So yesterday we went to the aquarium. It was tiny, not terribly varied, and a long drive away. (For island standards. It was like 30 minutes away. My distance perception has changed after four years on a small island. Heaven help us if we every have to drive an hour anywhere.)
But it was still worth it. The boys went from room to room, with their eyes and mouths wide open, and we went through too fast because Lincoln kept yelling, “Let’s see what’s in the next room!”
It was small, but there were sharks and jellyfish and sea horses; all things that Lincoln hadn’t ever seen in real life. Upon seeing the sea horses, all bobbing in their little tank, he yelled excitedly, “Mama, let’s get inside with them!!”
This was the first place like this we had gone where Eliot could walk and he just toddled every which way, head up towards the fish, so much so that he fell a couple times. Who has time to watch where you are going when there is so much to see? Not this boy.
After the fish, we went to the fountain down the street that Lincoln had spotted on the way down. Granted, it was considerably less fun when they realized we weren’t going to swim in it, but they both just ran circles around it for a while.
When everyone got tired and cranky, we headed for the car, and I thought the wonder was done for the day. Wasn’t a zebra shark among the rocks and a giant bobbing shrimp and a fountain that went as high as the sky enough?
Then I discovered I lost my phone, and I was sure I had just paid for our morning marvels. I looked for it for ten minutes, increasingly frustrated as the boys got increasingly upset because I had strapped them in the car, and becoming convinced that the lurking woman who had been next to us while I had fed Eliot had stolen it. I drove home as fast I could because I was sure that someone was taking information from it as I drove. But when my aunt called it for me, someone actually answered.
Was it a Honolulu businessman? A Japanese tourist who was at the hotel that is right down there? No. It was answered by a traveling acrobat who also considered himself a linguist. Shows in a tye-dye tent on the beach? Check. Face paint and a tent on his back? Check.
I thought we had exhausted life’s strange for the day. But this one was just for me, reminding me that even for me, wonder can still exist. Sometimes people say that real life is stranger than fiction, which I often find it hard to believe because I have read so much strange fiction. When I get jaded and critical, these days are put here to save my life and sanity.
We all saw a few impossible things before dinner; a real live seal eating fish, jelly fish floating in their translucence, and an acrobat who picked up my phone before his show. Sometimes I forget to look for the wonder. Sometimes I even start to believe that it doesn’t exist, like when I jump from a lost phone to assuming that a specific woman is a thief. And the days when both are shoved in my face are beautiful reminders that astonishment and redemption exist, even on a beach in Waikiki.
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