(A Critique of) Judgment Calls

We don't soon get over judgment of others, said Mary Grace Orr, at insight meditation this morning in Volcano. She quoted Ram Dass as saying we should think of people as being like trees. "Who said I don't judge trees?" my husband asked when I told him. Well, there's that.

Late this past semester, I asked my introductory creative writing students, first in my office, and then in class, to tell me their strengths as a writer, and then to say what they still wanted to work on. It was as if the first half of the question hadn't been uttered; they jumped quickly to "I'm bad at ____"; or "I can't do ____." But what are you good at? I'd ask, and they'd tell me they couldn't say what. Nothing about facility with metaphor or turn of phrase or empathy, nothing until they were prompted again, but then the answers sounded sheepish. "That would be narcissistic," said one student. No, it would not, I responded. A joke about the president came after.

The day before their final projects were due, I asked them what we could talk about that would help them to complete their chapbooks. There were a few questions about covers and book construction, but at least half of them responded with (actually, without), "Confidence." As if we could give them that in one class session at the end of the semester. "It's our generation," one student said. "None of us has any confidence."

Two years ago, I was teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me to Honors students (freshmen) for the second time. The first time the class had taken valuable lessons from his experience as a black man in America. This time (just after the shift from Obama to Trump) several students said that Coates was "too angry." They resisted his book. How could he be so angry. It put them off. So I asked the most judgmental of the students to read a paragraph of the book out loud to us without adding any comments along the way. Just read it. Then, I asked her to tell the class exactly what the paragraph had said, without adding any commentary. This exercise didn't go smoothly, but it was certainly instructive.

As I get older, my teaching gets less rigorous as intellectual transfer. My students learn less about the rules for things, though I still insist on a grounding in history. It gets more rigorous as a counter-intuitive paring away of judgments, especially when they occur quickly. The effort to see the world as it is, rather than to re-imagine it through the curious utopianism of critique, is what I try to instill in them. That this effort proves more difficult than judgment intrigues and disturbs me. At the beginning of each semester from now on I'll hand out my sheets of attention exercises, intended to get students out of their heads rather than farther into them. (Note, not "out of their minds" in the sense it's usually intended, though a loosening of boundaries around creativity is also necessary; students show up to creative writing classes in shackles!) Let me append the list of exercises, so far, here:

Attention Exercises
Prof. Susan M. Schultz
214 Kuykendall

Attention exercises

Do these exercises without doing anything else at the same time. No computer, no phone, no music, nothing. Then write in intense detail about what you noticed. Do not use judgment words, or “poetic” language. Write at least 250-300 words each.

1. Look at a raisin for eight full minutes, then eat it very slowly.

2. Take your dog on a walk and notice what your dog notices.

3. Spend 15 minutes watching and listening to your cat. (Any animal is fine, including geckos, lizards, guinea pigs, and so on.)

4. Spend 15 minutes sitting in a public place (bus stop, mall, etc.). What do you hear and see?

5. Spend 15 minutes with a photograph or a still from the television. Describe exactly what you see. You might also draw what you see, if you wish. Then write about the process of drawing what you saw.

6. Sit somewhere and turn off one of your senses: close your eyes or ears.

7. Start a conversation with a stranger. Where does it go?

8. Take a ½ hour walk to somewhere you don’t need to go. What do you see and hear?

9. Go to the art museum, on campus or downtown, and spend 15 minutes with a painting or piece of sculpture.

10. Take the same walk for many days in a row and find something different each time. Make a list as you go.

11. Meditate for 10-20 minutes a day.

12. Walk at different speeds, exceedingly slow to very fast.

13. Listen carefully to fast and slow talkers.

14. Watch the hand gestures of people around you.

15. Watch a baseball game on television and watch the catcher throw the ball back to the pitcher, as well as other parts of the game that don’t contribute to its score.

16. Watch a football game and watch action away from the ball.

17. Talk to a homeless person; offer him or her something to eat.

18. Play with children.

19. Cook something you’ve never cooked before.

20. Listen to audio in a language you don’t speak. What do you notice, or think that you notice?

21. Figure out what your favorite words are, and those of your friends.

22. Read what you’ve written as if it’s by someone else. What do you notice about the language, the sentence structure, the tone?

23. Learn to ride a unicycle or play the flute. Take notes on your progress.

24. Eat very slowly and write down your sensations.

25. Read signs. Read bumper stickers. Look for flags and other symbols on vehicles.

26. Notice typos and other mistakes.

27. Walk slowly on the beach and describe your sensations.

28. Go snorkeling and list all the fish you see, what they look like, how they act, and what their colors are.

29. Read or listen to an opinion you disagree with. What do you notice when you take away your judgment?

30. Keep a journal of the weather (clouds, sun, rain, etc.)

As I sit in Volcano on the Big Island, I remember Albert Saijo, who lived around the corner from here. His life's writing swung wildly between rants against government and other institutions, detailed descriptions of animals and the marvelous effects of marijuana; late in his life, when he was frail, he simply noted the weather. There would be several entries a day in a small notebook, to record the rain, the clouds, the wind.

Over time, we get whittled down to this: looking out our window and seeing the patterns of sunlight and shadow on a brown fence, listening to the birds in the canopy of ohia. Our judgment is fear of losing this fragile place. There is so much to fear. Perhaps confidence is not what we're looking for, but somthing more flexible and stubborn.

Meditation 1

12/27/2019

12/27/2019

Between decades a change. “Change is important,” said the woman at the Hilo market, who egged me on about Trump, joked crudely with a man who laughed as he said he was fleeing. Aspiration as breathing, not ambition. Caught between free air and suffocation. Between the frail brown skin on a diabetic’s leg and the cudgel of the president’s tweets, all they represent (if representation can be said to follow breaking). Is representation a form of repair? The OBU Manifestos (Vol. 2) diagnose, dissect, laugh bitterly at. Rise to the bar of community formation, then fall like the bar we wriggled under in elementary school, usually knocking it to the floor. A coalition of categories always more difficult than the category of one, even as mandated as forgetting in Ogawa’s novel. Community of forgetting, rose petals scattered on river water, beauty before release. The feeling of these petals already gone as a woman scatters her garden on water. It’s not memory that matters to the police, it’s the affect that attaches to it. Affect to effect: it’s either politics or spirit, and the real trick is to weld them together. “The bus driver was so kind,” said our new tenant, and he was, speaking to each passenger in turn, bidding them good-bye until the next ride. Sandy wondered about the man who did not turn into a deer and I had no idea where that sentence came from; not even the deer who was one with the dachsund could explain that one. Not metamorphosis but metaphor, presage not the spice itself. The words open like petals, then fall into sentence slots, or spaces between sidewalk segments. A yellow weed reminds us of something, pincered in the gaps. Should we breathe with the poems, she asks of Paul’s new book. I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Look at the tree!” she’d said on the walk home.

Enforced oblivion is violence; dementia degradation. Neither is as quick as gunshot or concussion. If we slow this down, no one will notice our shift from speech to deeply guarded quiet. The book referred to the “war” for silence, which sounded the oxymoron in me. Gerschwin streams from the living room, bartering saxophone for violin, heart cry for mind meld. We argue ceaselessly against the binary, but in terms of oppositions. Do we mean to break them over the knee, like a baseball bat after an ill-timed strike-out? Break into the binary, but never recover the grain of the wood, or the potential energy of the instrument. We adore our teams, but they are composed of contracts made by agents and susceptible to breaking. Our neighbor’s yard fills with scraps of ceramics from projects that did not rise to the bar of commerce. He uses volcanic ash in his process, which comes out as solid grit on a slab, more potential than actual evidence.

But again, the problem. We talk in small groups about trauma and depression in the classroom. We notice the spiking (up, not down like a volleyball). There are so few resources: wait for over a month to talk to a stranger about your affliction, then another six weeks to start talking to another stranger. Our talking makes us less lonely, but just as ineffective. We decide we need each other. K. says her friend opened a door in her house and ran into her husband’s legs; his body was hanging from the ceiling. They’d just been talking about what to eat for dinner. Do not try to make her feel better, I say out of my training, just be present. Present at the harshest absence there is. We are not to call it epidemic and yet. I read the book on the death of culture after hearing of the author’s suicide. Then we read as much for clues as for content. Blu’s Clues will star a Hispanic actor for the first time; the consolation there is in likeness. The one, divided into self and image, reorganized in the mind of a little boy imagined by a man.

Tell your student she can come to the office to cry. Tell her she can count on you to be present. Tell her there’s so little else you can do. Call admin and demand assistance. Watch admin muck up. Another six weeks until she can talk to someone with or without a license. Tell her you’ve been there, without knowing where her there is. Counsel long walks. Take things in your own hands and wring them into the shape of an arthritic joint. Pain beats oblivion, but only in moderation.

Hilo to Volcano bus, Boxing Day, 2019

On the bus from Hilo to Volcano:

--Older local bus driver and passenger talking about Christmas specials in Pidgin. Passenger says his favorite is the I Love Lucy show about five Santas, only one of whom has a real beard (hurts when pulled). Little Ricky was so confused. Driver says her mother watched the show every day. "Great seeing you, braddah," driver says as the passenger steps out at Kea`au, his legs discolored and weak.

--Transgender person with deep voice gets on, starts talking about how the bus used to be free (our taxi driver in Hilo had been obsessed with what a bad idea that had been!), and wondered why you had to go to Kona to get trained to drive the bus. Hilo guy retired, the driver said. The new passenger's vocabulary was big; words flew around the front of the bus until they got off at one of the unmarked stops the driver specialized in.

--Another guy with an old blue bike had gotten on the bus near Target. White hair, pulled back in a short pony tail. He'd been in Hilo to spend Christmas with his ex. Used to work in a care home there. The building was on the ocean, and 50 feet of earth disappeared during one storm. "So good to see you," said the driver as he got off at a "stop" that literally blocked the intersection of a street.

--At the Volcano store I bought two newspapers and a hard-boiled egg. Waited for Bryant to come back in car (which proved to be very unhealthy). A young blonde man with glasses was crouching behind the wooden barrier beside the restaurant. He wanted to know where to find the sun. That way (Kona side?) or that way (Hilo?) he asked. Was so sick of the rain. I said Hilo's sunny today, you could head there on the bus. He asked if there was anything interesting to see in Kea`au. I said he might prefer Pahoa. He pushed his old bicycle across the road to wait for the bus in the rain. He paced back and forth on the road, talking. Pushed his bike back, muttering a one syllable word beginning with f over and over again.

--Another man was standing in front of the store in optic green shirt, smoking a cigarette. He's lived in Volcano since the 1970s. It used to be cold! (Now, I remarked, there are mosquitos.) His father had been in the Air Force, WWII, Korea, and retired after Vietnam. Got 30 acres when he married his second wife, farmed for a long time. Died in '89. Alcoholic.

--The bus arrived on the other side of the road. The blonde guy flagged it down, standing in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. Came back to this side of the road to fetch his bike and backpack. "What was that town you told me about?" "Pahoa." He and his conversations got on the bus.

--The man with the cigarette left for a brief while on a bike. He'd waved to a guy in a BMW SUV with "Vietnam Vet" plate on the front. Might have been one of the grumpy guys who sits in front of the store a lot, or maybe just looked like a grumpy guy who would.

As a freshman in college in Alfred Corn's class, we read Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" and I wondered why a conversation in a bus in Nova Scotia about this and that was interesting in a poem. I was not persuaded then, though I appreciated the moose ("a she") and the neatly done stanzas. Today I realized she (both she's) had been my teachers in the art of eavesdropping, how much pleasure (and sorrow) there is in hearing these voices with their local and non-local cadences, and trying to catch the frayed end of a man's conversation with himself outside a general store in the rain.

Doggie Bags

 

Lilith had already pooped twice when we got to the cemetery, and I had no more bags. I looked up to see an African American man in a TALL MAN THEORY tee shirt, with pit bull and another big dog, striding toward us. "Do you have an extra poop bag?" I asked. "I thought she'd finished for the morning, but decided to grace the cemetery, too." He took off his headphones and I asked again. While explaining that his dogs prefer people to other dogs, he handed me three bags, two of which fell to the ground. "Three bags!" I exclaimed, scooping them up. "I have lots," he said, as they kept walking. He turned back to say, "Dog owners are like cigarette smokers, always bumming off each other!"

Important articles about mental health crisis at UH

The first article, by Susan Essoyan, is from the Star-Advertiser, which is behind a pay wall alas.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/11/24/hawaii-news/university-of-hawaii-seeks-more-funding-for-student-mental-health-and-scholarships/

The second came out this morning from Civil Beat. Eleni Gill is a good reporter. I also discovered that she's Susan Essoyan's daughter.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/11/mental-health-services-on-hawaii-campuses-lag-far-behind-demand/

Please send these links to your contacts--

Impeachment bathroom

I left impeachment for a few minutes to walk Lilith. A neighbor (whom Lilith adores) waved me across the parking lot with great enthusiasm. He wanted to show me his renovated bathroom (spent sooo much money on it). Had to wait at his door while he cleared stuff out. He held Lilith while I entered the bathroom. Quartz counter, beveled mirror, a shower that looked like the one I had in a Shanghai hotel. I said, "wow!" which pleased him. It pleased him less when I said my favorite part of the new bathroom (he's polling the neighbors) was the quiet fan. So I obliged him by saying I also really liked the counter. That was the right answer, I gathered. "I bet this is the nicest bathroom in Clubview Gardens," he said. As Lilith and I left we were approached by a worker and two younger guys announcing that the water will be off in most of our area today. I kind of recognized the older guy, but don't know him. Then he turns to me and grins: "Big day in impeachment, isn't it?" he says. "Did you see what happened?! He flipped!" I responded. He smiled and walked away. Behind me, my neighbor thanked me for looking at his bathroom.

The Man Who Gives Treats to my Dog

Yesterday morning, as Lilith and I walked up the hill, three police SUVs drove by, blue lights lit up on the two outer ones. Near the top of the hill, I saw the cars and an ambulance in one of the townhouse parking lots. Another cop drove in the lot and parked. (Lilith took this chance to do her business.) I lingered, the ambulance went nowhere. The rest of the day I thought about the dog walking man I talk to from that court, his southern accent intact after four decades in Hawai`i, earbuds installed with Biblical lessons playing (he once saw a woman miraculously cured of cancer in a church); his large white and brown terrier mix striding along energetically. He'd often pull out treats from back home (organic) and give one to Lilith. He'd told me about how difficult it was to deal with his son, who had been in rehab many times. So I worried about the son, too. This morning I saw that son walking that dog and interrupted them, asked what had happened in their court, said I'd worried about his dad. "No, he's home reading his Bible, and I wasn't there," he said. A young white guy with Chinese writing tattooed on his right arm. When I got home, I had an answer to my question from a woman I know who lives up the hill. Her court is afflicted with troubles: the elderly couple and their mentally disabled daughter who are essentially imprisoned in their home down the stairs by the son; an alcoholic who lives with his mother and has lots of guns; the man who used to beat his puppy and screams horrible things at his son. His girlfriend finally left him. I remembered that, while talking to him once I said, "I called the cops on someone in your court who was yelling at his son," and he said, "could have been me." But that guy was yelling in pidgin, I thought. My friend up the hill assured me my dog-walking friend was who she meant; he yelled at "homo" at his son (no wonder he's on drugs). An abuser, but like so many of them, quite charming. I was worried about him, his son. I guess I still am.

Upcoming Tinfish reading

Kobe, trains

On a train yesterday, I pointed to the name of my destination to two young women beside me. One was wearing a long gray dress with NYY logo on it. They conferred with each other and dissolved into laughter over their lack of English, my lack of Japanese. A studious looking woman in front of me took over, telling me in English that I was on the wrong train, Hanshin instead of Hankyo. She wrote a description for me of where to get off and transfer to a local train and then onto the right one. The NYY logo woman and her friend walked me part way and gestured dramatically to where I should go. I used up my ticket, then didn't have enough change to get another, which is when I adopted the policy of simply walking through open gates after people who used their tickets. (Shame! at least I didn't have to vault, as one does in Paris.) Coming back was another adventure, though mostly in self-doubt, eased by a businessman on a bench. Arrived to my hotel room to find that the good Elijah Cummings had died. I have not traveled alone in a country where I did not speak the language in a long time. It felt easier when I was 20, somehow. Or even 30!

The view from Kobe, Japan

1.

Walked to the port of Kobe, which features an enormous Starbucks. I did not enter. Was reading the plaques at a memorial to the 1995 earthquake--mostly a lament for the port itself--when I heard the sound of laughter. A woman approached in black pants, her ehu hair unkempt, carrying a plastic drink cup. She laughed again, loudly, as she walked past. We walked quasi-parallel for a short distance before she turned toward the water and started to dance. Her arms flung outward, her legs moving side to side, the plastic cup in the midst of it all.



2.

Walking uphill toward the hills behind Kobe, I stopped at a light. A mother was attending to her son (maybe 5), dressed neatly in a blue uniform with black shoes. He spoke loudly, with confidence, and hailed a friend across the street. "Bye bye!" he said. My eye happened upon his mother's bag. Bright image of shave ice! "Matsumoto's Haleiwa," it read. I laughed and pointed to her bag, said "Matsumoto's." "It's our last name," she said. "And I live on O`ahu," I responded.

Tinfish in Japan, October 19 and 20

Safeway Checker

Yesterday, S and I went to Safeway to get pain pills. We were behind a black man and white woman in line; they were buying two bottles of white wine. The cashier was looking at them with no particular affect, but she was looking. My bill came up with a question as to whether I wanted to end child hunger. I said, "they're making me feel guilty again, when I hit no," and she said, in a southern accent, "they've got us." Somehow I heard myself saying, "it doesn't bother me; I just want to get rid of Trump." She seemed to step back as she thrust the receipt in my direction. "I got her goat," I said to my son. "The southern accent." And then I felt pretty creepy.

Brad Waters, on the event of his funeral

Brad Waters

The last time I saw Brad, Anne and I had just driven him home from the hospital. I offered my hand as he got out of the car, but he ignored it. He walked up the stairs to his house, clutching both railings to maintain his balance. (He always did that, my kids told me.) And then, for me, he was gone.

On one of the Over the Hill Gang hikes in 2011 we were hiking above Pearl Ridge (I think) when the trail suddenly ended. Instead of turning around, we bushwhacked down a very steep incline, full of plants and rocks and pukas. Brad gently lifted Zoe down some of the steepest boulders. The walk up the other side of the valley was also steep, although there was a path. Brad moved up the hill svery lowly and deliberately with his dogs. He met us later at the top.

There was this quality of loving persistence to Brad. When he looked at plants on the trail, he looked carefully. He could name each plant: in Latin, in English, in Hawaiian. He knew each plant’s history, its uses. Often, he took a photo. When the photos had been downloaded, they were often surprising. A fern at such close proximity you could see lines of spores, some open and some closed, running down the vein like natural Pacmen. His photographs often made the ordinary world seem strange, so you could realize that it is.

There is a poem by the Japanese zen poet, Ikkyo, from the 14^th century, about living and dying. It goes like this:

Empty-handed I entered the world

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going--

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

I’m grateful that my two simple happenings overlapped with Brad’s.

Stage of grief

"It's not color that I see, but I see." (Etel Adnan). It's not the past I see, like a mental diorama whose dusty zebras cross the veldt. S dreamed his grandfather kicked us out of the house so he could clean up some leaves outside. The mango tree has been cut since he died. You can see Molokai now on a clear day through palms and over roofs. R pronounces "roof" like the sound a dog makes in print. Lilith chases the singers of cock-a-doodle-doo, the gulch opera.


I get a notification. Must remember to turn them off, and the beeping. S says he was surprised his instructor told him to watch video games, think about them. The course is on video game design.


I tell B I don't usually suffer guilt, but I do. She had gone gray, gone thin, gone abstract, but I didn't call. It's a sticky word, "call." Less sticky, though, than "death." Do other miracles hurt as much?


The verb "to pass." She passed for. She passed you on the highway. She passed along her kuleana. She passed the test to get into "standard English school," because she knew "bolocano" was pronouned with a "v." She passed last Friday.


Hurricane and mass shooting make our president go golfing. He's less dangerous that way. The road from Midland through Odessa leads to El Paso. I am suspicious. Remember the pronoun "they" in Pynchon, how it peppered the dense, paper bound text? Remember how "they" were always making things happen but we never heard who "they" were? This was not a "they" in transition, a "they" who passed from one to the other pier, but "they" who organized our mysteries for us. It was a more delicate time, at least symbolically.


I know what the distress flag means, and I know the Kingdom flag, the splintered paddle flag, yellow and green. But I don't get the state flag that's not in distress when paired with a Cleveland Browns flag. Or the bed of a pick-up, two state flags waving right side up (is it?), an Oakland Raiders sticker beneath the black window where I see a flag and a royal palm.


Her new book mixes poetry and performance. We fold the book outward, watching the raised cardboard push into a dimension we can touch. S enters to say everything is going well in the game, except the Cards are behind and the benches did clear. There were benches at the pond, one student reported after our slow walk. One man was eating his lunch. They all saw French fries, and one assumed hamburger, but I'm pretty sure it was fried fish inside his dull bun.


You don't stop thinking, you release what you think. What you think does not burn, but you don't want to hold it for long. If you want to hurt yourself, try putting an ice-cube in your palm and closing your hand. Strong sensation without injury. Or imagine a hot plate and your hand opening to let it go. Lilith has us in the palms of our hands, as we reach to pet her stomach.


If language were not absurd, it couldn't save us. A brawl during the mystery play clears the chairs and reveals the altar, emptied. Where alteration finds, I promise to remember you.

Grief zone

Grief is not a standard time, nor is there daylight savings. "To save" is not in question.


You can't save memories the way you do money, through the abstraction of direct deposit. Depression remains not as fact but as fear, an impacted tooth that's not likely to break the gum's surface, but sends signals to the nerves.


Lilith was so stressed by a vaccination that the vet tech's hand was smeared with her blood. Her bandage was blue, with sparkles. I bought pill pockets so the cat would ingest her fluoxetine. Inappropriate peeing termed "behavioral."


It's not that we lose philosophy when history shrinks, but that philosophy lodges in detail. Or in the verb form "shuffle walk" (Marie Hara) that catches my student's voice where he expects a comma to intervene.


One student thought the prose poem was about a "normal person," and then she realized the speaker was homeless.


Marie's daughter says she was briefly in memory care, where she mothered everyone. To care for memory is still to lose it, name by noun by sense of direction. The renovated palace of memory is more internet than synapse, a fund sent off-shore to evade taxes. Each incident is an evasion, blood-letting in the corner of a ballroom denoting the anecdote you mangle as you tell it. The anecdote of origin is most inclined toward bending. He fired the aide who talked about his family, then tweeted out a classified photograph.


An error occurred while trying to save this post. A saved post is only saved in the sense that it remains on the internet. The error is not one of commission or omission. It is nearly as mysterious as death, but less serrated.


"Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid," writes Etel Adnan. So many reasons to unsay, to move from "crayon" to "clown," from "crumpled" to "crumbled." Watch how the letters bob and weave on the chart, think how you wish you could distinguish the G from the C at several paces. Did she work with the homeless? one student asked.


The surprise is in the strength of the loss. She reads her mother's diary, about her mother. I write to her to ask her to lunch. We do not replace each other the way one cat replaces the last. S opened Tortilla's ashes the other day; his grandfather's sit on the piano in a box. He wonders what will happen when he can't lean on his parents. The way we catch on a bit of bone among the ashes. It signifies very little.

Words for and about Marie Hara

Marie Hara was co-organizer of the Talk Story conference; she was vice president of the Hawai`i Literary Arts Council; she was not a founding editor of Bamboo Ridge (that was Darrell and Eric); she was simply someone who worked on the press for 40 years. Marie was not BR's break-out star; that was Lois-Ann Yamanaka. The novel she long toiled on never came out, though her wonderful book of short stories, _Bananaheart_, did. While Marie read widely, traveled far, taught powerfully (the first course in Asian American literature at UHM, in fact) she approached everyone with her grace and kindness, not her high-powered intellect. She was an easy target when Bamboo Ridge was attacked in the mid-90s for being a coterie, local Asian, press. She was easy to dismiss as the "mother figure" of the Bamboo Ridge study group, a little too insistent at times, her ideas sometimes a bit "wacky." But Marie was the real thing, sweet like steel, her bright smile a knowing and compassionate one. She taught me so much. As a young whippersnapper white female poet new to Hawai`i, she drew me in, welcomed me and my work, collaborated on the HLAC when I was so suddenly named its president two years in. She found me a lovely apartment a few doors down from hers, where I lived until I moved off with Bryant to the windward side. She spent 20 minutes once explaining the meaning of "da kine" to me. She told me what it's like to be an older woman. She talked a blue streak about her husband and her daughters, and later on about her grandchildren. She talked about the Writer's House at UPenn, where her husband and daughters went to college and dreamed of starting one here. She talked about understanding the way adoptees search for family as a way to seek connection (she had a missing father). She loved my children. She talked about being half-Irish and half-Japanese, and co-edited an anthology of hapa work with Nora Okja Keller. Everything for her was co-. She talked about literature all the time, and read Roddy Doyle's work, everyone's really. She called me a "word poet," which I found funny. She nominated me for the Cades Award for years until I asked her please not to. And then I got it and asked her to introduce me, which she did. I have no memory of what she--or I--said, I just remember she was there, as she always was, a beautiful welcoming presence. I love you, Marie Hara.

Marie Hara

Marie Hara has died. For the last 40 years, Marie was an author, editor, teacher. mentor, and community builder, a crucial member of the literary community in Hawai`i.

Marie was co-organizer of the crucial Talk Story Conference in the late 1970s that led to the creation of Bamboo Ridge Press, which “publishes literature by and about Hawai’i’s people.” Her book of short stories, Bananaheart and Other Stories, was published by Bamboo Ridge in 1994. She co-edited, with Nora Okja Keller, the anthology, Intersecting Circles: the voices of hapa women in poetry and prose (1999). She was winner of the Elliot Cades Award for Literature n 1995. She taught the first classes in Asian American Literature in the state of Hawai`i and was a long-time instructor in the UH English Department. [I’m not sure what years she taught.]

Those are some facts about Marie. The truth is less tangible, but also significant. Marie was kind, quirky, attentive and compassionate to her students and friends, open-minded in her reading and teaching practices. She leaves behind her husband, John, who designed UHWO’s campus and the Luce wing of the Hawai`i Museum of Art (among many other buildings), two daughters, and grandchildren.

She was a dear friend.

Embodiment

The old haole man in maroon shorts and white tank top undershirt hobbles out of his townhouse, holding a broom, a red fly swatter and a large can masked by a damp paper towel. He heads to his seat by the mailboxes to sit underneath a "Work Order" sign. Fly swatter in left hand, he scratches his back.


The 30-something year old Asian man passes Lilith and me on our way toward the highway. He has an earring in each lobe, wears blue swim trunks and an off-white shirt. He looks at Lilith but not at me, though we're close. His gait is stiff, arms rigid at his sides. He walks to the light to cross over to the shopping area.


On our way back down Kahekili I see a young man in swim trunks, dancing at the light; his movements awkward, head bobbing up and down. I also see someone with long brown legs carrying a large black plastic bag, a black piece of luggage and an umbrella.


We follow the person with the garbage bag; she stops half-way to Hui Kelu to attend to this precarious load. I ask her if a hand is needed to the next block. She turns to say no, has on red lipstick, her face framed by dark black hair, appears transgender. Starts to cross the street soon after, examines something on the street with her slipper, heads toward a dumpster by the road. Garbage day.


Lilith and I walk around the cemetery building where we picked up Brad's ashes a week ago. The parking stalls are full. Scent of incense.


"Marie, Marie hold on tight" had nothing to do with a waste land, but with dear Marie, who just relaxed her grip on this earth. Nothing to do with loss except record it. Hold onto the rails until the shaking stops for a time. Take another nap.


We had no sooner entered our Travelodge room in Tacoma than we heard a boom and sparks flew outside the window. An earth mover had ripped a line off the pole. Later, a large square of yellow tape appeared between two poles and the back of the motel. Men came out to point up.


Attention to detail involves either the shrinking of history or the inventory of what is still in front of us, bulk item couches and mountains and teenagers practicing their parallel parking on the hills. The embrace of what has yet to mean anything. There's comfort in that. The dull object that has no word for you. It's only after you pass that you realize it was the prompt for a cultural studies essay, like the side by side photos of Snitch (black as a tire) and (brown) Kwan Yin, index finger folded over to touch thumb. We read that the figure is male, but can also be rendered as female. One is on a pedestal, the other on a stair, but you are not allowed to touch either of them.


Farther down in the gallery, another Buddha sports a curled mustache, like one of the Three Musketeers. Barry remarks on the embodiment of spirit, which is at once neither, both.

Box of ashes

The woman who handed us his ashes in a pink cardboard box inside a pink tote bag said she'd seen me and Lilith in the morning, walking. "Small dog who struts, yeah? So cute."


The woman who handed us his ashes in a pink box lingered to chat. Across from us a woman in sunglasses sat on a long bench, her mouth set. An employee said to her as he strutted by, "they just need to design the head-stone." He wiped sweat from the back of his bald and sun-burned head, disappeared into an office door, and then walked by the other way.


A stone gargoyle stands in front of the air-conditioning units near the benches we sit on.


I tell the woman who handed us the ashes that my mother is still in my closet. Our late cat is still in a tin near the television. My neighbor says her dog's ashes nearly fell off their resting place when her neighbors banged on the wall (her living dogs bark). She would have killed them if they knocked her Ginger's ashes on the floor.


The space of this meditation is flat.