Calendar of Regrets

November

January February March April May June July August September October November December   & & &373' 12.08.76. Shortly after they were married, Victoria and Albert visited Florence and were taken by the city’s incredible architecture, especially Brunelleschi’s dome atop the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore with its distinctive octagonal design built out of something like four million bricks. When Victoria returned several years after Albert’s death, the queen was delighted to see the dome restored. She ordered her carriage to stop in the piazza, rolled down her window, opened the locket around her neck, and turned the tiny picture of her husband toward the cathedral so he could enjoy the sight, too. After a moment’s silence, she flipped the locket shut, rolled up the window, and ordered her carriage to drive on. 374 b & LANCE OLSEN ' 12.09.76. Did you know, Taru, that Mandalay didn’t start as a small settlement like most cities? Instead, the story goes, Buddha, passing through the area, pointed to the hill where much of Mandalay now exists and foretold on that site a great capital of his religion would blossom. On January 13, 1857, King Mindon issued a decree to fulfill that prophecy. The former royal city of Amarapura was dismantled piece by piece stone by stone and moved by elephant to the foot of the hill. The king was also responsible for ordering made the Ti-pedikut, the world’s largest book: 729 pages of Buddhist scriptures inscribed on 729 marble slabs, each housed in its own stupa. A book whose pages you stroll among like you would huge gleaming white shrubbery in a garden. & calender of regrets ' b 375 12.10.76. In 1892, the year he married and moved to Vermont (Vermont, of all places!), Rudyard Kipling composed his famous poem “The Road to Mandalay”—although the only city he ever actually visited in Burma was Moulmein, on the southeastern coast of the country, hundreds of miles away from, and nothing like, the place he wrote about. 376 b & LANCE OLSEN ' 12.11.76. I’m sitting on a wooden stool on the thatched porch of a food hut on the river across from Mandalay hill, eating a bowl of chicken curry for lunch. The chunks of meat are dark brown, stringy, stiff, dry. I had to use my shirt to wipe off from my communal chopsticks whatever the last guy was eating before I could use them. This afternoon I’ll visit Sutaungpyai pagoda at the top of the hill. Hens are zigzagging across the road in front of me like agitated women with feather petticoats lifted among people clattering by on bikes. A shorthaired beige dog squats, scratching his ribcage absentmindedly with a hind leg, staring straight ahead, as if the locals were moving in a less interesting dimension than the one he inhabits. On the bamboo wall beside me, three greengray lizards, eyes shut, frozen in a breathing knot. If I reached out, I could touch them. & calender of regrets ' b 377 12.11.76. P.S. Tourism makes foreign countries into museums you walk through. 378 b & LANCE OLSEN ' 12.11.76. P.P.S. I guess what I’m trying to say, Taru, is that travel shows you what you already know in ways you don’t recognize. How little you understand when you begin your journey. How much less when you end it. Which is exactly why you go. & calender of regrets ' b 379 12.11.76. From the terrace of Sutaungpyai, flooded fields gleaming through hazy atmosphere all the way to the horizon. Shared the ferry over with five Brits—sweet, daffy hippy types with filthy cracked bare feet, paisley bandanas, colorful baggy Nepalese pants, baggy once-white shirts. They started improvising their way south and east two months ago, traveling from Katmandu to Janakpur, across into India, Bhutan, and now through Burma. They’ve enjoyed everything, they say, but it’s Bhutan they adored most of all. Stepping into it was stepping into the thirteenth century. No phones, no paved roads, not one traffic light in the whole place. Bhutan moved from a system of barter to currency within the last ten years. Thimphu, the capital, has a population of slightly less than 30,000. But the hippies’ favorite spot was the Tiger’s Nest...