Month: January 2015

Hitchhiking

All types of people hitchhike on the Big Island; public transportation is limited and the price of renting a car is steep. You see them just off the airplane in their mainland clothes overdressed, suitcase in one hand and their thumb in the air. Young mothers holding their baby in one arm and groceries in the other standing in the hot sun. We even have a lady who hitchhikes with her goat and often men hold a six-pack of beer as incentive to pull over.

One time while driving to Pahoa I noticed a woman with three kids and a dog waiting for a ride. “Please dear God, let them be gone before I come back this way”. I do my errands and make my way back home and yes there they are just waiting for me to stop, nothing like the smell of wet dog in a cramped car. I pull over and they climb in.

Mom is a classic Big Island wild woman called White Feather who needs to go to Kehena Beach to find some lady who makes natural futon bedding, they are on a mission. It isn’t where I am going but it is still raining so I drive them to the beach. My reward is an invite to a great Halloween party. Most of the time when I pick up someone hitchhiking it isn’t so rewarding. They will get in the car and the first thing I notice is how bad they smell. I know that we all sweat when it is hot but this is more than that, this is a lack of hygiene in a serious way. When I finally get them to their destination they depart but their odor stays in the car haunting me.

I guess I expect too much of hitchhikers. I think that once I’ve taken the time to stop and invite them into my car that as we drive to our destination it’s a good time to make conversation, maybe make a new friend. I’m lucky if I can get them to tell me where they want me to drop them off, before they stare out the window without saying another word. Hitchhikers don’t seem to do small talk. Sometimes I want to say to my traveling companions “ Maybe the reason you have such a hard time getting a ride is because you stink.”

I hadn’t picked up hitchhikers for a long time after a bad experience on Kauai. I had gone over there to scout for a location for my wedding. My boyfriend was working on a cruise ship and I decided to walk down to the harbor to meet him. I was in love; here to have an adventure on this beautiful island, the sun was shining.  A local man stopped and asked if I wanted a ride and I said sure and jumped in. The next thing I notice is he is no longer going down hill but back up towards a sugar cane field. Then it hit me like a brick wall, really I saw a brick wall in front of my face and I realized he wanted to do me harm. This is what went through my head;  “I’ve given it away a hundred times but you are going to have to kill me before I’ll have sex with you.” He stopped in the field and we started to struggle, he had a knife and I just kept screaming and fighting him like a little girl no instinct to poke his eyes or kick him in the balls. Finally he stopped humping me and I got the door open and started to run, here is the weird part he called after me that I had forgotten my flip flops that had fallen off as we struggled. I just kept running. It took me years before I felt comfortable trusting strangers because all I kept thinking is I can’t tell the good guys from the bad.

I hear the goddess Pele has been known to hitchhike. She takes the form of an old woman dressed in white with a small dog waiting on the side of the road. Pele has a temper so it’s a good idea to take her where she wants to go and if she doesn’t want to talk that’s okay with me.

Meltdown #1

For 57 days my life was an emotional rollercoaster. I was running a marathon in my head and couldn’t stop. The only way I slept was if I self-medicated which lasted for six hours. I need eight hours to function. My emotional stress was constant. It was exhausting. I knew I needed to slow down and take care of myself and I also knew I needed to play this pain out. I had to be as close as I could get to my authentic self or this grief would come back to haunt me. I don’t want to live with pain like that anymore; there is too little time. Nothing like death to remind you to live.

I slowly started doing things to relax. I went and soaked in a hot tub for an hour and let my pain seep into the warm salt water. It really helped as I use water to find my self when it has run away. I love water, it heals me.

During this hurricane of hurt I had a few emotional breakdowns. Once after waiting 20 minutes on the phone to cancel a subscription of my mums’ I let loose on the operator about the fact that mum had two subscription for the same thing as the constant barrage of renewal notices had caused her to pay twice. “Surely you could see that it was the same person at the same address getting the same information.” One of mums’ fears was dementia, so she would get too embarrassed when she would make any kind of accounting mistake. In the six years I was around I watched her keep charge of her banking and medical issues plus a plethora of medicines. I couldn’t have done it. There I was screaming at this man on the phone, crying hysterically about how mean it was to take advantage of the elderly and then in the middle of it I hung up without “officially” cancelling her subscription. I wonder how often this has happened to operators?

Grief

I sometimes feel I am wearing my grief. It hangs over my head and slips down my face and pushes on my shoulders. Can you see it? Can you tell? I think I can see it on other faces. The ones who forgot to brush their hair or put on a smile. I wish that we still worn black arm bands to let the world know, don’t look too close, don’t expect too much, don’t mind my tears.

My two best friends

grace&sweetieI have a dog. She is a rescue that came to me when I lived on the Big Island. I had wanted a small dog for about a year and one day she appeared. Of course there is more to the story than that.
I was housesitting which included watching over the cat, four dogs, one horse and 40 chickens. I was driving home from Pahoa town going down the narrow two lane road that led to the beach when I spotted a small dog running along side the road. Oh that’s not good, road kill I thought as this could be a busy road on the weekends. I turned the car around and went back to the spot where I had seen the dog, got out of the car and started calling here Sweetie come here and there she was looking up at me, so I scooped her up and put her in Big Red (my jeep) and back to farm. I knew I couldn’t let her out with the other dogs that often had a pack mentality so I wrapped her up and found a chicken cage to put her in. That night she slept with me in the loft while the other dogs scratched and whined at the door. She was so small, I felt like I was taking care of a baby. It was the weekend so I had to wait to Monday to call the animal shelter to find out whom she belonged to as she did have a tag on her collar. I find the owner and take the baby dog who is really maybe 4 years old back to the owner, who is this eccentric woman who tells me that the dog was kidnapped and that she hasn’t had the dog that long. The crazy woman raises exotic cats and had this large outdoor cage where she kept the cats and did say that when she went away she would leave the dog in there with the beasts. The whole time she is telling me this story the little dog is sitting on my lap, she has made no attempt to acknowledge her owner. We both noticed this. I leave feeling sorry for the little dog but thinking maybe I wasn’t ready to have a dog as this one seemed so needy.
About two months later the crazy woman calls me up to say that it is not working out with the dog, the cats want to scratch her eyes out. And since you saved the dog maybe you should take her. I was living in this koa wood cabin at the time that had not been occupied for a while so I was sharing it with some critters that turned out to be mongoose. It must have been mating season because they had started to show them self to me more often and I could tell they felt I was taking up to much room. I have a YouTube video about how I tried to capture and relocate them. Anyway a friend mentioned that the dog would probably help discourage the critters. So I took the dog. She had a Hawaiian name that meant something like sweetheart but I kept forgetting it so I just called her Sweetie. Well my friend was right she went into and under and over that cabin and made sure that we two were the only ones living inside.
Sweetie has been my best friend now for 8 years.
She is rat terrier/Chihuahua mix? Everyone has an opinion as to her breed. I am a bit of a dog snob and never thought I liked Chihuahua until I met Sweetie but of course she is not your average dog. She does not nip, or yap and has learned how to visualize her inner German shepherd so rarely shakes. She understands English; she likes people (women more than men), is polite to dogs and cats and will poop on command.
More about Sweetie later.

Storage

I finally made it up the two flights of stairs to the queen mum’s storage space. Four big boxes and a small suitcase, not bad I think. Wrong. What do we keep in storage? All those mementos that we just can’t seem to let go of, the important papers, pictures, letters, cards, tapes, history. I carried them down the fourteen steps slowly as I don’t feel grounded and falling, tripping,stumbling would not surprise me.
I’ve been trying to stay “in the moment.” Trying not to think too long or hard about what happened that last month but I don’t find it easy. Trying to remember to eat, brush teeth, smile, relax, breathe while inside I’m cowering in the corner. So today it was the boxes from storage that brought the tears and the pain in my heart to the front. Boxes full of memories, most wonderful, some grab my soul sad. She had saved every piece of paper that had anything to do with my brother Sean’s death. Her husband Capt. Rolly had saved drawings from my nieces when they still drew Birthday cards, such a sweet, sentimental thing to do. Family pictures, b&w photos of relatives I never knew, every card I’ve ever sent them. Their life now in a box to be thrown away.

CHANGE

I slept last night. Deep, natural, body relaxing sleep, the first good sleep in forty-five days; that’s when she fell. When the queen mum was still with us I always slept with one ear listening for the phone. I did that for six years. I would wake up in the middle of a dream and think, where is the cell phone? Jumping up to make sure it was somewhere close so I could hear it and if I couldn’t find it, that meant I left it in the car. Trying not to fully wake up while I’m doing this or I may never get back to sleep. I never had kids but I imagine once you do that you learn to sleep like I did, always on alert. After I got the queen mum Lifeline I felt a little better because if for some reason they couldn’t reach me she was to go to the ER. Though I did have to condition her to this idea. Once she fell three times in the living room on soft carpet hitting soft couch or soft chair. “Are you sure you are okay Miss Grace, I think I’ll call your daughter just to let her know what’s going on.” I was her “Big Brother”. I don’t have to worry about that anymore, I could leave my cell phone in the car all night if I wanted to, or not even answer it. It feels good, but it also felt good having someone to care about.

I got attitude

My petite estate sale is tomorrow, and I’m okay ready. A so called friend who I have never really had any dealings with except having to go to her husbands boring birthday parties because he is an old friend of my mom Grace and her then husband Rolly called up and offered to help with the sale about three days ago. I called right back and said yes please because I have pretty much given up buying stuff and had no idea how to price ( I have a give it away mentality, which when you are broke is maybe, why you are broke}. So she doesn’t show up the first day she said she might and the second day she calls to say she thinks she is sick and doesn’t want to infect ( so Port Townsend considerate) and then goes on to say she doesn’t price stuff, just waits to somebody asks and then you know makes a party of it and has fun trying to get them to pay a good price. it’s around this point as I listen to the message I hang up as yeah that is how I feel right now, let’s party with my dead mothers’ stuff. So then she calls back and says I just realized what I said to you, I’m so sorry. Guess what? I’m busy and you aint’ helping so goodbye. I had made a sign for the estate sale that said “Make me an offer but don’t offend me. I have attitude.” When I showed it to a real friend who did help she said “that might be a little off putting”. I felt I had toned it down, my original sign was: Make me an offer, but don’t offend me. I’m not in the mood to suffer fools.

Taking care of the details

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Soon I will be able to think about something else besides the queen mum. Yes, she is still running the show. So many details go with the death of a loved one. Friends and family to contact, some by phone (that is the hardest) some by social network (that is easier but so impersonal). I found out my dearest friend had committed suicide by an email. That was hard, the news coming that way. Is there a good way to find out about someone you love death? There is no good way.
Every day details. The newspaper, TV guide, dish, telephone, magazine subscriptions, dental insurance, AARP
insurance, give 30 day notice at apartment, send out memorial cards, put in an obit in the newspaper, change address, notify bank, credit cards, send back dish box, find a home for pet, go through all her papers, cards, pictures, she never threw away anything that belonged to her dead husband, have an petite estate sale, go through kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, closet, storage. Throwing away stuff, stuff and more stuff. Giving back the hearing aid she had just bought, returning the birthday and Christmas gifts she never saw or got to use. Donating to local charities, changing titles on car, cancelling her life. I’m almost done.
This is good, as I need to think about something else for a while. I need to forget and remember, to come back to the present, to brush my hair and wipe the sleep out of my eyes, to get out the big eye mirror and check for long black hairs that show up overnight on my chin. I want to be able to read a book, magazine, look someone in the eye without crying, and get my shoulders out of my ears. I want to feel it’s ok to take time to go swimming, take a yoga class, be nice to myself without feeling like I need to finish something first, enjoy my food instead of forgetting to eat and then eating too fast because I’m not paying attention to the food but the list that is going on inside my head.
Oh I’m not saying I’m almost finished, I still have boxes and garbage bags full of medical supplies and medicine and photos and cards to got through but I will do them at my pace not dealing with a deadline.
And when I’m back in my body in the here and now I am going to do something about our local nursing home.

My Town?

I have lived in mum’s gentrified, adorable, PNW town for six years. Besides being her caregiver, I have had jobs working at a hotel, cleaning houses, and pet sitting. I haven’t met a lot of people but I took some creative writing classes and swam at the local pool (lap swimmers are very unfriendly). I was hurt when mum died and the only people who called to offer sympathy were two of her old local friends. I am grateful that my old friends called from around the country. No one that I had met in this quaint, almost all white bread, politically correct, GMO sensitive town felt the need to call. They are so aware here, they are too correct.
Here is one example of my limited exchange with “my” community.
For almost four years I have known a couple in town that I once worked for as their housekeeper, I have babysat their animal, I have the keys to their house even though I no longer houseclean for them, I have the keys because they have been known to call me up to check on house, animal whatever. I have had Thanksgiving dinner with them, the wife and I have girl dinners together. I am a Facebook friends with both of them so they could read about what I am up too. The husband calls me up to ask me for some help (they always pay generous) and during our conversation after I assure him I would be happy to take care of his concerns he says to me “I hear your mom died, were you close?” My heart skipped a beat and I’m sure my face turned bright red (good thing we were talking on the phone) as I replied “Yes we were, I’ve been her caregiver for the last six years, that is why I moved here.” With no hesitation he goes back to talking about his problems. My town. Am I concerned he might see this? Not really, I doubt he would even think I was talking about him.