Karma in the Pacific

Coming from a beach town (Panama City Beach, Florida), I am not usually awed by water and sand. Seeing sunlight on water is religious to me—nothing else quite looks like a god kissing the world.
Hawai’i is therefore a beautiful place, a generally welcoming place, in terms of the land and the water.
I didn’t expect the following, though:
Clouds so low on the land—I have never seen mountains touched this way—roads that could take me into a cloud if I followed them high enough.
These clouds hover around the horizon, too, blocking the sun at sunset, creating pink shadows, but precluding the view of a sun dying in the sea.
A sun that burns me through my sunblock almost instantaneously. Parts of me are red and weary and the rest are librarian-white.
An angry Safeway with three ridiculously small parking spaces & a crowd of people always inside and in each other’s way.
A little restaurant with half price appetizers and sushi and jazz on Sunday afternoons. The first full song I heard there was the one I would have requested if there had been a need—All of Me.
Firedancers performing after dark at one of the hotels on this strip each night—and the hosts proclaiming to the paying crowd (of which I manage not to be) that they won’t see that show anywhere else.
Spam sushi. Spam in the A.M. at Burger King (a spam platter or spam crossaint-wich).
In angry Safeway, a can of Bud Light Clamato. That’s right. That’s what was in the can.

But I have found a grocery store that is not angry, I have ahi to grill today for lunch. Tomorrow I will visit a bar that Willie Nelson owns. And the sun will burn and then drift down into the clouds and my skin will match the clouds at dusk–white and pink and ready for ready for rest.

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