Uncle John

 

"Where's Uncle John?" I asked at the first booth at the cemetery. (He calls me Aunty, so I call him uncle.) I'm told he's at the back booth where the temple is, so Lilith and I head in that direction. There are a lot of buses in the Temple parking lot; big blue ones, smaller white ones, Roberts buses. And there's Uncle John. "Haven't seen you in a long time," he says. Spending time on the big island, I respond. "That's the only island where I get lost; my inner compass doesn't work there," he says. "That island is Pearl City for me," I answer. His grandmother was from Hilo, one of the last full Hawaiians. Only spoke Hawaiian when she didn't want her kids to understand. (My father said his parents did that, in German.) He's also African American and native American (dad was a Marine from the South who met a lovely Hawaiian girl...) and German. You can see the German in some of the family eyes, he says, gorgeous. Me: "I'm half-German, half-Irish. Makes me stubborn."

 

Lilith and I have a book coming out, I tell him, and he's in it. Some of those arguments we had. He laughs, turns to his co-worker and says, "political stuff, all in good fun." Unable to resist, I remark that Trump doesn't look too good these days. "Neither does Biden!" I disagree with him. "That affidavit is all redacted; they need to release all of it," he tells me. Can't yet, I say.

 

A fresh line of tourists develops, so I leave him to his customers. Lilith and I pass a woman with a barefooted small child. It's already hot out. "I've got two pairs of shoes for her on the bus, but she refuses to wear them." We walk to the artificial falls in front of the Ko`olau. Back down near the Temple, Lilith pulls and pulls me toward the parking lot. That's when I see puddles of cat food in the gutter, and a woman in a dress approaching in a lei, scattering it from a plastic bag. Lilith had smelled cats on another woman near the start of the walk. What comes around smells around.