Summer Solstice
After we’d made the long drive back down along I-5, through the mysterious weekend traffic-jams of the 520 intersection, past the MLK exit we used to take before the boys were born, past the Federal Way Mall and the Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife, we sat on the stoop of the single wide gathering our strength and trying to figure out how we were gonna make it though the next few hours of a nieces birthday party hosted at one of Sweeties sister’s houses. The Older Boy had only slept for twenty minutes in the car and Ike, like always, wouldn’t even consider it. It was too hot in the trailer to try for a nap now, and since another long ride in the 402 was out of the question, and downright pointless, we knew that we were just going to have to suck it up and power on through.
We didn’t last long, but we made it.
Back when we lived in the West Wind Trailer Park down south of Boeing field, before we moved back to the City of Destiny, the kids were born and Sweetie and I had just gotten married, we took in Sweeties niece for a while giving her the front bedroom that we sometimes used as an office. We were looking for someone to watch the trailer while we were on our honeymoon and she was looking for a place to clean up after finding herself with lousy friends and taking a spill with some hard drugs.
It never occurred to me that her staying there might be a bad idea, and of course it wasn’t. My guess is that she slept a lot and ate some decent food and when we came back after a few weeks, she just looked a lot better and everything worked out just like I guessed I thought it would.
We were at her birthday celebration Sunday, almost ten years to the day from when she came and stayed with us. She just got back from a year in Venezuela cooking and working aboard a 75-foot yacht with her captain/boyfriend. She looks healthy and tan and in love and like those old dark days were from the life of another person – or at least from time so long ago it would be hardly worth mentioning.
We managed to sing happy birthday and eat Big Yellow Cake that we washed down with dark strong coffee. We heard her stories about Venezuelan political unrest, armed bodyguards and aging Bonaire Nazis, watching her open presents under streamers her father had set up and toasting her with imported beer to the sound of old mariachi music drifting from a little yellow boom-box perched at the top of garage steps.
Sweetie asked her how it felt to turn thirty and she said it was more difficult than she expected. Though her twenties were a hard decade for her no doubt -- a long road with a lot of false starts and dead ends, she found it tough to leave them behind.
“Where did the decade go?” she kept asking, like somehow it had all just cruelly and unexpectedly slipped by. It seemed to me a strange view of her own life, going from a small front-room office of an undersized trailer to the living quarters of a luxury yacht sailing the southern Caribbean. If that isn’t progress then maybe I need to get a new dictionary; mine seems to be broken.
Now please don’t get me wrong here. I don’t know everything there is to know about being happy by any stretch of the imagination since most of my days are spent alternating between rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and trying to keep one foot in front of another without falling down. But so help me that if in ten years I were to find myself sailing the coral reefs off of Bonaire and Grenada with Sweetie by my side and a 75-foot yacht underfoot, I hope I’d have enough goddamn sense to put my toes in the sand and catch myself laughing.
How far away is success if where you are is joy?
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