What is it about the Virgin Islands that keeps beckoning?
Not only during deep snowy, sunless months do I turn to island life and ways. (Memory can only warm the imagination, never the body, rarely the soul).
It happens in the most ordinary of times–at the mall parking lot with sea gulls winging overhead, I open the car door momentarily surprised I’m not at Four Winds; in my office, glancing out the window, expecting to see an Eastern Metro flight wobble to a landing at the airport; coming from Papa John’s with a slice of pepperoni pizza feeling for an instant I’ve left Barnacle Bill's and will eat it while I walk along Crown Bay marina; and so on.
Little, really insignificant blinks, caught in the transhifting of time. Yet there’s more than occasional outward dissembling. It’s as if my heart beats one measure where I live now, one measure then. Odysseus could not have been more enchanted by the Sirens’ song. He could not not listen, so he ordered himself strapped to the mast. Hearing but not following. He is intent to return home.
Home. Where is that? Sure, it’s where the heart’s at rest. But is the heart ever for long? During my St. Thomas life, a daughter died, a son was born. A few deep and lasting friendships remain–Elliott Thomas for one, Frank Jordan another. Much good and not quite so lie between.
The work I did at UVI, I like to think, lives on in the attitudes, affection, and goodness of my students–they were the islands’ best and brightest, and when not the brightest, still the best.
The casual courtesies, surprising welcomes in the smiles and eyes of many, sudden flashes like lights on edges of ripples at sea. The flat hard dirt beneath my feet. Or the violence, crippling thought, stopping breath. Before going on.
Where have all the roads gone? Each day I read of island news, visualizing mundane things like reflectors in the medians, being cleared, potholes filled or not. The same with government action or inaction. All the storms that come and go. I know that I am not a part of it, do not contribute in any way. Yet . . . .
Odysseus returned to a home he only partly knew. And so it seems, I too have found it to be true. Then. And now.
Editors' note: Dr. Joseph Lisowski taught creative writing at UVI from 1986 to 1996. He now teaches at Mercy Hurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania.