I Was Asleep, But My Brain Was Not

    In July 1991, my wife and I flew to Hawaii to visit her brother Herb and Mimi his wife, who I had never met.  They lived in an apartment building in Honolulu, which is on the Island of Oahu.  From my Peace Corp training days, I remembered Hawaii to be a laid back, easy going place, but that impression certainly disappeared as Herb picked us up at the airport and drove us back to his apartment.  As he wove in and out of the congested traffic through urban Honolulu, Herb was yelling and shaking his hand at others drivers the whole way.  I realized that I had certainly lost the aggression you need for city driving since living in tiny McBride

    Their apartment was very modern.  It was on about the third floor, and being situated in tropical Hawaii, the whole end of the living room was glass and sliding doors which opened up to a big balcony.  We could look down at the tops of the nearby trees below.  Being in the living room felt like being half outside when the big sliding doors were open, which they usually were.  Sometimes, a bird would come into the living room for a look. 

        The photo above is the only one I could find of their apartment.  The child you see is Alex, who now holds a Doctorate Degree in Art History.  (Tempest fugit).  Alex is sitting on the living room floor, where we slept.

    After watching the eclipse and exploring the volcano on the Big Island, then snorkeling on Kauai, our Hawaiian vacation was coming to an end, so we traveled back to Honolulu to spend our final days with Herb and Mimi and to catch our flight back to Canada.  Our return flight home was set to depart on Weds. 12:15 AM.  We did a day of visiting on Tuesday, and went to bed on Herb and Mimi’s living room floor, thinking we had all of Wednesday yet to go, before catching our flight.

        Strangely, sometime during the dark hours of Wednesday morning, I suddenly awoke from my sleep in a panic, somehow my slumbering brain had come to realize, that we had missed our plane:  12:15 AM of Wednesday, is part of the second half of Tuesday night.  Full of distress, I woke my wife to tell her we had missed our flight.

    I used Herb phone to call the airline to see what we could do.  The Air Canada employee just chuckled at our predicament, and brushed it off saying, “Oh, that happens all of the time.”  She then rebooked us for the 12:15 AM flight that would happen that night, so we did have one more day in Honolulu after all.

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