Thoughts From The Current

Four days ago I was standing on the lanai of my friends' apartment in Kona, Hawaii, watching a little girl. She was about six, with her hair in two pigtails, clutching a ziploc bag of cheerios. She didn't see me watching. She climbed up onto the bumper, then the trunk, then up the back window and on to the roof of a car parked in the parking lot, kicked off her Mary Janes and sat down cross-legged in her orange sundress to eat her snack. She looked around her, rolled over on to her side, slid frontways down the window, flicked cheerios off the roof and watched them roll into the storm drain, and generally owned the place. Later on I saw her standing in a rain gutter behind one of the buildings, pulling up parts of it like lion gutting an antelope. My friend Adam told me she was the caretaker's daughter.

'So this is her world,' I said. It was a wistful statement. I don't have a world.

At the moment, I am at the Detroit airport, watching the grey day go on and on out the big window and waiting for a plane bound for Tokyo. As one person, I'm really too small to inhabit such a large place as this planet that I keep flying around. There is no familiar car roof or bag of cheerios, nothing like that. The fact that all airports look the same doesn't help. After this, Tokyo, after Tokyo, Singapore, after Singapore, Medan - like a current pulling me along. Once, when I was fishing in the Squamish river for late chum, I saw ragged fins at the surface, drifting backward. They belonged to fish too old to make it home, wagging weakly in the current as the river pulled them back to the sea and deathward. This image comes to mind now. I wonder if I'm only going back to the confusion and mis-managed life of an aid worker because I've lost the strength to go forward. Hmm ... no. I know I could make it upriver and home. The problem is finding it. Here's where I have to leave the fish image, because I have no instinctual feeling of where home is. It's got something to do with a car roof and cheerios, maybe.

Ok, I admit it, I'm tired. These aren't the most cheerful thoughts. Honestly, folks, I'm not sure right now if I'm doing the right thing here. My visit to HQ in Baltimore left me with more questions than answers, and I'm right back in the old stew of doing things and trying to convince myself that it's helping. Unfortunately, my job this time is to try to convince other people of that as well, and from here it looks as though I might have to lie my head off to do that. I really hope not. I guess that's why I started with a little girl in her orange sundress spending the afternoon on the roof of her father's car. It was the last truly hopeful thing I saw.