Countdown to Hawaii

A week from today Sara and I leave for a vacation in Hawaii!

As the countdown begins it seems an auspicious moment to restart this moribund blog. I plan to chronicle our Hawaiian adventures here (provided of course I can get an Internet connection on the coast of Kauai) in hopefully interesting and unexpected ways. But because the blog has been dead for SO long, there's a risk that no one will notice. Hence I'm going to "rev up" with some entries during this preparatory week, which will hopefully act as a twinkle in the window for those who care to look this way.

The week before a vacation is fully valid as a vacation topic anyway, filled as it is with exotic purchases and a mounting sense of incredulity. Even here, seven full days out, the real world is starting to become transparent around us, and the little Hawaii pamphlets scattered on the countertop seem glowing with surreal vividness, like spot-colored objects in an artsy black-and-white scene. Sara bought a snorkel. I rummaged around and found my bathing suits. Seven days to go!

The background: it's our 20th anniversary. (Well, actually the anniversary is November 4, but project schedules at my job made it more practical for me to take the time off now.) This kind of number is worthy of romantic celebration all by itself, but in truth there's a whole other level of need to it.

Over the last two years Sara and I have lost both our mothers to cancer. Sara's lost an uncle as well, and my father has had complications that have made us start arranging Assisted Living for him. It's been two years, not only of death, but of constant TRAVEL in the service of death. All our relatives live on the East Coast; we have been back and forth in airplanes more times than we can count, back to family scenes, family climates, family needs. We've managed this explosion of last-minute jetting despite me being laid off twice in these years: somehow we found the money. When you have to find it, you do.

Well, after the last two years we needed to find some for ourselves.

Our elderly East Coast relatives, of course, remain convinced that all our emergency flights and hospital stays were "vacations" for us. Grieving though they were, they still found room for delight at our "visits," yea, even at graveside in the winter rain. Likewise, the two employers who laid me off turned suspicious and no doubt envious eyes at my taking another "jaunt" to New York in the midst of their deadlines. A floating fiction has attached itself to us, ghoulish and sticky, in which we've somehow ENJOYED the last two years -- a fiction we started to half-believe ourselves -- a fiction that could only be exorcised by the holy radiance of ACTUAL TRAVEL, of a REAL VACATION, for US.

So this Hawaii trip is Romantic in both senses of the word: it's a kissing reconnection in a beautiful setting; and it's a quasi-supernatural battle with emotional forces that express themselves in gloomy scarps, walking shafts of sunlight, and implausible turrets of voluble nature.

I'll try to capture both aspects in the weeks to come.

--Matt