Typed on the 1957 typewriter I received as an eighteenth birthday present from my father, this is it.  This is the list of everything I need to accomplish before I leave my home of six years.  Looking at the thing now I realize that I do not care about doing maybe half the things, and that there are countless more I failed to verbalize as I sat there at the dining room table in the middle of the night.  Still, it has become my mission to make sure that in the coming years when I run into the other people scattered across the globe who have lived on and loved Okinawa, I will be fluent in all of their favorite places so as not to appear as if I never left the base.

So all these years come down to a bucket-list.  Leaving this place is going to be the hardest goodbye yet--doing it right seems rather essential.