The Aloha Swap

The Aloha Swap Meet takes place three days at week at, naturally, the Aloha Stadium, home of the University of Hawaii’s chronically unsuccessful football team, as well as the NFL’s annual Pro Bowl, the consolation prize for outstanding players whose teams did not make it to the Super Bowl.

Although the Aloha Stadium was built for football, it’s had to make do with a swap meet.

Eager for some alone time with my girl, I took Robyn and Kennedy to the swap meet when they visited us in Hawaii. Robyn wanted souvenirs, and I’d heard that this was the place to score them cheap. We strolled the baby past vendors selling packets of pink sea salt and miniature ukuleles, the sun beating down on the sweaty exposed whites of our necks.

A few weeks later, I made a list in my journal of the dominant colors in my closet: turquoise, red, yellow, pink, white, lavender. My clothes looked like I lived on a cruise ship, which was fortunate since I was, in fact, living in Hawaii. I hopped in my car, list in hand, and headed east on the H-1 towards the swap meet.

I took a lot of deep breaths that morning. I was there to buy head scarves. The first round of chemo had turned my hair brittle and thin, and I had just a few days left, I knew, before clumps of it would fall out by the fistful. Several swap meet vendors sold soft cotton sarongs in the same cruise ship colors in my closet. I spent every bit of money in my wallet, and took home big plastic bags of scarves in all the right shades.

Back to the swap meet I went every time visitors came, helping them find trinkets to take home. I loaded up boxes of swap meet finds at Christmastime, too, because, surely our people in the East wanted Kona coffee beans and macadamia nuts on Christmas morning.

I had a long hiatus from the swap meet, months and months when I was too sick to peel myself up off the sofa. And then, finally, as the days on our island came to a close, I ventured there once more.

I didn’t want to buy anything, nor did I feel particularly nostalgic about the Aloha Swamp Meet. I just wanted to say good-bye.

Several folks commented about my hair that day. It was growing back, and had reached a length that was longer than a lizard’s, but shorter than a military-issue buzz cut. A man selling cheap luggage said, “I love your hair!” and a woman I routinely bought soaps and lotions from said, “Wow—you’re brave.” I smiled on the outside, but my thoughts were curdling.

I was angry and pissed off and in no mood to feel anything other than angry and pissed off.  I imagined showing these “encouraging” folks the bloody scabbing burns in my armpit, the upshot of weeks of radiation, and asking, “Want to see another little cancer accessory I’m sporting?”

Every time someone smiled at me that day, I thought, “Screw you and your stupid aloha shirts and sickeningly sweet papaya slices and over-bright sun. I am so over all of this.”

Glennon Melton says that we are afraid of pain, that we think it’s our job to avoid it. She also says that pain is a sign that a lesson is coming.  She advocates for sitting in it, as still as a mushroom, until its work is done.

I submerged into my pain that day, as far as I could sink without drowning. Avoiding it with shopping or food or Facebook would have been my preference, but it was too loud, too demanding, for numbing.

Pain has always been an unpredictable mistress for me, sometimes visiting exactly on schedule—on difficult anniversaries or in conversations with people who know precisely how to tweak my deeply co-dependent self—and, other times, frustratingly arbitrary in her visits, this particular day in the cheerfully exasperating observations about my nearly bald head.

I don’t know that I received a lesson that day, other than the simple permission to feel. But grace? Yes. That day and every day, and which is exactly why I say yes to Jesus. Because grace is not the window treatment of my faith, it’s the load-bearing wall. Grace holds me and my contented days and my miserable days and my bald days—the days I shine and the days I fail—all together. And the suprise? She offers up gifts.

And that’s the miracle, I think.  That the gifts come whether I am baking chocolate chip cookies, or pulling the covers up over my head. Inviting people to my patio to laugh until our backs hurt, or burying my face in my phone. Reaching out or tucking in, building up or tearing down.

That day at the Aloha Swap Meet, I believe God looked at my resentful little self and said, “You are my beloved. And you are not behaving nicely because you are mad about cancer. Know what, peanut? I’m mad, too. Let’s be mad together.”

I complained to Matt that night about the comments I heard at the swap meet. He listened. He nodded. And then he took me a on a walk to see the sunset.

I don’t think my heart softened much to marvel at it.  But the sun set on my upturned face anyway.

Grace for me, a woman so angry about her wisps of dryer-lint thin hair that she entirely missed the light.

And was profoundly loved anyway.