Lilith and I stop to talk to the mortician, Paul

"I'll go get Pops for you," said the young man who'd just shown me a photograph of his chihuahua terrier mix on his phone. I'd asked if Paul were around, the cemetery's mortician. After the man with the dog opened the door, Paul popped out of the low building next to the chapel, dressed in his scrubs. When I told him my own life seems full of death and dying now, he looked tender. He may have come across a friend of mine who died a couple of months ago. I went to Jason's viewing yesterday. My 95 year old mother-in-law isn't well. He's keeping an eye on his 94 year old mother in Jersey; a family friend died recently at 50. ("She's JW," he said, "but a strong member of the community, so there will be a large gathering.") His work doesn't bother him much because he figures they're all fine now. 

 

We started in on the difficulties of our time, and he indicated that he didn't need to say more. So many conversations happen that way now. You start talking about Trump, the climate (even next week's weather), the height of the grass, and you announce that you've already said enough. "I won't bother you with my diatribe," one woman said to me recently. "Oh, I have one, too," I said, and she replied she figured as much. Paul and his friends talk about the end-times, then realize they just saw them in the news. "Woah," they say to each other. At least the world will begin again, and there will be another chance to do it well, he adds. I tell him I think of us as tourists. We come here, we look around for a while, and then we leave. But maybe that analogy doesn't work so well in a place where hundreds of tourists come each day to see the Temple turned photo destination. Many of them don't even realize they're driving through a cemetery.

The sympathy card was signed by me and Lilith

Uncle John's little brother was laid to rest today, as they say. I attended the viewing so I could leave a sympathy card and give hugs to John and his other brother, Paul. The brothers stood at the front of the room next to the coffin in which Jason lay; the top of the coffin bore the logo of the Las Vegas Raiders. The body was not the man who rushed around in dreads only a couple of months before, on security detail. (Security was replaced by cameras and the security guys disappeared.) When I got to John, he was crying, as was Paul. I didn't stay for the funeral, but picked up a button and program at the back as I left. Members of the family wore teeshirts with his face on them; the woman in line behind me was crying, as were others who came back down the aisle from the coffin.

 

I only met Jason once or twice; he seemed a bit jumpy, not interested in the woman who wrote books about the cemetery. But after John texted me that he'd died (at 42), I found an interview with Jason on YouTube, by someone who traveled in the Pacific talking to people. Jason sat on a chair in the middle of a bare yard. He was sad. Sad about his preacher father's neglect of the family for his parishioners, sad that he wasn't Hawaiian enough (he was part African American), sad that he was having to raise his nephews. He wouldn't take drugs, though he drank beer and smoked weed, he said with a glint in his eye. There was something soft, vulnerable, thoughtful in that Jason. "He hasn't been like that in a couple of years," another cemetery employee said to me later.

 

And so he came to be buried in the cemetery that had employed, and then fired, him, the cemetery that had employed, and then fired his brother, John. When I left, Ola (at the gate) said, "I never see you without Lilith." Then: "at least he's being buried beside his father."

 

Another death on Waihee Road

"What's her name?" asked the maintenance guy seated on a rock wall at the Key Project, his head lowered, beside his trash can, broom, black bags, and other tools of the trade. He seemed preoccupied, so I wasn't going to approach him, but the dog did. "Lilith," I said, but you can also call her Lily. "No," he said firmly when I asked if I could take his photograph. (I will leave out a detailed description of the man, though I _am_ writing about him. Privacy has its issues.) "Did you take one when we were cutting down the tree near here?" he asked. "The guy I cut it with, Popeye--we called him Pop--just died. Tuesday. 55 years old. Lived right up the hill [on Waihee Road]." I said how sorry I was to this man whose heavy face now made sense. He gazed into the common area, where a breakfast for Kupuna was being held, past the woman with the tattoos and her baby who'd talked to us at Creature Coffee Shop. She'd let me take a photo of one tattoo, a saying about God that had faded over time.

 

I told him my friend Ruth had lived up the street, too, and that she died recently. And a young guy (42) at the cemetery. He said someone in his family (60) had died recently. It's a difficult time, we agreed. "I guess we have to return to the present," I said in my best Buddhist cliche. "Yep, in and out, in and out," he said, his head moving back and forth, like it was a slow ping pong game.

 

"What's your name?" he asked me. I told him. He told me his, then his Hawaiian name, but everyone calls him by the first one, short for the second one.

 

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.