The place where time stands still

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The dream was a subconscious effort to hold on. I dreamed about flowers, fields of vanda orchids, red hibiscus, pink plumeria, hibiscus, anthuriums, birds of paradise. The scent of the flowers followed me out of the dream, along with the heat of the sun, coconut trees rustling in the breeze, waves crashing against the shore.

My husband told me I sang in my sleep. "Hello, sweetheart, aloha. Aloha from the bottom of my heart." "You were actually in tune," he joked. I have never sung in my sleep before. I have never sung this song while awake before. But then I have never felt so removed from reality, so at peace with the world, so content - not in years, not since I was a child.

The memory of the days spent last week in Kauai lingers. It was a business trip for my husband. He had to work. He hurried from meeting to meeting. He carried a briefcase. He had no time in the sun.

But for me the days were a visit to paradise. I nested on the beach and watched the sun rise and set while I didn't accomplish a thing. I didn't read a newspaper. I didn't think. I didn't worry. I didn't plan.

I read fiction and ate hot dogs and drank mai tais and watched whales surfacing and surfers riding gigantic waves that slammed their boards and hurled them toward the shore, and it was as if I had followed the advice of all the popular self-experts and taken my troubles and stuffed them in a balloon and sent them floating away.

I hadn't believed this letting go would be possible. I'd planned to use my time away from home to catch up. I'd brought along Paul Tsongas' "A Call to Economic Arms," which has sat on my desk for months, and a book about education I'd been planning to read and a pile of mail to answer and papers to correct - all things I absolutely had to do.

Yet I did none of these things because the minute I stepped off the plane, nature seduced me. I became, in this land of beauty, no different from the trees that reach out to the sun, no different from the rocks that are molded by the wind and the sea and the rain: A thing to be acted upon. Content just to be.

I savored flowers in February; sand between my toes; waves, huge and frothy, breaking and spilling like a pina colada on the sand; the sun like a compress, filled me with warmth; perfumed air; the cool shade of coconut trees. From here to there, it's just a half-day by plane, and yet it's more than a world away. It's nature's Disneyland, the streets lined with trees and flowers, the island itself the main attraction. But the real enchantment is that time isn't just recreated and imagined here. Time, in this place, actually stands still.

How often I have wished for this. A million years ago when Rosemary and I were young and planning our lives, I knew suddenly that the reality could never live up to the dream we were weaving, and I wanted to keep the dream alive. I wanted to stay 11, to continue pumping away on the swings we were riding, to continue inventing our future.

But the day ended, the moment passed, the dream changed and life went on.

Years later, on another afternoon in Colorado I longed to freeze a single moment of a view from the top of Rocky Mountain National Park. But it, too, faded, like the memory of summer mornings in Maine when the world seems new, like all the times when the kids were small and doing ordinary things and all of a sudden I would see how extraordinary these things were, and ache because even as I watched, the moment slipped away.

Last week the moments lingered. Life stopped because every day was the same as the day before. And so there was no need to yearn for yesterday, because yesterday was today and today was tomorrow, and on it went until it was time to go.

Now, today, home again, I look at this recent past, at a steady succession of fresh memories, but already it is like watching the sky in the reflection of a lake. Yesterday the lake was still and clear, the shape of the beach where I sat distinct: the indentation the surf made, the cliff to the left, the pile of lava rocks to the right, the sun, the sea, the sand, the sky, all as they were.

Today it’s as if a breeze is blowing across the lake. The water shimmers. The memory is blurred. Tomorrow the breeze will be stronger and pieces of the sky and the sun and the beach will break up and float away, all in the past now, not real for me anymore, just memories that come back in a dream.