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4 - Friday, March 22, 1991 - North Shore News

Nightmare Hawatian

I KNOW it will come as a
terrible shock to readers,
but travel isn’t always the
way it’s made out to be in
the glossy brochures and
posters.

Or, dare I say, in the romantic
prose of the travel columns.

For instance, I spent the morn-
ing of my last day in Honolulu
combing through the hotel’s trash
bins and inventing a brand-new
mental illness called
paradophobia.

This takes some explaining.

Of course my wife and I during
our two-week visit had cheerfully
coped with other problems, which
were mainly three in number.

Our children.

Avery high proportion of peo-
ple, probably 97.8 per cent if the
public opinion polls chased
around after important stuff in-
stead of who’s your favorite for
prime minister or federal grain
commissioner, would tell you that
taking three children under six
anywhere, let alone on a crushing-
ly expensive holiday, is simple-
minded madness. So true.

However, when we set forth
with our three — two of them stil!
in diapers — we did not call it
madness. We called it faith.

We were therefore serenely un-
moved when, for instance, our
youngest, 10-month-old Berta, on
three occasions during costly din-
ners erupted in fountains of
half-digested milk.

Notice I said costly dinners. It
is one of the Ten Commandments
of Childhood that no kid ever
throws up in a McDonald’s.

On that morning | awoke with
some trepidation, unusual in a
man famed for his steely nerves
and boundless imperturbability.

This was only partly because by
2:20 p.m., or whatever time the
captain arbitrarily decided was the
real time of departure, we would
be flying home to good old, cold
old Canada, a prospect that had
me speculating on whether I could
find a rusty revolver in a pawn
shop and shoot myself.

No, there were further edges of
uncertainty.

First among them was one of
those tiny little anxieties planted
in your brain quite casually, and
which grow and grow during the
hours when you are supposed to
be resting up for approaching
ordeals and instead are staring at
the blackened ceiling and wonder-
ing why you were ever born,
especially in a country that quite
straight-facedly considers Van-
couver warm.

This weeny seed of anxiety was
my wife saying the previous night:

‘*Have you seen Kate’s journal?”’

No, said I, distracted by the
serious task of eating an enor-
mous wedge of macadamia cream
pie.

When dawn broke, the seed had
blossomed into a sequoia of para-
noia, if you like the rhyme.

“I can’t find Kate's journal
anywhere,’’ said my wife in her
second report on the situation.
Then she said uneasily: ‘*] hope
the maid didn’t throw it out. It
was in a bag on the floor with
some old paper ...’’ and she
reminded me that we'd left the
room in haste the previous morn-
ing without the usual tidying-up,
in order to catch a funeral (yes).

Kate, who is five, burst into the
mother of tears.

And not to mock it a bit. She’d
kept that journal every day, a
concise summation of what she’d
done, and illustrated it profusely.

Dear parents, you know what
such a loss is to a little giri. And I
could empathize mightily. If I lost
my journal, any one of the several
volumes I’ve kept since 1960, I'd
be inconsolable for several years.

There was only one thing for it.

[ phoned the front desk and
explained. And asked where they
kept the trash.

Minutes later I was gingerly lif-

ting the edges of a number of
large dumpsters, wondering if it
would be worse if (a) one of the
hotel guests, or in fact any other
human being on earth, saw me in
this activity, or (b) I would be re-
quired to methodically go by hand
through large, wet masses of filth,
to the indignation of whatever
furry animals, cockroaches, or
other creatures who would more
or less interpret this as a serious
interruption of their meal.

As it turned out, I was spared. 1
checked three or four of those big
blue bins on wheels. But they con-
tained only crushed cartons,
countless printouts of the hotel’s
business matters, and such. The
really ripe stuff obviously is
whisked away fast.

It broke my heart when t
returned to our room. Kate came
skipping excitedly to greet me.
Then she saw my face. I shook
my head in the way doctors used
to in the movies after they'd ex-
amined the patient with the ter-
minal disease. .

Kate wept anew. I regretted that

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it was too early to find a pawn
shop open with a rusty revolver.

But, that irreplaceable loss con-
firmed, we hed to move on to
fresh disasters,

I should point out here that I
have only three fears in life: of
love, of success, and of missing

airplanes in a strange town.

And suddenly I recalled yet
another potential for disaster.

The Honolulu papers had noted
a few days earlier that a parade of
some 3,700 Girl Guides was plan-
ned for that morning. Beginning
at ll a.m. And right across the
road, at Fort DeRussy.

Then, in large and excited
headlines, the papers reported that
there would be another parade —
of the returning heroes from the
Middle East, a cavalcade of buses
full of soidiers, with streetsful of
cheering crowds ... passing by just
a long block away, on Kalakaua.
Also that morning.

When the fuil import of all this
occurred, £ broke out in a cold
sweat.

We faced getting caught in a
crossfire of two unlikely parades
— the Girl Guides clashing with
the 282nd Airborne, or whatever.

T yanked back our little family’s
proposed departure time by a full
hour, And what if that wasn’t
enough?

The sweat turned from cold to hot.

Style

And then, dear readers, as we
feverishly slapped what seemed
like all the world’s possessions in-
to three bulging suitcases of her-
nia-inspiring weight, stuffed the
last of the macadamia cream pie
into ourselves, and humped the
various loads down to the rented
car — then came the topper.

My dear son Daniel, 2%,
somehow contrived with his in-
quisitive little fingers to get the
doorknob off. From the inside.

Do you realize the sheer,
Kafkaesque terror of it all, the
genuine Hitchcockian nightmare?

We were now locked in cur own
room.

I shouted to our next-door
neighbor on her lanai. Gave her
the key. She got us out. We drove
to the airport easily. We were 3%
hours early. The flight was
wonderful. We can’t wait for our
next holiday. You see, it’s just as
the glossy travel brochures prom-
ised. Almost.

Ok yes —- and Kate is redoing
her journal, With Momma’s help.

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