A Little Drop of Glue

Dearest Grandchildren (Thanksgiving Day, 2020)

Early 1980

I have written a few stories about Emmy’s and my life in Fiji. I have even written an entire book that you should probably peruse someday.

I can tell you so many stories…

About the evening Emmy and I were sitting on the floor in the bure and a large moth landed on my back. A few seconds later, a Huntsman Spider, easily as big as my hand, launched from the leaves lining the wall of our bure to landed on my back, wrestled with the moth, then jumped off my back and carried its prize back to its lair on our leafy wall. We moved to the center of the room.

About the incredible waterfall a couple miles into the jungle behind our bure, where we often went to swim. Surprisingly, we never saw another person there – just us and our dogs.

About the hurricanes and the rains that accompanied them, where it poured so hard that we could shower in the rain when the water pipe in the falls that fed the village got plugged up until someone – often me – went up to clear it out. Interestingly, your Emmy chose to stay in the bure on those trips.

About how there was little to do except read and read and read. We consumed novels like salted peanuts. I even played hooky a couple of times to finish a book. I discovered that reading “Dracula” is not a particularly good idea when you live in the bush, with giant bats scouring the night skies, even if they were just fruit bats.

About the beautiful children. Oh, the beautiful, happy, smiling, laughing children. I have never seen as much joy as in the children in a Fijian village. A story I should write someday.

About how when we entered the classroom and the students would stand, wait for us to get to the front of the room and address them, “Good morning class.” They would answer, “Good morning sir/madam.” And then we would tell them, “You may be seated.”

About the gallons and gallons of yagona I drank in the village – Emmy just took “vaka lai-lai” (a little bit) and fell asleep on the soft, matted floor.

About the old man carrying the back half of a six-foot shark down the road from the village –something you don’t see every day. I asked him where he got it. “Na uciwai,” (the river) he answered. I don’t think I swam in that river again.

About that same old man limping down that same road from the village. “Na cava na lega,” I asked. (What’s wrong?). “Vuaka,” he answered. A wild boar had gored him while hunting in the bush. I carried my cane knife through the bush from then on.

About when that same old man died, and we attended his funeral in the village; his well-used body wrapped in a mat right behind me while I drank yagona to his memory. I never knew his name – “the old man on the road.” That is a good name, come to think of it.

So many stories, many of which are in that book you should read someday, “What to do if a Coconut doesn’t fall on your head.”

But I want to tell you this story, a story that takes me away from the events of our election, a pandemic, and all the other things that have haunted me – us – this year, this 2020: a simple, short, sweet memory…

Sunday night: dishes washed; dogs fed; tomorrow’s lessons planned; laundry taken down to keep the devils away; mosquito coil extinguished; mosquito net tucked all around the bed to keep the blood-sucking, ear-burrowing, six- and eight-legged critters out. I reach under the mosquito net, turn the kerosene lantern down to as low as it will go, barely a shadow cast from the cool, orange flame. 9:00 PM. I turn the radio to Radio Fiji 2 – “Good evening from the BBC’s Mystery Theater. This evening our story…”

In the soft glow of our lantern, with my Jungle Girl’s head on my shoulder and my arm wrapped around her, we let the everyday slip away on the narrator’s voice into the dark Fijian night. We listen with the same swept enthrallment as a little boy sitting on his Baba’s lap some 40 years later as he listens to his Baba’s voice bring life to a storybook.

Just us – not yet Emmy and Baba, or even mommy and daddy – huddled into our cozy nest, listening, sheltered by our mosquito net, our grass bure, our dogs snoozing outside, with the reality of the world beyond our leafy walls little more than a dark, inconsequential vapor. Charmed by the escape of the telling, taken away together to new places where, as cooks, architects, paupers, ghosts, kings and thieves, we haunt castles, solve mysteries, thieve and catch thieves, escaping every time to tell our stories the following week. And then we return to a well-deserved slumber in our soft Fijian nest.

This is one of the sweetest memories of my life, grandsons; a memory that I got to share with the sweetest person in my life. It is one of those life stories that I like to call “life art.” A story that binds lives together, supports their growth into a single tree, bound by the glue that holds together not only the love between two people, but the bond their grandsons, children, friends, strangers, and even a world can – and must! – sometimes rely upon to help us get through times when love seems to be in such extraordinarily short supply.

A little drop of glue: one hour, with your Emmy’s head on my shoulder, my arm around her holding her close – so very young – in the deep Fijian bush, held fast by that same hushed euphoria of a three-year-old sitting on his Baba’s lap listening to the voice of Goodnight Moon.

I am thankful, this Thanksgiving Day, for those little drops of glue.

Baba

When we visited Fiji in 2019, our bure was gone; the bush had slowly encroached on our little plot of land. Unless you knew, you would never guess just by looking that this was where the love that eventually brought you into this world would sink its root so deep into the earth that it would become the foundation for you, your brother, your mother and your uncles…and so very much more.