a right here,” at the corner with the police station, upper left on my notebook sheet, “I would make it to a diner, where you girls probably go for hot dogs after class. It’s called Casey’s.”
All eight eyes lit up. One girl exclaimed, “I went there before we came here on vacation. They have the best!!!”
My attention turned back to the sheet. There was someplace I wanted to bring them. They put their forks down and stopped eating.
The girls whose t-shirt originally got me to visit their table asked, “Are you from here? Do you live nearby?”
“No, I replied. I live rather far away. Bear with me here.” I turned them back to the ever-developing map and was adding in more detail. “Here”, at the bottom of the town green, “is a road.” Then I put in the four compass directions as I understood them. “If I keep going this way”, to the right, “that takes me into Boston. The other way, and that is the road to Hopkinton. This would have to be the Marathon route. How am I doing so far?”
“Perfect.” two said. “We’re with you.” One even showed me where she lived, even if it took us slightly off the paper.
“Fine, I want to see if I can have you recognize one particular spot in town, very close to the green. Now, if I take this road”, I pointed and drew a sharp line straight down, “it will take me to your school, the one that sits on a reservoir, yes?”
“Exactly.” the first girl answered. The four of them by now had forgotten about their breakfasts completely.
“Fine, that’s Pond Street.” The four nodded. “OK, now try to see this with me.” The two girls at the far end of the table even closed their eyes to concentrate. With my pen, I etched out marks to represent side streets. “About three or four blocks on the left hand side, you reach a small street called Western Avenue.”
From one of the girls, “Are you sure?”
“Yes, of this I am sure, dear.”
She came back, “Well, I think I know it.” One of the four expressed much more confidence. It was the tall, slender one. She put her finger on the corner. “Yeah, OK” she said.
“Girls, at the corner of Pond and Western is a large, dual family house. It hugs the corner and is among the old style family homes right across the street. Can you see it?”
Nothing. They really tried. One girl put forth so much effort to envision the home, she even squinted her eyes. None of them produced a sound. Though it didn’t matter much in the end, I was disappointed.
“One more thing,” I added, “it is white with black shutters by the windows.
Then it suddenly struck one of them, the slender girl with long hair. “Wait! I think I know that place! It has two porches, one on the first level and a smaller one right above it!”
Bingo! That was the one.
“Yes, dear. That’s it! Thank you.” The other three wanted to see it, but just weren’t sure of which specific house I spoke. The tall slender one was so pleased with herself. She started to involuntarily applaud her success. It was if she had solved an arduous puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, but with only three letters and one vowel turned.
I closed my notebook with much satisfaction and diverted them off to another topic. They loved the mall in their town.
“You know, it’s being expanded. Soon, it will be one of biggest in New England!” If anyone ever wants to animate teenage girls, talk about the closest mall. They went on for minutes about the stores and how the renovations will directly lead to an improvement in their quality of life. Quickly enough, all four had forgotten about the home at the corner of Western and Pond.
I thanked the girls for their time and they sincerely enjoyed the diversion back home. All but one lacked the intellectual curiosity to even wonder aloud. As I paid the minuscule bill for breakfast, it finally occurred to the pretty one in her high school t-shirt. “But why did you ask us about that house, anyway? Have you been in it before?”
“Yes, but for you, it was a very long time ago.”
I walked down the street to Nong Kai’s busy Indochine Market on the banks of the Mekong and realized I never told them:
My father grew up in that house.

Travel is an emotional roller coaster. Sweet highs of riding in the bed of a pickup along the windy Mekong can transform into being abandoned in an Issan village with seemingly few avenues of escape. Yet, Pak Nehm’s villagers’ selflessness belies their poverty.
Nong Khai is a surprisingly orderly and compact city, where I stayed for the better part of three leisurely days. Paraphrasing Ray Bradbury, the average visitor to Nong Khai sees what he has come to see. Yet, only because I came to Nong Khai did I have a personal encounter with the past. Travel brings to life powerful coincidences and personal experiences that would be more trivial if just grocery shopping for the family back home. Three women called out prices for live eels squirming around in buckets. All I could was vividly recall early afternoon dinners of pasta and meatballs followed by coffee and Sara Lee pound cake. I used to fall asleep on the sofa built from the wall or finagle my grandparents’ black-and-white TV set to catch an inning or two of the Red Sox game. In a worse-case scenario, I banged the keys of an old piano in the home on Pond Street on which my father laboriously yet successfully attempted to create music from his mind.
Later in the day, a Dutch couple returned from an afternoon of taking photos at a sculpture garden. They made the trip on rented bicycles. The images I have recorded of Nong Khai will not be relegated to the back of a dresser drawer among other pictures measuring four inches by six.

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