Everyday on a sabbatical with Melissa is a nine point something, but some days are tens. As Melissa said in her post, Sticky Rice, Sticky Rice, today was a ten.  When I read her post – and, yes, I am still trying to catch up – I felt the way I feel trying to cross the street in Hanoi or Hoi An, moving as quickly as possible all the while feeling as if at any moment I might be plowed over.  All of you who know Melissa can feel the infectiousness of her joy when she gets like this, and, no, it was not, as she noted in her post, a result of downing a few (smallish) shots of rice wine before noon, one of several stops on the bike tour to visit with local families to learn about their livelihood.

The rice wine stop involved sampling several flavored rice wine shots. A sixteen ounce bottle costs less than a dollar and is more than enough for several companions. Incidentally, one only drinks rice wine with others. Before taking a shot, the group of drinkers raise their shot glasses and say in unison, Mok! Hai! Ba! (one, two three). Then, you click glasses and down the shot all at once followed by a big sigh (ahhhh!) and a knee slap. Melissa had some difficulty with the proper order of things, slapping her knee several seconds before remembering to say ahhh. Yen, our guide, found this quite amusing. We did not try the exotic flavors, pictured below, but I may or may not have had an out of body experience getting back on the bike after the banana-flavored shot. 

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Interestingly, the perfect days like today have less to do with the excitement of being in a new place, seeing things I’ve never seen before, or tasting something I’ve never tasted before (see banana shot above), all of which are amazing.  Rather, I think, the perfect days have everything to do with the people you meet, not just because the encounter is filled with laughter and tenderness, but because the lightness of the interactions – every smile, every peel of laughter, every tender, sincere Xin Chao, reverberates with such power.  In a word, the people I met today filled me with the flavor of love we call forgiveness. Here’s why. 

Today, while biking through the rich green rice fields, the tender new stalks of chilies, the mango trees, and fruit I have never heard of before, we met a couple – she is 87, he is 91 – both of whom fought for the Viet Cong resistance against the South Vietnamese Army.  He was taken prisoner and tortured for five years.  Hanging on the wall of their tidy, small home are their portraits in uniform with the medals they won.

Attached to their house is the family shrine.  Many of their ancestors – 11 generations – are buried there.  Side note: the central focus of the “chapel” as Yen, our guide, called it, the place of highest honor, is reserved for the female Buddha.  Until today, I had been told that a woman could not be a Buddha.  And get this, the woman Buddha, the mother of the first-born person in this family was, wait for it, a virgin!  Hmm.  Something sounds familiar here.

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If you’ve read Melissa’s post, mentioned above, you have a good sense of how delightful, funny and teasing our guide Yen was.  I haven’t laughed this much in a long time, especially not on a bike.  Yet, despite all her teasing, she had a rapport with the older couple that was simultaneously tender, playful and respectful. At one point, as Yen explained that these two quiet, diminutive people were war heroes, I held back tears.  How does this happen?  How do we, two Americans, members of a nation that was responsible for the deaths of two million Vietnamese civilians, over five million civilian casualties, and by some estimates as many as eleven million internal refugees, get invited to spend time in their home, not just to spend time, but to be warmly, genuinely received?  

It is both curious and inexplicably wonderful that a moment as bittersweet as the one with this remarkable couple can generate in me a profound hope for humanity.  To be so blessed as to hold the hand of this woman, my mother’s age, a woman who has seen atrocities no one should have to witness, who has lived through the killing and destruction of everything she held dear, and to feel in her, despite the inescapable weight of that evil, the lightness of her quiet peacefulness is to see clearly with “the third eye” the true, absolute power of love. As Samwise Gamgee said to Mr. Frodo in the darkness and despair of Mordor (Melissa is going to kill me for this quote or at least give me unmitigated grief) “There is still goodness in the world, Mr. Frodo.  And it’s worth fighting for.” 

Today was a perfect ten. Today, I was gifted with unasked for and unearned grace in the form of a beautiful man and woman whose greatest strength, despite everything they endured, is, without question, their ability to love.