There are days when I start to consider that maybe I’ve lived here long enough – when I realize that I don’t even notice the view outside my expansive, oceanside windows or when the tropical lethargy and procrastination takes hold of me and I just can’t seem to get anything done at all. From the very beginning of our life in the islands, we were acutely aware of the potential risk of insidious but irreversible mental changes. ( I will stop short of suggesting damage.) It’s a hazard that has always concerned us.
There was that time when I was volunteering. (Now, for those folks who actually know me, don’t get excited. It only happened once. It only lasted for a few months. And I’ve never been tempted again.) I agreed to serve as the secretary for a small, charitable organization. I was heady with my new responsibilities and wanted desperately to do a good job. So when the first committee meeting was scheduled for 9AM, I was up early, hair combed, pencils sharpened and ready to get the jump on my 4 minute commute when Michael asked me to help him with something. I was aggravated. Didn’t he realize I had a place to go, people to see, things to do? I was on a schedule, and he made me late. I cursed him. Well, I’m typically early. So being late can really mean being just on time which is what I actually was. I fussed and fumed and grumbled to myself for the entire 2 mile drive, and then I rushed into the meeting room at the stroke of 9AM only to find, of course, that I was the only one there.
It was 25 minutes before anyone else showed up and nearly an hour before somebody called a quorom and decided that everybody who was coming was there. Oh, that’s just island time, everybody says. You get used to it. Yes means maybe. Now means sometime. Blah, blah, blah. I vowed then that I might endeavor to quit freaking out if I were running late but that I would NOT quit caring about mine or other people’s schedules. And I think if you polled my social contacts on island, you’d find that I am still, 11 years later, pretty darn punctial proving that not everyone falls prey to the allure of ‘island time.’ In fact, I was putting gas in the car one morning while two locals were also filling up next to me. I couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but it became apparent that one of them was ribbing the other for being late to work when he said to his friend, “Well, you know, man, you can’t go for work at 8 to be for work at 8!” See there. That’s not exactly how I might have phrased it, but point taken.
Then there was the time that a friend of ours suffered a stroke. There was no facility equipped to perform fancy, diagnostics and only one option for treatment – anticoagulants which would be indicated in the event of a clot but seriously contraindicated in the event of hemmorhagic stroke. Fortunately he lived. That’s not the scary part of the story. The scary part is that he thought he had received great care when in fact he had just been lucky. Honest to goodness, flip-of-the-coin kind of lucky. We realized then that it was possible to stay on island long enough to lose the ability to see that one shouldn’t stay on island any longer. A classic Catch-22.
So, what happened this week that made me wonder whether I’ve been here too long? The exhaust fan in our closet quit working. (That wasn’t it, but bear with me.) Michael was quick to blame the fancy timer switch and was lickety split off to St. Martin to get a replacement in spite of my suggesting that maybe we should switch out the switch with a simple toggle version to see if that was really the issue. He ignored me and replaced the switch only to find that the fan still did not work. This set him off on a tirade about how he’s never in his whole, entire life had an exhaust fan go bad. This tropical environment is brutal. How can we live this way? And on and on and on. I tried to calm him down by suggesting that maybe we should start by taking the cover off of the fan so we could take a look. Maybe, I propsed, a stupid gecko got in there, got caught and jammed up the fan.
And lo and behold, when the cover came off, what did we find but a poor little gecko cadaver bent in half and wedged against the fan blade. Now pardon me but when you’ve been on an island long enough that your go to answer is “dead gecko throwing a wrench in the fan works” and you are right – well, point taken.