"I think a lot of people who come to visit Mauna Kea come for a reason," said James Kimo Pihana, a ranger with the Office of Mauna Kea Management. "People challenge the mountain. The mountain always wins; it is people who lose. But the mountain accepts challenges."'To The Summit,' by Bret Yager for the Hawaii Tribune-Herald

So far, so good. I've been meaning to jot down notes about the workouts, and life in general, lately but if there's one thing I've learned in the past year, it's that I don't write much when I'm doing heavy code work during business hours.

I've been surprised by how many people remember me from my prior stints at the gym. Quick, sweaty conversations: where have you been? the new tattoo looks great, when did you get it? are you training for anything?

I've deliberately chosen not to progress as fast as I could have. I started at twenty-five minutes at level three, and have progressed up to forty-five minutes at level six. Memory tells me that I was doing forty-five minutes at level nine when I stopped.

It's not where I was, but it's progress. That, plus keeping a reasonable eye on my calorie intake, seems to be working. Progress is slow, but steady. As July creeps closer, I suspect Adam and I will work out where, exactly, in the forest we want to go rambling, and that will determine the last couple of months of workouts.

That, and the hills of Seattle, will tell me how much more work I need to do before October. After my chat with Alice on my New Year's trip, I worked out the cost of getting Jeff and me to Hawaii to see them and realized that it could be done rather easily, as long as I planned ahead.

A few months later, the slush fund for the trip now has $1600 in it, and as soon as we clear our vacation dates with our respective workplaces, I can buy airfare. We have only the most nebulous of plans for the nine-ish days we'll be there, but the prospect of doing photography at 14,000 feet was exactly what I needed to nudge me back into the cardio work I was so good at a couple of years ago.

So -- Hawaii. One island only: the Big Island. (Hey, it's where our friends live.) By dint of island choice alone, we'll miss most of the major tourist traps; now all I have to do is plot out what camera equipment to take, and do whatever's necessary to prepare myself to deal reasonably well with the altitude so I can do photography atop Mauna Kea.

I don't expect to function well up there; I just want to function well enough so that I can come home with photos that will make you all hate me.

I mean, if that's not a reason for getting back in the gym, I don't know what is.

Growing up in Arkansas, we were careful about where in the yard we went barefoot, because there was a certain type of grass we called 'stickers.' It was grass, but it has small but definite thornlike parts, and they stuck in your skin (thus the name) and made it very uncomfortable to walk barefoot on grass.

Anyone know the real name of what I'm describing?

I didn't really call you that while you were alive, and it feels strange to call you that now, but I didn't know any other way to start this letter.

I've become a person who grumbles at roadside memorials for victims of traffic accidents but who writes something about you every year on the anniversary of your death. I wondered about that for a number of years before I realized that I was closer to your death than I was to your life, and I've spent the years since trying to come to terms with your absence.

This entry covers it better than most:

We each had our own worlds, with our points of intersection, but for the most part we lived separate lives. I met some of my father's work friends for the first time at the visitation after his death, names I had heard of for years but whose faces and handshakes I had never known. He talked about us, it seems now, possibly more than he actually talked with us.

We make our place in the world we are born into, and through work and luck and personality and presence, the world gives us a space -- for a time -- before taking it back. When we go, our absence leaves holes in the fabric of the living, but in time, those holes close, and the world begins to seem once again right on its axis. The timeliness or untimeliness of our passing becomes irrelevant, for the world has moved on.

Mom is remarrying this year. It is yet another on the list of things that would not have happened had you lived. I am happy for her, but uneasy about what my new place in this moving-on will be. Amidst my friends from a dizzying variety of families (separated, blended, whipped until foamy) there was a constant: two parents, my sister, myself.

Not any more. My mother, my mother's fiance, her two grown daughters, his three grown sons. There are stepbrothers and stepnephews whose names I need to learn.

The wedding date is just a few days after Jeff's and my tenth anniversary. The photos from that decade-ago wedding are still there, in Jeff's and my hall; me in my tie-dyed Veasey Luau shirt at the rehearsal, pointing down at my feet to remind you not to step on them. My mind finds it vaguely incomprehensible that I'm going to fly directly from a trip celebrating my tenth anniversary to my mother's remarriage, because I've been back to Arkansas so few times since that ceremony and it seem by rights, nothing should have changed.

(But I'd be wrong. Very wrong.)

Relationships change over time. I told a friend earlier this week -- one of my few friends remaining who remembers you -- that I wondered how our relationship would have changed if you had lived longer. We weren't close, not by any stretch of the imagination. I want desperately to believe that you were proud of me, and that despite your words you saw potential in me, but barring some stupendous, dumbfounding letter from the grave, I will live the rest of my life without knowing. I would like to believe that if we'd had more time, perhaps we would have had that giant, air-clearing fight that I wasn't ready to have in my early twenties.

I want to believe our relationship would have changed for the better, but there's no way to know that, is there? There's only the sinking feeling of watching your friends' relationships with their parents change as everyone ages, and feeling robbed.

I cried a few days ago when I realized it was mid-March. Not so much for the date but because when I tried to conjure up memories of you, there was so little I could point to for remembrance. I remember so few real conversations between us -- mostly it's arguments, frustration, and absence -- but my inability to remember your voice this past week made me sob so hard I thought my chest would burst.

In September, my photography will be shown for the first time. I do vividly remember that it was you who first put a camera into my six-year-old hands. I have never been able to match my sister's or my uncle's ability to photograph landscapes, but over the past six months I've managed to prove even to myself that I have an eye for composition and a definite photographic style.

I find myself saying this a lot: I wish you could have seen it.

We'll light a candle for you at Mom's wedding.

(...and today it rains almost as hard as the week he died. A different year, a different state, and yet so strangely familiar.)