Is There Life After the End of a Long Marriage?
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
The Road to Samoa
Part 5
The Road to Samoa
I couldn’t sleep on the flight to Hawaii. I’ve never been a person who could sleep on a plane, or sleep in a car while someone else is driving. Thank god for in-flight movies!I spent quite a bit of time in Hawaii while I was in the Navy and the memories of those days flooded back to me as I felt the first caress of the warm, humid air as I left the terminal. I had planned a three-day layover before traveling on to Fiji and I thought I would make use of the time to lookup a few old friends from my Navy days. My first real girlfriend was a navy nurse I met while she was stationed at Barber’s Point. Whenever my ship was in port at Pearl Harbor we always got together. After she got out of the service she decided to make her home in Honolulu. She married a local guy there but the marriage didn’t last. She divorced him after 18 months and she’s been single ever since. It had been 23 years since I had seen, or spoken to her and I amazed myself as I dialed her number from memory. Her number hadn’t changed in all that time.
“You’re kidding, you’ve got to be kidding”, she repeated throughout the conversation. I told her that I wanted to catch a cab and come and see her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Twenty-five minutes later she was at the airport to get me. She leaped from her car and jumped into my arms as more then two decades evaporated away. Sure she had changed some. A few more pounds and the addition of glasses, but I was floored by how much she hadn’t changed. Still the wild and crazy hippy chick that I knew so long ago. She was the first person in my life to talk me into smoking grass. And true to form, the first thing she did when we got to her house was to get out the pipe. Since I last saw her I may have smoked weed a total of three times and though I tried to decline she was insistent. Big surprise!
Now I’m not one of those people who tolerate marijuana well. When I get stoned I turn into a giggling idiot. Everything anyone says is funny and starts me laughing until my sides ache. Since I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed, it felt pretty good. We got pretty wasted that night on the weed and some cheap wine and I think I slept for about twelve hours. It wasn’t until the next day that we played catch-up and filled each other in on what had been going on in our respective lives. She was still doing the nursing thing at a local clinic when she wasn’t hanging out at the beach. That was where we spent the next few days. We even slept on the beach the second night and screwed like the kids we were twenty-something years earlier. The years melted away that night and it was as if no time had passed at all.
I thought a lot about her all that last day in Honolulu and I guess I even entertained the notion of starting up where we had left off. But I was fresh out of a devastating relationship and I knew that emotionally, I was in no condition to be with anybody at that time. I had to have some time to myself, to figure out who I was again and what I wanted out of life. I knew from the look in her eyes as she drove me to catch my plane that it had been in her thoughts too. I thought about why we had broken up in the first place. I was leaving the service at the end of my tour of duty and she had two years left to go. We were great friends who just happened to enjoy each other’s bodies. And we both knew that it takes more than that to build a relationship on.
Next post: Part 6
I am Robinson Crusoe
