My girlfriend came to visit me here in the Marshall Islands this last Thursday. I had been counting down the days one by one ever since she bought her ticket. My frame of reference was broken down into B.T. and A.T. (her name is Tiffany). People would ask me if I wanted to do something and I would run it through my head to see where it fit in relation to her.
In my class I shoved it into the regular lineup of other mundane announcements. Quiz on Wednesday, basketball game on Thursday and Tiffany will be here in 29 days. Towards the end of my countdown I elicited groans from the crowd.
“Ah, Mr. Tim,” my student Bryant said one day, “all you talk about is Ms. Tiffany, Ms. Tiffany, Ms. Tiffany all day and we are tired of it!”
Finally the day came and I took a cab out to the airport way too early and set about waiting. I paced all around the airport until she came and I am sure that if it were a bigger a facility with more security concerns, I would have been stopped and questioned. As it was, her plane was only ten minutes late, a ten minutes that seemed so long I felt 80 afterwards, but 10 minutes nonetheless.
There she was the girl I had been waiting for. She looked as beautiful as ever and had enough bags to cloth the entire island through a snowstorm if the climate should suddenly shift.
“It is so gorgeous,” she told me. “From the plane, I could not believe how beautiful it was.” I looked around and saw the coconuts swaying in the sunny breeze with turquoise beaches glimmering beyond. Suddenly I remembered that when I first touched down, I too saw all of these things and was blind to the trash and grit that has later caught my eye.
“Yeah, I suppose it is,” I said.
After she unpacked we went for a walk and along the way we saw many of the neighborhood children.
“They are so cute,” Tiffany said. “I love how every one of them gives you a smile when you wave at them.” I looked around and saw how wherever we went children popped out from their front yards and down from trees and waved their tiny waves and smiled their enormous smiles. Some shouted “hello” and some shouted “yakwe.”
“Yeah, I suppose they are,” I said.
A couple of days later the yacht club where I am a member (that’s right, I’m a “yachtie”) took us out on a “Learn to Sail Day.” We learned a little about the foreign language that is a yacht, cut the jib and all that, and then went out for an afternoon jaunt around the Majuro Lagoon. At the end of the day we glided back into port and drank coffee and ate cookies and talked with the couple who took us out. They were in the beginning of a five-year around the world trip. After a swim off the deck they took us back to shore.
“Sometimes I want to pinch myself because I am not sure this is real,” Tiffany said. “Sometimes it seems too perfect, like it is made up, like it is a ride at Disney Land.”
I saw the sun setting on the horizon and the coconut trees all black outlines in a sky on fire. I heard the lapping of tropical water on a dinghy. I saw a dock materializing and I knew that home was close by.
“Yeah, I suppose I live in paradise.”
The love you give comes back in the end.
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