Another Day In Paradise

Another Day In Paradise

                                              .....a lesson in forgiveness...






Part 1

In early 1995 the phone rang late one Sunday afternoon. Laying down the large chef knife I’d been using to cut carrots as a snack for the kids, I picked up the phone in a distracted sort of way.

“Hello,” I said, brushing my hair back out of my face.

“I don’t know if I have the right number. Is this Liz?” a woman’s slightly child-like, sing-song voice asked.

“Yes….?” I answered, somewhat cautiously, trying to identify the faintly familiar voice.

“Liz, this is Grandma Julie!” the woman said, and a flood of memories long buried welled up inside me.

“Umm…. Oh my goodness…! Uh…. Wow!”

“I’m calling you from here in Kauai,” she said. “I can’t talk long, because you know how expensive long distance is…”

“Um… I’m just shocked. How are you? Are you okay?”

“Well, just getting older,” she said in that odd way that only Grandma Julie could, making it sound like such a heavy burden despite her cheerful tone. “We’re not getting any younger!”

“Well, it’s so nice to hear from you. How is Grandpa Ollie? And Dennis?” I asked, because it was my turn to talk. I had to fill the silence with something and that is all I could manage.

“We’re all fine. Listen, the reason I am calling you is that, well, I’ve been putting money aside – a little every month for a while now – and I want you to come here to Kauai this summer. I will buy you a ticket,” she continued without pausing. “I have always loved you the most of all our grandchildren, and I want to do something special for you. Raising those kids all by yourself, I am sure you don’t have much time to do anything nice for yourself, so I am flying you down here to visit us this summer.”

I stood there, dumbfounded, oblivious to the water I’d left running in the sink and the childish, arguing voices coming from the living room. 

Grandma Julie. And Grandpa Ollie.

A flood of emotion came at me like the tidal wave that plagued all of my childhood nightmares.

Grandma Julie was not my grandmother. She was my step-mother, Marilyn’s, mother, who I liked well enough, but never quite understood. At times, her childlike ways made me wonder if she was actually simple minded. But then there would be moments when the shrewd woman within would slip out – usually when neither Marilyn or Grandpa Ollie were around. But around them, she always talked in a childish voice with a syrypy, sing-song lilt.

Hearing her voice on the phone took me back to those uncomfortable months just after my father married Marilyn in 1971. We didn’t know her well, nor did my dad, really, when he married her.

She and her daughter, Blythe, just blew into our lives the summer before "on a trip around the world." she'd said, so self-importantly.

At thirty-four, she was seventeen years younger than my widowed father. And she was completely infatuated with his stories of his thirty years in the navy and all of the famous people he’d met. Especially the Kennedeys, with whom she seemed especially obsessed. She just gushed and hung on his every word.

She spoke in a childlike manner around us kids. A dilluted version of Grandma Julie, calling everything and everyone precious, and calling inanimate objects “Mr. Hanger” and “Mr. Telephone.” She would laugh and dote on us children when my father was around and then seemed to change the moment he wasn’t looking. I'd never seen anything like it.

She stayed for a couple of weeks and then left on the next leg of her supposed trip around the world (which in reality was just a return ticket to Los Angeles.) I sighed with relief as we settled back in to normal everyday life where everyone said what they meant and no one wore masks.

Some months later she returned for another visit. And then my dad flew all the way to California, supposedly to “visit old friends.”

One day several weeks afterward, I walked into his bedroom to drop off a pile of folded laundry and he asked without looking up from the open drawer, “So… What do you think of a summer wedding?”

I honestly had no idea what at all he was talking about.

“Whose wedding?” I asked, stupidly. I’d never known anybody who got married before.

“Mine and Marilyn’s. I asked her to marry me.”

And thus the nightmare began.

He flew to California to marry her that summer. They got married the day my sister, Jenny, graduated – valedictorian of her class. Marilyn thought her wants more important than him watching his oldest daughter graduate at the top of her class. A foreshadowing of things to come.

A step-mother, step-sister and step-brother moved into our five bedroom house overlooking the Caribbean, and nothing was ever normal again!

Certain shelves of the fridge were off limits to us kids, and held special food that only Blythe and Marilyn and Cameron were allowed to eat. And none of the normal, common courtesy types of behaviors or family rules applied to the sociopathic step-brother, Cameron. He tortured the cat, shoplifted, lied about everything, destroyed personal property, and my father said, “Just be patient with him. This is a big adjustment for him.”

For him!? What about for the rest of us? But I’d been taught not to question my elders. So I bit my tongue and kept quiet, secretly wondering if maybe I was being selfish. Maybe I should try to see it from Cameron’s point of view…

But Cameron became the least of my worries, and indeed an unexpected commrade in arms when Marilyn began to make unilateral decisions that seemed insanely irrational to us kids.

We would no longer be allowed to use salt or pepper on anything, nor could we eat any meat, the exception being liver of all things! She also banned sugar, movies, dancing, riding the horses on Saturday – even to bring them up to the house from pasture a half mile away for water twice a day.

I could never quite get a picture of who exactly this chameleon woman was. Her moods changed in the blink of an eye and she would go from praising you and calling your ‘precious’ to raging and accusing you of impossible things. Her rules were equally as fluid and volatile.

A few months after the new family members joined us, Marilyn’s parents, ‘Grandma Julie’ and Grandpa Ollie’ moved in. I took a liking to ‘Grandma Julie’, though I had never met anyone quite like her with her childlike manner. 

I didn’t understand her anxiously waiting hand and foot on the volatile, abusive Grandpa Ollie.

He scared me - flew off the handle at everything. He never asked things – he barked and demanded. And if he told Cameron or George (the two youngest of the bunch) to do something and they didn’t jump fast enough, he’d come at them with whatever he had at hand – a fly swatter, the buckle end of a belt, a two-by-four. Though I was the quiet, well-behaved, people pleaser of the family, I very carefully gave him wide berth.

And then Dennis joined us in the house overlooking the sea and brought a whole new dimension. Who couldn’t love the zany, boisterous, fun-loving Dennis – Marilyn’s much younger brother? Twenty-year-old Dennis was also like no one I’d ever met. And I loved his hysterical, fun-loving behavior, though I sometimes hung back from the overwhelmingness of him.

Somehow when he laughingly called us ‘preciousssss’ it made me giggle and it didn’t have the false ring Marilyn’s ‘precious’ held. He was like the gregarious big brother anyone would want around. An exhibitionist like him was quite a novelty in the heretofore quiet Carson household where unkind or heated words had never been spoken, nor loud or boisterous affection ever displayed.  I was absolutely mortified when  he would call out for my step-sister at the top of his lungs in the department store, "Hil-DA!!!!" like a pig farmer calling the pigs home with a 
"sou-eeee!!!"  

They would laugh hysterically and I would just look around and cringe and wait for the ground to open up and swallow me.  (But inside I secretly wanted to giggle and be a little carefree like that too.)

The upheaval in the heretofore quiet Carson household was overwhelming. I was broken-hearted when the hilarious Dennis departed. And I secretly, selfishly wished for the day that sweet, but sappy Grandma Julie and the irritable, angry Grandpa Ollie might leave also. But it appeared they had no plan to leave any time soon.

I can’t remember how long Marilyn’s parents stayed with us, but it seemed a long time that I tip-toed around Grandpa Ollie and avoided the sweet but timid Grandma Julie. But they’d been gone quite a while when I graduated from 8th grade in 1973 and Marilyn announced that there just wasn’t enough money for me to go to the Catholic high school. I would be leaving for boarding school 3,000 miles away in California, at the end of the summer. And I got no say in the matter.

Not only did I have to leave my family and dear network of friends, I’d have to stay with Marilyn’s parents, alone for a whole week when I got to California! 

After flying to California, I spent a week at their house in Redondo Beach, before being deposited at boarding school at Newbury Park Academy.

During that week, I took a couple of walks to the foreign, wide, endless, sandy beach with its strangely icy, thundering waves. But mostly, I hid in the bedroom, avoiding Grandpa Ollie and marveling that TV in California had not just two, but seven stations, and they ran all day long! (We had only two in St. Croix, and they only ran from late afternoon to 10:00 at night. )

In the early years at Newbury, I wrote to Grandma Julie fairly regularly, sharing my poems and telling her I had made friends and was fitting in. I think she needed my letters even more than I needed her affection.

But after she moved to Kauai and I graduated high school, the letters became fewer and eventually dwindled to nothing. Probably as I eventually let go of the dream of ever belonging to a family again, after the advent of Marilyn in our lives. And now I had a family of my own that no one could take away, I promised myself.

So when she called me out of the blue like that and said she wanted me to fly to Hawaii for a week with her and Grandpa Ollie, my first reaction was unexpected panic. I had buried the disappointments and sense of rejection and fear that came with the invasion of this family and the destruction of our comfortable lives. And I didn’t want to open that door again. Even for a free trip to Hawaii and a week of non-single-motherhoodness.

I thanked her and tried to politely extricate myself from the phone call. But when she said I was the favorite of all her grandchildren and she really wanted to see me and do something nice for me, I caved in. I told her that I would consider it and we’d finalize arrangements at a later date.

That May, I got a phone call from Marilyn’s sister, Barb. She had been so nice to us for Thanksgivings and Christmases during those high school years, welcoming us into her home with open heart when we’d otherwise have been left behind in an empty dormitory. I knew her child-like voice instantly when she called, though I’d not spoken to her in years.

She called to tell me that Grandma Julie had passed away in her sleep and they had just had her memorial service the previous week. Grandpa Ollie still wanted me to come to Hawaii for a week, as that had been Grandma Julie’s dream and the thing she had looked forward to for so many months.

Now fear and panic washed over me along with guilt that I had not done more for that sweet, tormented woman whose favorite grandchild I had been. But I told Barb there was just no way I could possibly go. I didn’t have to explain. She understood the unspoken fear.

“Liz, please…. Please consider it. I am flying down in July with my granddaughter, Lauren. Why don’t you come with us? That way you will have someone as a buffer… Grandpa Ollie has changed,” she said. “He’s not the same man you remember. He's changed.”

And so it was that I found myself on a plane to the island of Kauai in the summer of 1995, fearfully making a trip into the vortex of my past. Barb and I had planned to fly down together but couldn’t coordinate our plans. And so I would meet Grandpa Ollie at the airport in Lihue, alone. I anxiously scanned the tiny, airy, Hawaiian airport, trembling inside, but smiling outwardly, lest I give away my anxiety.

I knew him in an instant, though I’d not seen him in over a decade. At 85, he had the same bald head and thick glasses. The tanned, leathery neck and gnarled hands put the fear into me. He stood there with a white, red-tipped cane, slightly stooped and a tad more frail. But my heart jumped into my throat and I wanted to turn and flee. Not just him, but the past.  I could hear him roaring like a raging bull and swinging two by fours in undeserved anger from nowhere.

Instead, I smiled bravely and came to him and hugged him hello.

He took my hand, holding it too tightly and stepped very close, staring into my eyes with his pale blue, watery ones. The same ones that sparked with fire in my childhood, now muted with age. He stood like that for several moments, squeezing my hand.


And then he spoke, or tried to at least. And as he did, tears filled his eyes and overflowed.

“Liz….,” he began, and then faltered. “Liz…,” he tried again, but could not get past that. His hand began to tremble as he squeezed mine tightly, and my heart went out to him.

“It’s okay, Grandpa,” I said. “Whatever it is, it can wait. We have all week.”

But he grabbed me so hard it hurt. He searched my face and finally said, “No. Liz…. Um… I have things to say that need to be said right now.”

My heart began to race and the fear that had fled at the look in his pale, watery eyes gripped my heart again. “Okay,” I said, calmly taking his other hand. “Let’s have a seat then.” And I led him to the nearby bench, where he sat too close for comfort and continued to squeeze my hand.

The vacationers who had arrived on the flight with me had all found their luggage and left the tiny airport, so he and I pretty much had the place to ourselves, emphasizing our aloneness.

He looked away from me, scanning the open, garden-like airport as though searching for the words he needed. But he still held my hand tightly.

“It’s okay, Grandpa,” I said, patting his hand. “I can wait. We’ve got nothing but time.”

He squeezed me even tighter and cleared his throat in the way that used to strike me with fear, and then very stiltedly, he began to speak.

“Grandma Julie would be very glad that you came. She really wanted you to, you know.” He dabbed at the tears in his eyes.

“Thanks Grandpa,” I said, squeezing his hand. “It was so nice of her to buy me a ticket. I’m just so sorry we couldn’t all spend this week together…”


“Well, that’s not what I want to talk about,” he said in that gruff, abrupt voice of his. He turned and looked at me intently, not ten inches from my face, and began to cry again. “Liz… I just want to say that…” He cleared his throat loudly. “…that I am sorry.”

And then the words tumbled out so quickly they almost tripped over each other. “I’m sorry for the horrible things I did and for being so cruel to all of you kids. I was an angry, mean old son of a bitch and I took it out on you.”

“Yes, you were,” I was startled to hear myself say. “But that is in the past now. It’s okay.”

He wiped at his tears, then pulled a handkerchief out and blew his nose. “I’m sorry for the horrible things Marilyn did to you and your family too; for the way she treated you kids.”

Now he was actually crying openly. I put my arm around him and squeezed him as I let go.

I let go of the resentment and the pain and the fear, and just held him tight.

We sat there for some time, without saying a word, at one with the sweetly fragrant silence.

“Well!” he said gruffly after several minutes, abruptly slapping the bench with a strong hand and a bam! that reverberated from my past. “We’d better go find your suitcase. These people might lose it if we don’t pick it up,” he grumbled, recovering from letting down his guard.

So we got to our feet and walked to find my lone suitcase circling 'round and 'round on the carousel. A perfect metaphor for my life – always moving forward, hoping to be claimed by someone, yet ultimately just running in circles, trapped by the past I thought I’d left behind.

Part 2


Throughout the week I spend at Grandpa Ollie’s that July, his recurring theme was to work on talking me into returning the next summer and bringing the kids. When we girls weren’t at the beach, I’d be in the kitchen cooking with Grandpa Ollie, or out in his work shed watching him tinker. And always the topic of next summer and the kids came up. He wanted a chance at being a better grandpa, I think. But I just didn't think I could ever let my small children into his life.

And yet, he persisted. It was then that I told him about my five year promise. When Eddie walked out on us, leaving us virtually homeless and penniless, I only made it through by telling myself that five years, or ten years from now it would be better.

And so I promised myself that for our five-year anniversary of being on our own, we would do something special, something big. The next summer would be our five year anniversary. What better way to celebrate than to spend our vacation on the beaches of Hawaii. Seven days in Kauai! It doesn’t get more magical than that. And Grandpa Ollie could meet my kids.

And so it was that after an extended legal battle with their father who didn’t want me taking the kids to Hawaii, in June of 1996 we boarded a pre-dawn flight to Paradise. My friend and fellow teacher, Angel, came with us to help me with three young ones and luggage and boogie boards. And the kids were thrilled with their first plane ride they could remember.

After changing planes in Honolulu, we finally arrived on Kauai where almost a year to the day after my facing my ghosts and rebuilding a relationship with the no longer scary Grandpa Ollie. He met us at the airport, though he shouldn’t have been driving, being legally blind.

We crammed everything into the trunk and squeezed all the bodies into his car then he handed me the keys. And with him directing, we drove home to his house and unpacked. Though it was late in the afternoon and we’d been up since the wee hours of the day, the kids just could not wait to go to the beach. So we donned bathing suits and set out on the short trip to Poipu beach before making dinner and calling it a night.

After the long day or flying and exploring and swimming, the kids ate and promptly fell asleep. I lay on a mattress on the floor in Grandpa’s back room and listened to the wind as it blew through the open windows, wafting the scent of the plumeria trees outside the window.

I smiled in the darkness and said to myself, Well, you pulled it off. You picked yourself up by your bootstraps and became a great teacher and gave the kids some structure. And you filled your five-year promise! Life is good.

Though weary to the bone, I just couldn’t sleep. I listened to the wind and the rooster scratching around in the dark, and smiled at the beauty of paradise - even in the dark of night.

I pulled out a book and read for a while, still wide awake. After a few chapters I put the book away and tried a few games of solitaire. Finally, about eleven p.m. Hawaii time and two a.m. California time, I drifted into sleep.

I slept fitfully, bizarre dreams running through my tired head. I’d wake just enough to turn over and start a new dream.

“Mommy…” a little girl in my dream said. “Mommy…!” the girl called through the plane window. I couldn’t hear what she tried to tell me. Then a hand touched me on the shoulder and I turned away from the girl in the window and woke up.

Ten-year-old Jen leaned over me wheezing loudly. “Mommy, I need my inhaler…”

Bleary headed, I jumped into action. I’d planned everything for weeks. I knew exactly where the inhaler was packed in Jen’s belly bag. I looked through the luggage, but didn’t see the belly bag anywhere! Pushing aside wet suits hung on the back of a plastic chair, I searched everywhere. No belly bag. No inhaler. Somewhere between the house and here it had disappeared on a bus or a tram or an airplane.

I went into grandpa’s room and woke him. “Grandpa, Jen is having a bad asthma attack and she can barely breath. We can’t find her inhaler anywhere. I’m going to have to take her to the hospital. Can I borrow your car.

He handed me his keys and said he’d go with me to show me the way, but his vision was next to nil in the dark. He tried to give me directions to the hospital, but many of the roads had no names, or he didn’t know them.

“I can’t wait, Grandpa,” I said, concerned at the whistling sounds coming from Jen. “I’ll just find it.”

I went and woke Angel and asked her to come with me. “I’ll read the directions to you,” she said, looking at the blank page in my hand.

“We don’t have directions,” I said as we bundled Jen into the car.

“How are we going to get there?” she asked, alarmed.

“I don’t know, but we just will. I’ll drive and you keep an eye on Jen and let me know if she gets worse. We’ll just pray as we go and I am sure we can find it somehow. Keep your eyes open for a Coke machine. Caffeine will help until we get there.”

And so we barreled down the dark country roads of Kauai trying to instinctively find our way to the hospital,we knew not where. We just knew it was somewhere twelve miles or so to the east of us. Fifty, sixty, seventy…eighty miles an hour we flew, praying for direction and Coke. I slowed at each intersection, praying for direction, and just followed my gut.

Angel spotted a Coke machine and we screeched to a halt and bought Jen a Coke and some time. Then back on the road flying and praying. I think we need to go left here, I said and we climbed a hill doing eighty.

"Have you been there before?" Angel asked, wondering if I'd lost my mind.

But we barrelled on into the darkness praying for signs - or better yet, a sign saying "Hospital, this way."

Where are the cops when you need one, I wondered. Surely we must be close…

Finally we came to the edge of Lihue and kept our eyes open for hospital signs. In record time (I was told later), we made it directly from Grandpa’s house to the hospital in Lihue, barreling down the dark, unfamiliar roads and praying hard. Not one missed turn.

The ER staff at the hospital was outstanding, with state of the art everything. They gave Jen a shot of adrenalin and hooked her up with a breathing treatment and had her breathing again in no time. They set us up with a replacement inhaler and finally sent us on our way around 4:30 a.m.

We got lost a time or two on the road back to Grandpa Ollie’s in the early dawn light. It just proved the miracle of how we'd made that incredible trip, blindly doing eighty, and never missed a turn on the road to the hospital. I guess God wanted us to take the scenic tour back…

By 6:30 12-year-old Nick and 8-yr-old Erin were up and ready to go to the beach. I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head promising them if they went and poured themselves a bowl of cereal and waited until 8:00 to wake me up again, I’d take them to the beach.

Way too soon, the two eager early birds cautiously woke me, letting me know it was 8:01 and time to go to the beach.

Reluctantly, I crawled out of bed and managed a few handfuls of cereal then rounded up towels and masks and boogie boards and bottled water and set out in Grandpa’s car.

I could sleep this afternoon. Or tomorrow. Who couldn’t enjoy another day in paradise. Even after our wild middle of the night ride. After a look at the map and a democratic vote, I lost out and we headed for the farthest beaches of Hanalei and the North Shore.

Always the family geography expert, Nick unfolded the map in the back seat and gave us directions. We passed Lihue and the hospital where we’d spent the wee hours of the morning and had to get out to take a photo of the ER entrance. Then, after a little whining protests from the car, we jumped back in and set off.

We continued along Kuhio Highway along the island’s eastern shore toward our intended goal: Hanalei. 

“Look at that beach! Let’s go there!” Erin piped up, eager to hit the water.

“No, I want to go to Hanlei!” Nick insisted.

“I don’t care,” an understandably somewhat irritable Jen said. “Let’s just get to any beach!”

Boom! Thump…thump…thump…!

Oh no! Angel and I looked at each other at the same time and groaned as I pulled over to the side of the narrow road.

“What?” Nick asked.

Jen wailed, “What are we stopping here for! I want to go to the beach!”

“We had a blow out,” I informed the kids. “A flat tire. Nick, you and I can change the tire. I’ll teach you something new!”

But though we found a spare tire in the trunk, we found no jack. The kids all wailed and whined. I couldn’t help but sympathize with them. I’d much rather be down on the beach enjoying the warm Hawaiian waters too!

“Maybe someone will come along soon and help us,” I said, trying to remain positive despite my lack-of-sleep headache and crabby side waiting just inside my skin. After all, this was our first day in paradise!


We climbed the hillside above the road, looking at old tombstones in the cemetery there. The historian in Nick found at least some interest in that, but the girls whined and begged to go down to the beach just below us. And they didn’t understand that we had to stick close to the road in case a car came along.

After a half hour or so a police car came along and he called for someone to come help us change to the emergency spare. Then when we had to drive back into town to buy grandpa new tires, the grumbling really began. And I joined in too when I decided we should really buy grandpa all new tires rather than have the half blind man driving around on bald tires! That definitely was not in the budget!

Finally, with all new tires, we headed back out in search of the nearest beach. Forget Hanalei and the far end of the island. We just wanted a beach. Any beach.

So we settled for the beach just below the stretch of road where we’d had our blow out. It was close and good enough. Down the bumpy road we went and piled out of the car with towels and masks and fins and boogey boards.

But the entire stretch of beach was littered here and there with jelly fish washed up on the shore. That was the last straw. A midnight race along an unknown path to the hospital’s ER room followed by a blow out and $200 worth of new tires not in our budget, and now jellyfish infested beaches.

Just another day in paradise, I sighed. Nick and Angel put up a good argument for pushing on to Hanalei. Erin again just demanded the nearest possible beach. And Jen, who began to feel the effects of the night’s events grumbled and said she would only go to Poipu beach (where we’d gone the evening before) or nothing.

Now, even more tired and more grumpy I announced to all the disappointed members of our party that we were going back to Grandpa’s for a nap. Then anyone who wanted to go to the beach after I’d had a nap would join me at Poipu for a swim.

And thus went our first day in paradise:

An asthma attack with no inhaler;

a trip to the ER with no directions;

a blow out, but no jack;

new tires, but no room for extras for the next several months;

and finally, a beach, but jellyfish.

I am pleased to say, the rest of the week went seamlessly, with our having had all of our bad luck in our first twenty-four hours on the rock. And we had a marvelous time in Paradise.

After that first 24 hours, we frolicked in rivers, boogey boarded and tried to surf in the warm ocean waters with Dennis' young sons.

We had slurpees as we watched the beauty of Waimea's waterfall, and watched the volcanic blow hole at Spouting Horn. We spotted whales off of the Kilauea lighthouse peninsula, body surfed at Brenneke's Beach and snorkeled off the beach of Prince Kuhio.

We ate fresh mangos and avacados from Grandpa's yard, and the kids got to know Dennis's wonderful boys who were close in age.

All in all, we had a wonderful time in paradise. I learned that even in paradise, there are problems. And that even with setbacks, nothing would stand in our way of enjoying the vacation. We overcame asthma attasks, wild rides into the darkness, flat tires, and jellyfish.

I learned:

.... that in this life we are expected to forgive and let go of the pain and fear that others have planted in our lives, and which we, ourselves have often have fostered and nurtured.

...that though we do not need to condone the bad behavior of others, we do ultimately have to forgive it. And not just giving it lip service. We need to actively forgive - not just for our own good, but for that of those who have wronged us.

Only then can we someday reach the ultimate paradise that God has created for us.




 Liz Carson Rosas
15 May 2009

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Revelation 2:7 & 8

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

                                                                   2 Chronicles 7:14

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins."

                                                                  Mark 11:25