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.