When I said my wedding vows nineteen years ago, did I think my marriage would end at a Greyhound bus station in Green Bay, Wisconsin on the night of a Donald Trump rally?

No.

I was visiting my soon to be ex-husband in Door Country, Wisconsin, it being a slight commute from my home in Kunming, China. We had grown apart, physical and everything else. And on Friday, August 5, 2016, we had a fight over everything and nothing, leading to my realization that my marriage was not a De Beers diamond commercial and my credit cards being chopped up by my husband.

This was a real quagmire, or in Chinese, a mafan (bad rice), as the majority of my cash was colorful yuan. I didn’t have plastic to order a UBER or other “credit card” required ride. Luckily, along with the pink faces of Mao Zedong, I did have a hundred-dollar bill and a Greyhound bus ticket to Michigan, looping over the Upper Peninsula You know things are bad if you think having a Greyhound ticket is lucky. But a hundred wouldn’t cover cab fare, and the bus wouldn’t be pulling out of Green Bay until midnight, which was ninety miles from the touristy town I was stranded in, with the shards of my platinum VISA. Ninety miles that might have been nine thousand.

The good news was that the touristy down was just like jumping into a Norman Rockwell painting. Friendly faces with freckles eating cheese curds and other dairy products. I just had to figure out how to jump out of it to make my bus like midnight. I knew there was a place to find answers, happy endings and even scribbled phone numbers to carpools.

The library.

I crossed my fingers, hoping there be an old-fashioned bulletin board in the foyer cluttered with cottage rentals and carpoolers. But all I found was a box of Nora Roberts novels under a stuffed deer head. I wiped my nose and walked inside the temple of knowledge, and near the return cart, I saw my answer. A librarian, about my age with a beaded lanyard dandling around her neck. As I approached her, she put on her glasses.

The words flew out of my mouth like emotional projectile vomit. “My husband kicked me out, and I have to get back to China.”

She furrowed her brows. A guy in the periodical section tunes in. I wasn’t a local patron with a library card who wanted to bum the bathroom key. I was an out of towner with panda eyes from crying. I was the me I never thought I would be.

“I might know someone. Where can he pick you up?”

“At the ice cream shop.”

“He’ll be there at four.”

“Four?”

The librarian hands me a fresh tissue. “He wants to beat the crowds. There’s a Donald Trump rally in Green Bay.”

“You got to be kidding.” I still couldn’t believe that the host of the Apprentice was running for president. But the chances of him winning would be as crazy as if the Cubs snatched the World Series.

“Yes. And the convention center is not far from the bus station.”

Forty-five minutes later, I get into an old Taurus with someone referred to me by a librarian, accepting her recommendation as if it were the debut novel by a new author, headed towards the epicenter of Making American Great Again. Did I mention I was in the state known for serial killers and dairy farms? Jeffrey Dahmer, David Spanbauer, Ed Gein, and squeaky cheese? But I’d take my chances. After all, any driver in Wisconsin would be safer than any cab in China. His name was Ken and he didn’t go to church much but his actions that day were more Christian than most pew warmers.

I arrived at the Greyhound station five hours too early, buying the Good Samaritan a tank of gas and a Super Gulp. I walk into the terminal and on every screen was the broadcast of the event happening just two blocks away. If I went to Donald’s rally, it would be a distraction. From the wait, my marriage, my everything.

I look around the station for an accomplice. Slim Pickens that day for a place famous single mother’s holding crying babies, marines heading back to wherever they are stationed, parolees with tickets to their grandmothers. But scrounging around the vending machines, there was an older gentleman checking for change. The ticket agent behind the bulletproof glass seemed to know him.

“Hey Zachariah, this lady wants to know if you’d walk with her to the rally.”

He scratched his chin. “Might not be many black folk there.”

“Might not be no one there.” I smiled. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

Sealed Deal.

Over the next few hours as we moseyed around T-shirt hawkers, Trump supporters and Hillary haters, Zachariah tells me how he lost a daughter to a bullet, his wife to a lump, his job to a factory closing. Yet I was the one crying.

I swear Zachariah was an angel in second-hand khakis. He even carried my bag.

“The station closes at nine. I can stick around for a while,” he says looking around the parking lot.

“I’ll be OK.”

Zachariah smiles then disappears to who knows where, leaving me blubbering on my duffel and waiting for my bus back to the rest of my life. I swatted mosquitoes for a few hours and waved at the occasional police car making its rounds. But then, around ten, I saw a thin figure walking towards me. His boots click on the pavement, his mustache a throwback from the seventies. My heart leaped into my throat. I didn’t have mace or a cell phone to call 911. I wished that the cops would make another round.

As he gets close, I can read his T-shirt:

JESUS DIED FOR YOU.

TRUMP LIVES FOR YOU.

“Designed it myself,” he says.

I felt it wasn’t the time to share my political views.

I notice what is in his hands. It wasn’t a gun or deer knife to skin me alive. It’s a roll of toilet paper with Hillary Clinton’s face.

“Got this, too.”

Hillary’s face was blotchy black and white, her eyes wide, her mouth open. Who’d ever think I’d run into her at a bus station.

Mr. T-shirt looks at my face, my eyes still swollen from my crying. He rips me off a few squares. “I think you could use some.”

“Thanks.”

We talk for a while under the lights, about everything and nothing — except for politics. I wonder if this guy is an angel, too.

A bus pulls up around ten.

“Appleton?” the driver asks.

“That’s me.”

The stranger boards the bus and once again, I’m alone swatting mosquitoes and waving to the police as they make their rounds.

Years later, I think about the day, the ending that seemed as impossible as the Cubs snatching the pennant and the host of the Apprentice becoming president. I have no idea of the long road ahead of me. The journey of divorce and recovery is a lot longer than the bus ride and flight to China combines. But I thank God for Good Samaritans with old Tauruses, homeless guys for their stories, Hillary haters for wiping my tears. And yes, I am even thankful for Donald for bringing us together that day.

.

But my husband didn’t leave me in suburbia with the keys to the storage unit. He left me in China, in a quaint village of six million while he moved back with his parents in Wisconsin.

Translation? My divorce spans two continents and thirteen-time zones and fluctuating currency exchange rates.

Because of my peculiar living situation, I had the choice to file for divorce in one of three states: Illinois: where lawyers are more expensive than parking near Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Option two: Michigan, where I’m a legal resident but don’t live. Or divorce choice number three: Wisconsin, where legal fees are the least but my attorney’s time is still billed at sixty-nine cents a second.

Yes, I talk fast.

Living overseas brings crazy twists to what could have been an amicable divorce. For starters, my husband is requesting a forensic account to look over my pay stubs, that are literally the makings of ticker tape.

I don’t blame him.

Then, I had to get something notarized, which isn’t as easy as dropping into your local bank branch. First the document had to be drafted in Chinese, then translated into English, then the English was translated back into Chinese and finally back into English.

Then there’s the getting up in the middle of the night for court hearings and attorney calls, when it’s too late to crack open a Tsingtao but too early to fire up the coffee machine.

I scrape every yuan — about six cents — to pay for closure.

My budget for food is two dollars a day, just like the kids you can support with extended bellies and flies buzzing around their faces. But in China, a few dollars can stretch far — hopefully all the way to Green Bay.

Still, I’m looking for options to pay for my freedom or dig myself out of divorce debt. If all else fails, I could sell a kidney, something people can readily do this part of the world.

While the recipient of the pays over seven figures for the black market organ, the donor gets about three grand.

That’s not even thirteen hours’ worth of legal fees.

Now back in the nineties, my father got a donated kidney.

I remember the day crystal clear. The phone rang about six on a Saturday morning. My Dad got all teary when he heard the nurse say,

“Good morning, Mr. Sinsabaugh.”

She didn’t even have to finish her sentence.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where the kidney came from. It wasn’t from a desperate father in Indonesia who needed to feed his family but a kid from a local bible college who got killed crossing a major road. The college had Dutch Reformed roots, one of the few in the country. It changed the last few years of my Dad’s life.

Now fast forward a few years. I’m asked to speak at some podunk town in southern California. It’s in the middle of dairy country, which oddly enough, was Dutch Reformed territory.

Making small talk with the pastor, I told him the story of my Dad’s donated body part from a Dutch Reformed college. “When a kid at that college died, my dad got his kidney.”

His wife’s eyes got the size of golf balls. “That was my cousin.”

Then my eyes got the size of golf balls, too. I had a chance to say thanks for the gift given to my Dad.

It was a six degrees of Kevin Bacon like moment, sort of. I mean, what were the chances?

I wonder if those who sell body parts get a thank you. I wonder if those who buy black market parts even want to thank the seller, or are they too ridden with guilt.

So, I decide to keep my kidneys and when I die, to donate whatever I don’t spend on this divorce to buy legs for landmine victims in Laos (you can, too, by clicking here.)

But I did investigate body parts that are legal to sell:

Hair

Sperm

Breast milk

And finally, poop.

Gee, To think of all the money I’ve been flushing down the toilet over the years.

If you are considering midlife divorce, Without This Ring, by Abby Rodman, can help you muster up the courage.

I was on the other side of the world when the news hit, in the Mangkok district of Hong Kong, in a hotel room about the size of my first cubicle at Leo Burnett. I wasn’t doing touristy things or eating dim sum with this guy. I was sick, bedridden and the news on the television made me sicker.

It was coverage of the Las Vegas shootings.

I was tòng bù yù shēng (痛不欲生 ) or overwhelmed with sorrow.

It was awful. I was held hostage. Either I watched the breaking news or an Australian cooking show featuring crocodile quesadillas, which wasn’t appealing either. I turned back to BBC and listened to the reporter. Did he say twenty-three guns in this guys’ hotel room or had the cold meds made my mind muddy? Then this guy had nineteen more weapons at his home? Plus five hand guns and two more shot guns at his Reno residence?

That’s forty nine guns.

I can’t even check out that many books at Chicago’s Public Library without a problem.

Trust me. I know. I checked out a book in 2013 and left it in China. Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. I had to change my name and address to get a new library card. Either that, or get my mug shot added to Chicago Library’s Ten Most wanted list.

Upon returning to China, I bequeathed my library card to one of my best friends who will rename anonymous (though her last name rhymes with Squirrel-Gutter). She hasn’t run up any fines but every time she puts a book on hold, a notice ends up in my inbox in China.

Nine thousand miles away. Behind the Great FireWall where Google and YouTube and FB are banned. But Chicago Public Library has it figured out.

Yet, this man in Las Vegas legally purchasing forty nine guns and his local police department was none the wiser.

Now fifty (wǔ shí or 五十) is the limit of books you can legally check out from the Chicago Public Library. Don’t you think that should also be the cap for guns one can own?

Granted, libraries aren’t without their problems. Once, I had to use a computer at the CPL branch on Belmont Avenue and the only machine open was next to a guy viewing something other than microfiche. He was viewing porn, but lucky with headphones. When I complained to the librarian, she informed this patron was protected by the first First Amendment. Watching porn in public libraries is also protected in the state of New York, according to this NPR story. But porn won’t kill you. Libraries are also a haven for pick pockets, as I have had both a wallet and computer bag lifted while intensely working on a project. Pickpockets won’t kill, you either.

But one thing isn’t allowed at Chicago’s Public Libraries: concealed guns.

Laura Bush is known for saying, “I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card. “

And Walter Cronkite said, “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot more guns in our country than library cards. There are more registered guns than people in this country and not every citizen has a legal library card. Right, Miss Squirrel-Gutter?

As of 2013, there were over five times as many registered gun dealers — (58,344) than public libraries. You can see how many gun dealers are in your state.

I got sick thinking about the shootings, the deaths, the wounded, the out of control violence in nation that’s still digging out from hurricanes. I turned off the TV and thought about when I was in grade school, how a classmate accidentally shot her sister with her father’s shot gun, thinking the noise outside was a prowler. I’ll never forget seeing her school picture on the front page of the local newspaper. Even thought that was over forty years ago, I’m sure my classmate deals with that headline everyday. As will those who lived through Las Vegas.

Hopefully, the issue of gun control won’t be silenced this time. 为时不晚 — wéi shíbù wǎn — it is not too late.

Until then, maybe librarians should run the NRA.

Prayer bells at Wong Tai Sin Temple, Hong Kong.

My mind goes back to the early 1970s, to Watervliet’s old Junior high School, otherwise known as the Zoo. My mom went to high school there and kissed her first boy friend– in the gym–all glitzed up for prom night. Then my Uncle Norman got hung out of a window by his classmates as a prank, which nearly gave his teacher having a heart attack.

I tried to remember these things as I wanted to disappear in my 7th grade social studies class, where I was severely bullied. Notes were being passed by the boys snickering in the next row, the teacher turning a blind eye. Or was the teacher actually sleeping?

Who does a kid turn to?

I avoided the stairwell near the gym as I was spit on by boys standing at the top. And as much as I loved art class, the area to wash our paint bowls was just out of earshot of the teacher.

More hurtful remarks.

And of course, the scribbles on the bathroom wall stalls, the original form of social media.

And so the memories go.

These thoughts crossed my mind as I stood in front of my school’s student body to receive a birthday card yesterday. I also received an unexpected gift from a group of the 7th graders.

Booing.

Booing. It’s one word that needs no translation.

This was the day after the principal talked to these same students about their ongoing behavioral problems. And not just in my class.

It’s just that in my class, discipline problems are magnified due to the role of my job. I’m the language police, the undercover agent who spots the child who can’t read or write.

As the ELL teacher (English for the Language Learner) my job is to work on issues other instructors might not see or ignore. I insure a student knows the difference between a cheetah and a llama after reading a short passage without pictures. Or that the kid with perfect pronunciation can comprehend what she just read (often not). Then there’s the problems out of my scope, like a few students whose handwriting is written in a language I call scribbleze. I suspect its some sort of dyslexic thing, something about as common in China as clean air, since pictorial characters are decoded in a different part of the brain. Meaning, sloppy English penmanship from a student with acceptable Chinese handwriting is often blamed on “Western teacher who allow shit work”.

Anyway, my 7th grade classroom doesn’t smell of valve oil or eraser dust of WJHS, it smells of the various food squirreled away in student’s desks (even though food in the classroom has been officially banned) along with teenybopper cologne being spritzed at every break. As I snatch up the sucrose contraband, I focus on how the western staff successfully stopped the 7th graders from a having a coffee maker in class.

As western teachers fight for discipline- believing it’s the foundation of education, Chinese staff have a YinYang 陰陽 philosophy, keeping balance in the classroom, which often means siding with the student when the instructor is ready to blow a gasket.

“Mac LaoShi, student misunderstood you. He not know FUCK no allowed in spelling game. Or, “Mac LaoShi, student misunderstood no standing on desk to throw water bottle not allowed”.

But before being booed by the students born in the Year of Entitlement, I glanced over their essays on, “What I Need to Do Now to Prepare for High School.” I groaned at the one where the only legible line was, “I have beautiful blue eyes” as well as one quickly penned by another student, one I presumably she had memorized and written before on, “What it Means to be Successful”.

But I did take the time to read one from a newer student, one hungering to learn instead of eating banned candy. As I read his legible words, I discovered he wanted to quit school after his first few days, but changed his mind after –gulp– attending my class. I guess I showed a Happy Birthday video on his birthday.–something I forgot about–something that he dearly remembered. This kid is hard working, the kind that will eat American students up for breakfast one day. But his essay concluded, “I don’t know why 7th grade classmates all hate you. I think you good teacher”.

A lump forms in my throat. Memories rush back.

I look around the room for a teacher to tell. Oh, I am the teacher.

So I get yanked from my desk to attend the assembly where I get booed. Another lump, this the size of a grapefruit forms in my throat. I desperately scan the crowd for the boy who wrote the essay. He waves and smiles. I hold back tears by glancing at two birthday students standing next to me: a toothless second grader who’s working hard learning the difference between P and B, and a senior who studies around the clock for her TEFL test…a test that’s over a year away.

I wipe my tears. The lump in my throat melts. The memories fade.

There is more to life than the 7th grade.

When Life Gives You Butt Beans

My name is Ginger MacDonald or 麦静洁, which translates into Pure and Peaceful Hamburger Bun when you put it into Mandarin Translators. I know this because I lived in Kunming, China for four years. It’s a quaint village of six million people on the fault line of the old China and new, where English is the new currency and modern high rises are being built by men wearing rice hats with wicker baskets on their backs.

That’s where I was the spring of 2014, the day before my fifteenth wedding anniversary, when my husband announced he wanted to leave.

He didn’t want to leave China.

He wanted to leave me.

Me, the woman he vowed he’d be with for better or worse, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, through sickness and health and explosive diarrhea after eating jaozi from a street vendor, and all of that other jazz that’s supposed to make life a living breathing Hallmark card.

To make this fairy tale even worse, our fifteenth anniversary was right around the corner, falling on — how appropriately — Good Friday.

But unlike you, I couldn’t go to Wal-mart and numb my pain with large quantities of Cadbury eggs. It’s not because China doesn’t have Wal-marts — they do and curious locals follow you around to see what a měiguórén will buy. It’s because Easter isn’t celebrated in China anymore than Tomb Sweeping Day is in Cleveland. And besides, even the best Chinese candy tastes like sour milk.

I couldn’t get lost in the crowds at the Flower Market and cry myself silly, because a crying white woman in Chinese flower market is about as rare as a crying white woman in Chinese flower market. Curious onlookers would offer me a tissue and ask, “White woman, why water full of sorrow flow from face?”

So instead, I made plans to visit Kafelaku on my anniversary, a sleek new coffee shop overlooking a park where old woman did morning Thai Chi. The signature drink was both high end as well as rear, one that was made with the help of the intestinal track of the Asian civet. The cat swallows the beans whole then excretes them out in Pay Day Bar clumps . Technically, it’s called Copi Lawak, but I call it Butt Bean brew. It was just what I wanted to drown my sorrows.

I called my friend Meg to join me, a trooper whose been working in Chinese orphanages way before adopting Asian babies was in vogue. Meg had the three qualities needed to survive life in China for fifteen years: faith, a sense of humor and an endless supply of hand sanitizer.

When I told her my plans, Meg agreed that butt bean coffee would be great way to celebrate my anniversary.

That is, until she found out the price.

“Forty dollars a cup?” Meg exclaimed. “We’ll take the local barley tea.” She stomped back to our table with two cups of a murky liquid that tasted like dirty Grape Nuts.

My sobs turned into full blown wails. My runny mascara gave me panda eyes. I couldn’t stop crying. And it wasn’t just the taste of the tea.

As Meg wiped away my tears, we talked about the irony of my anniversary falling on Good Friday. Maybe, just like the story goes, my marriage would miraculously come back to life after being dead for a bit. That would be a storybook ending. But then, we discussed the Easter back story of Judas, the good guy turned bad who betrayed his famous friend. Maybe that was the final chapter of my fracture fairy tale. Betrayal. Broken friendship.Blame. Either way, God wasn’t going to take the cuppa joe away from me.

“I’m hoping for option A,” I sniffled.

“But prepare yourself for B,” Meg advised.

I knew she was right but didn’t want to go there. This was supposed to happen to someone else, not me. I was a born again believer, not just of the guy who brought us Easter, but of romantic comedies and their respected saviors: Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire. Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally, Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, and the silver screen gospel message: Boy falls in love with girl. Boy leaves girl. But boy comes back to girl and resurrects the relationship before the audience polishes off their tub of popcorn. After all, faith promises marital bliss without ever having a striped Asian cat cross one’s path.

Or does it?

“Excuse me for a moment.” Meg scooted away her chair and marched towards the barista, a lanky guy more interested in his cell phone than in customers. Her rapid fire Mandarin caught the ear of his manager. Before long, all three were looking at the picture of the striped bushy tailed cat on the menu board. A few moments later, Meg returned with a big smile and a small surprise.

She grabbed my left hand and put something inside. “It’s all I could afford.”

“What is it?”

“It’s your very own a butt bean, pooped out by a constipated cat.” Meg paused to reapply some hand sanitizer, understandable after handling feline droppings.

My puffy eyes lit up as I examined her gift.

“Your anniversary is no different than this butt bean. A hard experience can be worth nothing or can be something that will get you to change.You must decide what you want to do with it.”

I looked at the small shiny object and knew my friend was right. When life gives you butt beans, you can do nothing or you can make coffee and sell it for forty bucks a cup.

Meg poured her barely tea in the trash. “Let’s get out of here. Do you want to take a taxi or rickshaw?”

Three years later…

My girlfriend’s words of wisdom still brew in my mind.

While the Chinese calendars proclaimed 2014 to be the Year of the Horse, I will forever remember it as the Year of the Butt Bean. I experienced enough butt beans to open a coffee chain that would rival Starbucks. Along with my marriage crumbling like a bad fortune cookie, I returned to the states without home, job, game plan for the rest of my life, and the most tragic thing of all: without the key to our storage unit. Just a darn good wok and few Chenglish T-shirts.

And oh yes, that coveted bean.

I ended up moving into a faith based community in Chicago, cooking for a group of Jesus happy hippies who devoted their lives to serving the poor. Outcasts, addicts and misfits, each with their own signature blend of butt bean experiences.

I started every morning the same way: by chopping onions, an average of forty pounds each morning, without shedding a tear.

I left them all at Kafelaku.

I tried my best not to stare at her hair plugs.

“I’m trans gender.”

“Oh really?” My acting was bad as the doll-like holes on her forehead but her voice was water to my parched ears. We were in an English language desert, the Thai Immigration Bureau in Bangkok, located a three hour bus ride from anywhere familiar, as was the story I was about to hear. The chatty fifty-five year old Muslim woman applying for a retirement Visa used to be an Amish man. And I had fifty-five million questions.

“What state did you grow up in?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“And how many schools have you taught at?”

“Fifty two in thirty years. Not one asked me to renew a contract.”

“And what triggered you to change your faith?”

“My students in Dubai,” she tucked a fly-away hair behind her ear. “They were so inspiring.”

Wow. Fifty two new schools. A new religion. A new gender. A new retirement visa. That‘s a lot of change. As we waited for our numbers to be called, I became convinced of one thing. You need change when you want it the least. Maybe not changing your religion, assigned gender, employment status, zip code and cable provider all at once, but an occasional shake up is good. A get off the couch of life and throw the remote out the window already.

Since my husband left me in China — without even the keys to our storage unit in Chicago, damn it — I have to change. And I don’t want to. I’m in my fifties and was hoping this was the decade of planning my “happily ever after” not my reinvention. I already left one career for a new one, my body revolting midlife with hot flashes, my neck resembling the chamois my dad used to wash his car on Sundays. My life is an Etch a Sketch with two broken knobs. Even if I want to change, I feel overwhelmed.

Instead of facing reality, I go to the corner and buy a stack of pirated DVDs, many starting with the phrase:

FOR ACADEMY CONSIDERATION ONLY

But I cry even harder because Hollywood makes mid-life change look so easy. Viagra popping husband leaves non-suspecting wife, but instead of ruining her day or running her mascara, she embraces the situation like Kryptonite and invents a new mop or starts a restaurant with her strapping sons. That’s when I throw a shoe at the TV and pour myself a tall glass of peanut juice with a splash of Jack. Why can’t I be like that? Why can’t this slightly incontinent, too pudgy for spandex superhero conquer change that spans two continents and thirteen time zones?

Even if they are meddled with Chenglish, inspirational posters offer good advice:

If you fell slippery in hole, throw carefully you rope.

Well, the rope I was counting on to help me with change was my faith. Prayer was my Valium, my prescription to combat chaos.But moving to Asia changed that too, as my American brand of Jesus was ripped out of its hermetically sealed package and trampled on the ground. It can’t go back to what it was any more than I can shove cockroach toothpaste back into its tube.

But maybe I don’t need faith in God…maybe what I need is faith in me, like my English speaking friend with the new tourist visa .

“Try looking at these,” she scribbled a few school names on an abandoned ticket number. “They are military but the pay is good. Take care, sweetie.”

“Thanks.” I smiled.

As the Muslim Woman formally known as an Amish Man took off in the sunset and got stuck in gridlock traffic, I smiled and looked at the crumpled ticket. Her leads may not go anywhere, but she ignited a change in me, starting with my definition of a guardian angel.

They might not have wings but they definitely have hair plugs.

I didn’t know what to say when a friend lost her second son to suicide. Losing one was tragic enough. But two? That was more twisted than a plot Stephen King could dream up. Living in Asia made it hard to wrap my arms around the globe to give her a hug.

Pain of that magnitude would take Gods of all kinds to help wipe the tears. I vowed to light incense at every temple I came across in Asia, from those with blinking lights and offerings of Red Bull in Vietnam to those with long eared Buddhas in Yunnan. I wanted to make a pilgrimage to Bangkok to the Chao Mae Tubtim better known as the Penis Shrine.

It was tucked behind the old Swiss Grand Hotel. On an ancient river bed, in the shade of a gnarly bohdi tree were hundreds of phallic objects. Some were lined up like soldiers ready to fire, others lustful, others sad and finger like, one ten feet tall, a few appearing to had been carved with a pocket knife. All that was missing was the Cialis bath tub couple.

Women who want to conceive have been visiting this fertility clinic for over a hundred years. But I didn’t visit to set back the hands of my biological clock, I first went out of kinky curiosity. And this time, I had a mission.

The air was oppressively hot that day of my penal pilgrimage, making the wand of deodorant I packed just a waste of luggage space. I didn’t need a map, I had my own landmarks. I walked past pomegranate and tangerine stands, the bootleg DVD man, past street-workers leaning back on walls checking their cell phones. A few right turns later, I saw the aging hotel and scurried down the secret path behind it, cutting across the loading dock. When I finally got to the bohdi tree, my heart went flaccid.

The shrine had been castrated.

This was not good.

Had Chao Mae Tuptim finally hit menopause? Were prayers and offerings no longer honored there? Was my sweaty trek just another hot flash?

I stumbled around the few remaining penises, like a poor peasant gleaning a wheat field, until I found one worthy of a prayer. It was carved of dark wood and about the size of a trophy I had received in the eighth grade. A few faded ribbons adorned this set sleek set of family jewels; a few wilted wreathes of wilted marigolds were tossed on it side. I dropped my bouquet of white lilies at its base then scratched my head.

I mean, I had never prayed to a penis before.

I didn’t know what to say.

I didn’t want to be greedy and dump all of my wants, like the frigidness I had of my future, doubts about my impotent faith. I would save those for a temple filled with monks in mustard colored robes.

I got on my knees and thought about the two brothers who had slipped through the door to the great unknown. I prayed they would keep bringing life to our world, no matter where they were.

As I picked a few leaves off my knees, a gardener put down a basket of clippings to see what I was doing. I wanted to ask what happened to the shrine, but couldn’t as I didn’t speak the bouncy Thai language that sounded like a tongue playing ping-pong.

After some investigation, I discovered the hotel was being purchased by a hospital. I imagined the shrine being replaced with a reserved parking lot for hot shot staff or a Starbucks cafe.

I guess it doesn’t matter that I don’t know what to pray to a penis. I might never have the chance again. Unless I pray for one more thing: that the hospital keeps the original fertility clinic.