They Say You Can Never Go Back

Two visits to Pearl Harbor have impressed upon me that brief glimpses of the distant past are possible  to us under certain circumstances. Twice I have come away feeling like I have revisited segments of my childhood in visiting an active naval base. Base housing has a look to it that one recognizes immediately. The area around Hickham Field felt especially familiar to me since the last base quarters I inhabited with my parents was 45 years ago in Charleston, South Carolina and those were built in the 30's &  40s themselves. Military public works departments are quirky. For example, in Quonset Pt., RI, the steam radiators were turned on by date, not by the actual temperatures prevailing. So you might be roasting on an Indian summer afternoon listening to the clanging and banging of those old radiators coming on and just shake your head in wonder.

Paint is bought by the shipload, so all buildings get a coat of whatever that surplus happens to be. It did not surprise me when we toured the relatively new Pacific Aviation Museum (begun in 2006 yet still a work in progress) and saw the hangars from WW II with the bullet holes from the strafing still puncturing various panes of the hangar windows. Certainly, it must have been intentional, but it struck me that the military keeps such excellent maintenance of the materiel which keeps its missions functional and safe yet at the same time, ignores aesthetics. Those restored airplanes are an exception to that observation, however. They are beauties. So well worth a visit. The smells of old leather and jet fuel, the mannequins with uniforms that had gold stripes on the sleeves and oak leaves on the hats, the descriptive epithets painted on the noses of the planes, the strangely shaped ammunition and fuel tanks welded to the planes all whispered "Dad" to me. Isn't that just the most ironic thing: that what typifies the military SOP (standard operating procedure), should be so deeply embedded as a memory of someone so nurturing to a child and young person? So for a brief moment today, I revisited some place hidden away from long ago. "You can't go home again," isn't true. You can, as long as it happens in short moments, triggered by a smell, an image, a "frisson" or shiver, as the French term it.

New Zealand Here We Come!

Watch this spot, as I hope to add posts often during the next two weeks, as we trek over to Honolulu and then down from Auckland to parts south.