I had one last day to kill in Hawaii.  My flight didn’t leave until eleven that night.  I’d barely interacted with anyone during the whole trip, but the night before a young guy had asked me about my Hawaiian Mythology book and thought it was pretty cool when I told him I’d been studying it.  It wasn’t that cool, I let him know.  Everyone else was partying and hooking up. 

Here I was with my reading glasses, more at home in front of a university chalkboard then at a youth hostel, yet not at home there either since I didn’t have a PhD.  I finished the last page of the book that morning and donated it to their small library.

In one month, I hadn’t made any real connections.  If I was to stay any longer, I’d have to remain at the hostel since it was all I could afford.  The woman working the front desk told me about a staffing agency that was hiring substitutes, but by now I had one foot out the door.

It was a cloudy cool day.  I imagined that I’d rent a surfboard for one last session, and yet resisted when the time came.  I’d only been in the ocean once since arriving.  It turned out that I liked everything about Hawaii except the reality of being there.

I’m not sure how it happened.  My father had been an independent evangelist for five years after resigning from the Lutheran Church, and had made his living off donations, preaching anywhere people would have him.  He was thought to have a special connection to God and some folks even considered him a prophet. 

Then one day he came home and told us that we were leaving Hawaii and going back to the mainland.  Some elders had gotten together and banished him from preaching on the islands.  I don’t know the details of the story or where they got their authority from.  According to someone who was there at the assembly, when my father was called before them his face was shining like the sun.  A few months later we sold all of our belonging and moved into a little shed behind my grandparents’ house in Denver.

We were strangers when we lived in Hawaii, and it is as a stranger that I return to it every time.  As bad as it gets, however, I will never stop loving Hawaii.  If you’ve been born there, or just live on the islands for any length of time, you might discover just how deeply you can fall in love with a place.  When we left Hawaii for the mainland in 1976, my mother said it felt like a chunk of her heart was breaking off.

There were no chunks breaking off my heart now.  They were breaking off of my brain.  Paradise is a state of mind.  All I could do was keep looking.