My mother told me about the dream she had two nights before, of her father and her mother and some relatives I didn’t know, particularly her twin brother, killed in action in World War II a month after I was born.

Her father graduated from teacher’s college at age 19, starting his first job in 1901 with a classroom of eighty students. He raised my mother and seven others with his wife who shared his bed until she was nearly ninety, in a house with an upstairs bathroom. After my grandmother’s stroke, he visited her bedside every day the year before she died. Not long after, he fell dead going up the stairs. The family thought he opted to stop living.

In 1918, the pastor of the Lutheran church in whose school he was teaching said the religion classes must be taught in German, the language of their Bible. My grandfather unsuccessfully argued for English, the language his students spoke with their peers. Though his seventh child was but a few months old, he resigned on principle, working that summer in a pea cannery and then two years in an industrial office until he was called to a Lutheran school teaching everything in English, where he spent the next thirty-one years.

In her dream, her relatives were all standing on the other side looking her way, but when she made a move to join them, they waved her off. She wasn’t ready, they said.

The clear plastic tube exiting her chest was thinner than I had imagined, considering how things had sounded over the phone. The gauze over it wasn’t bloody, just taped there with a little brownish yellow spot in the middle. I followed the tube into a plastic bucket on the floor, enclosed and sterile, holding amber liquid.

She told me she wasn’t afraid of death. She knew it was waiting in the hall, just around the corner, but she wasn’t scared. All the things she was afraid of, she had already met.

That’s what you taught us, I said. I’m not scared either.

She hung on until my brother and his wife got home from a trip. Then she just stopped living, sort of like my grandfather had, leaving at a time of her own choosing. She said once that she loved the moon. I think of her when I see it, full and rounded, the way her life was meant to be. According to what she told me, it was.

I’m going through the family history box, the one with pictures of people my mother labeled so as to tell us when she was gone, who they were. She made an album too, pictures of my ancestors on both sides of the family, with typed vignettes as she knew them to capture the spirit of the person. Is it because of the pictures that I remember them? For me, some are most themselves in her little stories.

One whose father died early began work at a coal company at age fourteen and later bought the place. Another raised six children as a seamstress after her husband died of smallpox at forty. An immigrant father said no to a son’s violin because violins were just for the rich, so the son made himself a banjo.

These people exist for my children only because their grandmother, whom they lovingly remember, chose to make them visible.

“My name is Somchai,” he wrote in my gray notebook, its cover blistered with sweat from my shirt pocket. “I like yellow,” he said, fingering his saffron robe.

Somchai, age 23, was the school principal at Wat Sirikanchanaram, a mountain temple outside of Kanchanaburi, half a day’s drive west of Bangkok. Six monks were responsible for the education of 150 novices in a new monastery built to perpetuate Theravada, the most ancient branch of Buddhism.

For most of the novices, Thai was a second language to their native tongue of Lao. They also needed to learn English and Pali, in its way the Latin of the original scriptures, plus math and science taught by community teachers. I was there with Carolyn to teach conversational English, one of a series of native speakers brought in by my volunteer group.  

“See you at three o’clock,” Somchai said as he dropped me off at the classroom with 30 junior high students at 1PM the first afternoon. Two hours and not much of a lesson plan, but I was the teacher.

I showed them pictures from home, sources of teaching words.

Daughter. Son. Wife. Son-in-law. House. Snow. Say again. Watch my tongue.

OK, let’s hear you describe your own families. Brother. Sister.  Father.  Mother.    

On my Michelin world map, unfolded with them crowding around the desk, we found Thailand and Kanchanaburi.

Washington DC. New York. L.A. They were elsewhere on the map, looking for places they knew from other classes, from the computer in the office, from talking with volunteers who had preceded me.

The tallest teen, in the middle of a voice change, challenged me. 

“How much you know about Buddhism?”

“Not much,” I said. “Some.”

It seemed that’s what he wanted to hear: another teacher going at English alone with them despite ignorance of their main subject, devoid of real control.

During class the third day we went birding, because I was out of gas teaching English by rote, done with holding up and describing pictures from home, exhausted of thoughts collected into stories written on the slate blackboard for them to recite back, finished with cheap chalk that broke under the slightest pressure and dusted over the desk, the floor and me.   

They looked through my binoculars, some crouching down to see better into the trees, some waiting a turn to write their names in my notebook, some drifting slowly into the periphery of novicehood, not long for the monastic life. Most were from villages in Laos, given the opportunity as early as seven to live in and be schooled by the monastery. Twenty was the age of decision: choose a monk’s life or return to lay society.

Sunee, our housing host with whom Carolyn taught English to a thousand middle schoolers elsewhere in Kanchanaburi, brought us into the street fronting her home one morning.

“We give food to the monks,” she said.

We knelt in the street with fruits and vegetables, offering them when the monks from their neighborhood arrived. We felt drawn in and yet distant, dropping food into the brass begging bowl of a monk about our age, saffron-robed, with thin-rimmed glasses, going about his rounds for his community.

“They cannot store up food for the next day,” she said. “Their food for today is what they receive. They eat early in the morning and at noon.”

Back at Wat Sirikanchanaram, the cars from the community arrived each midmorning. People carried food to an outside table and left it there, as if bringing potluck dishes and not staying for the meal.

And so I took lunch with the monks, or rather alongside them, sitting outside the refectory at a stone table beneath a tree, brought fruit and vegetables and some cakes as their teacher of the moment. I was to learn their way by watching, temporarily immersed in their community.

The chant before eating was startling, a blend of children’s, changing and adult voices, its clarity spilling from the two-sided hall beneath the newly leafed pho trees of a February spring. They ate in silence, only the clink of metal spoon on metal plate. Nothing but their clothing and what they ate each day was their own except what they learned of the practice, and even that was a received tradition in which they participated.

My last day there, I picked up a piece of the mountain and put it in my pocket for the way home. It is a small red stone, like all the others on the hillside I walked up every day on my way from the street. I took it along to remember the experience of being among them. And I left some of my heart.

The thing about overnight trains is that for a time while you’re on the road, you’re home. Your apartment is yours for the night, a little room with a view.

It was chilly on the November evening we left Gare de Lyon in Paris’ south end, our train sliding out of the station toward morning in Florence. We slowed for rows of evening-lit houses and headlights, stopping briefly in cities where people up late were there to catch the train.

I undressed and climbed into the top bunk between tightly stretched sheets. Carolyn was still reading in the bottom bunk when I fell asleep.

“You awake?” She was sitting on the edge of her bunk. “You have to see this.”

It was faintly light through the window below me. I looked at my watch, the luminous hands showing midnight.

Crawling over the edge of the bunk and letting myself to the floor, I peered out the window.

Snow, about a foot, fresh.

Everything went black. I sat next to her on the bed. She hunched closer. Her shoulder was cold.

“Just wait.”

After the tunnel, we ascended a snowfield patterned with farmhouses, muffled lumps in the silvery light.

To our left, above the crest of the Alps, rode a perfectly full moon the color of a Camembert wheel. We huddled on the edge of her bunk, holding hands, absorbing the immense silence.

Lately, we have begun to experience what Carolyn calls “subatomic network communication.”

She read about this somewhere.

Physicists, she says, are aware of the existence of this phenomenon but loath to discuss it. There is no way it fits into the calculations of matter, energy and other things with which physicists concern themselves.

What happens is this:

We’ll be in one of those protracted pauses of conversation that happen on trips, especially while driving through long stretches of landscape.

One of us will re-start the conversation on a different subject from where we ended. The other, not replying at first, looks over.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

We put it down to each of us having observed something along the road, triggering a mutual memory. I still think that’s mainly it, or trains of thought rolling around in both our heads until they arrive at logical ends about the same time.

Carolyn doesn’t think it’s that simple. Mystical, maybe; difficult to explain, certainly, unless our thoughts have grown closer by proximity.

I suppose our personal spaces have fluid boundaries now, natural riverbanks separating us as persons within a single landscape. Our tectonic plates may have softened a little at the edges, our borders harder to patrol the longer we live together. Maybe it’s just an intolerance of boundaries that happened to us that midnight, holding each other and watching the moon from the edge of a bed in a French train, crossing the Alps in our underwear.