The Longest Day

It was the summer of '92. I was a twenty-two year old who would be twenty-three by summer's end. I can't remember the exact date, maybe it was July—it seems like it was July. Whatever the date, I was about to start one of the greatest adventures of my life and it began on that hot summer, Florida day which would become literally the longest day of my life.

As a little bit of background, the events that led up to that day began some time before. My father was working for one of those Silicon Valley computer companies. Overall, life for my father was pretty good. He was in his late forties and worked a nice white collar job that offered benefits and stock options. He had been divorced twice—neither divorce really seemed to weigh on him too much. He enjoyed his single life.

I didn't understand it then but now as a man in my early forties I definitely get it. The question that sometimes arises in the man that seems to have the world where he wants it is simply, "is this all there is?" You can see your youth slipping away and with it, all those dreams that you once had of living a Hemingwayesque life of international adventure. These thoughts crossed my father's mind and my father was not someone who would let that go.

My father started working on a transfer in his job. The company he worked for had positions in other parts of the world. My father picked the Far East megatropolis of Hong Kong. He was overjoyed when the transfer came and took the job. Unfortunately, before he could really immerse himself in his Far East adventure, the U.S. economy went south and my father's position in Hong Kong was eliminated. He could have come back to the U.S. but then that wouldn't be in character with my father. Instead, he took his severance, cashed in his stock options, married a native and bought a British Pub. Once he was established in Hong Kong, my father wanted to fly my brothers and me out to Hong Kong. My brothers, the products of the second marriage would fly in from Canada while I would fly in from my home in Florida.

My life prior to that flight had been in a little bit of turmoil. That January, my fiancé and I had broken up. I felt lost. She had quickly moved on and was living with the man that she would eventually call her husband. My hopes of being an actor as a career were going nowhere and my real occupation was pizza driver. Though I was only twenty-two, I felt the pressure of a life that seemed to be spiraling away from me. I was lost and I lacked direction. My father's invite to spend the summer in Hong Kong was the perfect opportunity for me to take a figurative timeout and try to reassemble the pieces of life on the wrong track.

My adventure that day started on an early Orlando morning. I boarded a plane headed for Dallas. That plane would then eventually land in San Francisco and there I would disembark and board another plane that would land in Hong Kong.

My early morning flight began with a sun rising from the East. Approximately six hours and three other time zones later, I was in San Francisco. It would have been late morning or early afternoon Pacific Time. The flight to Hong Kong from San Francisco was a fourteen hour straight flight. I tried to sleep but couldn't. Though my body thought it was night, my mind couldn't grasp the concept with the bright yellow sun poking in through the plexi-glass window of the plane.

As the sun finally started giving way, my plane came down for landing. We flew in over Hong Kong's famous harbor. The lights of the city and the lights of the advertisements that peppered the harbor were starting to light up. Prior to this trip, I had only been out of the country a couple of times and those times were to Canada. Immediately as I could see the junks in the harbor, I could feel the alien nature of the place. Instead of causing any apprehension in me, it had the opposite effect. I felt giddy. I was suddenly as far away from home as I could possibly be and it felt like . . . destiny.

I was landing in Hong Kong almost exactly twenty-four hours after I had gotten up that morning. It was only then that I saw the sun set. To boot, I had also crossed over the International Date Line. I had crammed almost two full days into one day before the sun had set.

I was right about being giddy about that trip. I met a wide array of people from different countries who became fast friends. I worked as a bartender slinging drinks to the many ex-patriots that frequented my father's bar. The adventure didn't end when I returned home either. After that summer, I decided that I needed to leave Florida. I went back to school, transferred to Alabama, and eventually attended law school. It was literally on the flight home from Hong Kong when I decided that I was going to go to law school. I think most of my friends got a chuckle out of my "leftfield" decision. It certainly wasn't in my nature and to give them their due, I had spent the last four plus years in and out of community college. I was on the twenty year college plan. Once my decision was made though, I had finished my last two years of college in about a year and a half. I then finished law school and shortly thereafter, I met my wife when I was an assistant prosecutor in a small Georgia town.

My whole life travelled in a new direction starting on that "longest day." Many of the people that are closest to me would be faceless strangers but for my boarding that airplane that morning. A few years ago, I found myself in my father's position wondering if there was more. As a happily married father of three, I answered that question differently. I decided to write a novel. What did I have to write about? I could have written some legal adventure, science fiction, or maybe wrote about vampires. Instead, I decided to write a fictional tale based on a twenty something guy in the early 1990s whose life is spiraling out of control and who gets an offer to go to . . . . where else but Hong Kong. It probably sounds like a thinly disguised autobiography but it isn't. My lead character stays in Hong Kong where I left. He is my parallel life. Maybe one day my manuscript gets published—maybe one day it doesn't. Publishing is nice and I am certainly trying to accomplish that but my goal was always, simply to write it, to memorialize that which had meant so much to me and in that, I succeeded.