It was not so much that we were lost souls, but you might say that we were difficult to find. Each one of us had a meandering tale that wound through Petchaboon Province, a natural paradise and rarely visited outer-province in North Central Thailand. We were joined by our isolation, which was possibly the only thing that we had in common.
This was what Fenwick was telling me while we sat in the cafeteria at the nursing home. He was visiting his Uncle, who we all called the professor and who was far and away the most eccentric of our residents. I am a janitor in the home; I am a listener.
Everyone here has stories to tell, and Fenwick, well, I was still trying to figure him out. There were not too many stories in this particular nursing home in suburban New York that took you as far away as Petchaboon Province.
The journey through his words was forever the road not taken as he might tangent into anything. His stories were a rollercoaster off its tracks, sailing on rainbows and cascading into shrouded mountain mists. They bounded from elephants to an episode of the Twilight Zone from the 1950s: who knew where the story might go? I looked at his head as if I could see into it, but all I could imagine was a pinball machine let loose to carom amongst a Milky Way of stars. I listened intently to what Fenwick was telling me of Petchaboon Province and the Expat Group that he and Harry The Finn had formed.
2006-11-01
12:17:22
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