Recently, Richard Hamilton and I had a long discussion of my book, "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Volume 2 fromSinging Horse Press.Richard has put the conversation on his substack, which is worth visiting in any case.
The second volume of DB kind of disappeared into the ether, so it's good to see that it's getting notice now. It's the most formally inventive of my books, using bureaucratic forms, photographs, inventories, children's stories and other materials to tell the story of my mother's last years. It's also a portrait of an Alzheimer's community, one in which people have long conversations, fall in love, fall down, and experience emotions. I miss them.
"If I ever met Barack Obama," the retired airplane mechanic said, "I'd tell him how much I admire his oratory, but how much more I admire Michelle's." I told my story about Obama and the skinhead, and then about the time I saw Michelle leaning over to look at me through outstretched hands as she shook mine at Ke`ehi Lagoon. (I felt her husband's hand on mine, but he didn't peak.) Alison, with whom we were walking, counted the six degrees of separation she had from Obama, including a cousin who went to Punahou with him when he was Barry.
Up the hill from those stories, she and I ran into the woman who lives on the corner, her house always dolled up with flags and signs. A loud house. We talked about the heat, how she suddenly wished for the rain she'd wanted to have stop just the other day. She said she ran a lot of things in Honolulu, including the zoo, the Shell, the Blaisdell. She was really happy that they might make the zoo into a sanctuary for old elephants. Her expressiveness manifested itself several times in exclamations of "Oh shut up!!" as when Alison said she'd been at the circus when Tyke killed her trainer and ran out into the streets of Kakaako, only to be shot dead by police (1994). The police are still traumatized, she told us. Not her daughter, who was only two at the time. Her husband had told her to close her eyes when the trainer was killed, and she did. I said Tyke has a memorial stone in the pet cemetery nearby, though her body was disposed of in the Waimanalo landfill, which is somehow in Waianae. "Oh shut up!!" said the woman, who said she'd go look for it soon. She was pleased that the new zoo director used to run the zoo in DC; he also used to work for Obama, who made him ambassador to Australia. A good man, she said of the former president, whose 2008 campaign shirt I was wearing.
"I'm a senior influencer," the tall Asian man said to me and Raschelle yesterday, as he asked me to retake his photograph. It needed to include his feet, decked in bright blue Hokas. The hat he wore over his white hair and pony tail also read HOKA. His daughter works for the company in California, and the photo was for her. He lives on the other side, near Skyline (the billion dollar rail system on stilts). Everything's so noisy over there, he'd rather live over here. Now, if only the Japanese had built Skyline, it would go all the way to Hawai`i Kai by now, through Waikiki (in a tunnel under the Ala Wai), and to UH Manoa. Their speed trains were built in the 1960s and there have been zero accidents. What are they doing putting all those sculptures on the Skyline poles anyway? (I suggested they made them look a little bit less boring.) But with everything so expensive already, why decorate a pole? The trains are elevated so that they don't have to have drivers, he said.
Today, another walker told me that the Chinese man whose odd Christian nationalist patriotic American tomb sits at the top of the cemetery has been detained for a year now. She called up a story from Hawai`i News Now last week. "A Chinese millionaire who has invested more than $100 million in Hawaii real estate is fighting deportation by the U.S. government, claiming he fears retaliation for supporting democracy while officials say he smuggled aliens and has communist ties." You've gotta read it to believe it, and even then it seems fantastical. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/.../chinese-millionaire.../
I showed Bryson the photograph I took of him petting Lilith yesterday on his John Deere gator. "I saw it already!" he said, "Hoku and Ola showed me" He said he'd seen John, who is doing ok, better, somehow has taken a good turn. No, he doesn't have a new job but, Bryson said, as he stared off in the distance, "you've got to put yourself in his hands." He raised his toward the sky.
He was a storyteller. His sentences moved from subject to object and the subjects then turned into pronouns and the pronouns got detached from their subjects until I realized I could never tell the story back. We met him at the top of the last hill; his small white dog ran at Lilith from a white Tesla whose logo bore a Santa Claus hat. He was an Apache from Texas who'd grown up with Mexicans. San Antonio, El Paso. Now lives near the shore off Kam Highway. And he was here to visit his grave plot. It was up for 60K, but he'd bought it for 40K because he's a fully disabled veteran. I walked to the plot with him; a small red flag marked the space, and he leaned over to pull it upright. He wants a tomb, with a statue of the Virgin Mary on it that he'll design himself. And yes, they keep calling to ask if he wants an upgrade.
I asked how he ended up in Hawai`i. The pronouns gathered like a rainstorm over the Ko`olau, while he communicated the story of how he and his wife came into a lot of money. Land deal in LA was at the center of it. "She" paid off everyone's houses, including his and his wife's, and they had a huge party near the graveyard in Culver City, and the other one, where the Jackson Five are. They did the rosary up there. He also inherited responsibility for a Catholic community that sheltered abused women. And he gives to St. Ann's here (later, he'd say that he needed "to go feed the poor at 11:30.") He's not a materialist, like the Mexicans in his family, but so much material came to him through his trail of pronouns. He arrived at how he'd gotten to Hawai`i, but by then all I could think of was Catholicism and land deals in California.
We returned to an earlier topic, the large number of transgender people he sees here. Yes, I told him, they're mahu, and I read him the definition of the word on my phone. They have an honored place in Polynesian culture (if not, alas, in the state of Hawai`i) as third gender persons. He said he supposed it didn't matter much, he was simply perplexed. We exchanged names and took photos; I sent him his as he wandered down the hill with his noisy dog. Also part chihuahua, also a hunter.
Uncertain weather. Uncertain left knee. Lilith's supine on the floor, only half-expecting a long walk, her eyes drifting closed, then open, closed again. A season of new birds; the smaller, duller colored, Brazilian cardinals chase their parents for food, though it won't be long until they'll need to find their own. Mynas squawk. Doves do what doves do, coo. Other mysterious cheepers add to the not-quite-dissonant cacophony.
Valley of the Temples was opened in 1963 by Paul Trousdale, a continental developer who built tract homes on the windward side of O`ahu. Waikiki also bears his imprint. The cemetery pre-dates the Temple that sits within it by five years. I've already written about the Buddhist clergymen who worked at the Temple for many years, ending in 2019, with the death of Bishop Fukuhara. By 2001, the property had been purchased by RightStar, led by John Dooley, a funeral management company (now called "death care" by the happy euphemists who write PR copy). According to one source (yes, I'm doing investigative journalism these days), RightStar had links to a Christian music group, The Imperials. I've been told that there were frequent concerts outside the administrative building.
By 2009, Dooley, who'd been fired years prior, plead guilty to stealing nearly $51,000 dollars from RightStar's clients. After being indicted in 2006, he'd been picked up for speeding in Oregon and brought back to Hawai`i for trial. The fraud had been much greater than that. By 2012, none other than former Governor John Waihe`e had suffered the consequences of being trustees of RightStar. Waihe`e had earlier lobbied for the corporation. Jim Dooley wrote: "Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe`e and three associates have agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle claims by the state Attorney General that they helped to illegally divert some $30 million from funeral and burial plans sold to thousands of Hawaii residents." Large amounts of plunder came from the trust funds set aside for upkeep of the cemetery, which were paid into by those who bought burial plots. You can see an extravagant pay schedule for Waihe`e and other trustees here: https://www.hawaiireporter.com/exclusive-new-allegations.../
The state controlled the properties (which included other Hawai`i cemeteries on Oahu, the Big Island, and Maui) until the business was bought by the current owner, NorthStar, in October, 2011. This is the corporation headquartered in Houston, with no local ties to this place, which is currently milking the Buddhist Temple for all it's worth (and more--or less, if you're a Buddhist--). The general manager--said to be very honest--who'd repaired RightStar's damage was promptly fired. Plans to raze the Modernist/Hawaiian administrative building were made, but fortunately never enacted. Instead, NorthStar renovated the main building.
When Lilith and I started walking the cemetery in early 2017 there was still a local feel to the place. The Temple grounds were mostly quiet. (I read somewhere that young Barack Obama liked to visit, which tells you something about the pull on local introverts. He and his family visited in 2009, as well.) The graves were laid out mostly according to ethnicity/culture: there are Chinese, Korean, Japanese sections, along with a large Catholic section. Up the hill farther, there's a "patriotic" section that tells the story on a large plaque of how immigrants made America great. Something about "tilling her soil." At the very top, a newer tomb, vast, including many as-yet-uninhabited niches behind black stone, fronted by stone (cement) images of the White House, the Capitol, and likenesses of Lincoln and Washington. Christian iconography is everywhere, as well. It's owned by a rich Chinese guy, young, I'm told.
Something about this last reminds me that there's a UFC event tonight on the White House grounds between fighters who yesterday walked down the Lincoln Memorial steps, flanked by a military honor guard. It's intended to celebrate America's 250th, but just happens to coincide with Trump's 80th birthday.
"Yes, you told me before," I said to the woman at the desk who only wants to live three more years. She's scared she'll live longer, because she's so healthy. Never had the flu, hadn't been sick in over 20 years. (But she needs new knees and had serious kidney stone surgery a few years back, remembers exactly how much it cost.) "It's so hard living in this body," she said, nodding at her walker. Her last roommate left such a mess that her friend's husband came over and cleaned the room out in two hours. It would have taken her days.
She did have two covid shots because she works here. "You know people spit on you when they talk," someone told her. Her face wrinkled. She believes in Jesus, in heaven and hell. Worries about her son, who does not. She prays for him. She left a small church (of 300) because they didn't do any social distancing. One woman died of covid. Now she's at Calvary, where the pastor preaches about the end times. 150,000 tune in on zoom to hear him.
The other year she stopped doing her Christmas tree; she'd collected ornaments for decades. She spread them out on the table, Macy's style, and gave them to her children and grandchildren so they could start their own Christmas rituals. One son is in his mid-50s.
Lilith and I moved out of the way of a woman with a large white flower display attached to a frame. There were lots of funerals today. Lilith and I wandered up hill. On our way down, we saw the man in black, showed him the photograph I'd taken of him, told him S was happy to hear about him, got a quick hug and hurried home in the hot sun. Lilith's on the couch now, nose on her blanket.
“Me and Eucalyptus” by Susan M. Schultz: the metaphysical relationship between man and nature in nature writing
There are books about trees that teach to
recognize species, others that tell the forests as places of salvation,
still others that transform the landscape into autobiography. Me and Eucalyptus by Susan M. Schultz belongs to a rarer category: that of books seeking a relationship.
In the great tradition of nature writing
— from Henry David Thoreau to Roger Deakin, to the most recent books
dedicated to trees as living, symbolic, almost interlocutory creatures —
Schultz chooses a very personal path. He doesn't cross woods, he
doesn't build a botanical atlas, he doesn't tell nature as a refuge. He
remains next to a single tree. A eucalyptus observed day after day,
photographed, interrogated, heard.
From this fidelity comes a surprising,
hybrid and luminous book, which continuously oscillates between poetry,
meditation, diary and philosophical reflection.
The author looks at the tree as you look
at a living being capable of presence. Not an object of the landscape,
but something that exists next to her, in the mystery of an impossible
yet real reciprocity:
“Eucalyptus and I cannot communicate, even if we are in communion.”
Perhaps this is the phrase that best
guards the heart of the book. Schultz knows that the tree will never
speak the human language, and yet he continues to turn to him. He
observes the bark, the resin, the colors, the wounds. He photographs it
obsessively, as if each image could bring it closer to something
essential.
And the images, in these pages, count as
much as the words. Photography is not just documentation: it is a way of
being in the world, of measuring the distance between what we see and
what really exists.
“Focus is presence.”
But the presence never coincides with
possession. Schultz understands it continuously: every attempt to
capture the tree risks turning it into an image, into an “object”, into
something separate. For this reason, the book dialogues underground with
the thought of Martin Buber and his distinction between “I-You” and
“I-It”. The eucalyptus always remains on the border: a real creature and
at the same time irreducible, near and far.
The writing proceeds by lightning,
fragments, intuitions. Schultz naturally passes from personal memory to
philosophy, from the contemplation of the tree to the violence of the
contemporary present. In the book enter the war, the media images, the
technology, the chatbots, the digital photography, the incessant noise
of the modern world. Yet the eucalyptus remains there, motionless,
almost to guard another temporality.
Some passages reach an extraordinary poetic intensity:
“Your silences don’t bother me. They protect me.”
or:
“The tree is broken (however it stands.”
In these sentences you can feel something
that goes beyond ecological discourse. The tree becomes a figure of
human vulnerability, of resistance, of memory that continues to live
despite the wounds.
Yet Eucalyptus and I never
indulge in easy sentimentality. Schultz does not idealize nature and
does not transform it into consolation. He knows that every look is
partial, that even photography can lie:
“To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.”
It is precisely this awareness that makes
the book so contemporary. The author does not seek absolute truths: she
seeks a form of attention. A chance to stay by the way without
dominating them.
As in Roger Deakin's most beautiful books,
here too the landscape becomes an inner experience; but Schultz is more
fragmentary, more philosophical, more restless. Where Deakin recounted
the cultural relationship between man and nature, Schultz stages an
almost metaphysical relationship, made of silences, images and
unanswered questions.
At the end of the book there remains the
feeling of having inhabited a space of rare contemplation in
contemporary literature. A place where a single tree still manages to
oppose the speed of the world, forcing us to look better.
And maybe that's what Susan M gives us. Schultz: not a lesson about nature, but an exercise in presence.
