July

 

Sometime earlier this year, E’s dad announced that since he was turning 80 in July, he wanted his whole family to come to Hawaii to celebrate.  His whole family basically consists of his two sons and his brother, A.  A lives in Hawaii, on the north shore of Oahu, on a bloody estate.  He’s rich.  Look up Benton Oil.  That’s E’s uncle.  No, we will get none of the money and we have never benefited from it.  Plus we had to trek out to Oahu on our own dime.  We were invited to stay at A’s (he has multiple guest suites), but E and I both decided it was worth the extra money to rent our own place, so we got an AirBnB.  E was totally fretted about the trip, for like months.  I was basically determined that this trip was way too damn expensive for me not to enjoy myself, and I was going to snorkel and see green sea turtles and that was pretty much all there was too it. 

 

So the trip was … fine.  We had dinner with the family (E’s Dad, Uncle A, Brother S and his wife and 13 year old daughter) every night, and we did some sightseeing with them one morning and one afternoon, but otherwise we had the days pretty much to ourselves, and so we mostly snorkeled and saw turtles and it was pretty damn nice.  No one ever spoke about anything remotely real or interesting - we were warned by E’s dad, who is fairly conservative, that Uncle A is super duper conservative, and of course I’m like the poster girl for bleeding heart liberal – so conversation basically revolved around the weather and the turtles and a bit about the refugee story of the brothers.

 

The down side to the trip (other than the $$) was that I had to blow six days of vacation, which I had carefully saved up because I wanted to spend some time in CA – haven’t been in 3 or 4 years, since the big wedding, and I really want to see my friends!  Oh well.  Hopefully next Spring.  It’s complicated, rather.

 

I was interested to see how much I enjoyed the weather and general ambiance – for the last couple of years I have been in serious nostalgia mode about Puerto Rico (where I went to high school b/c my Dad was stationed there), and thinking I even wanted to find some way to move back part time, or at least figuring out a way to spend a month or so there every year or so.  And, to be honest, as I suspected, I didn’t enjoy the sun and surf nearly as much as I thought I would.  Not that I didn’t enjoy those things – I did, and very much.  But in a god, this is a lovely vacation kind of way, not in a yes, this is the life for me kind of way.  Not that I would turn down such a life, if it jumped in my lap.  And I do still want to spend a month or so in PR.  But the idea of trying to sort of live there (without the husband) is no longer eating away at me, which is a good thing.  Mainly, I just miss Kim so damn much still … but being there without her … it would probably really suck.  Of course now PR may not be anywhere anyone wants to visit for a very long time …

 

So that was our big July.  Next:  two weeks in Europe at the end of August, beginning of September.