Time without consequence

Missing Mirrors

If Maui was about feeling at home in my skin,
Then Andros Island was about the beauty of inconvenience

I had the luxury of riding in many cars
Some without mirrors, some right hand drives, other left hand drives,
And one which had to be jumped into half a block from home because there was a swarm of bees buzzing around the drivers’ side door.
The van I drove to pick the girls up had half a key stuck in the ignition and
a power seat that was jammed, nothing a simple pillow thrown behind me wouldn’t fix

The day I picked up Ebony from her work place, the car ran out of gas
And though we were at a gas station, the lady at the grocery store kindly informed us that they had gas, but the pump was not working.
We sat in the van waiting, not really minding much,
for help from family, which came in the form of uncle Tibby, who drove half the island with a canister of gas, and after topping up the van, drove off again with barely a word, suggesting that this was a rather routine occurrence.
We later found out that the gas pipe was leaking, draining the car of gas.

The internet had been down for 2 weeks,
kocked out by a storm
In order to plan the next leg of my trip Ebony, Shiraz and I drove 20 minutes to the airport almost daily, armed with a laptop and no extra battery.
We roasted in a van in the hot Bahamian sun - squatters in a parking lot shamelessly calling the Western Airlines Terminal Andro’s latest internet café for an hour at a time.
At home, there was dial-up – as long as the phone lines were up – and a phone book
Despite all of the seeming inconveniences, a lot of things got done,
The only difference, other than the speed,
Was the noticeable absence of stress I was more accustomed to.

I started to wonder if my suspicions had always been true, that less is more.
I wondered if we weren’t distracted by a million events in a day,
Constantly pushing ourselves to work at peak efficiency,
worried if we made it on time to 3 appointments a day,
when 1 would have been enough to satisfy
Would we trade the life packed to its gills with activities, striving perfection in order to achieve our schedues’fulfillment,
for one with a little less - but as I’m starting to see - one that is infinitely richer.

My mind drifts back to the dish washer in San Francisco
Where Katya commented, almost reading my mind,
That when you are living life out so loud,
You really don’t need a dishwasher in your life to keep you happy.