Hawai’i Day Two: Seeing Stars, & Staying Put

It’s difficult to explain the pull this place has on me.

The easy thing to say (which I DO) is that I went to school here, thirty years ago. That’s one tie: I lived here, however temporarily, and I hung out with Locals. That’s why I can exclaim, when a tour guide begins to describe a dive entry just past Magic Sands, “You mean Four-Mile-Marker!” Yes, he said, surprise painted across his face. Only Locals know that one.

So that connection is the easy one to explain. The deeper one that still has hold of me, though, (the messier one, the harder one to explain) is the time I spent absorbed in all things Hawai’ian, while owning and operating Kana Girl’s Hawai’ian BBQ in Boise, Idaho. My late husband—a hefty Hawai’ian himself—was the cook, and the singer-in-the-kitchen, and the speaker-of-Pidgtin-English to the Pacific Islanders who flocked to our menu. I learned the inflections of Pidgin, I learned to say “Howzit” like a Local. It doesn’t seem respectful to break into Pidgin here and now—someone might think I was mocking—but I sorely wanted to tell our waitress “Eh, Sistah, Mahalo fo’ da kokua!” when she showed us how to validate our parking without paying the exorbitant tourist prices. I guess what it comes down to is that I was accepted by the Pacific Islanders who ate at Kana Girl’s, and who showed up for our lu’aus when we threw a party for one reason or another. And somehow I look for that acceptance being here now. I don’t know why it’s important to me, but there it is. Certainly I’m dressing like a Local: swimsuit top with a skirt, and bare feet whenever I have the opportunity (which is a lot in Hawai’i). All my touristy jewelry—the plumeria ring & bracelet that I wear at home—is tucked away in a case so it doesn’t tarnish with the snorkeling we do. And maybe? Maybe so it doesn’t give me up as a tourist. I guess I’d like it if there were at least a question, that I might belong—It’s just such a part of me. I translate Hawai’ian signage for Jon, and think about the Pidgin grammar book I was compiling before Keoni died. I don’t even have the remnants of that anymore. I flung it away in grief. Somehow my grief is also tied up in this place, or in my “belonging” to it. Perhaps that marriage was my tie to legitimacy—I was Hawai’ian by marriage for that time. Remarriage doesn’t make that grieving go away, and Hawai’ian music in particular brings it to the surface. I told you it was messy.

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There’s a book here in our condo on identifying Hawaiian reef fish, and it’s actually a newer edition of a textbook I had when I was studying marine biology here. We had to memorize it, with scientific names, before we did a quantitative survey of Puako reef—had to be able to identify every single thing we saw. I surprise myself still, sometimes, with one of those scientific names floating up from the depths of memory, or even the Hawaiian names, which they also taught us.

Our work-crew at home just sent us pictures of new snow on the ground. We’ve been sending them pictures of palm trees and water…

The swell has been WAY up, which means snorkeling in most places would be tricky at best—and we needed to gear way down and get into a more relaxed pace… So we stayed put yesterday and had an entire lounge-around day. Watched the surfers just out from our balcony, making the most of that swell—some huge waves in toward evening especially—and made one expedition, to the grocery store for more solid supplies (we bought breakfast food when we first arrived). Now we have sandwich-makings, and last night Jon grilled us steak and potatoes on the grill by the pool. If you’re going to have a lounge-around day, you couldn’t beat the place for it.