The voyage out

Compared to the last time we went abroad for a long time -- four years ago, with our little six-month old in tow -- this time leaving the States was not very dramatic. Last time, I remember going through those last few days at home taking mental notes of all the things I did, hoping to be able to remember them through the months away that lie ahead.

This time, I mostly only noticed how busy and tiring it all is. How many loose ends kept popping up, how I almost willfully tried to avoid thinking about what it means to leave home for a long time. So far, this trip has given me little chance to ruminate on the metaphysics of what we're up to. It has been a very immediate experience.

To give ourselves plenty of time to make our flight, we stayed the night before at the Days Inn near the airport. It is one of those airport hotels that is a lowest common denominator space. Everything felt small and cramped, cheap and plastic, easy to clean and yet somehow still filthy.

Our flight out was on Transaero, one of the newish Russian airlines that has recently begun the New York-Moscow route. We knew little about them, but the tickets, bought months ago, were priced alright. In our usual fashion, we made it to the gate at the last moment, and was surprised to see that the plane was a Boeing 747. Imagine the jumbo jet that took you on your first trip to London, way back in the 1980s or so... this was the exact airplane that the company must have bought from BA on eBay. The paint was cracked, the lights were dirty, the upholstery was threadbare. The only difference was that the seats were painfully close to one another. Now, this is a common refrain among air travellers, who have been slowly squeezed through the years. But this wasn't the case here: I was unable to put the tray down all the way, the seats were that close together.

But what was weirder was how Transaero chose to divide their space. As we walked onto the plane, we walked through a completely empty Business Class section. Empty. The company has a weird strategy for making money that seems a bit too rigid to make much money or to make customers happy. Apparently, according to the inflight magazine, the First Class sections in the front and on the upper deck are given over to full-blown elitny bullsh*t. Which explains the better dressed, friendlier, prettier stewardesses we caught brief glimpses of on the way in and out. They boast dining tables, beds, meeting rooms. But lord, when Mila accidentally walked close to that empty section, the stewards freaked out.

The usual finding our way around Russia process went as would be expected, with a predictable mix of new and various annoyances. First, there was the visa registration process. It is in some ways easier now -- you can do it at post offices. Trouble is, in actuality we had to visit three different post offices to find someone competent to do this, and then had to account for lunch hours, computer breakdowns, and half-assed attempts to fish for bribes. That took two days.

Then I came down with a massive bout of food poisoning that sent me off the earth for many days. Then there was a big editing project that needed my attention, and so since we arrived, I haven't gotten out much.

At the moment, my wife is on a business trip, Mila is at the dacha with her grandparents, and I find myself with time on my hands. I'm amazed at how quiet things can be. I'm still getting adjusted, thinking about what's next.

A poem for heading off

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.


Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.


The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.


(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)


-- Walt Whitman, from "Song of the Open Road."

Woody Allen chugs along to Paris

I always like say that my Russophilia killed my Francophilia. I grew up a young man with a Romantic streak, a fascination with Europe and travel, and all kinds of cultural aspirations. But after long experience with Russia, somehow Paris has become very quaint and safe, a bourgeois fantasyland.

So I started to tune out of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris sometime during the first real scene of dialogue, as Owen Wilson mooned to Rachel McAdams about how inspiring and perfect the whole damn place is. Especially how breathtaking it is in the rain. The rain, for some reason.

A few quick points:

-- Woody Allen, more or less, has been functionally retired to me since 1997. I think a great number of the fans of his early work would draw that line at different points. But at the very least, the guy has got to slow down. There might have been an interesting movie in here, which with some patience and teamwork and at least another year in the oven, it could have emerged into something really valuable.

-- There's really nothing wrong with rehearsal. Allen's way of having actors interact has become a mannered charade of how late 20th century New Yorkers interrupt each other, say "Really?" in a forced way, and awkwardly try to purposefully look at one another when they aren't yapping. Loved it all when Diane Keaton did it, but man, every new generation that tries it out just looks dumb.

-- Woody needs to have a drink with an actual conservative every now and then. I love making fun of wingers as much as anyone, but even I cringe at the caricatures Woody routinely trots out to get a few cheap laughs from the Upper West Side crowd.

-- I love the "Lost Generation" -- far more than most do. So I enjoyed all the imitations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dali. But I realize they were cartoons, and I think I was kinda laughing at them, not with them.

-- "Prufrock is like my mantra!" ... Really? this line got through a rewrite?

-- I know everyone thinks it when they see it... so I'll say, *SPOILER ALERT* that you should do the math and figure out the age difference between the last two characters on the screen. (okay, I checked IMDB, it's 17 years). It's just gotten creepy already. Is he really so surrounded by yes men that he doesn't realize this? If this movie had any emotional honesty, Carla Bruni (one year older) should have appeared at the end.

-- So, New York, London, Barcelona, Paris... someone wake me up when he gets to St. Petersburg.

For the Fourth...

"Bunyan's Greeting"

It is the spring morning without benefit of young persons.

It is the sky that has never registered weeping or

    rebellion.

It is the forest full of innocent beasts. There are none who

blush at the memory of an ancient folly, none who hide

beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart.

It is America, but not yet.

Wanted. Disturbers of public order, men without foresight

    or fear.

Wanted. Energetic madmen. Those who have thought

    themselves a body large enough to devour their

    dreams.

Wanted. The lost. Those indestructibles whom defeat can 

    never change. Poets of the bottle. Clergymen of a 

    ridiculous gospel, actors who should have been

    engineers and lawyers who should have been sea

    captains. Saints of circumstance, desperados,

    unsuccessful wanderers, all who can hear the 

    invitation of the earth. America, youngest of her

    daughters, awaits the barbarians of marriage.

-- W.H. Auden, from the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Paul Bunyan.

The prodigal Bruins fan

The puck I caught at a game at the Boston Garden in 1988. It came into our section off Gary Galley's stick.

I've been following the Bruins very closely these past few years, but very quietly. Mostly out of shame that I couldn't face everyone who has been with the team through these rough years. I feel like the hockey equivalent of those Pink-Hat crowds that showed up at Fenway in 2003.

But it still feels great to be back. And to have that unusual feeling, first time since 1990, of caring about the Bruins' season when it is 90 degrees outside.

The reasons I drifted away are quite common around here, as hockey in general and the Bruins in particular went through a pretty rough patch. Foremost, I had a lot of qualms with the direction Gary Bettmann took the league -- trying to turn a regional passion more like candlepin bowling into a ready-for-primetime mass market entertainment product. This was quixotic at best. When I was younger I developed a theory that you couldn't watch hockey on t.v. unless you played hockey yourself -- this was the days before huge plasma screen HD t.v.'s. I remember watching games with my uncle, a basketball fan, who would leave the room. "I don't even know what you're looking at," he would say. Bettmann's effort also came with a desire to pull the game from its heartland and force it on the Sun Belt. I've always maintained, and frankly, I still do, that hockey doesn't belong in places that don't have naturally occurring ice.

There were a host of aesthetic problems as well with the game in the 90s. The dreaded neutral zone trap was as bad a problem as we all remember. The league's effort to clean-up the goonishness may have gone too far, taking away a lot of the game's personality. And the fact that every team suddenly decided it needed teal and a cartoon character on its jersey made it a giant circus.

But ultimately, there are a number of reasons why Boston fans in particular might pull away. The Jacobs family, the consummate skin-flints they were, were unable to put a decent product on the ice. I loved the Garden, flimsy seats and obstructed views and all. I only went to the TD Bank Fleet Center Whatever-you-call-it one time, and it was more than enough. And we lost a great rivalry when the Hartford Whalers moved.

More than that, we fans had gone through a lot. We'd lived through Cam Neely's freak injury, and watched loyally as Ray Bourque's career fruitlessly ticked away. When the team hit hard times, it was really hard to go through emotionally. Don't forget, we were all tortured Red Sox fans as well. And the Celtics were going through the very hard post-Bird, McHale, etc. years. And the Patriots, though already on showing signs of life, were still the comprehensive laughing-stock of the NFL. At some point, there's only so much you can put up with.

So many things combined to restore an idea of what the game could be. The most important was my daughter. I've been conscientiously bringing her to all manner of sporting events at Williams, getting her to understand what they are and hopefully begin to decide what looks right to her. Her favorite by a wide margin is hockey. She can happily plant herself on my shoulders and get through an entire game, which knowing a preschooler attention span is remarkable.

And this past winter, I started playing again. Just pickup hockey around the rink a few times during the week. Just enough to get my legs back and remember how bad I was at it. Still, it's been great. It reminds you of how fun life was up in New England when hockey is a part of it.

Life after napalm

It was with profound, profound interest that I read Jack Shafer's story in Slate about great moments from journalists on the way out of newsrooms (such a rich topic, it managed a part two). A few years ago, I had my big bridge-burning moment, with a letter that I still think about a lot, and which might be some of my best work -- I didn't even have to resort to profanity. What's surprised me most, is how long after the fires have died and been forgotten by everyone else, I still can't make peace with it all.

I should say from the start that I have never, not for a moment, regretted what I did. I wrote the truth, to the correct person, with the precise amount of force the situation warranted. It got me out of a very crumby situation, and perhaps for a few moments forces another human mind to think with a little more depth about a situation and the choices they made. It also forced me not to settle for easy decisions, and though it is the most transient and base aspect of all this, it made me feel better after months of feeling helpless.

But eventually, the very brutal reality set in: it didn't accomplish anything. This effort, this sacrifice, didn't change anything for anyone except me (and my family, for better and for worse). It's a terrible irritant: the story here that resonates the most with real life, alas, is Ron Rosenbaum's famous departure from the Voice ("Who was that?").

While Shafer pokes fun at the idea of the journalist that "works through his anger by killing chipmunks and other small game," I'm not sure there is a lot to laugh at. Journalism, or "Journalism" if you must, is suffering because of those "paper-pushers" and "quacking mallards," though maybe that's easy to forget when you have a steady paycheck from the Washington Post Company. And of course, if you look at the state of late-model, corporate capitalism, it is pretty clear that every line of work is being debased by this new feudalism of a handful of wealthy bosses and a vast army of peons. Only difference, perhaps, is that journalists are usually better writers.

There is a pattern to the lives of journalists. The thing that has dismayed me the most about the business, the point at which the high-minded rhetoric of J-school is in too stark contrast with the reality of the newsroom, is how... well, meek working journalists can be. Oddly, people who have no trouble asking the grieving mother how she "feels," who can shout embarassing questions at a press conference about a congressman's privates, who can shrug off any number of nasty arrows and cheap-shots from Internet trolls, seem unable to constructively engage with the reality of how little control they have over their own careers. And the methods for dealing with it are pathological. In the day to day, it looks like this: Bitch bitch moan complain bitch complain and bitch some more. Some decide to carry on and get by, others quietly slip away (hopefully to something more lucrative), but for whatever reason, I didn't care for either option. And when that happens, things catch fire.

Obviously, I could write about this all day, even though I realized long ago, consciously at least, that madness lies in that direction. Whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to shrug and make a small joke and try to signal that I've moved on. But really, I haven't as much as I would have liked. And the fact that I'm still mad this made me mad makes me mad.

There is wisdom out there though. I'll refer to Joseph Brodsky's Michigan speech, which I wrote about last month, and which had an interesting take on the angle of forgiving and forgetting:

"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those -- in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists... By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time that it took for it to occur." 

Great advice. Very hard to live by.

At Play in the Fields of the Word

Perhaps best not to ask why, but I spent a little while this afternoon reading Rhoda Koenig's lengthy feature in New York magazine about the PEN conference Norman Mailer organized in January 1986. It was a bonfire of the vanities, with every big name in literature showing up to make a point, shake their head, or simply cut a dashing figure through the proceedings.

They argued about politics, oppression, the writer's duty. About sex and gender and alienation and censorship. There were public arguments, bitter recriminations, hurt feelings, frighteningly hilarious anecdotes about Albert Speer, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. John Updike makes a fool of himself, Saul Bellow confirms his reputation as a difficult person.

The observations along the way are fascinating -- Susan Sontag's tweed trousers, Isabel Allende's paisley shawl, Czeslaw Milosz's eyebrows, Danilo Kis' pointedly casual homophobia. All this plays out against the reliable baseline of Norman Mailer's more than ample ego. I'm convinced that time will be kind to Mailer's legacy, especially considering that his ample faults leave us something like this ("Mailer was laughing with a couple of reporters, saying that he got the bruise under his right eye 'sparring,' and telling one journalist not to ask him general questions. 'You should say, 'What do you think of Susan Sontag's remark that Norman Mailer is a mean-spirited dog?'")

At some point, some of the attendees complain that there was too much talk about politics and not enough about books and literature. But you know, I'd take that. What do we have today? Jonathan Franzen mooning over his new BlackBerry, that's what. 

A Russian commencement address

I've long had a fascination with commencement speeches as a kind of debased literary genre. I think it goes back to the crummy one I had to sit through on the baking astroturf of my own commencement, when Bill Cosby scolded me for not appreciating all the "opportunities" that he imagined had been dumped at my feet.

So around this time of year, I always feel a strange longing to search for better, paternal advice. And I sincerely wonder if there is out there some combination of words uttered by a successful person that could sum things up better, help one live a better life. I've long since concluded that when you are 21 and in the moment you can't even hear it. Is it even possible for such words to reach a young person, nervous and excited in what may be the first conscious Incredibly Important moment of their lives, a little frightened at the real world, rather sad that everything they've known is vanishing, suffering a hangover and wearing a ridiculous costume?

This month, purely by accident, I happened to come across the speech Joseph Brodsky gave at the University of Michigan in 1988, which is in his anthology On Grief and Reason.

It gets off to a rollicking start. "Life is a game with many rules but no referee," he said. "One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose."

Well then. One knows from the start not to expect platitudes congratulating the graduates on all they've accomplished (which really, isn't much, to be honest) and how limitless and brilliant each and every one of their futures' is certain to be.

Brodsky was a remarkably complicated guy and doesn't fit nicely into expectations. He has different reputations here in the U.S., his adopted home, and Russia, which he left in the early 1970s (Soviet authorities were mercifully through with gulags and summary executions by then, content to call him a "social parasite" and just toss him out).

To Russians, he is known as an outstanding poet, and more than that -- as the true heir to the great unbroken thread of Russian poetry, the chosen heir of the Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak (who despite Zhivago, Russians often think first as a poet). To Americans, he was best known as an essayist, frequently appearing in the New York Review of Books, writing thoughtful and grand essays about literature and the Life of the Mind befitting a major public intellectual (the kind that would never slum around with Tina Brown, or appear on cable television shout shows. In other words, the kind that doesn't seem to really exist anymore).

But Brodsky's life is full of incompleteness and sadness. For a great Russian poet, he spent much of his adult life after age 32 in the United States, in exile, where he died young of heart disease at age 55. And for a man who prized the precision and clarity of language and thought, even he admitted that he felt awkward writing in English. There are many striking thoughts and beautiful moments in his essays, but they are sometimes glib and digressive and it feels like he is flopping around in a way that must have been painful for him.

To the graduating Michigan students, he offered a few suggestions for life. "Ignore them if you wish, doubt them if you must, forget them if you can't help it: there is nothing imperative about them," he said. "Should some of it now or in the time to be come in handy to you, I'll be glad. If not, my wrath won't reach you."

There is something fatalistic about these, which I think sums up in large part the blunt, honest part of the fabled "Russian soul" that I admire.

They are pretty self-explanatory. "It will pay for you to zero in on being precise with your language," is the first. Then, "try to be kind to your parents." Sensible advice. But the whole thing drips with the conviction that the world kinda sucks, so find a way to make do.

"The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be," he said. "The only thing that's going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you've elected will promise to cut the pie, it won't grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that -- or, rather, in dark of that -- you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves -- at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius." 

And a few more bits, culled from a youth avoiding the wrath of arbitrary authorities, a senseless persecution, and an adulthood of radical acclaim. "Try not to stand out, try to be modest," he suggests, explaining that seeking to thrust yourself into the limelight, or assuming a superior air over your neighbors, "testifies to the failure of your imagination, to your disbelief in -- or ignorance of -- reality's unlimited potential."

He also doesn't want any whiners. "At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim," he said. This perhaps, cuts right to it: "Try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships too," he said. "They are a part of the game, and what's good about a hardship is that it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the verge of despair or in despair, remember: that's life speaking to you in the only language it knows well."

Brodsky makes what might be a half-hearted effort to wrap it up in a hopeful bow at the end, talking about his love for Ann Arbor and the important place Michigan holds in his heart (it was his first home in the West when he was booted). He wishes them luck, acknowledging it is the kind of thing that exists and that you actually need to succeed in the world.

All in all, this is emphatically not the kind of speech your usual CEO or television anchorman would dare to give. It is positively unAmerican. Where are the self-deprecating jokes? the homilies about the unquestioned, solitary virtue of Hard Work? the cheap instructions to be a massively productive worker while taking the time to sniff the flowers and raise your kids?

The first time I read it, I was astonished at how grim and bleak it was, and how I would have left that ceremony blinking and confused and sad. But reading it again, I realize that yeah, I wish I'd heard that. 

Passing on The Office (U.S. version)

I feel that I am demographically, generationally duty-bound to enjoy the American version of the sitcom The Office. And yet, I don't. In fact, I'm amazed there aren't more people like me -- who think the original British Office is brilliant in its cringe-inducing, acidic way, and think the American version is just more corporate entertainment trash. As Special Guest Star Will Ferrell once said in another role, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I think this goes deeper than a simple prejudice against American network programming, whose highest cultural achievement in recent memory as been Three Two and a Half Men. It has to do with the pale comparison the American version is to its source material. And yes, I know that Ricky Gervais produces the American version, but frankly, there's just too much money here for him not to.

To be fair, I actually do think the show is funny, even though I haven't seen too much of it. Like other shows of this ilk, 30 Rock in particular, there are too many funny people and funny perspectives involved not to get the set-pieces and one-liners right. Doesn't mean that it matters, though.

My first big problem with the American version is its rampant crimes against narrative order. The Office U.K. had a beginning, a middle and an end, as do most television productions in the rest of the world. But the American model, honed by our unique brand of consumer capitalism, is to take anything successful and run it until people stop watching and it stops making money. Along the way, in the painful decline of the show, all sorts of reliable cheap story tricks are pulled out of the bag -- a wedding! a baby! special guest stars! a major character's departure! Each of these can be spread over multiple episodes, and each will be familiar to any regular Office viewer.

But there's another, far more important concern I have. The original Office was harsh. The laughs came with cringes, and you were never allowed to forget that this was a show about the bleakness and despair of labor in the modern economy. It didn't flinch, and it hurt, and perhaps it made you think a little bit more about your life, and the options you might have to make it a little better for yourself and others. It was challenging.

The American Office, however, levels everything down to a simplified narrative that everyone is alright once you get to know them beyond their personality quirks. Boredom, even of the terminal, soul-crushing sort, is just something to lightly complain about. The ultimate lesson is that you don't have to change your crappy situation, just your crappy attitude and realize how good you got it, presumably because even after a miserable day, you still have your merry television friends to entertain you. This is narcotizing.

And it begins its eighth season this fall.

Hawaii

Hanauma Bay

Since we returned from our trip to Hawaii last month, I've been thinking about becoming one of those guys who says "mahalo" or "brah" without irony. I don't think I've ever been to a place that has chiseled itself so neatly into my head, even as I was aware of its famous propensity for doing so. The way its native patois pops up in the strangest places, how it remains a shortened euphemism for "paradise" in the American mind. But having been there, it all makes sense, it is all fair, and isn't a simulacrum or a discourse or whatever.

So many of the amazing things you hear are actually, seriously true. It is a natural marvel. We spent three different days at Hanauma Bay, Olga and I taking turns snorkeling while Mila played in the sand and learned how to paddle along. On two occasions, I found myself out on the reef, face to face with a very large sea turtle. One time, I watched him (from a respectful distance! I paid attention during the film they make you watch about reef safety and manners) have his lunch and float around. Thinking back on it, I think to myself, really? I saw that? not in a movie?

And even the bona fide touristy stuff has a kind of earnest shamelessness about it that makes it pleasant. The few times we went to Waikiki (we did a pretty good job of going as authentically 'native' as we could) I enjoyed visiting the markets, with their stacks and stacks of tikis and surfboard wall-clocks. I even picked up a tiny statue of Lono, the harvest god, for my desk. I remained self-aware enough to resist buying an aloha shirt, which would become instantly unwearable back in New England. 

And beyond the things you see, there were the people, that famous "aloha spirit" that actually seems to exist. We stayed with our friends at their house on the eastern end of Honolulu, and to get to their house from almost anywhere, we had to take the main east-west high. From the beach or the store, you had to merge onto the road, and then in the space of two long blocks had to cross three lanes of significant traffic to make a left turn onto their street. I can't conceive of making this maneuver in much of Massachusetts without a fit of curses, rude gestures, honking horns and angry glares. But I swear, we did this everyday in Hawaii and it was never a problem. Cars would slow down, wave you along, take their time. You just had to hit the blinker and wave thanks and the entire universe seemed to be on your side. Paradise.

The singular alignment of so many different cultures there has a lot to do with it. It is a wonderful thing, and a hopeful picture of what this nation can be. We ate a ton of magnificent Asian food -- sushi, noodles, anything that was more colorful than the pale imitation we find back home. It was amazing how many different kinds of people you saw there -- Chinese, Japanese, Portugese, different kinds of white people from the mainland. They were there for awhile, or they were passing through. We were amazed at the number of Japanese visitors we saw, even though the drop-off in arrivals from the country since the earthquake was a cause for major concern. Waikiki feels almost like a distant neighborhood of Tokyo. This kind of mix is something that you can be of two minds about. I remember the story Sarah Palin's dad told about his daughter's abortive college career at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and Hawaii Pacific University. She left, he said, because she got freaked out by the ethnic diversity and eventually found a happy home in Idaho. So you can think of it that way, or you can think that this is what a healthy future looks like.

Of course, not everything is all rainbows (although, I've never seen so many in my life before. Every afternoon it seemed, one or sometimes two over the mountains. Absurd). One thing I wish I had learned more about is the role of native culture. Much is made about showing proper respect and deference for Native Hawaiians, in place names, ceremonial matters, and the like. But to phrase it carefully, I'd wonder how much of this is real and living and how much a created tradition adapted for current conditions. The Hawaiians themselves famously broke their own tabus in 1819, and were quick to embrace the various kinds of Christian that showed up on their shores. So what can we make of current efforts to make these traditions alive again? I suppose that's one for the anthropologists.

And of course, staying with a local family -- my old college friends -- showed us that even though it is paradise, people still lead lives that are recognizable as belonging in the early 21st century. Our friends are a doctor and a lawyer, they work very hard, worry about daycare and schools, and have remarkably familiar problems for a young family. Only difference is they don't have to have winter coats in their house.

Another thought that often occurred to me is how there are dark undercurrents there. For a place without snakes, or bandits, or dangerous extremes of cold or heat, an astonishing number of visitors don't leave the islands alive. Every beach and park features signs that are brutally frank in what you can and can't do, and while it seems almost quaint and overcautious -- like those airline safety cards -- they really mean it. I subscribed to various Hawaiian news twitter feeds, and there are an amazing number of stories about tourists drowning, or falling off something, or getting lost somewhere, or just plain vanishing. So even at the best of times, under the best of circumstances, reality can get you. Maybe even more so because you let your guard down.

Hawaii is going to stay with us for a very long time. I can't remember the last time I came back from a big trip relaxed and ready to face life again. It seems, strange to say without being ironic, that I learned some things. And now I frequently find myself staring at the map in our house, looking at those little specks in the middle of vast nowhere of the Pacific, wondering, just how are we going to get back there?