The stories we miss

Don't know if I've mentioned it, but this semester, I've been teaching the theme of telling stories, with the aim of getting a web site with my students' stories, and others, on it up and running. We're on our way to making... well, something anyway, and I'll put up a link to what we've got in the next month or two. In the meantime, you may start to see a few disjointed ramblings about stories in general...

Rambling number one, which is quite obvious, but bears repeating - We often have no clue whatsoever about the stories that surround us. Take this guy for example:



We were crossing a bridge over one of the many canals and small rivers in Bangkok, and the first thing I saw when looking down was a huge monitor lizard sunning itself on a couple of pieces of bamboo floating in the water. The second thing that we saw was this guy on an embankment opposite, doing more or less the same thing. Homeless? A traveling monk? Or (more likely, now that I look) just a homeowner out catching the breeze on a cool stretch of river? There are clues in the picture, but I don't think I know enough about Bangkok or Thai culture in general to read them.

In the picture, he seems to have just noticed our family's presence on the bridge, and is smiling shyly at us, but that may simply be a coincidence of a camera shutter opening at one millisecond and not another. Maybe he nodded to us and we waved back to him? Or maybe he saw us staring, at got up to go? In reality, I have no memory of him noticing us at all. Just a hot hot afternoon, a guy in a purple sarong, and a big lizard on a raft of bamboo in a river.