Alone (note to axe murderers: disregard)

The presents were bought, the tickets were nonrefundable, and so we flew to Oahu for my mother's birthday, which we celebrated in a pile of construction debris and Thai food containers. The boys were kept behind to finish renovation, and I was mailed back to Maui by myself to face a week of work and house hunting. I sat in the back seat between my sons and gripped their knees as we drove to the airport in the small blue VW - which may soon catch a barge over to replace the Chevy. And it is stick-shift. I decided to spend my week of isolation lifting weights and doing chin-ups, as this certainly means that I will also be needing to behead zombies and punch sharks (things, like driving stick, I also claim I would be able to do in a crisis). My superstitions are competing to determine which would cause less disaster; complaining about how everything can eat a bag of dicks and die in a fire, or greeting the challenge with optimism and manic enthusiasm. Opting to squint at it suspiciously and wait, for now.

After the initial grief of being left at the curb while my children cried and pressed their hands to the car windows, I broke into a state of emotional detachment. Walked across the tarmac to a roller skate on wings. The flight attendant appeared to be a young marine who had been plucked from a bar during his third shot of Cuervo and draped in a limp plastic life vest. The rattles of turbulence didn't bother me (and I once tried to steal valium from my cat on a bumpy plane ride). Found the car, paid up for parking, and drove to the grocery store for a cart load of Spinster Chow; fruit, Lean Cuisine, diet soda, beer, cat food. Drove home, listening to a Dean Koontz novel and skipping ahead through all the sappy bits.

So I'm here. With the cats and the quiet and all the pillows (also: locked doors and pepper spray), writing up lists and plans and sad emails to delete.

overwhelmed

Sarah knows things. You were just uncurling your talons to take hold of the first centimeter of the earth and exhale and then fuckity fuck, there goes the rug.

My entire life has been a slow-motion disaster film. We've always been moving forward toward the next destination. My mother grew up on Guam, lived on a boat her father built and sailed to Japan, Yap, and Hawaii. My grandfather earned his doctorate in Bloomington, and my teenage mother met my father at the Chinese restaurant where she worked as a waitress. A year later she was hospitalized for 3 months in Newfoundland, waiting for me to be born while her kidneys shut down. She worked through college, became a teacher, and the two of us moved to Arizona. We lived on the Navajo reservation in a small trailer. Then in a bigger one. We saw the small dramatic scenes of a rural community -  murder and gunshots and natural disaster. When the white folk at the nearby trading post town began getting shot, it was time to go. My aunt lived in Honolulu, and so we crossed the Pacific. We lived in a cramped city apartment, then a condo on Molokai, then a glass house in the clouds. We saw the redwoods at my youngest aunt's wedding, and Vancouver at my grandmother's bedside in the cancer ward. I flew off to Florida for art school, and moved from dorm to apartment to smaller apartment, driving north to swim in Lake George and fall in love and get a lot of speeding tickets in the Monte Carlo. Then back to Hawaii - rapid-fire years of birth, marriage, grad school, first job, divorce, heartbreak. I fled to the redwoods, walked through Seattle and San Francisco, had a short love affair, a reluctant reconciliation, an unexpected miscarriage, and a second pregnancy with my stupid lovable ex-husband. Fuck it all, I thought, and moved back to Hawaii with my son and huge belly and apologetic man. I found a corner and sat myself down and thought, finally, this is where I'm staying. Right here. I'll let the road take me, or a landslide, and I'll finally be home when it comes for me. 3 years have gone by. This last year was probably the best I've had since I was small enough to be carried to bed by my mom.


More overwhelming than the shock of the layoff has been the community response. People I've known for only months and years are pulling around me with tears, tight hugs, phone calls, moving arrangements, construction plans. This is where you belong, they tell me. This is your home, and we're keeping you and seeing your children graduate and growing old with you.

And so I am digging in my talons. This centimeter of earth is mine. For as long as I can keep hold.

blindsided

Long weekend. I dragged out the mower and chewed paths through the tall grass, kicking off my pants when it got too hot and impressing the mongooses with my Led Zeppelin undercrackers. We went to a kiddie party, and saw a naked mountain hermit lady lope across the driveway like a pink sasquatch. The power went out all day yesterday, and I took a page from the naked hermit and sunned my no-no bits in the back yard all afternoon while the infink splashed in his paddling pool. We ate Thai food in town, knocked papayas from our trees, collected lilikoi, then made green papaya salad and grilled pork chops with homemade passion fruit and tomatillo salsa. I knitted a hat. We played rummy by the light of the oil lamp and drank home-brewed Hefeweisen.

It was a golden, gorgeous weekend.

And this morning the power came back on, the email buzzed, and the man got his lay-off notice from his company in New York. There is much flailing and phone calling and shoulder-weeping going on today. 

I really don't know what we're going to do.

ogre dancing

I went to a dance party. I knew better than to go to a dance party.

It started well. I tarted myself up, took a look in the mirror, and thought, yep, respectably do-able.

It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There was strobe, and everyone looks fantastic under a strobe. Even the most uncoordinated flapping looks sexy when you can't see half of it. I huddled with a group of other furtive professionals and we shook our jiggly bits until our joints fused up. Just as I secretly suspected that I was an ice-skating prodigy the first time I pushed off and faceplanted at an ice rink, I swung my arms and felt certain that I was unleashing an untapped fount of dancing SENSATION.

And then the Facebook tagging began the next morning.

Recreation:

My evening of magic and mystery was revealed to be 3 hours of this:

I hate you, Facebook.