The king of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, died on Thursday. I wore yellow corduroy pants to remember him (yellow is his color, I believe because of the day of the week on which he was born). I lived in Thailand for a year after college, and during the first year I was back in the US I wore one of the King’s commemorative bracelets (kind of looked like a LiveStrong bracelet, but with Thai script–you could only buy them at the post office) most of the time. That was how I came to be friends with the owners of Absolute Bagels, the best bagels in Manhattan–my first week in NYC I walked in there and the woman behind the counter was wearing the same “long live the king” bracelet that I had on.
Every time I went to the movies in Thailand–which was ALL THE TIME, because unlike the UK and some other countries, they released American movies the same day that the US did (actually the day before, if you want to ponder time zones) and because movies were about $2.50–I stood, along with the rest of the audience, for a short movie about the king’s life. It was set to extremely emotional music and I think I literally cried, at least a sniffle, every single time. From an outsider’s perspective, the King seemed like a much more revered version of the British Monarchy–his powers weren’t codified and he didn’t run the government the way monarchs of some nations do, but the prime minister and the army listened to his advice. De facto rather than de jure ruling, which worked, mainly, because he was so beloved.
