And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lotus Eaters”

I

Lotus seeds plummet to the bottom of a pond, settle in the mud, then sprout out in wavy tangles of green, roots digging into the bottom. Sometimes, turtles swim by and eat them. Sometimes, tiny minnows nip on stalks. Mostly, however, one will rise, breaking the surface of the water, a teardrop, a hand in prayer that blossoms into a layered star. This flower, my mother says, has learned suffering, has persevered, has found the place where it will grow year after year, a continuous rebirth, a never-ending journey of swallowing mouthfuls of murk and still being able to breathe.



II

Sitting in the driveway, I counted the petals of a purple dahlia I picked from my neighbor’s Jesus garden. Jesus stood in white, a birdbath beneath him. His hair and beard were black, eyes serene like Buddha, the guardian of daffodils and irises.

My father had been spending more time away from home, and I thought I was in love with a blond girl who talked in a whisper. I didn’t know what she said most of the time, but I imagined she spoke in Shakespearian verses.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May…

It wasn’t May. It was July. A tickling breeze played across the front yard, pushing along a McDonald’s wrapper, and my mother swept the back steps, a cloud of dust following the brushes of the wicker broom.

My mother stopped to wipe her forehead with a rag that used to be a piece of my underwear. She didn’t laugh anymore. Most days, she sewed and looked out the window and sighed. She had been talking about home. She said she missed the heat and her sisters. Missed the lotuses, the climbing geckos, the jabbering mynahs.

I’d told her she was already home, and she’d said, Chi ci, of course, and played with my hair.

My mother waved.

I plucked another petal.

Tum alie? she said. She leaned on the broom like a crutch.

Nothing, I said.

Pretty flower, she said.

I shrugged.

She asked why I was destroying such a pretty thing.

I wanted to tell her there were no pretty things in the world anymore, that this blond girl with dimples came close, but even she farted when she thought no one was around. I wanted to tell my mother about this bubbling something I couldn’t explain, but I felt it in my chest and it made my legs restless. I wondered if I was waiting for something to make me breathless, like the limber shape of a tornado as it bounced off a midwestern field.

I asked her where Dad was.

Away, she said.

When will he be home?

She shrugged. Sometimes people get lost.

Lost on his way home? I said. I don’t understand.

She began to sweep again. The wind from her broom scattered the purple petals on the gray concrete. Some had begun to wilt.



III

My mother loves lotuses. Riding in the car in Thailand, she watches for her favorite flower. To her, lotuses symbolize home, like JR’s chili cheese dogs on 95th signify all that is wonderful about Chicago. There, there, she says breathlessly, as we speed pass rice paddies. Hane mie? Did you see? So pretty. I follow her excited finger. Catch a blur of color.



IV

It is the fields my wife longs for.

A green ocean.

A flatness.

The swaying waves of grain.

You can see for miles. You can see an oncoming storm.

Once in Kansas, as we were making our way towards the mountains of Colorado, I watched a tornado dance in the distance, a ballerina in tondue. It skipped off the land, kicking up swirling red dust. Lightning jagged from cloud to cloud. The tornado, surrounded by purple haze, headed for a speck of a barn. But it stalled, turning and turning, a pose of contemplation. Then the sky sucked it back up like the last sip of a milk shake.

This took no more than thirty seconds.

It was sunny where we were, and my wife drove while listening to a book on tape. I fell asleep. She hummed in my dreams.

Now, we live in upstate New York among trees and hills.

I can hide here.

She wants to be found.



V

Odysseus did not eat the lotus.

But what if he had taken a bite? Popped it into his wise mouth like a peanut. Would he have stayed among the Lotophagi? Would he have forgotten Penelope and her beauty that made men rage? Or would he feel as if he had forgotten something, a man eternally at the refrigerator door? A part of him dreaming of a land he couldn’t name and a woman whose flowing hair haunted him each day. Would Homer tell a different story, not about a journey home, but of loss?



VI

My father is a man without a home.

He lives six months in Bangkok, six months in Chicago. He travels back and forth, works and saves enough money to buy another plane ticket, then spends twenty-one hours traveling halfway around the globe. This is a life he didn’t expect.

He calls after a year. I never want to talk to him.

I no pass citizen test, he says.

Oh, I say.

They ask about president. I tell them Reagan nice man.

Bill Clinton’s the president.

Oh, he says. How you are?

Good. You?

Working hard. Make money to go back to Thailand.

Why do you come back?

Social security check. If not, I have no money.

Oh, I say. Where do you work?

Somewhere.

Where?

McDonald.

I don’t say anything. My sixty-seven year old father works at McDonalds, and my heart begins to melt. I want to reach into the phone, hold his callused hands and say all is forgiven. But I stay silent until he says goodbye and he misses me.

In Thailand, he works as a real estate agent in a high rise filled with silky-legged women. Here, he makes fries and boxes burgers.



VII

Lotuses grow like dandelions—in ponds, swamps, canals, roadside ditches, in jars, sometimes on top of temples. Some lotus pads are the size of quarters, hundreds of them clustered together; some pads are so large they can hold three infants.

They come in a variety of colors: soft pink, white, light lavender like the distant Northern Thailand mountains. In a Buddhist heaven, it’s said that the lotus changes color according to people’s wishes. In heaven, everyone is happy.



VIII

I spent three weeks in New York City. Most of the time, I thought about home.

I live in a quaint little log cabin tucked away from the sight of our neighbors. The house is an eclectic mix of cultures—Asian art and Pennsylvanian Dutch decor. In the front hallway is a hundred year old desk used as a display case; in it are old books, the poems of Browning and Kipling, and delicate meditating Chinese figurines. An old spindle music box occupies a wall in the dining room, and above it looms a painting of a Thai dragon flying towards a lotus temple. In the kitchen, the cabinets are filled with Earl Grey Tea and honey, leaf-patterned china, fish sauce and containers of dried chilies, and next to the refrigerator, the staple of any Asian kitchen, the rice maker. Pictures of Morgan horses and hummingbirds hang in the guest room, and on the dresser is a traditional Thai Buddhist shrine, protecting and blessing the house. In the main hall are a few photographs I have taken—a black and white photo of a steam engine train in Durango, Colorado, and my favorite photo of lotuses in a dark pond, the sun and clouds reflecting off the water’s surface.

This is the stuff in a home, but not home. Home is the woman on the couch, smiling when I walk through the door. The two wiggling cockers with toys stuffed in their mouths.



IX

My mother is ready to return.

Retired after over thirty years working as a nurse, she has become an American citizen so she can receive her social security checks when she moves back to Thailand. If not, she’d have to come back to the states every six months like my father.

Before her citizenship interview, she studied vigorously. Taped on the bathroom wall, opposite the throne, were two pieces of paper—one with the lyrics of the National Anthem, the other with the Pledge of Allegiance. Whenever I’d pass the bathroom, I’d hear my mother’s off tune, screechy voice singing our nation’s song.

She has come a long way in this country, spending nearly half her life in Illinois. She climbed the promotion ladder and lived in a nice home in a safe neighborhood. My mother married and divorced here. She raised a son and put him through college. After a lifetime of memories, she still feels like a visitor.

In 1992, two years before I graduated from high school, my mother bought a house in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, near her four sisters. The sisters take care of the home, preparing it for my mother’s permanent visit.

Now, her visits to Thailand are longer, as if she is preparing me for what is inevitable. But she puts off her departure. In two years, she keeps saying. In two years. Two have become six. I know I am her delay. She waits to see how I will start my life, the place where I will begin to grow.



X

In early Buddhist scriptures, in the world of water, lotuses blossomed in island clusters. “The water was clean and pure, and flowers floated on the surface in abundance. The currents were full of them….”

I imagine that this is the world my mother dreams of. Where we live in canoes and eat only what the ocean provides. Where we watch the sun rise and set each day. Where we pluck a petal and place it between our lips and whistle for gull, our dolphins. Where we are rocked to sleep, the breeze a soft lullaby in our ears. Where in our dreams Buddha floats on a lotus pad and touches our forehead, then folds his hands in the traditional Thai greeting. Welcome.