The Watcher Leaves

You are being watched.

Oh, yes you are.

By me.

You are hurriedly putting your bags through the agricultural quarantine scanner at the airport, and you just look like a guy from San Francisco. Like a guy I might even know. But you are trying to dress like you’ve been to Hawai`i. And naturally, because you are who you are – you there, with your appealing, stocky build and your good hair and short beard – you have done a good job. I’d almost think that you were local by your choice of aloha shirt. But of course you’re not.

You nod and smile. You know.

And you, with your plucked eyebrows - I know you do drag when you’re not in that uniform. The way you pull the curtain back using only two fingers and never, ever using your pinky. I know. And the rest of you, with the proper gait but just a bit too much lift in your step. I can recognize which one of you said, “Welcome aboard United flight 72 to San Francisco,” without even hearing you speak in person. And, sir, when you do speak to someone face to face, you still sound like Bea Arthur doing voice over for a Discovery Channel special.

Such a shame you couldn’t get the video system running properly. The movie was cute.

I don’t mind watching you. The guy who reads while biting his tongue. The tongue that just hangs from between his teeth, thoughtlessly resting between his lips. Or the guy who gets a nicotine fit and has to dip to calm his nerves.

I even enjoy it. But I’d give it all up to spend the day at home, play the game, work in the yard, and go to bed together tonight. I won’t do those things for a month, and I’m not happy about it, but it’ll be OK, and I’ll do those things again soon.

Turning Around

That fateful night in the hot tub, Head Chef’s eyes blinked and glistened with sadness stemming from recent losses and an older yearning I had seen many times before. He pined for Hawai`i and for the life he’d led when he lived here as a younger man, and he foresaw his unhappinesses resolved if only he could get back to this physical place.

I loved him as much then as I do today, so I said yes. After six some-odd years, I abandoned my well-practiced rejection and said, simply, “OK.” And we moved. What has followed has been heartache, harder work than I have ever known, isolation, and too few of the rewards he believed in.

And he believed in so many inevitable rewards. More relaxed work lives, bounteous gardens, and endless aloha were ours for the price of being here. Everything would be fine because we were here.

Since I had committed myself to him and this dream, I took up the faith along with him and prayed on my mat four times per day and chanted each evening as I clutched my beads. Work lives, gardens, aloha. Work lives, gardens, aloha.

But that’s the problem with faith. Belief doesn’t make it so. Trust doesn’t make truth. And while not necessarily Jones Town, this is not The Promised Land, either. Not my Promised Land, and sadly, not even his.

It’s time to go. I’ve been away from Home for too long. I miss It.