Island Life

Things that do not get old living on an island: the views and that warm clear water.

Things that do get old living on an island: all the rest.

Our swimming spot.

Literally the moon.

Just looking out the window.

What exactly are these skies doing??

Come on, Nature.

Stop it.

Just stop it right now.

I know, I am a spoiled asshole. I have been my entire life. And I want to smack my own face. But I'm gonna say it: island life is hard.

Sure, being able to take your half finished drink with you when you're done eating is amazing. The smell of the rain is intoxicating. The afternoon dips to cool off are pure therapy. 

But the loneliness is achy. The struggle to find something interesting that makes you leave the house is real. The cost of groceries is staggering... $8 for Triscuits, guys... and the unreliability of them is frustrating. And even though I love Mack, not having a way to get out of each other's sight is maddening.

It's been a year since we made the move to island life. Given the fuck shit stack that was 2020-2021, living on an island whose temperature is always 82 was some quiet constant that my soul needed. Each day feels like a month, yet somehow we get half as much done. 

Which is good, because there is nothing to do so you gotta spread that stuff out.

The times we've had visitors has made this place perfection. But then they leave and it's just us and here and, well, I started therapy it's that bad. So is my hair. 

Good vibes only. Except Mala.

Pure medicine. Especially in her giggle.

My daughter-sister. 

A couple other Covid runaways.

The Queen of Open Water

The co-inventor of Rail Racing!

The Griswolds even made it, despite a flight cancellation and Covid test requirements!

Chungus loved drinking that salty water.

Tater probably would've swam home if we'd let him. 

I have been trying to get connected to this place so it feels like home, but even after a year together, there's friction between us. I can't figure it out. I hate myself for that, because it really is so amazing. The critters are everywhere, providing constant and delightful entertainment. But somehow, even though I've seen a damn octopus in the wild, it's not enough to fill the void.

I've met no fewer than 100 baby chicks. 

These guys do pushups on the balcony, and I'm like, guys, stop, I'm married.

Donkeys! Also there are goats!

Oh, this is my friend. We've hung out a couple times.

Another buddy. You can just see the annoyance on his face. 

Luckily he only likes to eat the stuff on the bottom.

Oh hi, you killed Steve. On accident. I get it. 

Another casual lunch with a dinosaur.

I have found a few awesome people to spend time with. Really, they found me and didn't give up on me after a few shy encounters. They live a couple doors down, cook curried lentils like pros, and are so generous that they let me cling to them like family. 

Afternoon cocktails on the porch with the mayor.

And drunch with this power couple.

I'm a person who needs to put down roots, to put energy into something and be rewarded by watching it grow over time. I can't seem to get anything to root to, to anchor myself. Maybe it's because we come and go a lot. Maybe it's because there's no dirt around my condo... it's all rocks and water. Being a tiny life nomad requires you to neglect things a lot, either due to time or space, which makes me feel like nothing that takes a personal investment is worth doing. In other news, it's also forced me to find clever band-aids. Like, now I know an embroidery hobby will fit in a gallon-size baggie. But I don't want to put things I enjoy in a baggie and leave them behind. I want them to surround me all the time and take up space and see how they change over time. 

Then these rainbows show up, and are you really whining about life on an island, you idiot? Look what time does to them. They appear out of nowhere, change, grow, disappear, reappear, double in size, and capture the attention of everyone who sees them, forcing us all to stand still and look up at them in amazement. If only they could hug me, make me laugh, and give me something to do... that's what I need more than anything.

Life on the sunny side

Home-ish sweet home-ish

My Chubby Bubby

I don’t know why the baby makers in my life won’t coordinate their pregnancies so I can get a fresh baby every couple of years instead of all at once. The last time I got babies, Shannon had Nynie, Lee had Mateo, and Leiah had Beatrix in a span of 8 months. No one listens to me, so for this, which is likely my final baby season, Leiah and Lee decided to have babies at practically the exact same time. Of course.

And, to add to it, as they were discussing names, Leiah mentioned she was thinking they may name their son Elliott BUT LEE AND BUBBA HAD ALREADY DECIDED TO NAME THEIR SON ELLIOTT. Finally, Leiah took pity on me and took Elliott of her list.

Lee headed to the delivery room 3 DAYS before Leiah to bring our newest nephew to the world, a guy we’d watched growing in his momma’s belly all summer. In the couple months before his big arrival, his family moved into a new house, his daddy started a new job, and all they needed was this new baby to settle into life as they’d know it.

Having a baby during a pandemic means no one can come to the hospital to see you. And you get to huff and puff and push and get that baby out thru a surgical mask. Lee took it all like a champ, and then, at 4:53 pm on Nov. 25, our little Ching Ching showed up.

Ching Ching is apparently how you say cubby in Tagalog, and though this little bag of sugar is only 6lbs. 5oz. and 19 inches long, he is a whole pound bigger than his big brother was. And it shows.

We didn’t get to meet this sweet baby until this month, and I am not exaggerating when I say he is absolutely the best baby I have ever been around. We’ve been staying with Bubba and Lee for a few weeks and I have not heard one cry out of him - not one. He likes to lay in his basinet and listen to jazz or take naps in his swing. When he wakes up, he’ll listen for his mom’s voice to say hello to him and a smile will creep across his face. He likes it when Mack talks to him like they’re doing important business negotiations and then when Mack finishes it all with “Agoo,” Bubby just beams. I’m ruining him by snatching him up to hold him, but I’m his Tita and that’s what I’m supposed to do. I like to make him do “nexercises” and just the other day this butterball rolled over! He eats all his food, sleeps good at night, and is one of those babies you could forget about because he’s just so content. He doesn’t spit up. He doesn’t have diaper explosions. He’s unreal, except that I’ve held him and he is so real. 

I can’t wait to watch this one grow up alongside his brother, Mr. Personality. I mean just look at them! I’m going to have no money.

The One Who Tried to Kill My Sister

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the day after we buried my Uncle Vince, Nico Alistair Galownia burst forth from his mother, my little sister, and brought with him exuberance and despair in a matter of seconds in a true demonstration of the universe’s capacity to fuck your shit up.

We were gathered at Camp Grampa, where Shannon was improvising a dinner out of some frozen hamburgers and turnips, seeing if a change of scenery could put the grief one layer lower for my sweet Aunt Becky, a woman who just a month before was in this same kitchen, improvising a dinner of fried green tomatoes and fried blue gill that she and Vince had caught, in an effort to get our grief one layer lower. 

We got word earlier in the day that Leiah was headed to the hospital to deliver her son, a fella who’d made her belly so big strangers couldn’t contain their “whoa”s when she walked by, earlier that day, so I sent a text to David at 5:50pm to see how it was going. We got right in on the action when he replied “Dialted and pushing. Home stretch.”

In an attempt to do something with all the excitement, Susan and Becky trimmed the little Christmas tree Susan had put up in the living room. I collected bets for weight from everybody in the room to make it competitive. 

Finally at 7:37pm my phone tings and there is my nephew, Nico Alistair. A beefy red baby, 19 inches long, 8lbs. 13 oz. Isaac won. 

His dad let us in on his name, which wasn’t a guarantee, and told us that he was a super chill baby. And just as quickly as joy filled every cell in my body, fear crept in. Leiah had a huge 800 gram clot that was preventing her uterus from clamping down. She was hemorrhaging, and even though she was in the best place to hemorrhage, a place with blood and surgeons, and even though I knew they’d take the whole uterus out before they’d let it kill my sister, I was afraid. Leiah later told me she didn’t realize that many hands could fit in a vagina. David said, “The whole hospital was in there.”

Fortunately the fear only lasted for an hour before Leiah stabilized. She got blood and the hands that were inside her body did what they needed to do. We got pictures of her, smiling, pale and covered with a mountain of blankets, but alive and having achieved another echelon of love. 

Her family was complete, bookended by boys, little girls in the sweet center, and her record for biggest cheeks broken. Though it didn’t take away the loss that brought us together, Nico’s arrival bandaged our family with hope, with certainty that life goes on, that happiness will still bridge the sadness. He reminded me that the terrible things that are going to come our way will be made better by our cohesion and that even in the darkest times, there are beams of light to cling to. 

Welcome to the tribe, little man. I hope you love being one of us as much as we love you.

Pretirement

After 7 years in the Emergency Department at Harbor-UCLA, a Level I Trauma Center is South Los Angeles, I have pretired.

Pretirement is a lot like retirement, except it comes earlier and you fully intend to go back to work again... when you run low on money. 

I loved my job. LOVED it. And walking away from it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. So hard, I stalled it for 6 months so I could get my head around the idea of saying goodbye.

When I started my career as a nurse, I didn't know what to expect. I hated nursing in nursing school, and I wasn't sure I'd like it as a profession. Turns out, it is the best thing I've ever done, and I don't think that would have been the case if I hadn't landed at a county facility serving the uninsured. 

I loved the people I worked with, the patients we cared for, the uncertainty that rolled through the door, the smell of the firefighters' overalls, the lingo on the radio calls, the glued-together building that we worked in. I found my voice and my backbone, and standing up for someone who can't stand up for themselves became an everyday event, some classier than others. I got to do all sorts of amazing things as a nurse at Harbor, things that made me tough and things that made me cry. And laugh, oh there was never a shortage of things to make you laugh.

Disaster Training! What a disaster!

Thanksgiving with the Harbor Fam. We knew how to potluck.

In a place where people die, you've got to make the merry sometimes.

Easter egg hunts made everyone a kid again. Bad to be a patient in that 30 minutes.

Legends. Absolute legends. I was so lucky to work with them.

Less legends. But such a highlight of every day.

Helipad adventures

Everybody loves St. Patricks Day. Even the Russians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Nigerians, South Africans, Brazilians, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, and every other countryperson represented in our nursing staff.

Search and Rescue Training. I basically killed all the dummies. That's why it's called training,

Visit to the LA County Morgue. For, y'know, inspiration.

MICN Class. Literally thought my head would explode during that course.

Trauma Survivor Celebration. Without a doubt, my favorite extra credit work. 

I got to make friends from co-workers, celebrate their birthdays, weddings and new babies, support them to higher degrees, watch them fall into love and their first homes. We defiled party buses, celebrated any season we could justify, pulled off adult field days, white water rafted, camped, skied, tubed, and even traipsed through Europe. This dysfunctional family I was a part of is the reason I lasted all the years I did. 

Field Day! 

Work wouldn't give us a Christmas party so we gave ourselves one.

Lots of people died on the Kern River the year we did this. None of us!

At least one of us knew how to put up a tent. 

Birthday on the beach. 

Letting a couple doctors in on our good times. 

The Harbor Hoedown!

Babies! And since this, two more babies!

Playing in the snow became an annual thing. 

The gang does Germany. And Austria. And France. 

So much like family that Shana became a stand-in chicken mommy when we left. 

That place absolutely shaped who I am, and after seven years, I can say with confidence that I am pretiring a damn good nurse. I am smarter, kinder, better, more aware, and stronger than I planned to be. And even though my heart broke when I walked away, it was time. 

A couple months of perspective has really brought to light the toll that sustained intensity like that of my job can take.  It necessarily should have a short life or it will cost you some of yours. A typical day in the emergency department has huge swings from high to low, which can make you an impatient, detached, compartmentalized person as a means of self-preservation. Factor in the dysfunction and cripple of a pandemic, well, human beings aren't made to do things like that as a career. A month or six if it's real desperate, sure, but a career? Nah.

Pretirement is a welcome change. A slow, boring, empty change. It's got its own sweet torture, where every day feels like Sunday. Inconsequential things like if the hermit crab will show up out front become extremely important parts of the day. I am burdened by how many chicks the hens are having and tossing bread that costs $7 a loaf out to them in the morning. I spend an inordinate amount of focus on hydrating. I brush my hair once a week. A trip to the grocery store makes me need a drink. I've made huge improvements in my crossword game. I did a very complicated paint by number. Having only impulsive things to do has brought peace, and that peace has saved me from a chronic distress that I didn't even know I'd developed. Every nurse in the world deserves a pretirement phase after the Coronavirus shit we've been through.

I miss my job. I miss my work fam. But pretirement is just what the doctor ordered.