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"Its only an island if you look at it from the water"---
Martin
Brody, from Jaws (1975)
In August, 2010, my friend Ken and his wife Deborah took my wife and I to Hawaii. As I write this, that's been about 8 months ago.
Those of you who look gift horses in the mouth are probably asking why it's taken me so long to produce one of my incredibly long travel journals (which have now been approved by the FDA for medically-induced comas). The answer is simple: to talk about the trip, I have to write about my friend Ken.
Someday, maybe, I'll pay tribute to the handful of folks that I call my friends. Most of them I met in high school. I'm sure when they first got drafted into the detail, they didn't realize it would still be a part of their job description all these years later. One of them I even fooled into marrying me.
Relax... Ken isn't that one. But, aside from my wife, Ken is the closest of my close friends. I'm pretty sure saying this doesn't hurt my other friends' feelings. For one thing, they're probably glad Ken's taking the bullet; for another, it wasn't the result of a decision on my part. Circumstance (or, as I prefer to consider it, Providence) just gave us the most similar backgrounds and sensibilities, kept us in closer orbit around each other, and provided the experiences that super-glued our bond.
In my columns, I strive to maintain the consistent level of integrity and veracity that have earned me the Commander McBragg Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalistic Excellence. So by sharing a story in my usual fashion, where Ken is a major player, I run the risk of doing him a great disservice, giving folks an inaccurate picture of the caliber of human being my friend truly is, and trivializing our relationship. But hey... my wife and sons have occasionally undergone the same treatment, and if it were offensive, I'm sure they'd let me know through whatever third party they now use to communicate with me.
So, with the usual disclaimer that You Can't Believe Everything You Read, let's get started.
Sometime in 1999, after about 30 years of friendship, Ken had offered me
a job with the company he had started a few years earlier. Everybody
told us that one of the quickest ways to destroy a friendship is to have
one friend start working for the other, so the common wisdom was that
Ken had finally come up with a plan to cut me loose. It didn't work. Ten
years later, in 2009, I was still there, and Ken decided to celebrate
the decade-long barnacle by taking Sue and I to Hawaii for a week. I
tried to talk him out of it, for a couple of reasons:
1. I've benefited frequently and often from the perks of being Ken's
friend,
not the least of which is the sweetest job I've ever had, so the trip
would be unnecessary icing on a 9-layer cake;
2. We were in the last season of Lost and by now I had learned
that flights over the ocean never ended well.
Ken was not to be dissuaded, and immediately plunged into the travel arrangements. Schedules were consulted, airlines were vetted, accommodations were considered, and in no time at all a year had passed and we were set for a week's vacation on The Big Island.
Survivors of my past journals know that I usually give a day-by-day account of the excursions. I'll change it up this time and, rather than walk through the trip chronologically, I'll just highlight the main aspects, activities, and adventures in a more loose-knit fashion. It's not because I've suddenly come down with a case of compassion for my readers... it's just that, 8 months later, I've misplaced the grey cells that contain the minutiae of the trip.
First, a little bit about our destination:
Hawaii is the fiftieth state to be admitted to the Union, right after Alaska in 1959. It was actually supposed to be admitted before Alaska, until the island law enforcement elite realized that Hawaii 49 just didn't have the right ring to it.
Like New York, Hawaii is a state with an indigenous language other than English. For many years, that language consisted entirely of vowels, until the populace wearied of gape-jawed conversations, and a few consonants were introduced in 1855.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton