Jae Muey usually dressed in a secondhand slightly frayed wedding dress, looking very much like a fairy godmother. But she didn't do any whambo-bambo Harry Potter stuff. None of her magic shot out of a fancy wand. Rather, her special powers came from a beautiful soul and a faded three-wheel rickety push cart with a squeaky side wheel.
The magic was simply this: She joyfully picked up trash and kept the slums as clean as an ageing slum elder could -- all the while spreading her infectious smile and good spirit to everyone she met.
The prophets and all the great ones tell us that to inject peace into chaos is a gift higher than the highest heavens. The slums of Klong Toey were fertile ground for Jae Muey's magic.
Our gift of a fairy godmother used to traipse along the swamp canal, all the way to the backside of the bleakest backside, to the area where dogs and cats rarely tread and fighting cocks are trained still today. Until recently, when municipal garbage trucks carried away 36 loads of gook pulled from the muck, the water would bubble up with toxic gasses. It is still not entirely clean, but the stench is mostly gone. Toads and ducks are returning with deafening croaks and quacks, and even the turtles are moving back. Slowly, the way turtles do.
So, this was Fairy Godmother's stomping ground, the backside of the bleakest backside. It's also where she lived in a shack with her niece, Sri, the first in the clan to learn to read and write. Near Fairy Godmother's shack was the home of another slum godparent, Uncle June.
Like Jae Muey, he was and is high on a list of all-star slum elders. The pure souls whose selfless presence injects the calm into life's chaos. Uncle June never patrolled the slums for trash, but he's the kind of gentle and reliable neighbour that every neighbourhood -- slum or gilded -- needs. A while back when Jae Muey fell ill and her niece was off working, it was Uncle June who stepped up. He looked after Fairy Godmother's rickety cart and cared for her lame dog. He even paid a junkman 40 baht to fix the cart's wobbly wheel that had made it difficult to push. Afterward, he went to the local temple and picked out a pair of lady's reading glasses the undertaker collects from the deceased. The glasses were in perfect condition. He gave them to Jae Muey and, in return, she gave Uncle June some peace of mind.
The first time I met Jae Muey was a few years ago. Her grey hair was cut short, schoolgirl style, and she leaned on her trusty cart to feed her dog bits of picked-over rice from the garbage. The rice was clean and the lame pup, as always, was happy and riding shotgun in the cart. Fairy Godmother was wearing well-worn wafer-thin flip flops and a flowing long dress, which resembled a secondhand wedding gown. The dress was soiled, but relatively clean. You know, clean in a stylish, distinguished street-lady way. She had stopped at a faucet alongside the slum lane and used tap water to scrub away the most soiled parts -- like the crust of spilled instant noodles. She had no soap, of course, because soap is expensive, and after you use soap you need extra water for rinsing. Everyone in the slums knows that when "borrowing" tap water you skip the rinse cycle.
Anyway, I say her dress was "soiled" but that's not entirely accurate. Wedding dresses never soil, never stain, never fade. They never really lose their innate beauty. They might get a bit worn, a bit wrinkled through the years, but wedding dresses are spun from dreams -- and dreams are cut from resilient fabric. As someone once said: "How can anyone possibly take the dream out of a wedding dress?"
Jae Muey's selflessness of collecting trash and trying her best to keep the slums cleansed of bad energy had cleansed her. Her regular practice of helping others had left her unsoiled. She had an eternal beauty that no one could take from her. She was one of those worked-hard-all-her-life fairy godmothers who never had much money for herself, but who gave all she had to help others.
Not long ago, our fairy godmother died and went to heaven. Gently, ever so gently. Fell asleep in her push cart in front of her shack, just as the Sun was setting. Died with a smile on her face, so quietly she didn't disturb her lame dog.
The same reading-glasses undertaker was called and Fairy Godmother was moved from the shack to the death van, and then to the temple. The neighbour ladies washed the body, and then they even washed her secondhand slightly soiled wedding dress with lots of sweet-smelling soap. They rinsed twice. Then they brushed her hair and dressed her up real beautiful.
Every rag picker and cart pusher in the area was at the cremation. It was truly a glorious thing to see all of the lined-up carts and crutches and walking sticks. All of the slum's elders turned out. Even Lame Dog went to temple that day. Fairy Godmother would have been proud of how her dog protected her to the very end.
And who knows of these things? The old Buddhist lore is that it takes three days for the spirits of the dead to peacefully slip away to heaven, and the Catholic Irish also say that it takes three days for the souls of the just who die peacefully to go to heaven -- even if on the way they stop for a second at the grand cathedral in Cork City to whisper a prayer to our Blessed Mother.
After the temple cremation, Lame Dog returned with Uncle June and Sri -- Jae Muey's niece -- pushed the cart home. Nowadays, every so often and as often as she can, Sri can be seen pushing that cart through the backside of the bleakest backside and picking up trash among the chorus of toads and frogs. And in a way, Klong Toey's very own Fairy Godmother in a secondhand slightly soiled wedding dress lives on.
Father Joe Maier is the director and co-founder of the Human Development Foundation in Klong Toey. For more information, call 02-671-5313 or visit mercycentre.org.
