The diplomat who ate my frogs

Thank you, Facebook. You have uncovered a secret that’s haunted us for some 35 years. What ever happened to Suwit?He was a little boy from Thailand who rounded up all the frogs in the creek that flows behind our old farmstead, smashed their heads against a rock, then cooked and ate their legs.I didn’t know any of the frogs personally, but I so much enjoyed listening to them sing “rib it, rib it, rib it,” the frog melody that lulled me to sleep.We didn’t admonish the Thai boy, Suwit Soothijirapan, because he was our guest, sent to live with us by AFS as part of their international student program to familiarize foreign students with the real, not the Hollywood, version of America.As best as we could determine, Suwit came from a town about 100 miles north of Bangkok and lived in a house on stilts with farm animals underneath. He arrived with a small suitcase with one change of clothes for the year.At first he got along famously with our eldest son, Jonathan, until Suwit discovered that he was older than Jon. Apparently he believed that you don’t hobnob with anyone younger than you. Then Suwit became mysterious with my wife. When she asked him a question he would spread his arms out, look upward and say: “The answer is written in the wind!” Alas, there’s just so much of that you can take. (Today when I turn on the GPS in my car, the answer really is written in the wind!)Sadly, we got the idea that Suwit was not the least bit interested in learning about any of our American ways. And he didn’t make much attempt to give us a true understanding of what it meant to live in a little village way far away from one of the world’s most interesting cities.So when it came time for Suwit to return home there was no jolly going-away party, no urging him to send us his address and keep in touch. He just vanished out of our lives like a gust of wind.Thus you can understand the absolute shriek of incredulity when awhile back our daughter Ann called to tell us that she had a message on Facebook from Suwit. He said he had been following our family all these years, knew about our son, Adam, who died at age 36 from skin cancer, everything.I must be a late bloomer because I have only just started messing with Facebook but I found Suwit’s picture and message. He is a handsome man in his early 50s and has been serving as a diplomat for his country. His latest assignment was in the tiny, relatively new country of Timor.You’ve all heard of Timor, right? Maybe not. Our 22-year-old grandson not only never heard of Timor but barely knew about the mutiny on the Bounty, the most storied mutiny in the history of the British Navy.You remember how Fletcher Christian, leader of a mutiny on the British ship Bounty, set Captain Bligh and 35 crewmen, who remained loyal to him, adrift in a long boat and wished them well?Christian returned to Tahiti to pick up a dozen or so Tahitian women and then vanished off the face of the earth when he sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn Island. The island was a perfect hideaway because it had been misplaced on everyone’s maps of the South Pacific.Bligh meanwhile was trying to find an island refuge where he could put in to await rescue by the British Navy. There were several islands not too far from Tahiti but Bligh claimed he heard the natives were cannibals.So he sailed on and on and on. When he and his men ran out of food and water they fished and caught birds. After an incredible voyage of 3,000 miles in the small open boat, Bligh and his desperate crew landed at, ha, you guessed it, the island of Timor!And so now the story comes full circle. I sent Suwit a Facebook message asking him if there was a plaque on a rock or building in Timor telling of Bligh’s record-breaking voyage. Suwit answered me, but in Thai script, which I am not able to translate.I guess I won’t really ever know. Mayhap I should look to the sky on a windy day. Freelance writer Barnett Laschever, the curmudgeon of Goshen, has taken to watching top chefs creating fancy dishes on the Cooking Channel. He’s waiting for Bobby Flay or Wolfgang Puck to prepare before his very eyes a gourmet dish of frog’s legs.