Living, and living in paradise as I do, can lull us into taking life for granted.
Two days ago, drifting into my afternoon nap in a bedroom that looks out upon Kaneohe Bay, the islet Mokoli'i, and the Ko'olau range of folded volcanic cliffs that divide Oahu like heavy velvet emerald green drapery, I said to my Maltese pup, Kea, curled up beside me, "This, my friend, is as good as it gets."
I wanted to share this moment with someone dear to me, so I made a telephone call 2,500 miles to my daughter in Seattle, who is the one who once explained the mysterious purpose of life to me very concisely: "It's a gift, Dad. We are meant to enjoy it."
She, and all of us who know her, appreciate that gift even more in these first few months since she has been diagnosed with cancer. She is undergoing chemo therapy. It has cost her most of the hair on her head, so she went to the barber who normally shaves her husband's bald head, and had a shave herself.
"Does it itch?" I asked her. "No--it feels like Velcro." Do you stick to things? Sort of, a little, she said.
But even the horror of cancer can be forgotten on such a beautiful day in such a beautiful place.
I told her how absolutely perfect the moment was. She said, "I think about your place in Hawaii a lot."
Well, I started to say, you can come down--
"No, I mean I think about it a lot in meditations, I use it," she said.
Tonight, waking up in the same bed with the same pup at my side, I walked through an opening in our wall of glass doors into the light of a waning moon, and I watched the weather changing moment by moment as Hurricane Felicia spins toward Hawaii like a top thrown by a careless child.
The sea, that had been combinations of aqua and turquoise and ultramarine, was a dark slate stretching to the horizon. The puffy dazzling white cumulus clouds were gone, and in their place a coverlet of milky chiffon was being drawn down the sky, obscuring those few Perseid meteors that could otherwise be seen tonight despite the bright moonlight.
She is weakening, Felicia, to a tropical storm, but she will drop a foot of rain when she grinds right over our heads on Tuesday, and she threatens to to churn our eastern shores with a surge that could toss boats around against our harbor walls, and even send water over our seawall, through the boathouse, and into the cottage we call The Pavilion, or, less grandly, the Fish House.
So Felicia, lucky destructive girl that she is, reminds us all once again that in that very same spot where you felt only days ago that this is as good as it gets, it can become, as it has in hurricanes past, as bad as it gets as well.
