Don't Stop The Generator Or What Do You Do With 101 Ripe Bananas?

My mother and father were in their early twenties when they decided to take a vacation to a tropical paradise. We lived in Southern Ontario, and the Canadian winters were long, cold, and dark. So, it is no wonder that my parents were so psyched to go off on their adventure. I was about five years old at the time, and while they were gone I stayed with a local family so that I would not miss school. Those two weeks went by very slowly, but eventually my parents returned, and all was well again, at least for a little bit.

Approximately a week after they returned home, I heard my parents arguing in the den. I snuck in and hid behind the chesterfield. I heard my father say, "Fine, do what you want. I am putting a for sale sign on everything, and you make your own mind up, but I am going." My father was burnt-out--he worked for a large technology company, the one that insisted on everyone wearing black socks, black shoes, a black tie, white shirt, and gray pants--you know who I mean. He was one of the original computer programmers in North America. At any rate, he had had about all he could take of being told what to do. You see, he had previously been in the air force.

My mother was in real estate and was the silent owner of a small restaurant named after her in a shopping mall. My father worked nights and on-call at his regular job, and then worked all other times excluding weekends at a little tobacco and newpaper store that he owned in the downtown corridor designed to tend to the needs of businessmen. My parents worked all week, very hard, and my grandparents watched me when I was not in school.

Then, every Friday evening they would get home late. My father would quickly pack up the car, plop me with my pajamas on and blanket and pillow in the backseat, and off the three of us would race with our dog to our cottage on the Lake Huron. Once there, about two hours away, my father would unpack and he and my mother would begin the weekend of having fun fast so that we could race back to the city on Sunday night. This was the cycle--every week, weather permitting. You can image that this was quite the ratrace, but it was their reality and no none knew anything should be different. We all plodded along as if it was the only way to live.

While in the Bahamas, however, something happened to my father. I am not sure what exactly happened. I know the area mesermerized him and he fell in love with the scenery from a pilot's point of view. I know he was offered a position as the private pilot of a high level political figure, and he accepted.

The Islanders like to say it is the seabreeze that gets into your heart, or the song of the yellow bird up high in banana tree -- whatever it is, it happened to him. He went back to flight school, finished his instrument training, got his commercial pilot's license, sold everything we owned, invested the money in a Yacht Club on Cat Island (sight-unseen, purchased from an artist's rendering--that's a story for another day . . .) and a small Stinson airplane and began the process of becoming an islander by choice.

My mother had by this point decided that life in civilization would never be worth the sacrifice of her husband. Of course, being the Daddy's girl that I was, there would have been no living with me without my Daddy.

The rest is, as they say, history--the story of my Dad and the happiest five years of his life. I hope to share this story with you in this blog . . . It was an adventure that I will never forget and that I am so grateful to have experienced.