I want a Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle. – A Christmas Story
I need a trip. Somewhere I’ve never been, to a place where you do actually leave the farm. A nice place, preferably far away and tropical, to take my wife and lounge under an umbrella while the warm sea breeze lifts us gently onto that Greek river of forgetfulness. Where you sleep in the open air and flowered shirts are in vogue.
A place like Hawaii.
My plan in high school was to visit all 50 states, but the pact I made with myself said nothing about going in order. I’m serious about this, serious enough to buy Attorney Matt Henry lunch today at the Capital Hotel. Why Matt Henry, you ask. Well, besides being acquainted with Matt through the PCBA, and knowing he is a man of lively conversation, I know he has also been to Hawaii recently – very recently, in fact. I know this because of Facebook, where friend Matt began posting pristine pictures of the trip he and his wife were on. But rather than going with my initial instinct of unfriending Matt, for posting all those photos of beaches and pool bars and National Geographic like sunsets, while I waited on my Hawaiian looking weatherman to tell me the rain could begin freezing at any time, I instead thought, “If Matt can do it, why can’t I?”
I was on an airplane last week, headed to Atlanta with Publisher Boss (PB).
I’d already been having those mid-life Hawaii trip thoughts, but they hadn’t yet been formed into actual sentences with volume. As I looked down at the magazine Delta put in the pouch in front of me, to the page charting all the places Delta flies, I saw the long red line from Dallas, over the Pacific, to Honolulu.
“I’m thinking of taking Kathy to Hawaii,” I said to PB as the stewardess smiled over her shoulder at me.
“You have to do it!” PB said almost as excitedly as if I’d invited him to come along.
Then he began to tell me where he and Mrs. PB stayed when they went, somewhere on Maui called Kaanapali Beach, and all the great things they did while there.
A few days later, as I watched large oak logs crackle in the flames of my hearth (the same oak logs that had recently been part of an oak tree, until Christmas came and crashed it into the neighbor’s fence), my thoughts were again swept away to the place in the Pacific, and pineapple sticking out of umbrella drinks. Kathy sat across the room, and I imagined her in a grass skirt and an orchid in her hair. With courage at its peak, I blurted out, “I think we should go to Hawaii.”
The iPad dropped from her line of vision and she peered over the half-readers at me, “You’ve lost your mind,” which was less than the enthusiasm I was looking for. It was almost as bad as, “You’ll shoot you’re eye out.”
I had no good response but had to say something, anything that might somehow get me on that plane.
“PB thinks it’s a good idea.”
Again, the glare came over the readers.
“And is PB going to pay for it?”
Grasping, I said, “Well, Matt Henry got to go!”
“How old are you?” were her last words as she walked out of the room, making the score - Wife 1, Desperate husband 0.
But don’t give up on me yet. Remember, in the end, Ralphie did get to shoot at Black Bart.