Under the Sun
The continuity of life
fractured by slayingMY nephew, not feeling well, is home from school. He's sitting at my dining table, slowly eating a couple of microwaved pancakes and tapping his finger on the maple syrup container to determine if it is plastic or glass. His grandparents, who usually take care of him when he's sick, had to go out for a while to take care of some business, so instead of resting at their house he's with me, paging through the few books I have that are appropriate for children.
At this time of day, I'm usually at the computer, researching, reading and writing, but his presence has interrupted my routine. I do not mind. The break is temporary, an hour or so, and I don't often have his sole company. His questions and remarks about mundane things are refreshing.
Routines pull at us from different ways. Their boundaries are at once constraining and reassuring.
People get up at the same time every work day, gulp down coffee fixed the same way with a teaspoon of sugar or dribble of milk, drive the same streets and highways, park in the same lot, trudge to designated desks or positions on the line and do what they must to earn a living. Even on weekends, routines rule -- clean the house, do the shopping, run the laundry through the washer, mow the lawn.
Life becomes a series of the "have tos," familiar patterns that dull the senses and flatten the mind. It's what compresses time. One day so much like the last squeezes weeks and months together so that I'm waylaid when all of a sudden March has glided into November.
Routine hatches dissatisfaction in human creatures who crave excitement, so much so that some go through extraordinary measures to get a jolt. They jump from cliffs with rubber bands wound around their bodies for the thrill of defying gravity or race cars through city streets for the adrenaline rush. The more timid risk only sore wrists and eye strain by pushing buttons on a console to eradicate alien marauders on a video screen, a recess from the humdrum of TV's laugh tracks and predictable plot lines.
Yet there is security in the aseptic order of monotony. Knowing the schedule brings a measure of comfort. A day without the bumps of the unexpected passes blandly.
Routine can yield efficiency. For police officers, rescuers and lifeguards, firefighters and other emergency workers, operating by standard procedures may save a life. Police know whom they should talk to first, how to organize forces, how to put together clues swiftly and systematically, as they did last week in searching for Kahealani Indreginal. Other routines followed. Teachers and counselors huddled with students to ease their anxieties, parents renewed warnings to their children about being careful, neighbors organized searches and passed out fliers.
All of the effort that goes into finding a missing child unfurled, as horribly unwanted as it is commonplace.
On the morning she disappeared, the tiny 11-year-old with the shy smile probably dressed and slipped on the shining gold bracelets she keenly treasured, as she had so many times before. I imagine they clinked against each other as she threw her book bag over her shoulder, a sound intimate to her ears. She headed for class at Aiea Elementary, her schedule taking her through lessons, to lunch with school mates, the walk back home with friends and a stop for a snack at a manapua truck. All as usual.
After that, an ordinary day canted madly off track and a little girl was lost in a grotesque, unreasonable spectacle of slaying.
At these times, the typical patterns of life become incredibly precious, the desire for them aching. How we would hold fast to those unvarying seasons, still caught in grooves of the routine.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin for 25 years.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.