love

I sat in the back seat with Gavin as we drove to North Shore. Rose's mom chatted with Mike in the front, I looked out the window. Although Mike went to the festival last year, I hadn't been along the road since our wedding more than 3 years ago. I saw ghosts along the way, and I loved them: the teenage imprints of the boys and I walking from Kualoa covered head-to-foot in red mosh-pit dirt; my sad 23-year old self sitting at Kaaawa with my small baby jumping in my lap; Mike and Peter running through the surf at Sunset Beach; 17-year old Harris and I, lobbing water balloons at his summer camp near Turtle Bay; Mike the Marine dancing furiously to Irish music and swinging me in circles at the festival when I was 19. And Rose, almost there, a bit of her with us for the day in her wonderful mother.

We went to the opera in the evening. I switched my cocktail order at the last second, and the bartender dumped the liquor from my glass into Mike's before starting over. The people at the opera are amazing to look at. Women with fragile skin and delicate veins against purple velvet and pearls - bodies of all ages and shapes and posture wrapped in their best clothes and really truly beautiful. During the first act, Gavin swayed to the music and went limp in my arms, so long-legged and solid, almost all the baby gone from his sleeping little boy body. We ate at a lovely French restaurant as the crowd flowed out into the evening. Ron was unsuccessful in teaching Gavin to say "merci", but did manage to prompt an enthusiastic chant of "chocolate mousse". I enjoyed the most pretentious Diet Coke of my life, and Mike was surprised to find that he enjoyed the escargot. It made me happy to see my mother cut into the sugar of her creme brulee, one of those small things in life that is as beautiful to see in the dish as it is to see on the face of the person enjoying it. Mike and I examined the photos on headstones as we walked by the dark cemetery, Gavin dangling happily by our hands between us. One of the photos had fallen off and was lost, leaving an empty space that struck us as vastly sad.

On the way home, Gavin reached for my hand and pulled my arm across his lap, resting his cheek on my shoulder, stroking the inside of my elbow and threading his small fingers through mine. Beside us, Mike looked at him, pushed my hair back, and kissed my forehead. I looked at Ron's hand on my mother's knee in the front seat. The small ways we hold together through this fleeting trip.

There's so much love to be had in the world, it is almost too bright to look full in the face.

Me and Rose's mom, after 10 years:



Gavin ponders the graveyard on the way to the King and I at the Hawaii Opera Theater:



Getting with the program:




Gavin's reflections on passing a cemetary...
"All thems is dead?"
"Yes."
"I going die too?"
"Yes, we all will, but we have a lot of life to live before then."
"... I going to hit bad guys, and they die. Hit hit hit, like dat."
"What? Is that what you're going to do when you grow up?"
"Yep. I is. I be a policey man power ranger."
"How will you know who the bad guys are? What do they look like?"
"They has mustaches."
"All of them?"
"Yep, and I has a mustache, too. A biiiig mustache, and I hit them with it. And they fly hiiiigh up and crash! and make a big hole. And I fly after them, ha ha ha."
"Policemen can fly?"
"Yep. Like Superman." [Gavin has never seen Superman movies]