Trouble In Paradise

I remember my first few hours in Hawaii. My wife and I checked into our hotel, went up to our room where I collapsed on the bed. After a moment, I reached over and grabbed the TV remote. As soon as the television blinked to life, I saw the swirling opening credits of Hawaii Five-O. Jack Lord. James MacArthur. And Kam Fong as Chin Ho. I truly was in Paradise.
Eventually, we did go out into the lush tropical scenery afforded by our visit to the island. Our first stop was a record store where we purchased a fistful of cheap cassettes for playing in our rental car. Another wave of joy washed over me as we drove along the Pali Coast with the Trashmen roaring out of our speakers. What was the word? Surfin' Bird.
All around me were the mountains rising up out of the  jungle, behind which I was sure to find King Kong. Or the gates to Jurassic Park. At this moment, I was as far away from home as I had ever been, but I didn't feel nervous or worried. Somehow I had found myself in a place that brought me familiarity and comfort. This allowed me to do something that normally I would have found difficult if not impossible: I spent three days in a bed and breakfast. I am pretty solidly a motel guy. Give me my room key and a map to where the ice machine is and I'm fine. Contact with other humans should be limited to the desk clerk and with whomever I happen to be bunking. Yet, there I was, relaxing into both bed and breakfast in the middle of the Pacific. And we drove around the island with surf music looking for shaved ice, eventually finding ourselves on a beach. We swam in the ocean and watched the waves wash the sand. It was that sound that eventually lulled me to sleep there on my towel. For one of the very few times in my adult life, I took a nap.
Later that evening, after we had returned to our B&B for a shower and a change  of clothes, my bride and I went out for dinner. As I sat there, waiting for our waiter to return with our entrees, I absently tapped my left hand on the glass tabletop. It took just a moment for me to recognize something was wrong: the reassuring click of my wedding ring. I stared down at my ring finger: It was gone. For the first time since we arrived, I felt a chill.
Somewhere during that idyllic afternoon my wedding ring had slipped off. A combination of sunscreen, sand and surf took it away. My very patient wife went back to that beach with me in the dark and made the vain attempt of a search.
In a different version of this story, that would have been the vacation killer. But that didn't happen. My wife found me a replacement ring from a local vendor. With scalloped waves etched in black, it reminded us of where the original had gone to sleep with the fishes.
All of this is why I was so devastated when I heard that Hawaii had been destroyed in a missile attack over the weekend. Or not.