January 19, 2026

 We crossed the border into Cambodia in the middle of the night. At dawn we looked out at the intricately curled gold spires of Buddhist temples, which dot the land and convey blessings on all who seek them. We thought we knew about the curses, then learned how little we knew.

Phnom Penh, the capital, is a modern, fast-moving city. The name means “mountain of Grandma Penh,” honoring a wealthy woman, Madame Penh. The legend holds that she found a four-faced Buddha floating in a river. She retrieved it and had a temple built, called Phnom Wat, to house it at a place that is now the center of the city. The four faces of the Buddha signify earth, wind, water, and fire, the fundamental elements of life.

Phnom Wat, atop a hill reachable by 89 stairs, shows the intensity and beauty of the faith. We removed shoes and hats and stared awestruck at the delicate sculptures of the angels, many fashioned in brilliant gold, who guard the sacred images. 

Long before Phnom Wat, over a stretch of 1,000 years, various strains of Brahmanism and Buddhism had supplanted Hinduism as the dominant religious faith in Cambodia. More than 95 percent of Cambodians are Buddhists. Today it is endorsed as the official state religion.

The Theravada Buddhist tradition of Cambodia weaves ancient beliefs and practices into every aspect of life. We learned, as all Buddhists know, that Buddha is not a person, but the embodiment of true enlightenment, or understanding of the meaning of existence. Following Buddha is the vocation of every young man who joins the monastic life, a life of meditation, study, and discipline.

We visited the National Palace, Silver Pagoda, and National Museum, a complex of stunning structures that showcase the depth of the nation’s Buddhist traditions. The king, Norodom Sihamoni, succeeded his father, Norodom Sihanouk, in 2004, after a career of government service. The monarchy is an elected ceremonial post with no political power. 

The king, a 73-year-old bachelor called the “quiet king,” follows the Buddhist way. At his coronation he declined to wear the king’s traditional gold-and-diamond crown and did not take his seat on the throne.

We headed north on the Mekong to Kampong Tralach and Oudong, Cambodia’s former capital and site of the country’s largest monastery, home to about 200 Buddhist monks.

We waited with other tourists for a blessing by the monks, whose soft chanting, in some mysterious way, conveys serenity and peace. They ended the twenty-minute blessing by tossing lotus blossoms and jasmine among us.

The next day, in Oknhatey, we walked a dusty road past dozens of family tombs holding the ashes of families’ members. We visited an elementary school filled with joyful kids who sang “Jingle Bells” and “You Are My Sunshine” in crystal-clear English as their teacher, who speaks no English, smiled.

The students’ enthusiasm showed no awareness of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, which their grandparents survived—or perhaps did not survive. The fanatical Khmer Rouge army that seized power on April 17, 1975 murdered roughly two million, possibly as many as three million Cambodians and others.

It occurs to me that in 2026 no room for further horror remains. Since Cambodia we lived through the Serbian and Rwandan genocides of the early 1990s. But Americans did not know what was unfolding in Cambodia in those nightmarish years. We worked at recovering from Vietnam. We didn’t want to hear about Southeast Asia.

The Khmer Rouge aimed to recreate an agrarian society. They banned money and business, shut banks and schools, and emptied the cities by force-marching their populations to rural areas to work on farms. Educated people and ethnic minorities were killed. Monasteries, churches, and mosques were looted. Thousands of Buddhist monks were killed.

Today the visitor can’t avoid what took place in more than 100 “killing fields” around the country and at a Phnom Penh prison called S21 where Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them 15 or 16 years old, savagely tortured men, women, and children who wouldn’t confess to being CIA agents or other trumped-up falsehoods. More likely they stared in silent terror.

We visited the awkwardly named Choeung EK Genocidal Center about seven miles from downtown, where dozens of mass graves were found in 1980, after Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge. Evidence found—bones, skulls, clothing fragments—revealed that thousands of victims were executed there, often with hacking tools to save bullets, the bodies then dumped and covered with lime.

A loudspeaker was hung on a large gnarled tree to blare Khmer Rouge music to drown out the cries of victims. The killing sometimes went on until late at night.

Simultaneously, others were brought to S21 for interrogation, torture, and death. The prison superintendent was a former academic who required strict recordkeeping. Thousands of head-and-shoulders photos of victims were taken. Today they remain posted on the prison walls, the faces showing they knew what lay ahead.

We walked the S21 grounds. An elderly man sat under a tree, telling his story, as our guide translated. He talked about torture, fear, of watching family members killed. He survived because he knew how to fix typewriters. The Khmer Rouge bureaucrats needed their typewriters.

We ponder these things now. It’s been 46 years. The Khmer Rouge leaders are dead. A few, just a few, were put in prison for life. The country is struggling to move forward. The school children are singing joyfully. The monasteries are quiet, serene. The people are looking again to Buddha, seeking wisdom.

January 12, 2026

Maps and airlines call it Ho Chi Minh City, but to the locals it is still Saigon, or Sai Gon, the once-legendary capital of South Vietnam, which once was a country. Today it’s a giant metropolis of some 14 million, but second city to Hanoi, capital of unified Vietnam.

Since April 1975 Vietnam has been a Communist country, and Saigon leaves no room for illusions. The red-star flag and iconic hammer-and-sickle insignia are everywhere, usually decorating portraits of Vietnam’s George Washington, the grandfatherly-looking Ho. The legend on your visa reminds you you’ve entered the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Whatever that brand of communism or socialism, it doesn’t discourage a hyped-up entrepreneurial economy. Thousands of Saigon’s citizens at any hour are piloting motorscooters on some business or other, navigating expertly among fleets of Toyotas, Hyundai, Kia sedans and minivans. The city counts something like 9 million scooters. It seems there is no actual rush hour because it’s every hour. Many haul passengers, some children or animals. I saw one fitted with a cage of four dogs. The guidance for pedestrians is “don’t try to avoid them, they’ll avoid you.”

The center city, laid out in a sort of grid from Tan Son Nhut airport, is pure, unadulterated free enterprise. Furniture stores that lay their merchandise out on the sidewalks, cafes, coffee bars, department stores, shops of every kind, blare their names on giant boldface signs that rise from ground floor to high-rise level. The city streets pulse with business energy. Saigon has attracted a huge corporate presence, operating out of hundreds of shiny downtown skyscrapers that gorgeously light the night sky.

All the excitement doesn’t conceal a central truth: Saigon is a city in recovery, going on now for fifty years, since the last American helicopters and transport aircraft flew out with the last escapees. At the end of that infamous April the U.S. troops were gone except for embassy personnel who stayed till the end. Thousands of Vietnamese military, civilian U.S. government employees, Vietnamese government staff, and their friends and family members, also got out. Those who did not faced the vengeance of the North.

The government ensures no one forgets. In the center of town an elaborate memorial honors Thich Quang Durc, a Buddhist monk who immolated himself on June 11, 1963 to protest the South Vietnam government’s war against rural people. The former presidential palace was renamed the Reunification Palace. The grounds preserve the North Vietnamese army tank that crashed through the palace gates on April 30, 1975.

Americans may recall the Vietnam war. To the government here it’s the American war. If a tenet of Communist rule is keep the people loyal by preaching some powerfully emotive, unifying cause, the truths of the war, by whatever name, works. The Museum of War Remembrance, just blocks from the palace, supplies the proofs in spades of the insanity of the U.S.’s Southeast Asian tragedy. The two-story space tells the story of the Ho Chi Minh trail through jungles and swamps, traveled by Viet Cong volunteers and ordinary civilians to deliver munitions and supplies. They carried them on their backs, on pack animals, and in false-bottom boats to outmaneuver the government troops.

Hundreds of graphic photos of war crimes committed in the name of keeping the Asian subcontinent safe for democracy, the timeworn, long-ago abandoned rationale for the American war, have the power to turn visitors away.

At this point, defending America’s war aims is recognized as crude sophistry. Vast stores of government documents, starting with the Pentagon Papers released by Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, told the whole story in 1971. The American leadership’s pursuit of body counts, carpet bombing, the use of Agent Orange to contaminate vast ranges of the country, the nightmarish war crimes like My Lai and others tortured a nation and its people for two decades.

We visited the Cu Chi tunnels outside Saigon, a complex of caverns hundreds of miles long built by thousands of rural people, daytime rice farmers who became Viet Cong at night, to hide and move fighters, weapons, and provisions. I crawled through a 20-meter length of tunnel no more than three feet high. I felt the clammy, stifling sensation of dread those people felt, many for months and years as they fought and died up to the end.

And yet—on the grounds of the National Post Office, the government palace, and sidewalks around the city, thousands of young girls in beautiful traditional Vietnamese dresses pose with bright smiles for photos. Our hosts for these few days, the servers, hotel staff people, managers, store clerks, and tour personnel offer exquisite, scrupulously polite service to the American descendants of the G.I.s, and the G.Is. themselves who have come back.

They prove that time may not overcome horror but can assuage pain, as the countless European memorials to war’s cruelty have done. As hard as the government tries, the young grow up and move along in their futures and careers without the contrived Communist bitterness. Westerners, including American veterans who witnessed the nightmare, are welcomed. Tourist revenue has a huge role in the growing prosperity of this wounded place.

We stood in the line for Customs at Tan Son Nhut behind two tall, young, blond fellows. They said they were from Norway, here to spend four months backpacking around the Central Highlands, Hue, Da Nang, the once-wartorn, bloody places. Were they researching history, I asked. No, just backpacking, they answered. Here for the spectacular natural beauty, the mountain vistas, the joy of meeting the people.

So—the oldtimers may be struggling with their memories. They’ll soon pass from the scene. The young ones are coming, to help restart life, which is inevitable, as it should be.

January 5, 2026

The year ended here with good news, nine six-to-12-year-old boys and girls eating pizza and ice cream with Christmas-like enthusiasm at a kitchen table usually occupied by two senior citizens. Pizza and ice cream, the happiest way to close out 2025.

It was a major departure. Most evenings we go with our nearly iron-clad routine, maybe something from a vegetarian cookbook, maybe leftovers, old-folks chitchat. The kids came for an evening, then went home with their parents. The drill now is to brace for the further cycles of surreal news from the moral slum of the administration, in George Will’s apt phrase.

So for the present, pizza. But the coming years—the future—belong to children excited about what lies ahead in their lives.

The older grandson, Noah, who just turned 12, spent the afternoon with us. We tossed a football in the backyard, he threw mostly perfect spirals and talked about playing quarterback in high school. For the pizza pickup he carried a half-dozen fairly heavy boxes.

Since then we turned to the nuts and bolts of the trip. We have the vaccinations, the visas, the scanproof wallets. But the preparation really has to do with memory, because for Americans, Vietnam is much about memory. So we read Marguerite Duras.

Duras was born in Vietnam in 1914 as Marguerite Donnadieu. She lived there intermittently until 1933, when she returned permanently to France. She earned a law degree. She joined the Communist party, and during World War II served with the French Resistance. In 1943 she published the first of her many novels, adopting the name of her father’s hometown, Duras Lot-et-Garonne.

Duras led a life of brilliant creativity of writing and film-making set off by drug and alcohol abuse. She fell into a coma for six months, regaining consciousness in June 1989. She died in 1996 in Paris.

Her great work, The Lover, published in 1984 when Duras was 70, is a memoir, the story of a teenage French girl in Vietnam’s ethnic-racial stew of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Europeans, and Chinese, her family’s poverty, the difficult relationship with her mother and older brother, and her final departure from Saigon for France.

The memoir’s centerpiece is her passionate relationship, as a 15-year-old, with a wealthy 27-year-old Chinese man whom she meets on a ferry as she travels to boarding school in Saigon. They both know the affair had no future, their families would never tolerate it. Eventually her mother and brothers are shocked to discover it. The man helps them financially; the family sees their connection as a source of money.  

The girl on the ferry becomes the girl leaning against the rail of her ship as it pulls away from the pier. She sees her lover’s car, and understands he is seeing her for the last time. Her memory of her life in Vietnam becomes a foundation of her career as a writer.

Scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that “The Lover famously begins with the narrator recalling an image that either is pulled forth from memory or rose from the past to place itself before the narrator’s eyes. Duras exploits one of the fundamental, tricky parts of our recall—do we seek out memory or does it find us?”

Nguyen, professor of English, American Studies, and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, understands memory and history. As a child he escaped Saigon with his parents in April 1975 as the North Vietnamese army entered the city. In 2015 he published his first novel, The Sympathizer, set in South Vietnam and the U.S. The book won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Nguyen, deconstructing Duras’ masterpiece, explains that it leads us to the understanding of the poignant and powerful affect of memory in our lives. And at the dawn of 2026 we are looking back at the trauma of 2025: chaos and corruption of national politics, but also enduring things; the heroism of firefighters and law enforcement personnel, researchers leading breakthroughs in cancer therapy, the everyday bravery of teachers in their classrooms.  

For many Americans the indelible wound of Vietnam remains a touchstone of penetrating memory, as it did for Duras, who most Americans have never heard of. That tiny corner of the globe became for two decades a stage for vast suffering and a setting for great heroism.

Unfolding as it does in Vietnam, the love affair that consumed Duras through her life and led her to creative brilliance, becomes also a beacon of the need for love of every human person. So we fast-forward to the present moment, the happy chatter of children around our kitchen table. Where does it fit, why does it matter?

We know the answer: children are our repository of memory. We watch them in the moment as they learn their world, then they’re adults, decades from their past and ours. We watch them outgrow the pizza party while we feel the years, aches, and burdens. They leave us the memories of those precious moments. They move forward to create more memories, treasured or regretted, but always new, always becoming.      

December 29, 2025

The days grew shorter, Christmas rushed in. The lights in the trees along Main Street twinkled brightly, set off by the night sky to create a mystical charm, the anticipation of joy. Still the holiday season seemed a bit off.

We did our best. A week ago the air at Paris Mountain State Park was chilly. Four friends wore gloves and thermals. North Lake reflected the high sun against the surrounding hills. We trekked along the lake, then paused. A few hikers and dogwalkers passed. The forest was mostly quiet, which is why we go. We talked about another outing on a trail near Pretty Place, the Blue Ridge mountain lookout at Camp Greenville. But the Christmas mood was bittersweet.

We broke into pairs and slogged a steep trail that winds up four or five switchbacks. From the summit another quarter-mile leads to the ruins of an old fire tower, built in 1938 and abandoned just a few years later. We stared at the site then moved down the trail and turned onto a one-mile spur.

In the woods or the city, the poetry and mystery of Christmas lifts us. Downtown, coffee drinkers reflected on their lives at Spill the Beans. A toy store, O.P. Taylor’s, was full of determined shoppers. It was the same at Mast General, where you can find almost anything having to do with the outdoors. A sign reads, “No dogs in the candy aisle.” People were buying sale items. I didn’t see the big-ticket jackets and sweaters moving.

Traditions don’t die, even at this ambiguous Christmas. We all did our best to create thrills. Parents searched the malls and the internet to stage the perfect Christmas morning. Strangers are giving to charities and local food pantries. We know about the need, which is everywhere. Standard&Poor’s reports that business bankruptcies reached a 15-year high in 2025. Many Americans, those without 401Ks, those thrown out of work, don’t feel the promised economic golden age.

Others closer to our lives are caught in the intense complexities of human connections, victims of conflicts of the heart. They were not far from mind days before Christmas.

We strung a few lights on the shrubs, fewer than last year. Michael sent us rare plants, we’ll try to make them last. A friend sent a solar-powered mobile that will light the yard. We taped up cards with photos of smiling kids.

We did the important things. On Christmas Eve the church was packed when we arrived nearly an hour early for the 3:00 PM Mass. The Methodist Church next door also was having an afternoon service. The 1:00 PM service at Fellowship Greenville, a megachurch a few miles away just ended, traffic piled up. Christmas is getting earlier.                                                                 A young girl sang the traditional hymns in lovely tones, lifting the congregation of regulars and the twice-a-year Catholics.  Everyone was in good spirits, appreciating the music, the prayers, the brief homily by the young priest who smiled and yelled “Merry Christmas.” Still, it was Christmas Eve, folks left early. The triumphant recessional, “Joy to the World,” was handled by a near-skeleton crew. On Christmas morning Christ-child statues appeared to complete the nativity creches set up on church lawns.

We remind ourselves that we share faith for a reason, it may lead to peace, serenity, whatever they mean. Then there are the children’s smiles and bright eyes.

We thought hard about grandsons’ gifts that would make a lasting impression, longer than a couple of minutes. I like to think of them turning pages, so we tried books. The boys dived into the gift stack early in the perennial morning ritual. They set aside The Call of the Wild and Adventures of Sherlock Homes, but will get to them shortly, I’m sure.

It goes on everywhere on Christmas morning, or nearly everywhere. Others are having different experiences, less festive, more complicated.

The mercury reached the high seventies. The warm spell hung on through Christmas afternoon, we got out and walked. The young woman across the street waved from her garage. It had been a while. She overcame family conflict, established herself in this town, built a promising career. We thought about other strong, resilient people confronting tragedy and hardship. Another friend copes with her mother’s dementia. Sheer courage lifts her, she perseveres, honoring God in service.

We kept walking. A young guy jogged alongside us, breaking from his run. “Training on Christmas Day?” I asked. “The Cooper River 10K, March 28th,” he said with a grin. “Over the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston.” I said I missed him at the Thanksgiving 8K, he disappeared out front with the leaders. “At 31 minutes you were one of the leaders.”

He’s four decades behind me, an electrician on the 4:00 PM to midnight shift at the Inland Port north of Greer. He and his wife have two small girls. “She used to be an occupational therapist, right now she’s a full-time homemaker,” he said. Those girls no doubt got what they asked for from Santa. It was a cheering thought, young folks pushing forward. He raced off.

Christmas will linger as long as we reach for the magic of grace for those around us. The kids are out of school, the hikers are on the trails, the Hyatt is showing off its collection of trees. Folks are taking pictures of the big one in from of the M. Judson bookstore.

Elsewhere, freezing rain and snow are falling, reinforcing winter. Soon temperatures here will plummet again. Meanwhile, at Christmas we count the strong people around us, young and not young. They are present in our lives, living with courage, moving forward, creating happiness for children and old folks, bearing glad tidings for all.

December 22, 2025

We trooped into the exercise room, a lady asked our names and checked us off. It was time for the annual Seniors Christmas Luncheon at the YMCA. The “elves” who had volunteered for the event were still removing the tin-foil lids from the bins of catered food. We took seats as Cheryl, the Active Seniors Group coordinator, announced the agenda: lunch, games, songs.

She led a short prayer: “Let’s have some blessings. Lord knows we all need some blessings in our lives right now.”

We had shown up the past couple of years at this gathering of old folks in old folks’ Christmas sweaters. I spotted a couple of people I had seen last year but attendance was definitely down. Two years ago the tables had filled the basketball court, a band played carols and Fifties tunes. Last year we were in this same far smaller exercise room, maybe a dozen tables, no band. Someone said the band director had passed away.

Sandy had mentioned she signed us up for this but I forgot and grabbed my usual sandwich at home. We drove over. I wasn’t very hungry when we went through the buffet line of smoked turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, mac ‘n cheese. Afterward, dessert: pumpkin pie, cakes, lots of cookies.

Others looked forward to it. They shuffled along, watching as the servers heaped food on their plastic plates, then headed for the pie table. It was Christmas lunch, after all.

The group is mostly women in their seventies and eighties, a couple are close to breaking ninety. The ladies know each other from the water aerobics classes or other Y-sponsored programs. They’ve become friends, talk on the phone, go out to lunch.

A few folks critiqued the food, some liking, others disliking the smoked turkey. The conversations leaned into health news, aches and pains, appointments, surgeries, plans for surgeries. Some news of deaths. One of the half-dozen men, Neal, sitting next to me, reported on his family’s ancestral farm in New York State. No one lives there permanently, but he and his wife Bonnie will be heading up there in a couple of months.

As lunch progressed Cheryl called us to attention, saying we could get second helpings. A few folks headed back to the food. Then she explained the game, twenty Christmas trivia questions. We tried to remember the name of the Grinch’s dog (Max); the three gifts brought by the Magi (gold, frankincense, myrrh); the state that produces that most Christmas trees (Oregon); and an old staple, the all-time favorite Christmas tune (White Christmas).

Our table got 10 of the twenty, another group won with 14 correct answers. They got to pick from the door prizes, which looked mostly like Christmas table centerpieces. Our actual centerpieces were provided by Neal and Bonnie. Cheryl warned us not to walk off with them, which sometimes happens at these things.

Neal headed to the front of the room and called for 12 volunteers to represent the 12 days of Christmas for the song. He gave each a sign printed with the gift for each day. Cheryl handed out lyrics, and we launched into off-key, unaccompanied singing. At each “day of Christmas” the volunteer with the sign for the day held it up. We all applauded. The volunteers got a chance to pick from the remaining door prizes.

We did a couple of others, but attention was wandering. It was nearly 3:00 PM. Cheryl invited the young YMCA staff people in to get lunch. To the rest of us she yelled, “Plenty of dessert left, grab some cookies!” I thanked Cheryl. We offered each other “Merry Christmas,” and headed for the door.

These things are going on all over, old folks are gathering for seniors lunches and sing-a-longs. Some are looking forward to Christmas with children and grandkids. Others are alone, coping with health problems in nursing homes and assisted living spaces.  For them, Christmas is hard time. The Y lunch is a big deal.

We’re working hard at getting in the spirit. Last weekend we took in a stirring classical concert at a nearby Presbyterian church and a happy blast of Christmas tunes by the city brass band. Music may get you to Christmas cheer.

Days later, the mercury fell into the teens. It warmed to the thirties, but the wind was gusting. Downtown, on Main Street, a dozen or so demonstrators waved signs in the weak late-morning sunlight. Some of them sang “This Land is Your Land,” the old Woody Guthrie folk song from the 1940s rerecorded by Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others in the Sixties.

Their signs ranged from “Tax the Rich, Feed the Poor,” and “Democracy Dies in Silence” to “Hands Off Our Democracy” and “One Very Angry Veteran,” among others.

Christmas shoppers hurried by. The demonstrators, in overcoats, hats, and gloves, shivered and stamped their feet. Their voices rang out in the cold air, carrying heartfelt feelings.

Some of them were young, a few as old as our Seniors Luncheon crowd. A few kept singing “This Land.” It’s on a different wavelength from “Jingle Bells.” In its own way the old song, in the clear tones of that shivering little group, celebrated something good and positive, perhaps bringing hope to believers, and maybe those blessings we all prayed for. Merry Christmas!