Homesick for a time--not a place

..you can't go home again isn't true.

Sure you can go home. You can head on out the door with your ticket anytime you scrape up the cash to pay Orbitz. Which btw offered me a credit card, I'm such a good customer. I like these people, phone notification is the way to go. I can't count the number of times I've been on my way or sitting in the airport when Orbitz will call me with a flight update.

I even managed to rebook a weather cancelled flight through them before anyone else on the same flight knew--and get my seats upgraded to first class. They rock! They also gave me my first and last--'cause I'm too cheap to buy a first class ticket--taste of how the "other" people live. Wow. Hot towels to wipe your sweaty little palms. Hot and cold running food, free liquor. Little snacks and pillows and mints and candy, and when my kid had the munchies? A little plate of cheese and crackers with a bunch of grapes and a flower. And they WARMED their free nuts. (lol--I said free nuts.)

I went back to Hawaii a few years ago. But it wasn't home. Home is this static picture I keep up in my head. Like Kailua-Kona back in the seventies, when I could ride up and down Alii Drive on my bike and the waves would pound the deserted beaches, and there was never anyone on the seawall.



My mom would kick us out for the day and we'd build tunnels through the tall grass, visit the little one room library under the shopping center and talk about "old Hawaiian roads" and Night Marchers. There was always something to explore. Tumbled down walls, artifacts I know now I shouldn't have touched, bits of the old road that the Hawaiians built to circle the island, temples and heiaus, and lava crevices and ohelo berries.

Sometimes an earthquake would come--the ground would ripple, and every Friday--without fail, my dad would go drinking with his buddies and their wives, and all us kids would tag along to the old Airport beach park and look in the tidal pools with flashlights and swim in the black-sky water.

Last time I went--there were 7-11's. And people said "ma'am", and the only person I knew with a local accent was a cousin who belonged to the Hawaii Separatist movement.

People say, "wow, it must have been great growing up in Hawaii."

Yeah--it was. But that was then and this is now.