CHAPTER 4-PASSAGE TO BANGKOK

Fat snowflakes float onto New York City sidewalks, and some melt on my tongue. I am excited as we shop, holding onto my parents hands. In a few days we are leaving on a Dutch freighter to go around the world. A new song, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” drifts out from some stores—it is 1952. What makes a child embrace new beginnings? Safety, security…they have jumped off ledges of fresh opportunity, and always been caught.

We stop at a diner for hamburgers…it smells like wet boots and fried onions. I wander after eating, and a man in a booth tells me he saw Santa Claus earlier. Wide-eyed I exclaim the news to my parents, and they smile at the man across the way. “Well, we’ll have to keep our eyes open for him,” Dad says.

A few days later Grandpa Larson, Uncle Dewey, Aunt Petey, and our cousins wave us goodbye from the wharf. We wave back…they look smaller and smaller as the ship glides into the open sea. I have no conception of the years before we will see them again.

Since we have weeks of ocean travel, Mom decides to launch me into the Calvert Course and begin first grade, even though I am just five. Our adjoining staterooms are tiny, so we study in the ship’s common sitting room. I enjoy the challenge, even when high seas pitch us back and forth, our sofa bumping right and left in the alcove.

We celebrate Christmas crossing the Atlantic, then Mom and Dad’s January birthdays, and note landmarks along the way. The massive gray rock of Gibraltar between Europe and North Africa, the Suez Canal, and into the Red Sea. Mom paints on deck, her colors washing deep blue onto white canvas, as Romaine and I play.

Docking off the port of Jeddah, Arabia, minarets poke sharply into cobalt sky. Big sacks of grain from our ship are loaded onto the backs of dockworkers. “Amazing,” Dad exclaims, “No cranes!” At night I get sick—vomiting, diarrhea, high fever. Washcloths on my forehead, sips of water, late night fervent prayer. The ship’s doctor prescribes sulfa pills and I slowly recover. Gratefulness, thanksgiving…I was later told they feared for my life.

Day after day the vast blue sky meet the deep blue sea as we thrust forward through the waves. Dad shows us on a map how we turn east at the tip of South Africa, then pass south of India and Sri Lanka, and press southeast through the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. There we pack up and debark, thanking the kind ship officers. And after visits with mission workers in Singapore, fly to Bangkok.

Hot, exotic Bangkok! We walk the streets in amazement. Wiry dark-haired men hurry by, carrying baskets of vegetables on poles slung over their shoulders. Skinny men on bicycles pedal heavily, pulling large placid passengers. I glance into an open restaurant door and see a man eating noodles with chopsticks, sucking them up! Spicy smells, dripping sweat.

We wander into a large temple and I look upward, amazed. A long, massive Sleeping Buddha on its side. “The Thai people worship this statue…it’s their god,” Dad explains. I marvel that anyone would think a big carved statue could save them.