Suddenly, at four, wide awake

Suddenly, at four, I am wide awake. Or so it seems, but my mind, still caught up in the clammy vapors of sleep, isn't quite itself. It thinks odd thoughts; autobiographical thoughts; not quite of the what-if variety, but of the how different it could have been. (Not better or worse, just different). At four, the thought seems interesting, a kind of philosophical reflection; at four, the mind is too sleepy to know what it is doing.

The gist seems to be this.

Many years ago, in the middle of the last great automobile recession, I lived in Detroit, which was then a kind of bombed out hole in the ground -- unemployment, crime, graffiti, boarded up houses, not a tree in sight, stifling heat in the summer, arctic cold and howling wind in the winter. (It probably isn't much different now). Really, it would have been difficult to find a worse place to live. Why on earth was I living there?

I was barely a youth; totally inexperienced; without a clue. My parents, who had taken me to Detroit in the first place -- you move across the ocean to start a new life in the Promised Land, and what corner of it do you choose to settle in? -- had just compelled me to take up an education I was not interested in, of the technical variety, so that I, quote, would have a secure job. It was not a resounding vote of confidence in my ability to make it in the world on my own; it did not exactly inspire me with self-confidence.

I had not wanted to do it; there was resistance; words were spoken; there were tears, mother's tears (ah, mother's tears, how terrible). At length, we had reached an agreement: I would complete the degree, but then be free to pursue any unrelated course of life I chose. Already then I was thinking about moving on. Already the East beckoned.

During the summer, while waiting for the technical school to begin, I went to Hawaii. It was a religious camp; I had been invited, all expenses paid. Some churches will do anything to gain a soul and this one had some confidence in my worth -- my ability to achieve something without the technical education -- apparently; greater than my parents, at any rate. Perhaps therein lay the attraction. I went.

The prehistory of the religious thing would take too long to explain. Suffice this: it was that sort of last ditch effort which throws marriages on the rocks into that last cruise together -- to save things, the relationship. I was giving Jesus a chance and Jesus was laying it on thick: Hawaii and all.

It didn't work. It would take too long to explain why. About 9 PM one night I walked out of a prayer meeting and just kept walking until I finally tired and came to rest on a rock, under the blazing stars. I was single again. Alone. In the dark, under a great starry sky. I felt fine.

I was on the Big Island. I suppose it must be different now; there was only one development then, in Kona: the rest was still pineapple and sugarcane. At night the stars seemed to be just beyond one's fingertips' reach.

I must have been one of the last immigrants cutting sugarcane in Hawaii. I did it for four weeks to earn my return fare; I did it so that I could take up the technical education which I didn't want in a city I hated. When I think about it today, it boggles the mind: I worked in Hawaii in order to leave it for the Midwest. Really, does that make sense to you?

I then went back to Midwest, took four years to complete that education, then another to build up a small capital with which to leave for the Far East: five years in the West, waiting to go East. And yet there, on the Big Island, I had been halfway there already. Think how much time I could have saved, time and travel, if I had simply not bothered to go back to Detroit but headed East already then.

At four a.m., it boggles the mind. All of it.