An immaculate cremation

Ruth Hsu would have enjoyed the irony. Lilith and I were going to attend an informal ceremony for Ruth at the top of the cemetery, looking down on the crematorium where her body was scheduled to be cremated after 9 a.m. today. We'd be witnesses to the smoke, as we talked story. Lilith and I met Ola on the way up the hill, told him where we were going. "Uh oh," he said. "The crematorium is out of commission; they're working to fix it. My old lady is furious [she runs the mortuary]." A few minutes later, as we arrived at the top, I got a text message from Ruth's sister. She had just learned (at 9 a.m.) that the cremation would be delayed until October 16. 

 

We had our ceremony anyway. Friends and former students spoke of Ruth's kindnesses over the years; her activism; her quiet rage; her inability to maintain a garden; the cruel way the department ostracized her over many years; her dog-walking gig; her cat, given to her by Gaye and Nandita, now cared for by the twins who live in the bottom of her house. We talked about how well read she was, across the boundaries disciplines construct and then enforce. Melany told the story told her by Ruth about meditating at a local zen center and trying not to react to a bead of sweat as it began on her forehead and wound its way down her nose. How, in the midst of intellectual conversations, her child-like fun would erupt. I thanked Sina for being there, who was killed two years ago in Samoa. While Ruth had pushed most of us away over the years, Sina had mother-hen'ed from the south Pacific, and on occasional kinetic trips through Honolulu to other places in the world: Boston, Edinburgh, Berlin, Portland, Austin. Ruth, who was born in Singapore, raised in Hong Kong, and an immigrant to Los Angeles and then Honolulu, understood "the diaspora" in her own self, and in Sina's. Where do we walk each other home when home is so many places at once?

 

We wished we could have been there for her. We wished we had known she was so weak, so sick. We wished and wished and wished. But we were there today, looking down the hill toward the broken crematorium and addressing Ruth by name. Her "articulate silences," those she told Mike Pak about, will continue to speak through us. Good-bye, my complicated friend.

 

Pet and pua master: a birthday surprise

  

Lilith and I went wandering past Subway, past Times Coffee Shop, and past the Jiu Jitsu storefront at Ko`olau Center, an ordinary strip mall with an amazing view of the mountains. Between Chille Relleno's and the driver's test place, a man was sitting on a bench. Beside him was a dirty white bucket full of leaves and flowers; some of them were laid at his feet on the concrete. He wore board shorts, a Champion shirt, and a white crew cut; he had half a mouth of artificial teeth, and  squinted so much I could never quite look him in the eye. He muttered something about getting kicked out, his mother the retired cop (Punahou '59), his brother (manager of a local car dealership) and the 9 to 5 life he didn't have because he didn't have . . . 

 

He grew up across Kahekili where we live, up hill from us on Hui Ulili, back when the townhouses were being built (that was the 1970s). As a kid he used to walk down the trail that goes to the community pool and pick flowers. There were a couple of gulches he found flowers in, too. He'd always liked putting flowers together. That's why he's the Pua Master! People who see his Instagram come from all over the world to get flowers from him.

 

While he didn't want his photo taken (he didn't know my motivations, when I asked), he seemed interested in making a display for me and Lilith. "It's my birthday!" I said. He smiled broadly and began to put leaves and flowers together. If they didn't quite fit with each other, he'd take one out and replace it with something from his bucket or the sidewalk. He slathered his displays with baby oil to make them shine. I noticed that there were two musubis on his bench, a peeled orange on the ground.

 

He met Jesus in the flesh, he said. It's important to pray. He was on suicide watch when Jesus came down and saved him. He served in the Navy in the late 1980s, then spent time in mental institutions. "They should have me behind walls now," he said. He could stay with his mother, but she says he has itchy feet. Doesn't want to live inside, so he doesn't. He asks people if he can take flowers from their gardens; if they say no, he doesn't take them. If they say yes, well, here he is.

He took a rubber band off one of his bunches and carefully moved it over to the bunch he was giving to me. His fingers were worn, the nails framed in brown dirt. His legs were pocked with bruises and sores (small ones). Finally, he handed the bouquet to me. I asked if he would take a picture of me with the flowers. "No! Together!" he said, and we made a selfie, and I told what a nice birthday it already was.

 

The McDonald's drive-through was so full that a bearded man in a pickup truck couldn't turn yet. He smiled through his open window. "How much did those cost?" he asked. "Nothing," I said, and pointed to where he might meet the Pua Master.

Living precariously

 

"Oh, Hoku, you missed your chance!" said Ola, as a young woman drove by in a white Mercedes. Hoku was off weed whacking not far away. "Oh, so you're a married man living through his single friend, are you?" I said. "Yes, I'm a taken man," Ola responded. "Me too," echoed Makoa. "I'm living precariously through him," Ola added.

 

"Oh, you mean 'vicariously'!" I said. "What's the difference?" asked Hoku. "Well, 'precarious' is when you're on a tightrope and you could fall off at any time; 'vicarious' means you're living through someone else, like parents through their kids." 

 

Feeling the surge of retired English professordom, I reported that an old college friend in Milwaukee had called Manny Machado "execrable." We paused to talk about pronunciation. "Why not just call him a shit?" asked Hoku. "Oh no," said I, "that's way too direct!" You can also say "excrementitious." I had to go to grad school to take a course on excrementitious literature, I opined. 

 

'You should teach us lots of new words," said Hoku. I said I'd be back next time with my tip jar. Next time, that is, if Lilith is in the mood for it. She's got the "excrement" part down.

Lilith walks in circles

 

Lilith has lost her linearity, or perhaps she's given up on mine. We walked at Kahalu`u Regional Park this morning, near where my colleague and friend, Ruth Hsu, lived. We did the big circle once, past the baseball diamond (a man was asleep in the "dugout"); past the "waste water absorption field" the other side of an encampment guarded by two chihuahuas; past a homeless camp in the woods, where a man walked by warning us that there were dogs farther up the path; past the field goals; past the restrooms where one person sat, another slept; past the bench where a man lay, his feet black with dirt, his beard black with a touch of white under his hood, a heap of drink containers underneath him; past the bitter smell of urine; past the trucks and their workers; past the woman who didn't want her photograph taken because she is a photographer. Then Lilith began to improvise. There were chickens, after all, other side of a rock wall. We walked partway up Waihee Road to the elementary school, behind which Sangha used to play Little League and I sat near the dads to listen to them talk da kine about keeping pigs out of their yards. She turned back downhill, wandered toward Kahalu`u District Park. I steered her to Creature Coffee, where I ordered a cortado, then waited beside a crew-cutted man, his wife, and their clearly military son. Someone had ordered a pecan pie, which suddenly seemed the right thing to do, but I did not, when I saw the price. Lilith and I sat on a wall nearby, while I sipped the coffee and she stared off into the near distance, with chickens. I tried taking her back around the big circle the other way, but we got only so far before she turned again. Back past the houseless folks, back past the workers, back past the intricately tatted woman who did not want her photo taken, and back to the white car. "Why isn't it red?" asked the Cubs fan I stopped a few minutes later to heckle about his team. "Just you wait," I said, "two years from now, the Cardinals will be in there." He pretended to take note.

Storm drains and trapped cats

I couldn't get one of my walking friends interested in the demise of the cemetery (downed trees, fired workers). But today he texted to say that the new grates installed by management on the storm drains had trapped some cats inside, and he wanted to do something about it. He went and fed them. Raised a man-hole cover, but couldn't get the cats out. He took photos and sent them to KHON2 News. The reign of terror continues. Some people come everyday to feed the cats; others remove the cats' hiding spots and take away their storm drain shelters. Allegory is a bitch. So is real life.

 

Lilith walks with Tom, a neighbor on our writer's block

 

We had a guest walker today, Lilith and I, our neighbor Tom, writer, musician, father, husband, teacher. He used to think of AI as possibly benevolent, but now sees it as an engine of the apocalypse (my word). Tom is ostensibly a novelist, but one who generates much of his writing out of the material and sound of language. He teaches sci-fi and jazz literature at a local private school, one made nationally famous by its alumnus Pres. Obama. But he says he hardly reads novels now. He's tired of literature. I tell him about some recent losses, one complicated and the other less so. Later on, in a phone call with a poet friend, she said she thought language itself doesn't work any more. She spoke of losses, the losses of aging, of dying, and of communication. The loss of a belief in those national documents we used to find compelling. My friend is older, lives more or less alone, goes back to the Buddhist texts when she can. Tom's father, he realized this summer when he spent five weeks with him, is lonely. So many losses. But he renovates his two houses, making, remaking. Perhaps for his kids, maybe because it's something he knows how to do well that also passes the time. Tom's kids are good at things. One is studying in Japan this year, another is a physics whiz who wins the pole vault, and the third is happy. Two of them are deaf, including his daughter, with whom he writes music. She might minor in music, he says. We wonder about ambition, drive, where it gets you in the end. He reminds me I've had a good career. He asks about Tibetan Buddhism, having left a very strict zen center a while back. He still sits with friends. Lilith walked happily today; she likes guest walkers. For them she has pep in her step, even if she stops to sniff along the way. That is her career, as walker, diplomat, investigator, and companion. I desperately fear my loss of her.

Nolo stalls

On an ominous, gray morning, Lilith and I ran into the woman who sometimes walks backwards up hills; this time, she was walking forwards. She is not the subject of this walk, only its first sentence. We also ran into Auli`i, whose person is the retired aircraft mechanic obsessed with Ukraine. "I hear Lithuania is really worried that Putin might invade." I wondered out loud how Putin, who can't defeat Ukraine, could invade Europe, as well. "He probably wants to do it while Trump is still in power," he said. Like everyone these days, we got to talking about hurricane Nolo, sitting off the coast of Hawai`i island. "If a category 3 hit this island (O`ahu)," he said, "it would take years to fix things. We're out here in the middle of the Pacific, by ourselves; help can only arrive by air and by water. They can cut those off," he added, darkly. Later in the day, Nolo is finally turning to the much advertised left (closer to the American than to the the European model). But at 2 pm in Kane`ohe, we have a heavy evening sky, brief gusts of wind, humidity to cut like butter.