Ancient Kingdoms -- Laos

This is a continuation of Ann’s description of her “Ancient Kingdoms” trip to SE Asia.  For the first entry covering Thailand, click here

We flew to Luang Prabang, capital of Laos, located on a peninsula between the Mekong and Khan rivers.  This is another UNESCO World Heritage Site, famous for more than 30 active temples and hundreds of architectural treasures.  On the plane, I sat next to a fascinating woman. She is American born, but currently a French citizen on her way to the hills of Laos to work at an Elephant Hospital treating sick animals.  Although she has never worked with elephants before, she is excited to be volunteering her time and Veterinarian skills for the next year or two.  I was extremely impressed by her story; temporarily leaving behind her male partner with whom she has lived for the past 15 years.

 

This is a quaint town, with many 19th century French Colonial villas as well as the more traditional Lao homes. Our Hotel, the Ang Thong, which reflects the charm of the French Colonial style, is to be our home for the next three nights. We barely have time to check in and unpack when we are off, yet again, to visit another temple (it is jokingly said that OAT means Oh no Another Temple).  This one is the Royal Temple Wat Xieng Thong.  Our mode of transportation here, rather than the ubiquitous air conditioned bus, is the Tuk Tuk.  Not easy to get into and just as hard to get out of, this is the conveyance that is allowed in Luang Prabang and we shortly all learned how to negotiate these transports without conking ourselves unconscious by slamming our heads into the steel crossbar at the top!  Then once aboard, we maneuvered our behinds across the hard seat to give room for the next passenger on these bumpy rides.  These were really meant to accommodate 6 to 8 passengers, four on either side facing one another, knees knocking into each other. Only intrepid Dr. Frank and our lovely Japanese artist, Hiroko, were in good enough shape to walk all the way into town, the rest of us definitely having to rely on the only mode of transportation left to us.  After our Temple Visit, we head to Phousi Hill which is in the center of the old town and where all the action takes place, including a night market that draws out hundreds of tourists in the evening to look over every imaginable souvenir or gift you could ever want to buy.  Here, those who wished to climbed the 328 steps to the top of this Hill for a view of Luang Prabang and the River way off in the distance did so while the rest of us were left to find a cozy sidewalk table and drink that delicious icy beer we all had grown so fond of.

The next day, Feb. 3rd, we took our Tuk Tuk to Sang Khong Village and boarded a boat for our first cruise along the amazing Mekong River past idyllic scenes of rural riverside life which took us to the Pak Ou Cave or Buddha Cave which sits among the limestone cliffs where the Mekong and Nam Ou rivers meet.  Here we climbed up rather steep steps to marvel at the more than 3,000 Buddha sculptures, some inlaid with semiprecious stones, large and small made out of every imaginable material.  Many of these Buddha images and statues have been deposited here over centuries and left undisturbed despite repeated visitors.

Once back on our ancient boat, we were served a homemade luncheon prepared by a single woman in her makeshift “kitchen” in the stern where she had the most primitive cooking apparatus. However, it was absolutely delicious, everyone marveling at the variety and taste.  On the way back to our hotel, I mentioned to Ole that I would love to have a massage and asked if he knew of a place he could recommend.  Before I knew it, a few others thought that sounded like a great idea and suddenly we had an enthusiastic group eager to join me.  We all piled into another Tuk Tuk and off we went into town where we entered a very welcoming massage parlor.  Even Ole stayed for a treatment!  We were told to remove our shoes and then each one of us had a young women bathe and dry our feet and were given lockers for our clothes and cotton robes to wear.  I went upstairs, into a very small room next to Dr. Frank, and had the most invigorating and excellent hour-long massage.  My masseuse, who actually sat on my back for part of my treatment and naturally didn’t speak a word of English, was very experienced and I left there feeling like a million bucks! That was exactly what we all needed before we met for dinner shortly afterwards.

Feb. 4 - A Day in the Life beginning with Alms Giving - Luang Prabang

We had a 5:15 wake up call for our Alms Giving day in Luang Prabang  where we hurriedly dressed  without eating breakfast and departed our hotel a half hour later.   In the dark, we were deposited in a street where child-sized chairs were lined up single file on one side of the road.  Beside each chair, we were given a small round shaped basket containing freshly cooked sticky rice as well as shown how to drape ourselves with a woven scarf over one shoulder and also removed our shoes to show respect.  We had already been carefully instructed how to view this ceremony which is part of the cultural heritage of the local Monks, where no woman may touch them and where we must maintain respectful silence during their procession.  Before they arrived and still just before the first light of dawn, we were told to hold our rice baskets near our foreheads and silently ask the Monks to pray for us when they return to the temple, to grant our own special prayers for good health and a happy and long life for our loved ones.  Then we heard several soft gongs off in the distance which signaled the beginning of their march.  As they walked past us, single file on their route through the town, we scooped out handfuls of rice with our own bare hands and placed them in as many of the Monk’s baskets as we could. There was no acknowledgement from them as they typically kept their heads and eyes looking off in the distance in almost a trance-like state.

The Monks themselves, as many as 400 living in all the many small Buddhist temples and monasteries around town, young and old, arise at 5 to chant and meditate and then participate in this ancient tradition of tak bat where originally the pious villagers primarily rose early to offer their cooked rice to the local Monks to Gain Merit and Improve their Karma.  Today, this simple and beautiful ceremony where the Monks, dressed in their saffron robes and barefoot, heads shaven, walk for miles every single morning of the year accepting handfuls of rice in large baskets hung over their shoulders to feed themselves and give leftovers to the poor, have become a big tourist attraction in recent years - for better or worse.  In our case, everyone in my group treated this touching ceremony with the solemnity it deserved, although towards the end of the procession it was sad to see a few other tourists jockeying for position to take the best camera shot possible.  I have even read where this ceremony was almost discontinued because of the discourtesy shown by ignorant tourists, behaving boorishly.

When they return to their temple, they will offer their prayers to us in return for feeding them and pray to answer our own silent requests.  Their last meal was at noon on the prior day.  They only have two meals a day, breakfast & then the noon meal.  Other food is donated to the Temples on a daily basis, so rice is not the only item for them to eat. It is often difficult for the very young ones, novices, to fast all afternoon and evening until the morning meal, so it is not unknown that a banana, crackers or a chocolate might be secreted away in their bunks to tide them over.  Once several large groups walked past us and now fully in light of day, we were able to leave our seats & baskets & continue taking photos of the next wave.

The novices who wear yellow sashes tied over their saffron robes are often as young as 8 years of age and as old as 20.  Young men will often serve as novices for as little as 3 months up to 12 years, thus gaining merit for themselves and their families, leaving the crushing poverty of their homes.  Their other chores, besides receiving Alms every day, and of course praying and meditating, are to keep the temple grounds clean and to go to school.  Here is the major advantage: the chance for a young Laotian man to obtain an education as well as living in a larger city with exposure to the outside world.  Here he will be given lessons in English, Japanese and Chinese and offered the chance to choose a major subject to study if he stays on in the temple. This is often a priceless compensation for many years of personal sacrifice.  They have not been chosen for their piety or integrity. Their common bond is one of poverty. They are freeing their family of the burden of a mouth to feed, and hoping to get an education that would otherwise be denied to them as so many come from remote villages without a school altogether. Since every single Lao boy is expected to become a novice for at least three months, many of them are just doing time, and will leave the temple as soon as they are old enough to get a job. Very few of them make it through to full Monkhood, and even most monks leave the temple eventually to follow a life and career outside of the temple. One we spoke to, in fact, was taking college courses to become a Travel Guide, a career that can be very lucrative with tourism in his country growing by leaps and bounds!

Before returning to our hotel & a belated breakfast, our Lao trip leader, known simply as "Cheers", gave each of us a slip of paper with three lines on it, all written in Lao, a Lao greeting for hello, a mystery vegetable, and Lao thank you and enough local currency (the Lao kip) to buy what was on our paper. Then he wanted us - on our own - to walk into a very crowded early morning market & negotiate our way through to buy our item by asking vendors along the way.  After several attempts at questioning various sellers, I was finally directed to a woman who knew exactly what I needed.  Two onions!  I paid her and thanked her in Lao and passed my vegetable on to Cheers who was gathering all of our ingredients for lunch later that day!

We returned to our hotel for breakfast & then off to continue what OAT calls “A Day in the Life" where we drove about 45 miles away to an extremely poor village that Grand Circle has adopted, Ban Tin Keo. There the Village elder greeted us & we strolled thru his village witnessing such sweet children's faces & warm hellos and the typical 'wai' greeting by putting palms together & fingers pointing toward the nose with a slight bow.  This was a terribly impoverished area of bamboo & thatch shacks with hard dirt floors where families of 7 and more & multi generations live, sleep & cook in one room.  Dogs sleep in the road, little children play in the dirt yards and everyone has a hardscrabble life eking out a living from the crops they grow or handicrafts they make.  On our walk through this village, we passed their only water pump that was paid for and installed by Grand Circle Foundation, the Parent Company for OAT.  We then visited a school with little children of varying ages, 5 to 8, where they study together in one classroom.

Each of us had a child who presented us with a marigold lei & then took our hand to escort us to their desk.  We sang songs & heard them recite & those of us who brought school supplies or books gave them to the teacher.  They were very dear but more than a little unwashed as were their clothes, this in extreme contrast to the very poor Indian children I met who were immaculate.  Such a contrast in standards of hygiene and both 3rd world countries!

From the school we walked, now in the blazing sun in contrast to the 55 degrees from the morning, over to a Hmong village nearby where we were invited into a one room home.  There, we had a most interesting discussion with the husband who explained his farming life now that they left the hills for their present home in this village.  This room contained a rudimentary kitchen area where food was prepared and a rear area for sleeping as well as a central area which held benches for their visitors.   Outside, we were treated to an older and very agile man playing a Hmong instrument and performing a dance as well as being offered instructions in hitting a target using a traditional Hmong cross bow, without taking off a finger in the process! Ole was very good at this and I must say all who tried it did extremely well. 

From there, we had a short walk back to the Village elders home where all of us gathered together to have a small drink of homemade whiskey (I had a sip – it was like firewater or moonshine) and enjoyed the dubious pleasure of trying a bite of fried rat.  Yes, you read that correctly, fried rat, which many said was very tasty, like chicken.  I took a pass.  Finally we saw that all of our vegetables & other ingredients we had purchased earlier at the market that morning had been washed, peeled, diced or cut up for cooking in a huge wok over an open wood fire.  Cheers called us to toss in our item, first the finely minced garlic, noodles, scallions, cilantro, my onion, and so on, 10 or 12 items, and each of us had a turn stirring everything together.  This delicious vegetable noodle dish became part of a memorable luncheon along with the ubiquitous white rice and a watercress soup along with pork steamed in a bamboo leaf and clear cellophane noodles!  Everyone raved about the feast we enjoyed in a humble man's home.

And as if we hadn’t packed enough in this day already, we walked over to a Woman's Weaving Cooperative that OAT supported.  They had brought in experienced weavers to teach the local woman how to operate the looms so they could earn money from their handicrafts.  I even sat & did a bit at the loom myself & then naturally I had to purchase one of her hand loomed items.  The charge was five dollars for a hand woven scarf. This represented 2-3 days work.

 

Now back in my room, collapsing but having a cup of hot tea & working up the courage to begin the packing process all over again as we have a short flight to the capital of Laos, Vientiane, tomorrow.  Ole is escorting a group of us at 6:00 this evening back into town to have a look at the night market & have dinner on our own.  If I didn't think I'd be hungry later (impossible to imagine after the lunch we had), I'd stay in the hotel tonight.  But no restaurant here, only breakfast!  And how could I possibly miss a meal, I ask you?   So that concludes “A Day in the Life” and one very eventful day in mine!

Feb. 5th began with a short flight to Vientiane, the Capital of Laos in the afternoon and an orientation walk to the fountain square and the Mekong River.  How about a beer and appetizer before dinner?  Fine with all of us, but who knew it was going to be Grasshopper, deep fried with Kaffir Lime Leaves?  This was greatly enjoyed by those adventurous enough to try it. 

The following day, Feb. 6th, we visited Haw Phra Keo, where the Emerald Buddha was once on display, and Wat Sisaket, the only temple which survived the Siamese War.  Here we drove past the beautiful Victory Gate, stopping for a very typical Lao lunch beginning with a soup that was out of this world.  I could have made it my main meal, containing tofu, vegetables like cabbage & celery and seaweed & mushrooms in a clear based broth.  Everyone raved about it. After lunch & of course a very large Beerlao shared as always with Margaret, we drove to the COPE Center (COPE stands for Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise). Founded in 1997, it was established for education & fundraising to help find & destroy all the thousands upon thousands of bombs the US dropped over 1/3 of the countryside in Laos which were never detonated & still main & kill hundreds every year, mostly farmers innocently tending their lands. These were bombs dropped indiscriminately along the borders with Vietnam to simply get rid of the payload as trying to return to base with heavy armaments aboard was very dangerous! 

Each of us felt devastated after watching a twenty minute documentary showing what actually happened to a Lao farmer simply lighting a fire to cook a meal for his family when suddenly the heat detonated a long hidden bomb into a fiery explosion.  He was blinded & so seriously burned over the rest of his body that he is no longer able to work to support his wife & children.  He and his wife describe what kind of life they are left with since he can’t see to even properly care for their two babies. Tragically it is the poor & guiltless Lao farmer who has been the unlucky recipient of our war efforts in Vietnam!  I asked Ole how the Lao can stand to see so many US citizens touring around their impoverished country & not feel hatred toward us.  He said simply, they are Buddhists.  And they know it was aggression from our government and not us.  What an ironic distinction.

Later that evening, a small group of us were invited to Kevin & Anne's room for a glass of wine.  They had chilled some & want to share it before we fly out to Phnom Penh in the morning. Dinner is on our own tonight, but a group of us are going to try a French Restaurant in the bustling square about a ten minute walk from the hotel.  As it turned out, twelve of the group all converged at once and sitting down to a long table, we ordered Pizza!

So off to pack again!!   We have an 8:00 wake up, luggage out at 9:00; on the bus at 9:30.  I never saw such a punctual group of people in my life.  We are now leaving Laos in the morning and flying to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia for another dose of painful reality smacking us all in the head.

Ancient Kingdoms -- Thailand

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, my wife, Ann, left on a long-ago planned three week tour with Overseas Adventure Travel to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in late January, where – except for the hotels they stayed in – they sort of roughed it, on the go all the time, five short flights, and a tight schedule.  OAT does it right, putting together small groups for these trips and involving them with local people, their families, schools, in addition to seeing the sights. 

She wrote some very descriptive emails to me each night, which we've both edited for posting here. This is the first part, covering her adventures in Thailand.  Over time I will have three additional entries.  Unfortunately her camera was ruined so she had to use her iPhone and as she began to run out of space she emailed the photos to herself.  Because of Internet constraints and the poor quality of some pictures, I've worked with them in Photoshop and hopefully have brought out the best of what she took.

After my unforgettable adventure in India a few years ago, I thought I might be ready for another exotic trip to a part of the world I had never visited, S.E. Asia!  Although years before Bob and I had spent almost a week in Singapore and I had traveled into China, first with a friend and a couple of years later, alone, I was curious to explore four new countries this time, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and finally Vietnam with a group of like-minded travelers.

The travel company called OAT, for Overseas Adventure Travel, had served me well in India and so I booked their 19 day fully escorted trip they called, “Ancient Kingdoms”, taking advantage of their “no single supplement” policy since Bob was not joining me.  I would be meeting the 13 other Americans who would be my travel companions once I arrived in Bangkok.

Our first morning, we all gathered for a 9:00 AM meeting where I met Ole, our Thai Trip Leader who would coordinate every step of the way, and the rest of our group, several from California, six from the Washington/ Virginia area (who all knew one another), two from Ohio and two from RI.  And then there was the lone Floridian, me.  Many turned out to have been all over the world, some retirees from important careers, two Doctors, an Artist, others with a strong yearning to explore new places like myself, but all came to be comfortable fellow travelers, prompt and flexible, curious and intelligent.  As I was soon to learn, we formed into a cohesive group fairly quickly, teasing and laughing and enjoying one another's company.  Although there were 6 of us singletons, we mixed and mingled easily, making the entire experience a pleasure for all.

As soon as our orientation briefing was over, we all piled into the first of many air conditioned buses waiting outside our Hotel to take us to the Royal Grand Palace and Temple of The Emerald Buddha, to see the most sacred Buddha image in Thailand. Wat Phra Kaew is regarded as the most revered Buddhist temple (Wat is Thai for temple) in the entire country.  In fact, the temple does not house monks but rather serves today as the personal chapel for the Royal Family. It was oppressively hot and humid and along with the literal throngs of people – local and foreign - at the Royal Palace, we all slowly shuffled along in the heat, jockeying to take photos.

 

I was expecting to see an impressive Emerald Buddha but have to confess that I had no idea he would be so small and sit so high up on a dazzlingly bejeweled pedestal so far away that craning my neck for a good look was almost impossible.  Of course we were not allowed to take any photos, but in truth there are various suggestions that the statue, about 30 inches tall, is not Emerald at all but rather made of jasper or even jadeite.  The reality is that the Emerald Buddha has never been tested and thus its exact composition is as great a mystery as its origin. This statue, however, is so honored that the King of Thailand, himself, changes the Buddha’s garments with three sets of gold clothing for the three seasons, summer, rain and cool weather.

An hour later, everyone was soaking wet.  I had a paper fan and a very thin cool cotton top on plus a cooling towel around my neck, but it was still a harsh experience and when you factor in major jet lag (we were 12 hours ahead of the East Coast time and had lost an entire day crossing the International Dateline) with almost everyone in my group (except me, coming in by myself at 7:00 AM the prior morning) having arrived in Bangkok around midnight the night before, you can imagine how we were all beginning to wilt!  But the mere mention of driving off for an air conditioned lunch break put everyone back in a jolly mood.

Our first meal together was a delicious lunch at the scenic Mango Tree Restaurant alongside the Chao Phraya River.  This set the tone for the majority of our meals to come, which I must admit were mostly outstanding and featured picturesque settings and good fresh local food.  (Just the day before, I dined alone in the Hotel Restaurant and enjoyed the most incredible Tom Yom Goong or soup which is a “spicy hot” concoction with shrimp, mushrooms, peppers and cilantro which nearly blew the top of my head off followed by a Shrimp Pad Tai that held the prize for the best Pad Tai I had ever eaten!) For our lunch that first day, I had a wide flat fried noodle dish with soy sauce called Pad Si-Ew with tender chicken & a delicious fresh salad.  Yummy.

That night, we all enjoyed a Welcome Dinner cruise on the Chao Phraya River where we were served another beautifully presented dinner with tasty dishes.  Now we were beginning to get to know one another and even remember each other’s names!  It helped that everyone was very friendly and looking forward to our travel adventures together!  Our laid back Leader, Ole, was showing off his delightful sense of humor and we were all starting to relax.

The next day, we had our first really long bus ride to the ancient city of Ayutthaya, a UNESCO World Heritage site that was home to 33 kings from many different dynasties.  Here we visited Wat Yai Chai Mongkol which is flanked by a row of Buddha statues, all draped in their saffron robes.  The original stones were first laid in 1357, yet still functions as a meditation site to this day.  More walking in the oppressive heat, all of us soaking through our clothes, on to explore the ruins at Wat Phra Sri Sanphet, another temple complex.  At this point, we were all looking forward to stopping for a cool lunch break which did not disappoint.  We enjoyed another tasty Thai meal which began with a delicious soup in addition to many varied dishes, served family style.

After lunch we hopped aboard a motorized long-tail boat with a bit of cooling breezes which took us to a small village where we walked to a Muslim mosque and met the Imam's representative, Mr. Mart, for an enlightening discussion & tour of the temple.  95% of Thailand is Buddhist, but Muslims coexist peacefully.  Finally on the bus again for a restful one hour air conditioned ride back to our Hotel, The At Ease Salandaeng. Back in our rooms, with time for a quick shower, we then  met for dinner at Le Siam restaurant. Here we were served the most imaginative looking dishes, such an astounding variety and all tasted as good as they looked.  Margaret, (who came with very old friends from the Virginia contingent), and I soon bonded over beer!  At every opportunity, she and I shared a bottle of the local beer, huge ice cold bottles that neither of us could possibly drink by ourselves, but a treat to split and cheap as dirt.  Every time we ordered one, it cost us each a whopping buck.  In Bangkok, the beer was Singha, Beerlao in Laos and in Cambodia, Angkor beer.  All absolutely delicious (a drink that went surprisingly well with the spicy Asian food) and turned me temporarily from a Scotch drinker into a beer convert.

Another early morning wake up, this time at 5:45, departing our hotel at 7:15 for a long bus ride to meet our sampan paddle boat.  Finally we arrived at the Damnoen Saduak floating market, open from 8 AM to 11 AM, which was jam-packed with other vessels & hordes of people!  A chaotic ballet of dodging boats of all descriptions filled with thousands of tourists taking photos in addition to farmers with piles of food, fruit and vegetables locally grown loaded in their boats for sale.  Here anything your heart could desire can be purchased, all from your boat or walking through the crowded stalls.  Afterwards, we took a short bus ride to see how coconut sap is made into sugar & then a long-tail boat ride into a mangrove forest.  We had a bountiful local luncheon on the water with a refreshing breeze & very, very good food.  And let us not forget that icy cold beer!

Finally we endured a long bus ride back to our hotel with dinner on our own.  This was the first night we didn’t have an organized meal that Ole had prearranged and so I went back to my room to collapse and thought, good - finally some time to myself to relax and pack and have a quiet evening!  And just as I was thinking, who needed to ever eat again after that filling lunch we just had, the phone rang and my beer partner, Margaret, was inviting me to join her and two others for dinner across the street at a French Restaurant which Ole said was very good. So what else could I say but “yes, I’ll be down in five minutes!”  Ole was right; the food was absolutely fabulous, although my Scotch serving was so miniscule and outrageously expensive, that I forswore ordering it again for the rest of the trip. Stick to beer I said to myself and so I did!

Once back in the hotel, the job of organizing and packing everything that had been strewn everywhere for the four nights at The At Ease became a herculean task and I promised myself to not totally ever "unpack" all my things again.  That was a good lesson to learn and one I took to heart throughout the rest of the trip.  Anne and Kevin I later learned Never Unpack, a cardinal rule they follow that makes very good sense!

So now we were getting up even earlier the next morning and leaving the hotel at 7:00 AM for the first of five flights we were to take over the course of the next 15 days, this one to Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos, continued here.

Tyler Shows Her Age in A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler has joined my growing group of septuagenarians and her latest novel A Spool of Blue Thread seems to profoundly reflect her initiation.  We now deal with the travails of aging in its broadest sense, the decline of our own physicality, our illnesses, deaths of friends and loved ones, and anxiety about the passage of time as we near the end of the hour glass.  For many of us, there are our adult children, and our grandchildren (not in my case) to worry about, in a changing world that bears no resemblance to the one we grew up in.   Essentially, this is what Anne Tyler speaks to in A Spool of Blue Thread, a metaphor that ties together four generations of the Whitshank family, which Tyler describes as being such a recent family that they were short on family history. They didn’t have that many stories to choose from.  They had to make the most of what they could get.

I loved this novel, for personal reasons as well as admiring the Tyler’s writing skills.  She is one of America’s best living writers. In my praise that follows I’ve tried to avoid “spoilers” but as one friend pointed out when I shared this before posting (she had read the novel as well), I reveal “critical piece[s] of the evolution of the family’s story and relationships” – ones that she would prefer to discover when reading the novel.  I could argue this point, but I’m issuing a “spoiler alert” just in case any reader of this entry doesn’t want to know too much about the book before reading it.

This is a family history told in typical “Tyleresque,” and set mostly in the “Tylertown” of Baltimore.  The women are mostly stalwartly idiosyncratic homebodies.  The men are mostly craftsmen, homebuilders. At the top of the Whitshank family tree there is the grandfather, Junior, and his wife, Linnie Mae.  We learn that she had basically forced herself upon him, first as a 13 year old and five years later, after Junior moved to a boarding house in Baltimore (and completely forgot Linnie Mae, his own family, the feeling mutual, hence being short on family history) Linnie Mae just turned up, suitcase in hand, to move in with him, although they had no contact during those five years:  She was the bane of his existence.  She was a millstone around his neck.  That night back in ’31 when he went to collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front – her unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winters, her floppy wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell – he’d had the incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber.  You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day you see it’s crept back again.  So, indeed, she did creep back into his life but he finally acknowledges that his ultimate success in the building business was in part due to her people skills.  (Junior is a craftsman, a perfectionist, but not very good with the customers.)  He builds a home for a Mr. and Mrs. Brill, but: This was the house of his life, after all (the way a different type of man would have a love of his life), and against any sort of logic he clung to the conviction that he would someday be living here.

And indeed in due course they did, bringing up their two children, daughter Merrick and son Redcliffe, in that home.  “Red” follows in his father’s footsteps with the business, marrying Abby (the main character in the novel) and they have four children, Amanda (who had a bossy streak), Jeannie (tomboyish when young), Denny (whose story becomes the beginning and end of the novel) and Stem (who was adopted when Denny was four).  Stem is called “Douglas” by his wife, Nora, later on in the novel.  Both Amanda and Jeannie ultimately marry men with the same name, Hugh, so…their husbands were referred to as ‘Amanda’s Hugh’ and ‘Jeannie’s Hugh’, just another “family quirk.”  Naturally, Red and Abby ultimately move into the house Junior built, the bedrock for the Whitshank chronicles.

The opening chapter reads almost like a self-contained short story – about the black sheep of the family, Denny.  Personality is established at an early age, and this incident takes place when he was 9 or 10: One time in the grocery store, when Denny was in a funk for some reason, "Good Vibrations" started playing over the loud- speaker. It was Abby's theme song, the one she always said she wanted for her funeral procession, and she began dancing to it. She dipped and sashayed and dum-da-da-dummed around Denny as if he were a maypole, but he just stalked on down the soup aisle with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his fists jammed into his jacket pockets. Made her look like a fool, she told Red when she got home. (She was trying to laugh it off.) He never even glanced at her! She might have been some crazy lady! And this was when he was nine or ten, nowhere near that age yet when boys find their mothers embarrassing. But he had found Abby embarrassing from earliest childhood, evidently. He acted as if he'd been assigned the wrong mother, she said, and she just didn't measure up.

As a young adult, Denny comes and goes, disappears for large amounts of time and then suddenly shows up.  And whenever he did come home, he was a stranger. Naturally, parents try to “figure out” their troubled offspring:

‘It’s because I didn’t shield him properly.’ Abby guessed.

‘Shield him from what?’ Red asked.

‘Oh…never mind.’

‘Not from me,’ Red told her.

‘If you say so.’

‘I’m not taking the rap for this, Abby.’

‘Fine.’

At such moments, they hated each other.

Doesn’t that have the ring of truth, universally applied to many families?  I’ve heard that conversation time and time again between my own parents.

Denny is shipped off to a small private college, but that didn’t change his nature. He was still the Whitshank’s mystery child.  He bounced around from here to there, occasionally keeping in touch by phone, Tyler describing it with her typical humorous slant: He had this way of talking on the phone that was so intense and animated; his parents could start to believe that he felt some urgent need for connection. For weeks at a time he might call every Sunday until they grew to expect it, almost depend on it, but then he'd fall silent for months and they had no means of reaching him. It seemed perverse that someone so mobile did not own a mobile phone. By now Abby had signed them up for caller ID, but what use was that? Denny was OUT OF AREA. He was UNKNOWN CALLER. There should have been a special display for him: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

Denny suddenly marries.  The Whitshank family is invited to the wedding in NYC.  The preacher was a bike messenger with a license from the Universal Life Church.  Denny and his wife Carla have a baby, Susan, with whom at one stretch Denny regularly takes (without Carla) to visit his parents.  Suddenly, no word again, and it goes on for three years and after 9/11 Abby can take it no longer, afraid for her son and their granddaughter and they finally trace him.  After several failed attempts to contact him, they ask his older sister Amanda to call.  Abby and Red stand by the phone as the call is placed.  Denny answers.  Although the Whitshank’s couldn’t hear what Denny said after Amanda identified herself, they could imagine by what Amanda continued to say: Someday you’re going to be a middle-aged man thinking back on your life, and you'll start wondering what your family's been up to. So you'll hop on a train and come down, and when you get to Baltimore it will be this peaceful summer afternoon and these dusty rays of sunshine will be slanting through the skylight in Penn Station. You'll walk on through and out to the street, where nobody is waiting for you, but that's okay; they didn't know you were coming. Still, it feels kind of odd standing there all alone, with the other passengers hugging people and climbing into cars and driving away. You go to the taxi lane and you give the address to a cabbie. You ride through the city looking at all the familiar sights-the row houses, the Bradford pear trees, the women sitting out on their stoops watching their children play. Then the taxi turns onto Bouton Road and right away you get a strange feeling. There are little signs of neglect at our house that Dad would never put up with: blistered paint and gap-toothed shutters. Mismatched mortar patching the walk, rubber treads nailed to the porch steps-all these Harry Homeowner fixes Dad has always railed against. You take hold of the front-door handle and you give it that special pull toward you that it needs before you can push down the thumb latch, but it's locked. You ring the doorbell, but it's broken. You call, 'Mom? Dad?' No one answers. You call, 'Hello?' No one comes running; no one flings open the door and says, 'It's you! It's so good to see you! Why didn't you let us know? We'd have met you at the station! Are you tired? Are you hungry? Come in!' You stand there a while, but you can't think what to do next. You turn and look back toward the street, and you wonder about the rest of the family. 'Maybe Jeannie,' you say. 'Or Amanda.' But you know something, Denny? Don't count on me to take you in, because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these last few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from the beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well.  But most of all, Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

This is a poignant piece of writing, a cautionary note about the passage of time and the dangers of ignoring family and the ordinary details of our lives.  Abby wonders how they settled for so little when it came to their prodigal son. She says, ‘would you have believed it? Sometimes whole days go by when I don’t give him a thought.’  This is not natural! Red said, ‘It’s perfectly natural. Like a mother cat when her kittens are grown.  You’re showing very good sense.’ And this is just the first chapter, and it sets the stage for everything that follows. 

Tyler though does not construct the novel chronologically, instead moving back and forth in time. Regarding the grandfather, Junior, in her usual good humor Tyler explains -- If it seems odd to call a patriarch ‘Junior,’ there was a logical explanation.  Junior’s true name was Jurvis Roy, shortened at some point to J.R. and then re-expanded, accordion-like, to Junior.  As noted, Junior builds the house of his dreams for Mr. Brill, knowing full well in his heart that eventually he would be able to buy it, which he did.  He fidgets with it for the rest of his life as a builder, head of Whitshank Construction, then carried on by his son Red who moves his family into the house.  The house stands as a bulwark in juxtaposition to the fragility of the family.

Then another time leap to Abby who comes from another section of Baltimore and marries Red.  Might Tyler’s description of Abby match up in some ways to her own? As a girl, she'd been a fey sprite of a thing. She'd worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer; her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped their pageboys into rollers every night. She wasn't just poetic but artistic, too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along. You could count on her to organize her school's Canned Goods for the Poor drive and the Mitten Tree. Her school was Merrick's school, private and girls-only and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star there, the leader. In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed for civil rights. She graduated near the top of her class and became a social worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of her old schoolmates knew existed. Even after she married Red (whom she had known for so long that neither of them could remember their first meeting), did she turn ordinary? Not a chance. She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed her babies in public, served her family wheat germ and home-brewed yogurt, marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip, sent her children to public schools. Her house was filled with her handicrafts-macrame plant hangers and colorful woven serapes. She took in strangers off the streets, and some/of them stayed for weeks. There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table.

Skipping to the very present, we learn that Abby has a form of dementia.   This begins a progression of events and the eventual rallying of the family, even Denny.   On one lovely day, with the family on the porch Denny was recollecting to Stem (who is now running the business for aged Red) about his earliest recollection of his grandfather ripping out the walkway and resetting the stones, Abby comments ‘Oh, you men, stop talking shop!....Weather like this always takes me back to the day I fell in love with Red’…The others smiled.  They knew the story well….’It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon’ Abby began. Which was the way she always began, exactly the same words, every single time. On the porch, everybody relaxed. Their faces grew smooth, and their hands loosened in their laps. It was so restful to be sitting here with family, with the birds talking in the trees and the crosscut-sawing of the crickets and the dog snoring at their feet and the children calling, ‘Safe! I'm safe!’

That’s as good as it gets for any writer, to be able to conjure up such images.  I read and reread the passage again and again.  Even in my own twisted childhood there were times I felt “I’m safe.”

For some time the adult children, along with spouses and Abby and Red’s grandchildren come and go to help their aging parents.  There we learn much about the internal sibling rivalry, the hurts, the jealousies, and how these emotions relate to their upbringing.  In particular, Stem (Douglas) and Denny come to blows, literally. 

Abby, even in her condition, comes upon certain truths about life such as, you wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, ‘Something’s not right.  Something’s off somewhere; what is it?’  And then you remember that it’s your child – whichever one is unhappy.

She is seeing a doctor about her condition but she wants to discuss philosophical issues: ‘And time,’ she would tell Dr. Wiss. ‘Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you're little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you're grown. Well, now it's just a blur. I can't keep track of it anymore! But it's like time is sort of ... balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don't you see.’  I’m sure even Einstein would agree.  It’s all relative!

To go on with more about Abby’s fate is to reveal too much.  The house of the Brills, then Junior’s, and then Red’s stands steadfast front and center, almost like another character in the novel, but even that eventually devolves.  Everything changes over the course of time, but the spool of blue thread runs from generation to generation to generation.  Tyler captures this in perhaps her most ambitious novel ever, showing her abiding sympathy for her characters, and there are many in this novel.

It fittingly ends as it begins, focused on peripatetic Denny, who is searching for his own sense of belonging and place, as he boards a train for New Jersey on the eve of hurricane Sandy, an interesting image to leave the reader with towards the conclusion of this wonderful, evocative, but essentially melancholy, novel.  Tyler may be showing her age, but clearly with no diminution of her writing skills. 

My grandfather's Richmond Hill family home circa 1930's