Lilith's island life

"Does anyone ever comment on the name of your company?" I asked a man with a very long yellow level. I'd passed his truck a few times in recent weeks. "What about it?" "Looks like RACIST," I responded (it's actually RAYZIST). Lilith and I came downhill to take his picture. He held the level out horizontally "to show balance," he said. 

 

Lilith and I ran into our three worker friends; I told them I'd teased the guy about his truck. "Oh, racist!" they said. I told them his name was Kahua T, as he'd followed me on instagram. "Oh, the T's from Waimanalo," one said, "they all hate each other. My braddah dates one of them; that's how I know."

 

Looking for Lilith

 

"Yeah, Raschelle and Aldon (of the Waikane Store) asked if you were here," said S., as we left the cemetery. "Actually, they didn't; they asked after Lilith." They'd found us at the top, just before you get to another patch of new stumps, where Lilith had presented herself to Ola and Hoku for attention. Raschelle started taking photos of Lilith, as Aldon asked Ola his name. "Oh, Kamakana! I used to take his bus--that was your grandfather? The nicest guy, though you know those guys can turn, too." Ola said he missed that man. 

 

Somewhere between Raschelle's telling me what they're going to do in Vegas next week (Seinfeld and high tea!) and the discovery of Ola's grandpa, Aldon started telling tales of the Hawaiian mafia. "Oh, mafia on the mainland sent guys here; they got sent back in pieces, with a note to send more. That was before Osama bin Laden." "Before who?" I wanted to know. "You know, before the mail got searched." He asked me to say shalom to my husband. What? "He's Jewish, isn't he?"  I said no, he is not. Told him about a friend of mine who spoke Hebrew and got a cap in New Orleans from some Lebanese guys that read "Shalom, Y'all." Raschelle said, "Shaloha!"

 

Back at the front gate, S. was ruminating on management styles. He'd asked the old boss how he dealt with all the babysitting; he had so much of it to do with the young guys in the guard shack. The old boss said it was easy; he managed seven people and they managed everyone else. Now this boss is different. He thinks all 200 employees are his to order around. The maintenance manager will assign tasks and, when he goes to check on his guys, they're not there. What happened? Well, the new boss told them to do something else. He drives around the cemetery all the time in his white SUV telling people what to do. 

 

"They go through these guys a lot," said S. "This one'll probably be here until I retire, though."

The Temple's new shave ice truck

Lilith and I followed a shave ice truck and trailer into the cemetery this morning. Five Sisters, it said on the back of the trailer, above a wooden door. Workers were already figuring out where the woman lived and to whom she was related, as well as who in the cemetery must know her, when we walked by her parked truck, which sported an LA Dodgers logo on it. Was someone going to have a funeral with shave ice? I wondered. Later, we saw the truck and trailer next to the booth where you pay to get into the Buddhist Temple grounds. The woman in the booth said, "guarantee that's why they're cutting everything down in there; more vendors!" The guy at the front gate said, "yeah, they're making it into Waikiki." 

 

I looked up the Byodo-In Temple on-line. "Honoring over a century of tradition, tranquility & legacy," reads the headline. Beneath that you find "purchase tickets" button.

 

Two men from Michigan

Hardly any tourists walk through the cemetery to the temple. Most stick iphones outside their car windows to record the mountains and keep driving forward, ever forward. On the way out, they look diligently forward to the next stop. But today, two men approached Lilith and me on foot. One exclaimed at the cute dog. When I told him she's named Lilith, he said "first wife of Eve!" While suggesting that he meant Adam, I said he was the first person to know that (or was he maybe the second?). Most people talk about _Frasier_, which made these two look as blankly at me as I look at the _Frasier_ watchers. (Note to self: watch _Frasier_.) They said they were from Traverse City, Michigan; the one guy pulled up his hand so he could show me where on the mitten that was. "Oh, I know where that is; I have a cousin who lives there. He's a curler. Bolo headed guy, really nice." They didn't know Dan Ladd by name, but suspected that a friend of theirs would know who he is. "A big island friend has a cousin who curls there, too," I added. Small world.

 

As Lilith and I walked away, I realized no one from Traverse City would know what "bolo head" means, even if I did wave my hand in a circle over my Cardinals cap as I said it.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

I met myself at the intersection of Despair and Compassion roads. They looked about the same, but the book had said to choose Compassion, that Despair led to no good. I felt most comfortable in the intersection, not on either of the roads (whose signage was non-existent), so I lingered there with myself, suffering through yet another Platonic dialogue. Both of the roles were mine, though they felt more sturdy than roles, because I knew I would never forget my or my lines. That I and I spoke them all at once seemed normal, for I was accustomed to public places, their cacophonies of opposing voices.

The book makes a separation between the two, like a Maginot line between speakers of different languages. (I met two Germans in the cemetery today; one was east Asian and the other middle eastern, but their words came from Essen.) There was a reason the two roads crossed, did not simply run parallel. The word “despair” hadn’t yet suffered the fate of vocabularies emptied of meaning by fascist word workers. Nor had “compassion,” more mist than air, more air than earth.

How would I know compassion, had I not known despair? I asked myself. How would I know despair had I not felt the soft fleece of compassion? I had met myself, but we talked past ourself, not arguing exactly, but also not capable of agreeing. If the first amendment is dead, how can I talk to myself at all? Kill mockery, but leave hate behind like burned rubber, pretending to write but only impressing tire prints on the mud.

So, like the watercress farmers of Pearl City, I put down my hut at the intersection’s center. I preferred the “inter” to the “section,” so I called it “cross roads.” Around my hut they built a roundabout to keep traffic from flattening me. I appreciated the roundness, the cyclical nature of this traffic pattern, though it still led from Despair to Compassion, or vice versa. When I wept at night, having watched the news on my phone, I felt a kindness rise in me, as out of despair’s mud a lotus bloomed.

There was still nothing I could do about the beaten, the disappeared, the hung out to dry, those drowned in debt, the meek who had thought to inherit the earth before the oligarchs took over instead. The meek may still wear their Meek signs, but they also cradle AR-15s, because there’s no getting away from the argument that isn’t one, rather a violent assertion of one over the other self. I raised my Swiss flag, hoping there was a sliver of memory left that wars leave some mountains out. I worried only that traffic would stop, that the corner of Despair and Compassion would die of drought. I will go fund some water for me.

The woman in rehab

We've seen her the last couple of mornings, leaning against a truck, her coffee cup, its purple handle braided, balanced on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in her hand, looking toward the mountains. She says she's on rehab and wants to get back to work. "Environmental specialist," she tells me, which means "housekeeper." Hurt her back leaning over to wipe a low table. Hadn't liked office work; too many people in too small a space. She stays with her family here, and also with her mother-in-law on Okana Place (her mother-in-law is named Susan, her dog Lily). I tell her a friend of mine wrote a book about the sumo wrestler murdered on Okana Road, and the drug issues in the area. Her daughter knew the wrestler's girlfriend, who really had a hard time after he died. Drugs. I recommend my friend's book, _Big Happiness_, and tell her my mother-in-law was guardian ad litem at the house in front of which he was killed. It's a small island, you know.

 

"That's my president," she says, when the inevitable comes up. "I voted for him twice," she says, clearly not happy with her choice. Didn't like Biden either, thought he was a puppet, but now her friends say, "did you hear what Trump did today?" and they groan. I mention that Title III has been cut (which benefits native Hawaiians) and she said yes, he's going after all the minorities and that's all we are in Hawai`i. She's Chinese-Hawaiian-German, and no one in her family is "pure blood" anything. It's not even been a year . . . 

 

Her kids ask her how they can survive in Hawai`i. She tells them to go to Molokai, where the family has land. But what would they do there? they ask. Her nieces and nephews aren't political; they're just trying to make it here. But they seem content.

She's nearly finished her cigarette and her coffee. She wishes Lilith and me a good walk. Just the first trip around the parking lot, I say. Gotta have another coffee before we do our long one.

 

Gender reveal

"It's a boy!" says O, "I saw da boto on the ultrasound." Oh, that's a word I just learned the other day, I say. Had to call my friend who helps me with Pidgin. "It's a Filipino word, isn't it?" he asks his maintenance side-kick. His friend lights a vape pen, and my nose perks up. "Oh smoking da funny kine!" He laughs at my saying it in Pidgin. "Pakalolo," I add. That word must be Hawaiian.

 

"How's destruction going?" I ask about the on-going tree and bush-cutting going on. (The guys just laugh now, S had told me, at all the tree cutting.) O points up the hill, says that the azalea trees will all be cut. But azaleas aren't trees. He meant albizia trees. Invasive yes, but I doubt the boss is interested in botany. Lilith collects her attention from O and H, and we head downhill.

 

At the cemetery office, we stop for water. Our friend, the woman who needs new knees, wants to die at 80, and whose brother died by suicide in 1979 at 27, is seated behind the outdoor desk. I say I have something to show her, then wend my way through my instagram photos. "Here: I added your brother's name on a card for the memorial tree at the Out of Darkness Walk." Her face softens, and she thanks me. I have a post-it with her email address on it. The photo's been sent.

 

Lilith and an untraumatized man

"Well, he's not dead," said S, when I asked what happened to Charlie Kirk. "You're not so foolish as to believe that kid did it, are you?" he demanded, casting side eye at me. "A Lear jet left the airport 20 minutes after, turned off its transponder, which is illegal, then landed in Delaware and came back. And that wasn't blood, it was goopy, like motor oil, and his white shirt wasn't stained. There were three guys giving hand signals next to him, and the one guy just stepped back after the shot, didn't even look at Charlie Kirk."

 

"That kid, he was wearing one set of clothes going up the roof, another on the roof, and then a third change of clothes after the 'shooting.' No sign of a rifle on him, not even when he had a limp, which they said was because he had his gun under his clothing. Then he runs off without a rifle." You can fold a rifle, I suggested. "Not a Mauser; requires a kit and 20 minutes to do that," he said, after earlier saying he wasn't a "gun guy."

 

I wrote a prose poem years ago called "The Untraumatized Man," about someone who had refused to watch the twin towers fall on TV. Unlike everyone else, he wasn't wounded by the imagery of that day, because he didn't see it. But the friend on whom I based that poem knew that 9/11 had happened. S is another untraumatized man, one who denies that the trauma even happened. His world is oddly safe, wound in stories that make no sense but insure that what we saw happen did not. "That was sheer AI," he said at one point.

 

Lilith and the entrepreneur

"Don't go up there!" yelled M from his John Deere-mobile, as Lilith and I walked past the guard shack at the cemetery. "You won't like what you see." 

 

"Oh no, what have they destroyed now?" I asked. Trees in front of the Temple, M. told me. 

 

"You know, my husband's theory is that you guys will cut so many things down that you won't be needed any more, and they'll lay you off." "Oh, that's ok," M said, "I got three companies." After storms, he cuts trees in Kailua. That was one. Used to live on the Big Island, had three parcels in Puna, but the lava over-ran them. Wants to get land near Glenwood, build a tiny house, and grow vegetables to sell. If he gets his food license, he can start a shave ice business. "But the Big Island's one good place foa retire, not foa work," he said. I agreed, having retired to Volcano (sort of). 

 

"If you weld, can make $60K a month on the mainland." Wow, I said, not quite believing him. "My husband wants to learn to weld." Oh, just go to YouTube. He was going to go mainland to a welding school, but gotta stay close to his kids.

Lilith and I walked up the hill and started down again. I expected utter devastation at the Temple, but noticed very little. Some tree limbs down was all. When I told O that, he says, "you just wait." O was weed-whacking. His workmate was, too, but had a nice aloha shirt on. "You're well dressed today!" I said. Oh yeah, Aloha Friday. Lilith couldn't be bothered; she sniffed a drain where a mongoose hides.

 

I meant to ask S his take on the Charlie Kirk murder (he'll have one, I know that, and it will be extra- if not counter-factual), but it was hot, so Lilith and I wandered home. Tomorrow, if he's there.

 

Tasty bbq stories

Her family had moved to the US from the Philippines in 1971, but that's not where our conversation began. She'd noted that we had the same credit cards (Hawaiian Airlines) though I said I often flew Southwest, to which she made a funny face. Then there was a snide remark about dear leader from me, which displeased her not at all. She'd worked for DOD and NATO in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, she said, and knew how much money got spent for fuel (one thing he's right about, she said, is that other NATO countries don't pay their way). When I collected my kalbi plate, for we were in line at the Korean bbq, I asked if she was leaving; she said no, she'd eat there. So I sat across from her in a narrow booth, I with my plate, she with her soup, and talked story.

 

Her father had owned a ranch in the Philippines, where he organized some political events for Ferdinand Marcos. Her voice got softer when she told me this. I'd mentioned Marcos's former grave at the Valley of the Temples, before his body was shipped back home. Her parents bought a house in Enchanted Lake in the 1970s, and also four plots in the cemetery (cheaper then, yeah). She doesn't want to be buried there, but her parents are. Her father didn't want a flower vase on his grave, so they didn't get one, but when her mother died, she thought a vase would be appropriate for her. So she added to "the plan." The vase was placed on her mother's grave, but close to her father's; it didn't look right. So she asked that the vase be put between their graves, so it could be shared. 

 

Nothing happened. So she called, and she called. Finally, she went to the cemetery, explained in person what she wanted. Got a photograph later of the vase in the right place. And then the conversation came around again. Again she whispered as she said she's only voted once or twice in her life. For Ronald Reagan. She loved that man! 

 

This was yesterday. I can only write so many stories each day, especially when the news keeps intruding. Yesterday a man was shot in the neck. My son, in law enforcement, watched the video over and over again to see how people reacted; he tells me not to watch it, though I confess I tried to find it. Before all of this happened, S in the cemetery had offered a long monologue on the horrors of the funeral industry. Two companies own big cemeteries on island, and their people hate each other.

Suicide is (not) painless

 

The woman at the desk, the one who needs knee surgery but can't afford it, the woman who once told me she wants to die at 80 years old, that woman looked at me differently today. Lilith and I were heading back from the water fountain on this airless, humid day when the mountains were excruciatingly beautiful, as they often are in blue sky and cloud. "Thank you," she said. "My brother committed suicide. 1979." I was wearing a Walk to Prevent Suicide teeshirt. "It was work related. He was a policeman, single, 27 years old. He was sued for something. A year later, he was fully exonerated." She said her son is also a policeman. "But he has a wife, two kids, and a mortgage; it's a different deal then. When he was in the police academy and they'd all go to the range after class, he had to go home and take care of the kids. He took a $1K per month pay cut to do it, but his wife encouraged him. He wanted to." What was his name? I asked, almost as an afterthought. She told me. I told her I would think of him on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - Hawaii Chapter walk this Saturday. She was now on the phone, but she looked at me and pointed her finger at her forehead. 

 

When I got home, a neighbor texted to ask if I knew about the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Remembering Ken Quilantang

Ken Quilantang must have taken a course from me; how else would I know him? What I do remember clearly is the course he did not take from me, a graduate course in Documentary Poetry. Ken was a fiction writer, a very good one, so I was game to have him in among the poets. Many students in that class wrote about their families in the context of Hawai`i's history. It was a wonderful group of students. A week or two into the class, Ken came to my office. He had wanted to write about his kid brother, Jonathan, who had died suddenly, and who loved cars. He'd suggested making a container for his poems that was a mock-up of a car. He was nearly in tears. He wanted this to be his project, but he couldn't do it, as he was still grieving intensely. Years later, I heard that he and his wife Gail had had a son; they named him Jonathan.

 

Today, I attended his funeral, a beautiful service offered by his friends, family, and colleagues from KCC and HCC. As I sat in the chapel, a memory came up for me. Every so often in my teaching career, but only rarely, I would look at a student and think that my father would have liked him. Ken was one of those students, kind, humble, responsible, hard-working, talented, full of heart. Rather like my dad. He died of cancer at 52. Two black kittens kept coming down the aisle before the service, were carried out, and returned over and again.

 

The roots that clutch are all that's left

"I don't want to be driving by there when it all collapses," says Uncle John, "or maybe I do." Beneath a rock wall, an entire hillside is now bereft of trees. First they came for the pines, the bougainvilleas, and now for the albizias. (And no, this is not rooting out invasives to be replaced with native plants.) "Is there a plan?" I ask S. "I'm not the only one who thinks the new boss is just cutting everything down to show that he's doing something," he says. "I don't say anything to him any more; he doesn't listen." 

 

I tell the woman at the entrance to the Temple grounds that I've written comments about the tree apocalypse on Yelp and Google. "We're all on his shit list," she says of the boss man. "And he talks about his local roots," she adds, her eyes rolling like Prime Minister Meloni's. "If we refuse to do it, we'll lose our jobs--and have you seen the temple grounds?" I say I haven't, because I can't take my dog in there. "He's wrecking that, too." And he wants to get rid of all the cats.

 

We're all watching the path of Kiko, a hurricane in the mid-Pacific. It's expected to pass north of Hawai`i, unless it doesn't. There are still roots that clutch on that hillside, I hope, but they will relax as they decay.

 

 

Corruption and conspiracy for the win

2.

"It's all a fake," says S at the guard shack. "He's alive and living in Israel." "But those women," I say, "their lives were completely messed up, decades of PTSD." "Oh, it's fake, all politics now," he responds. "They're getting $200K each to say all that." "Have you ever known anyone who was sexually abused as a child?" I ask. "Oh, yes, I'm very close to one."

 

1.

"No, I just look like a bitch today," says the Ahuimanu Park custodian, when I ask if I can take her photo. Her wide smile is framed by the chain link fence between us. She's been weed whacking, has to pull up the grass-splattered windshield of her helmet to talk. She's aggravated because she has to do all the work around here. "So much corruption," she says. And they're blowing up her bathrooms. (I see exploding toilets, but she means graffiti.) Scrawling "BOTO" everywhere. (She kindly translated for me.) It might be better if she stopped and the place went to hell; then someone might clean it up. But she does it. "Hard being the competent one, I know," I say. Her neighbor down the road said she was going to die in a few months. Her grass got way too high, so she cut it. "Why'd you cut it, if you weren't paid for it?" the woman demanded. "Well, I knew you needed help, and besides, I have to look at it all the time, and it's ugly."

The woman hasn't died yet, she says, her smile turned ironic. But the custodian's father passed four months ago. As she goes back to weed whacking (she'd had a mower, but the bolt fell off in high grass and she thought people would assume she was on drugs, crawling around on the ground looking for it), I say I'm sorry about her father's death. "It's life," she says.

 

0.

The phone tree was more banyan than oak, options writhing around options, roots tangled, no way to know what limb would sprout next. (Imagine a John Cage piece composed of touch tone tones.) I was trying to roll over an IRA from a company that never responds, no matter how many trees you follow and forms you send in. "There's something wrong with the form," a woman finally says. "You hadn't confirmed that this was what you wanted." "But it's all on the form that was sent in three weeks ago!" Yes, this is what I want. "Will Susan get updates?" asked my adviser, also on the line. "No," was the response.

 

Stumps where bushes were

"The only thing they pay attention to is the internet," said a woman cutting flowers at the cemetery guard shack. "I wrote to complain," I said, "and got not response." Oh, I wrote to them. It's gotta be Yelp, she said. Lilith and I had just completed a circuit of the cemetery and had seen ever more stumps, where plants had been. One long hedge now resembles a jaw missing teeth. (So that small children can now see the mountain view?) A long bending line of bushes was down around one of the flagpoles. A Filipino worker, gathering up shreds of shrubs, told me everything was getting uglier. He laughed when I muttered, "baby Trump." And, on the way out, the sign at the entrance had been cleared of shrubbery, so you can see the word MORTUARY in all its glory. Those were bushes where cats hid.