Finality

That's a funny word, finality. I'm sitting in the VA clinic waiting for my turn. I look out the window and feel the noisy quiet you get in most waiting rooms, and outside the window I can feel the noise too. The trees sway, the occasional vehicle passing on the street several hundred feet away, the steady hum of a Cessna 172 flying above.

I'm transported once again. Back to my time as a child here on this beautiful island, and it truly is a beautiful island. I'm so anxious to leave and begin my life elsewhere that maybe this trip down memory lane is making the departure harder. Or maybe I'm just missing my Dad again.

I can feel the old life I had here. The heavy, sweaty work in the back of the bakery while other little boys and girls played in the sun in their yards. My sisters and I worked. This was to be our lot in life.

As a child I hated it. Now, as a middle-aged man, not so much. I understand it now. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.

I will miss this island home. It was a part of my life for about thirty years, give or take.

The irony is this isn't really finality at all. It's a bridge, if you will. The adventure. The switch from what once was to what will be.

What will be, as the plan goes, is some years in Daly City, then a year in Portugal, where I met my wife, and finally the Philippines, a place in the mountains around Antipolo overlooking Manila, with a little bakery and café of our own. God willing I make it there and beyond.

And that's a full circle. From the hate I felt having to work in a bakery in my youth, to wanting to open one of my own.

Maybe it isn't that I've fallen in love with the bakery, or the idea of it. Maybe it's the idea of service.

Being of service to others. Perhaps that's been the point all along. Not the bakery, not the long hours, not the sweat, but the ability to help someone when they couldn't help themselves. I've brought that up in my previous writings.

It's been a few hours now. I'm still waiting in this chair at the VA. But that realization, and the very reason I'm able to sit here at all, are the same thing. Service. I am what I've always been. A man with the desire to be of service to others.

Then a nurse calls my name.

And I think maybe it isn't only the VA calling me back. Maybe, after all these years, it's my turn. Time to go and live a life of my own.