I have decided to start a blog. I want to share some of the moments and marvels of my life in beautiful Hawaii, of growing older and calmer in Paradise
For example, it was one of those evenings when, while driving home, whole chunks of time, and roadway, seem to disappear without a trace.
Oh--YOU never have those evenings? Well then this is worse than I think.
Rolling along in my 1999 GMC Sierra Extended Cab* pick-up, still going strong after 120,000 miles, I followed the off ramp from the H-3 Freeway onto Kahekili Highway without difficulty. But that's when the neva vu syndrome set in.
Deja vu is the situation in which you feel you have seen this before, been in this place before, felt this way before.
Neva vu is when you look up and say, "Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-the-hell am I?" Cars rolling by, bright reflective (3M?*) highway stripes gleaming as if the asphalt was an inefficient cover for some vast halide-lit marijuana farm down below.
You feel, as we say in Hawaii, "I nevah wen' view dis place." Neva vu.
Kahekili thus was delivered to my wandering mind in short strips of roadway, each decorated by my fearful and amazed conviction that I had never seen this particular spot before.
At 69, already dreading the onset of the Alzheimer's Disease that felled my mother Alice and not yet prescribed for Aricept,* I was worried that the dementia might have begun, in earnest.
Then I arrive home, and Jane my wife, a native of Vietnam, makes Cinnamon Toast for the first time, somebody's brown bread, someone else's sugar, and Starbucks Cinnamon,* all sprinkled across a slice of bread slathered with somebody's butter. It is a steadying, reassuring moment.
I pick up the iPhone* sitting next to me on the dining room table and head into my office to sync it with my Mac G5 desktop computer*, and see neva vu voice mail on it.
I touch the play button, and the fellow named Fischer, already identified on the voice mail list, says his lease hasn't been signed and this is getting critical, and by the way (Beta Tango Whiskey) can he bring in another tenant.
"When did I talk to this guy?" I wonder quietly. "I signed a lease with him? He sure doesn't sound very pleasant.
Next is a message from a Realtor* I hardly know. How do these telephones identify people I have never heard of, I wonder.
No, this is worse. This is neva neva vu land, the abyss. I check the message times. I seem to have lost the better part of a day, conversations, contracts, all disappeared like so many political prisoners in Pinochet's Chile in 1973, los desaparecidos And then I look more closely at the iPhone. It is my wife Jane's phone and the messages are for her.
But it is a preview, my own version of that moment when, after arriving in my mother's home returning from a trip to Europe, after greeting her in her bed and urging her to come to the kitchen for breakfast, and telling her of the trip, she interrupts her animated and amused replies to ask:
"And who are you to me?"
