On Tuesday morning, April 30, 2013, I was at my gate at the Kansas City airport waiting to board my flight to San Jose. It was a beautiful sunny day. To get started on my trip homework, I began rereading Martha Ward’s memoir, Nest in the Wind, about her field work studying blood pressure in Pohnpei. All I remembered about the book was that it was full of delightful anecdotes about how she and her then husband Roger made friends with the Pohnpeian men who helped them carry out their interviews of dozens of villagers around the island during roughly the same period that I was in the Peace Corps there.
Martha added two or three new chapters to the second edition of her book, which was published after she returned to the island about 30 years after her first tenure. Like most of the publications that broadened my understanding of Micronesia, Martha’s book came out after I had left the island, not knowing if I would ever return.
But I was returning now, almost 45 years from the date I first set foot on Pohnpei, in June of 1968—or 42 years from the time I departed in July of 1971.
After boarding and stowing my medium-sized red suitcase in the overhead compartment, I deployed my self-inflating back cushion, a precaution against Sore Back Syndrome, something that had worried me from the moment I first contemplated making the trip. I had this notion that I would be crippled after being cramped with bad posture in the jet seat for a straight shot to Pohnpei. For that reason I not only drove to a special store in Kansas City to buy my “Relax the Back” cushion, but I scheduled four stopovers, two in each direction, to break the flying time into bearable durations.
At Auntie Anne’s counter at the DFW airport I paid $11.71 for three pigs in a blanket and, as advertised, the bonus clear plastic cup of rectangular doughnut holes. The name on the cashier’s shirt said something like Elechewa. She appeared to be East Indian.
DFW to San Jose was a few more hours of sitting and reading. There was the usual John-Has-No-Cell-Phone suspense at the San Jose airport, but Lynn Ritter and I finally found each other, and she drove me up to Palo Alto. How did people ever find anyone at airports before the advent of cell phones?
On Tuesday night I tagged along with Lynn to the remedial English class she was teaching. As I wrote to Elaine, “I’m sitting at the back of a classroom in the Mountain View Adult Learning Center and waiting for Lynn to finish some photocopying. I’ll be ‘assisting’ with her ESL class lesson, about 25 kids, mostly in their 20s, who are not yet fluent enough in English. I’ll be ready for nighty-night by the time we’re done at 9:00 p.m.,"which would have been 11:00 Kansas time.
It was wonderful to be carefree in California, especially knowing that cold weather was coming back to Kansas. My two and a half hour walk around the Stanford campus was perfect exercise. It helped me to reflect on my young adult life, trying to determine what common elements there were to the moves I had made: going into the Peace Corps, visiting Japan, living in Cuernavaca, getting married, learning band instrument repair, and so on. I was usually able to see a year or two ahead at a time, but no further.
On Thursday I was flying to Maui. Lynn Ritter--bless her heart--sent along a care package that I saved for the longer flight on Friday. Well, I did eat the granola bar. On the Maui flight, I was sitting in an aisle seat next to a skippy young Latvian woman who was taking a couple of weeks' vacation with friends to get away from her “job” in Sunnyvale, where she was doing research for the Maidenform Bra Corp. She was being paid a stipend by the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, which is funded by the U.S. government. All the while she was still running several small businesses in Latvia, where her family lived. She had had her iPhone stolen on a crowded bus in San Francisco, so she lost a lot of private information. We talked about Italy (she loves it), France (not too keen on Paris) movies, and Starbucks (she drank seven cups a day but was trying to cut back).
At the Kahului airport in Maui on Thursday morning, I attempted to phone Janet Gillmar from a pay phone, but whatever number and prefix I was using did not work. She may have heard a few desperate words from me before the connection was dropped. Nobody uses pay phones anymore, of course. I'm surprised they even work as well as they do. Good thing it wasn’t an emergency.
With some time on my hands I dined at Frankly Gourmet and had a saimin noodle bowl: broth, noodles, shrimp, ham, fish cake, hard boiled eggs, Chinese cabbage, and scallions. The stand mostly featured hot dogs. “Mahalo,” said the server when I paid the $14.15, which included bottled water.
At the gate I had two hours to read about grammar. I had checked the Rehg/Sohl Pohnpeian grammar out at the KU library. Through the huge windows at the gate there was a nice view of the Maui volcano, whichever one it was, with white and gray clouds covering its peak. There was a couple with two toddlers seated on the carpeted ledge that ran along the front of the observation windows. The dad was holding up his cell phone to entertain the baby. It was displaying a photo of “the best grampa ever.” Nearly everyone within my gazing radius was peering at their cell phones.
I wondered what extra stuff I should take on the trip: toilet paper. A plastic bag to hold dirty laundry?
More suspense when I landed at the Honolulu airport. Using a pay phone I managed to leave voice mail on Janet's cell phone and tell her where I would be standing with my red suitcase. She drove me out to their place in the Palolo Valley, where we picked up son Ben and then had a lovely meal at an Italian restaurant in the commercial district not far from their house. Jack himself was not there; he was finishing up a cruise around some islands in Melanesia to the south and east of Micronesia.
Ben Gillmar is the younger of the Gillmar kids. The older is Emily, who has a family on the mainland. Ben is a college graduate with about the same build as our son Robert. He talks like his dad (Jack) and speaks Chinese fluently. Quite congenial and unpretentious, not reluctant to share his competence. We talked as long as time would allow about economic and political prospects for China. Then it was home and bedtime at 8:00.
We had to get up at 3:00 a.m. to get to the airport with enough time to get our boarding passes and get to the gate. Janet gave me a partially used tube of sun screen for the trip. It was really going to happen