Coming Back From Oahu (I thought the theme was remember when, so I posted something old!)

The man in the leather vest that
Sat next to me on the plane
Was tired of riding his motorcycle
In circles all the time.
He said that he was ready for the Interstate.

I can only imagine his frustration,
Living for the road while living on an island. Ouch.
He let the cat out of the bag just then,
stroked it, gave it some words of reassurance,
and called it Neko, which means cat
In Japanese.

I wonder if he knows that.
He wiped the torrents of snot from
The cat’s face and stuffed it back in the bag and said
Something about seeing his wife and kids.

While trying to find my next flight
I found a man that understood
What I’d been thinking about.
He looked like a handy-man or a janitor
With a large gut that half-covered his toolbelt.

He’d lost all color, as many often do in the face of insignificance.
His skin and hair sagged, void of all will to stand out.
We got on the train at the same time, just him and me.
Standing at opposite ends
I made an effort to acknowledge his presence
He acknowledged mine in turn.
The red sign next to my head kept flashing:

Please hold on,
Please hold on,
Please hold on…

We understood one another.

The next train was different.
Everyone that boarded but me knew what they were doing.
A man in a uniform, leaning against the railing
Talking on his cell phone.
He was too busy and experienced
To bother with the red sign:

Please hold on,
Please hold on,
Please hold on…

Perhaps those with purpose have no need for signs.

The train came to life
With a cold rush and a sigh
The hustle and bustle had been left outside
And for our time in the tunnel
We were nothing more than people in a train.

The man in the uniform seemed to doubt,
Or at least consider the possibility
that he might not be what his uniform said he was.

Please hold on
Please hold on
Please hold on…

But before any of that took root the doors had opened and he was gone.

Sitting at my terminal,
there was a couple that had themselves in order
They each held a magazine
Brimming with examples and definitions
and signs and purpose.

They fit the pattern
Of every advertisement I’d passed
During my time in the airport.
Their respective magazines were made especially
for and by those of their gender
Telling them what their greatest questions in life are
And answering them.
What it must feel like to be so complete!

I wondered if they’d ever bothered
To read the other’s magazine.
The girl leaned over to show the boy
A bit of her reading that she thought was important and exciting

He rolled his eyes,
Convinced by Men’s Health
That he had no reason to take interest.
She wasn’t disappointed,
Glamour had warned her ahead of time
That this would probably happen.

So they went about their lives.
I fell asleep before they left,
But I could still see the red sign
From the subway:

Please hold on
Please hold on
Please hold on…

After the hurricane

After the hurricane, he called, urging us to come home. Our generator is running fine, he said, the grocery stores are already opened back up, gas won’t be a problem because I could always get it for you at the refinery. Mostly he was worried about the expense of continuing to stay in a hotel, but I convinced myself too, that I heard loneliness in his voice. He wanted us home. In his job in refining, he is last-out-first-back. He evacuated just as the hurricane hit, and only went two hours away to ride it out where the company had set him up in a motel. We went further, all the way to Dallas, and talked to him every few hours as the storm was blasting along the coast.

But I wasn’t ready to go back. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I think now that I didn’t want to go back to life-as-usual because nothing was usual. Nothing had been for seven months. After the move (from Memphis to Beaumont), the baby (number six, a girl, a joyful event, but stressful nonetheless), the diabetes (my two year old daughter diagnosed all of two days after her sister was born), all striking in three weeks, I no longer believed in usual. Or, perhaps it is better to admit that I hated what my “usual” had become. I stalled for a day, but I did go, taking my six kids on the six hour drive back to the place that was still barely home, arriving in a ghost-town so empty even the kids noticed the eeriness.

After the hurricane, our town was so battered that for weeks I would be driving around and notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. A stop sign bent backwards, billboards ripped in half, fences blown over, blue tarps on roofs up and down the streets, a tree across someone’s lawn. For months the Autoplex sign read “A to pley.”

What I couldn’t see, what I didn’t yet understand, what how battered I was inside. It took months of just surviving, one foot in front of the other, forcing myself out of bed each day to tend to the most basic needs of my family, before I would notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. Constant tiredness no matter how much sleep I got. Not laughing at . . . . well, not laughing. Undeserved irritability toward my children. A growing gulf between myself and my husband. Small tasks seeming overwhelming. Things not as easily repaired as fences and roofs.

It is hurricane season here again. Instead of leaving broken pieces and debris, why can’t the storm come through in a cleansing blast of wind and pounding, purifying rain? For that, I would stay. I would stand out in the street and wait while it ripped through my heart, swirled ‘round every little crevice of my mind, til wet and tired I would see that it had stopped, that all was still, and clean, and whole. And I would smile . . . after the hurricane.

Wired

Along the busy street outside my subdivision the trees are forced to grow in grotesque shapes away from the telephone/electrical wires. In their winter nakedness this is exposed in ways I’m shocked to have never noticed, though of course I’ve seen before how trees are trimmed in awkward shapes to keep them clear of the wires snaking along from pole to pole. (As a child, roadtripping with your family, did you ever lean your head just right, and watch the wires loop-loop-looping, dividing, reconnecting, keeping pace with the car?) And now that I am noticing, I see the wires and their wooden poles, standing in lines like scarecrow-soldiers — except here, where they’re more drunken in their post-hurricane leaning — everywhere. Something that blends into the background. Always there, never seen. And ahead, their metal-poled counterparts, with trios of wires stacked and still snaking through the freeway-side landscape.

Our lives are bent in a grotesque dance, snaking over around and through computers, tvs, telephones, ipods, radio, internet, Nintendo. Wired or wireless we are constantly connected. My children never lean their heads lazily to watch out the window of the car. They hunch over hand-held gaming devices, or stare blankly at the built in DVD player, wireless earphones piping Disney straight to their ears, while the car speakers play my favorite radio station.

we give them something to gawk at

Living in Laie can make you feel like a fish in an aquarium.  Tour buses come into our tropical little town a couple times a day to gawk at the natives.  Haha.  I kid.  Actually, they just want to get a view of our gorgeous temple, PCC, and BYU-Hawaii; and since we live a stones throw (if you can throw with great force) from all of these locations we frequently encounter many a bus on our daily jaunts about town.

I actually don’t really notice anymore.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when I saw a PCC tour bus of several tourists of the Asian and maninland variety rubberneck their way down our street that I realized me and my band of babes were the main attraction.

I even saw a few camera flashes go off.

And it made me come upon a halting, hilarious, incredulous realization: my life is kind of odd to the everyday human.  Or is it?

If you consider a barely 26 year old woman, walking down a street lined with towering palm trees, holding a black-eyed scrappy baby on her hip who is absent-mindedly tooting a hot-orange recorder at his high-pitched singing brother, who is sitting in a red wagon full of food for his friends family who just had a new baby a rare sight…

…then yeah, we warrant a few stares and maybe even a camera flash, but what are they gonna need that picture for and what are they gonna see when they finally load their memory card onto their computer two years later (if they’re anything like my parents- hehe)?

I bet if they looked back at pictures of themselves as young mothers and fathers they wouldn’t see something too different.

We’re all just getting through this tiring, hilarious, and exhilarating stage with as much patience and fun as we can… palm trees or not.