The Drunken Traveler by Devin Keith Nerison - HTML preview

CHAPTER TWENTY

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WHEN I l ook back there are so many things I wish I had changed. At that time, it was a flow. You didn’t plan your life, as many people did, but you rode the wave that took you to one place or another. Thinking back, it was al reckless abandonment. There is a time to march forward in your quest to accomplish what is in you or be practical and worry about your own impracticality. I chose the latter and took the aimless direction option. Where I would be tomorrow was not something I worried about. That moment in time is where I wanted to be.

I met Suratchawadee in 2002 in Thailand. We met in a very proper way. She was just graduating from university. She didn’t know much English but we seemed to get around it. It wasn’t long before I left the country and discovered…

I married Suratchawadee eleven years later. We used to take walks for miles.

It wasn’t long before we were talking about marriage. When she mentioned she wanted a child I bailed. I had two in the USA already and I was not ready to be dad again. I took the next plane out to the US. I got home and kept thinking about going back to Thailand to my friends at the church. After a year or so I emailed and a brother in Christ asked me to stay with him. He was a great guy with two extra rooms. He asked me to stay at his house.

She had gotten married. I found this out later. She was married for seven years. So ten years later I semi-retired to Thailand. After a year or so my friend in the church told me that Suratchawadee’s husband had died. I remember I was walking into the shower when I thought, “I am getting married again.” I knew in my heart that it was going to happen. Even though I resisted, the plan was already written. I kept pondering that for months trying to make better sense out of my reluctance to marry years ago.

Several months later I was asked to go to a church conference down south. I agreed to go and booked the train bound for Nabon in southern Thailand. It is a smal town down south where she was from. I didn’t know if she was there. This was a church conference I was going to attend so I was concentrating on the conference. But seeing her would be a bonus.

As the train stopped I got my baggage and jumped off the train. Little did I know was that she would be there waiting to pick me up. It was fate. No one knew who was coming off the train. I was a little shocked about this. Why would she be here? Was I set up? It didn’t add up so I started cal ing her. She was told there was a guy getting off the train to bring to the church. She did not know it was me. From further talks it was circumstance. She did not know I was coming in on that train.

We started talking on social media and phones and we had the same feeling as before. We started talking about Christ.

How we rise and how we fal . What we thought was the same. We saw that Christ that was our Lord. He wasn’t something we could ignore in our lives. He was too important to us and made a bond between us.

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She had a little girl a few years old from her husband that died. She was a nice little girl. She seemed to be okay with me and a somewhat easy going child. As time went on I became more and more comfortable with her. Her and her mom were living in Nabon with her parents and I was up in Bangkok in my condo. I was fairly comfortable there with my regular routine. Get up in the morning and have some coffee and some breakfast and then head to the gym on the train.

Workout for an hour or so then head down to a shop that made health drinks in a blender and give them a bag of whey protein to dump in and that was my lunch. Then walk by al the shops, into the markets to look around and buy some fruit. I liked the fish and pork markets there. The fish market had al kinds of fish and many of them stil flapping. As you read I tried to save one once. Snakeheads, catfish, and Tilapia were stil waiting to get to the water to swim away, but I don’t think that ever happened.

Then I would walk over a foot bridge across a big canal to the other side and walk through slum areas sel ing wares, and then to the pet shops along Sukhumvit Road and check out the pets for sale. One time I saw this beautiful midget rooster. I was going to buy him and put him on my balcony. I talked to a friend of mine and he said snakes wil come. I stared at him and reminded him I lived on the sixth floor! He said they would find a way.

Sometimes I would walk al the way home and sometimes I would take a bus when the last beer ran out. I was nice about it and used a straw instead of tipping them back like a homeless guy with his sixty cent bottle of Thai whisky. And I used trash bins instead of the road. And if you stagger when you walk it’s time to quit.

I would get home and go online and cal her. We would talk everyday sometimes for a couple of hours. Things got closer and we decided to get married. I felt remorse about some things. If we had gotten married like we planned eleven years before things would be so different. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be at that time but there were al those years we never had together. I was alone and so was she with her unhappy marriage. God worked it out but not in the time that we wanted. A lot of it was my past marriage that ruined me for a while. I guess we both had to heal. On January 26, 2013, we got married at the church in Nabon. Not a big wedding, maybe thirty or so people there. As usual I was the only one not native to Thailand. I didn’t mind that anymore actual y, after a while we al look the same. The interesting thing is after our wedding we al got loaded up in vehicles to go to Trang for a funeral of a grandfather I knew. Not many people can say they went to a wedding and a funeral in the same day. I was struggling since my operation as a kid to be sure things didn’t just go black when it was over. I spent my life searching and now I look no further.

A couple of years later my step-daughter had a new sister. Wasn’t planned, just happened miraculously. She is three and a half now and starting to calm down a little. Both girls speak Thai and English but mostly Thai to everyone except me so it gets rusty. I have to make “English only” rules in the house. I usual y fail and so Thai is spoken 75% of the time.

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As for the Lord I would say that there are so many things I wouldn’t have been able to get through in my life without Him. We need to learn the simplicity of the Lord but also the work we need inside to get us there. We create our own problems in most cases and think we can only trust ourselves. Just let Him in and al ow Him to work.