Tong kong and mud
Sweet Time and rum
Manila camera shop
Pan Am champagne flight
Dock of the Green Spot
San Francisco seagulls
Peppermint Patty
In a Notre Dame Baseball Hat
Barry Devine and talk and gin
Editing the Peace Corps Oath
Poker games with Anejo and laughter
strip poker with Pan Am playing cards

Stuck in Tagbilaran
with the Cebu Blues again
Hell’s Angels of Manila
Lifeboat mentality
Grateful Dead and Brandy
in the reading room
You shared a letter
I shared a poem
We both shared our lives
Milwaukee and Seattle
Amazing to be
In Southeast Asia

Notes: tong kong is a green leafy vegetable common in the Philippines. There was a field of it at our training site on Cebu island. One night I was carried out into the muddy tong kong field; Tagbilaran is the port city for the island of Bohol where I, and several in my group, went by overnight boat for our “host volunteer visits” when we were less than 2 weeks in the country; Anejo is a Philippine rum; there was a reading room at our training site where we often hung out socially in the evening (it was near the tong kong patch); we drank San Miguel beer and Anejo when the reading room turned into a dance hall one evening; Barry Devine was (I believe) the Country Director of Peace Corps Philippines in 1974 when I was sworn in; Sweet Time (I think) was a restaurant/drinking establishment at the dock where we hung out; Pan Am airlines gave everyone in our group champagne during the flight on the 747 (which was nearly empty, esp. in our section) when we flew from San Francisco to Hawaii to Guam to Manila.