Meeting of the Minds

So I am in Chiang Mai staying at my friend Glen's place. It's always interesting to meet people you feel a sort of instant connection to. B. is about ten years older than me and graduated with a Ph.D. (I think in English) in the seventies from Boston College. Unable to find a job in the States, he got a position in Montreal, where he taught for twenty eight years. I did not know these details when I met him with my friend Glen and another ex-pat at a Buddhist wat for dinner. A hot day was becoming a cool evening as we sate at a stone table to have dinner and talk. What Glend did tell me was that B. had been teaching in Chengdu for the past three or four years, at Sichuan University. Iwas curious how he ended up there, and he gave me the short version, which we all have to be able to produce, which was that he taught in Montreal for 28 years and decided to do someting different and took early retirment and got this position teaching at Sichuan University. He had a young Chinese girlfriend who also worked in Chengdu and who he was planning to marry. In a year or two he would leave the job and they would travel around the world for a year. He was carrying around a biography of the first Western woman to make it to Tibet, and related the fascinating details of her life story, Alexandar David-Neel. He was clearly captivated by the extraordinary tale of her life and exploits, noting especially that she had undertaken this epic trek to Tibet when she was near fifty. It was good to see someone still that passionate, still searching. B. was in his early sixties but looked at least ten years younger He himself seems to have lived a full life, having fathered three children and had a career and now was embarked on another adventure at a time when most men would have sat back and called it a life. After dinner the four of us retired to a nearby outdoor cafe to drink some beer and B and I continued our converstaion ranging over everything from Camus to contemporary Chinese literature to theories of human rights. Tomorrow morning he is off to Chengdu, where if all goes as planned I will meet up with him. In any case, I feel incredibly fortunate to have met him. One needs such glimpses along the way.