Spacific Destination

Last month, on the Thursday before the Saturday on which I was scheduled to fly across the Pacific Ocean, I couldn't bear to keep my right eye open for more than a second because everything was bright and painful. The eye surgeon gave me a prescription for durezol, a steroid in eye drop form, to be taken every hour while awake, plus dilation drops three times a day. He told me to come back the next day. "I assume I shouldn't fly to Australia on Saturday," I said, having already resigned to the honeymoon cancellation. "Not unless you're going straight from the tarmac to a doctor's office," he said.

It's Thursday again, and we've got tickets to Maui. Half as far as New Zealand and for half as long, but I have twice as many functioning eyeballs, so I'll call it even. I'm about as packed now as I was a month ago, but I feel much more ready to go.