Sipping coffee this morning my slab mate John leans over and asks if I have Internet connection. He does this every morning. I tell him that I do.
“What?” he explodes and walks over to where I’m sitting to make sure that I’m not lying. It’s too early to lie. I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee. Besides I’m not elected to public office where most lying occurs.
He storms off with his computer in hand. His wife Deb comes over dressed for her morning workout.
“He gets so frustrated,” she tells me.
I nod with a sympathetic look.
“Have a great work out!” I say.
“You know Micheal,” she says sitting down across from me at the large wooden table on the tiny patio, “to hell with it. I’m not going to do it.”
“Good for you!” I tell her, “Then I’m not either.”
At home I am a relentless runner. I run almost every day usually missing just a day or two each month. But something happens when I am in St. Martin. It’s like God flips this switch and I slide into a different existence with myself. There is no hurry. In the Caribbean nobody makes anything happen. Everybody just waits on something to happen. It is a big difference.
A large green gecko slithers across the patio. Deb stops talking to watch it. She is telling me about how she’s lost 40 pounds but loves to cook and how difficult it is to do that once you’re past 60.
John comes back with his computer in hand and announces election results from yesterday. I suddenly remember that there were elections at all. For the last 30 years I’ve done politics as part of my work. First the dangerous cut throat politics of the Baptists and then the regular cut throat version of Washington and Atlanta and Savannah.
I no longer care. I have come to believe that leaders are rarely elected but that people who are elected believe that they are leaders when they are anything but. I’m happy to be here away from it all.
Instead I dwell on more important things. I text people that I love and tell them that I love them! I check up on my friends on Face Book and through email. I send messages to new friends that I’ve just met and look forward to deepening relationships. I look deep into myself and write what I see. I miss people.
Randy wanders over across the yard that separates his palace from the slums where I stay to wish me a good morning and ask if I have connection to the Internet. I do. He doesn’t. There is something to be said about staying in the slums. He storms off too and I thank God that she has blessed me with connectivity.
Back home people are celebrating victory or consoling one another over defeat as though it were a football game. I’m counting the twelve conch shells that someone planted around that Banyan tree. It is much more fulfilling.
