• Tag Archives Hawaii

  • Changing Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                         Waning Strawberry Moon

    Now that Kate will be home for at least  two months, I’m shifting my going to bed and waking up time.  Got up this morning at 7am and plan to keep that up with a bedtime of around 11:00pm.  This gives me more good hours in the morning, plus it allows me to use the cool of the day for garden work.

    Kate’s walking on her own, with a good gate.  She’s so happy, I can see her float as she walks.  It makes me feel good, too.

    I went to a CVS pharmacy this morning to pick up a few things we needed.  I don’t go there often;  the combination of heat and dew point with the familiar but still not often experience lay out made me feel, for just a moment, that I had entered a Long’s pharmacy.  Long’s is familiar to those who travel to Hawai’i because its everywhere and carries a lot of stuff tourists need desperately, or feel like they do.  It was a good memory, happy it popped up.

    Well.  Went looking for a Longs photo and discovered that, guess what, CVS bought out Longs.  Sigh.

    Back to continue house cleaning, garden work for the upcoming July guests.  Not stuff I like, but, hey, it needs to be done.  At least once a year.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health Memories 📎and tagged

  • The Sons of the Soil

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     37  bar steady 29.78 0mph windchill 36

       Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

     

    Below is a reply to my brother Mark about this e-mail he sent to me:

    Charles, This is pretty amazing. It really needed to happen. Mark ** Penang abandons pro-Malay policy **The Malaysian state of Penang says it will no longer follow a government policy favouring ethnic Malays.< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7289509.stm >In re:  the sons of the soil.  When I was in Hawai’i, I learned the natives call themselves kama’aina, literally children of the land.  Businesses offer a kama’aina discount and there has been some effort to get civil service preference to kama’aina.  In Hawai’i, where the indigenous population has experienced considerable oppression (plantation slavery for sugar and pineapples) and marginalization (numbers cut by 90% thanks to disease), it seems just.

    It made me think a lot about this notion of belonging to a land, or a place.  The problem with identifying one ethnicity or one particular population as sons of the soil is its ahistorical nature.  That is, at some point in time, virtually every population on earth, outside of a miniscule group in Africa, emigrated. In other words, kama’aina is not a permanent characteristic, rather it reflects an acquired relationship, one that reflects a love for this place.  Others, too, can become kama’aina.  That is the essential injustice in the Malaysian situation.It is, too, an injustice in Hawai’i, if Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and white inhabitants cannot, at some point, also be kama’aina.

     

    As I thought more about it, I realized I am kama’aina of the American Midwest, the heartland of the North American continent, yet I am also a son of immigrants.  Am I less wedded to this land than the Annishinabe or the Lakota?  I don’t think so.  My life depends on it. When I return, I see home in its lakes and forests.

    In fact, the whole notion of an ecological consciousness comes down to seeing ourselves, each of us, as kama’aina of the planet earth.

    Anyhow, thanks.  I agree, amazing and hopeful. 


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • Deadlines, Bah!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Gray, dirty snow, chill with humidity.  A dull, gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.

    This morning I looked at my calendar, the stuff that March requires of me.  It looks ok, doable.  That’s thanks to writing a sermon, my workshop for the Woolly retreat and a presentation on the strange place of religion in contemporary art for the docent book club before leaving for vacation.  A good move.

    Deadlines do not stimulate me, unless they are a long way off.  I can finish tasks well before they’re needed, but as time gets closer, I get frustrated and willing to put up with whatever to get stuff done.  Not a recipe for my best work and I like to do my best work.

    The blog presents an interesting quandry in that regard.  By its nature the blog is better fresh and without edits.  It’s more like speech than writing.  Still, over half the time I run spell check and go back over the entry after it’s written, just to check.  Even if errors sneak through, I’m ok wid dat.  It’s a blog, not War and Peace.

    Seem rested, but still undermotivated.  A trip into the MIA should help tomorrow.  There’s a continuuing event and I can check Matt Welch’s lecture on the Weber exhibit.  After going on a few tours next week I want to start touring that exhibit the second week in March.  I’ve also picked up a China tour later in March that should be fun.

    By tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be back in the Aeron and ready to write. I still have mail to go through, but that’s about it as far as vacation-related catch up I have to do.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Back on Central Standard Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    23  bar falls 29.90 2mph  NNE windchill21

         Last Quarter of the Snow Moon

    Gonna get the weather changed back to Andover tomorrow.  Still a little fuzzy.  I stayed up all day to reset my biological clock and it feels like its worked.   I’ll be ready for bed around my usual time.

    This was 6:30PM on Hawai’ian Standard Time.  Time to hunt for dinner and begin to wind down from a day of hiking or visiting gardens or beach combing.  It’s always strange, at least to me, that when we return from a place like Hawai’i that it continues, in the same rhythms, after we leave. 

    Most of the year I don’t hold the distinct memories of two places in my mind as I do right after I return from vacation, but for now and the next few weeks Hawai’i will be as clear as if it were a short drive away.  This is partly a function of jet travel.  We walk down a jet way on Kauai, wander around a few mostly similar airports, walk down a couple more jetways, then we’re home again.  No landscape passes by as we travel.  There are only vague indications of cultural change.  OK, the banks of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport were not subtle, but you know what I mean.  No changes in cuisine, no different towns, license plates, grocery stores, just the world air travel culture and its modest inflections as we pass from one gate to another.

    Getting to bed time here on good ol’ CST.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged

  • Lahaina Town

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Maui night  A crescent moon hangs over the Pacific. The northstar, what I think of as our own Polaris (in Minnesota) shines even here in the moist tropical dark.   Clear

    Kate drove us into Lahaina Town.  I’m not on the rental car contract.  We wandered through the streets, looking into jewelry stores, art galleries, clothing stores.  A lot of people on the sidewalks, too many for my taste. 

    In Whaler’s Market (they like Whaler imagery here, in spite of the darkness in the history) I met a guy who works and sells jade.  I replaced my broken jade ring and bought a spare.  The owner thought I lived on island.  We struck up a conversation.  He buys his jade by the wheelbarrow load from Burmese families who carry across the Thai border near ChingRai.  He grew up in Rangoon, his parents worked for the Ford Foundation.

    By walking a block off mainstreet we escaped the crowd and found a quiet restaurant where we ate supper, macadamia nut crusted Mahi-Mahi.  At the bar a few locals bellied up to the bar,  bellowed greetings and exhibited much of the false bon’homie that drunks often think they enjoy.

    Back now in room 853 at the Westin.  Both of us still have a little travel fatigue.  Should get better tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Tommy Bahama, Reyn Spooner, Maui Dive Shop

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Maui weather 80 degrees and sunny 

    Ate breakfast at the hotel…not again.  Way too expensive. I knew that but I was not awake.

    Wandered over to Whaler’s Village and bought a new hat, looked in the windows.  There’s a scrimshaw shop that has objects inspired by netsuke, only about twice as large.  Well done, though.  Tommy Bahama, Reyn Spooner, Island Living, Maui Dive Shop, Honolua Surf Shop. 

    Noticed the palm trees around the resorts all have piton marks.  To prune these trees little guys clamber up the trunk with piton’s attached to boots and a leather belt around their waist.  The trunks have the scars.  Looks like abuse.

    A lot of people here.  More than I remember from previous visits.  Not as many Japanese, though they are still here.  The frontdesk has  a Japanese language newspaper and there is a concierge for Japanese speakers. 

    Kate and I are off to Lahaina Town.  There is a banyan tree there that spreads out over half a city block.

    Aloha.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • The Moratorium Years Didn’t Work Out so Well for Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    29  90%  26%  5mph NNE bara29.84  falls windchill25 Imbolc

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    In spite of the fact that this is Minnesota, how soon we forget, I had REI all to myself this morning.  Monday morning shoppers scared back into their easy chairs by, gasp, SNOW.  OK, I did think about turning around and heading back, then “I am a Minnesotan and I am not afraid,” soared through my mind and on I drove.  Slippin’ and slidin’ to the mall.  Just like when I was a kid and we had to walk four blocks all the way downtown to buy a pair of shoes.

    Anyhow, a helpful young lady, blond and cheerful, quite normal except for the hoop through the right nostril, which, I suppose, makes her normal in that world formerly inhabited by adults now over 60, guided me through the hiking/walking show selection process.  The first pair pretty much fit me, though they were a little snug.  Then, “Oh.  These are a women’s 8!”  Wouldn’t you know?  Still we did find an appropriately masculine pair of Keens, “They started out making water shoes so they know slick rock.”  One of the problems in hiking Hawai’i is water slicked rock;  I’ve learned this with bruised ankles more than once.

    Nearer to  home at the Anoka Co-op I went searching for Minnesota cheese (Bongards, in this case) and Minnesota bread (oddly, Holy Land Pocket Bread, made in Minneapolis) for my presentation at the Woolly retreat.  Then, sliding my way back home.

    All the while I listened to Tom Wolfe’s  I Am Charlotte Simmons.   Anyone who encountered college after academic stardom in a small-town high school, like me for instance, can identify all the over place with Charlotte Simmons, the little mountain girl from Sparta, North Carolina and a Presidential Scholarship.  Well, I never had a Presidential Scholarship, but there’s some connection, anyhow.  Wolfe has made a living out of closely observed novels of manners of our time, a sort of Dickensian project in hip, post-modern tongue in cheek prose.  This one may not be great literature, but it’s a great time-machine back to those magic years when everything seemed possible, if only you could figure anything out. 

    Those moratorium years didn’t work out so well for me.  Instead of sticking to my guns or buckling down with heroic intention fortified by small town common sense and parental support, I got drunk, wasted, started smoking and wandered without purpose for so many years I don’t even know when I stopped.  Sigh.  Oh, I did fine academically, but not as well as I might have without the marijuana and hash–yes, I inhaled–the LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, beer, 151 rum, cognac and single-malt scotch.  I floated out of college and stayed afloat all through seminary and well into my first years in the ministry. 

    Treatment.  Second divorce.  Flounder around.  Discover writing and Kate in the same year.  Now, in my final third of life, I’ve picked up steam and gotten the ole head and heart straightened out.  Thank Mother Earth.  Still, it is really better late than never.  I’m living proof.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Just Another Day in Paradise

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    12  73%  19%  0mph EEN bar30.06 falls windchill 11  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    “Paradise is here or nowhere: You must take your joy with you, or you will never find it.” – O.S. Marden

    Salient advice as Kate and I prepare for Hawai’i.  “Just another day in paradise,” is often heard when there, from tourists and locals alike.  There’s another one, too, “Lucky we live Hawai’i.”  Marden echoes Emerson, who said he didn’t need to go to Italy to see beauty, because he found beauty wherever he was.  

    “Wherever you go, there you are,” from the world of AA makes the same point.  We take our conclusions, biases, and perceptions with us wherever we go.

    A trap into which I have fallen in the past and no doubt will fall into again measures home against the temporary pleasure found in any distant destination, from Ely and Duluth to Kauai and Angkor Wat.  Home will always come out second best, because by definition it does not have what Ely does, ready access to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.  It does not have the perfect, year round temperature of Hawai’i, nor does it have the ocean.  It does not have the howler monkeys and ancient temples of Angkor.  The Napali Coast fires the imagination in a way different from the drive up Round Lake Boulevard.

    True.  All true.  Compare these far away places, however, to home from home.  Hawai’i does not have my friends.  Angkor does not have the Minneapolis Art Institute and my docent work.  Ely does not have easy access to theatres, orchestras and the Walker.  Kauai, though it is the garden isle, does not have the garden and grounds on which Kate and I have worked for over 14 years.  None of these places have our house, adapted to our creative work and the daily life we live.  Could these other places accrue amenities like these?  Friends, maybe, over years.  The peculiar blend of artistic life enjoyed here in the Twin Cities?  Probably not.  A house like ours?  Probably not.

    Also true.  All true.  Still, we also have, for balance, the testimony of Mark and Elizabeth, who cast off their worldly belongings (ok, they stored some of them.) to travel the globe.  So far they’ve hit Buenos Aires, Peru, Shanghai and head out next week for Bangkok.  Their home is where they are, though they return here episodically to unite with family and friends.

    I had a peripatetic 20’s and 30’s after 16 years in Alexandria, Indiana.  I lived in twelve different cities and rural areas until coming to the Twin Cities metro area.  Even after arriving in Minneapolis and St. Paul I lived in twelve different apartments and/or houses in both cities and two suburbs. 

    The 14 years in Andover has come close to setting a record for personal stability.   The minuses are written in the script of every foreign or domestic destination that has called to me.  They are also painted in lost opportunities to experience other cultures and locales. 

    The pluses though are profound.  Daily life has a routine that frees the mind for creative work.  I know the microclimates and the soil conditions of each inch of our 2.5 acres.  Our dogs and our children have lived their lives here, the dogs their whole lives, the children important parts.  Kate and I know each other as stewards of this land, this house and these memories.  Lucky we live Andover.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged

  • Blue Stretching Away and Away

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -2  52%  21%  7mph WNW bar29.58 steady  windchill-9

                    Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    I have passed into that curious liminal state before a longer trip.  The threads that hold me here release, one at a time.  Newspaper.  Mail.  Obligations at the Art Institute.  Dogs.  Obligations I can fulfill that will arise soon after I get back.  Notifying the neighbors.  The police.  Tickets.  Reservations.  Car rental.  Those are done or have a schedule.  At some point the attachment to this weather, this season, this place and its changes over the next four weeks will slip their knots and come unmoored.  

    There is not only release.  There is also memory and anticipation.  That first night in Hawai’i, spent, improbably, at the Hawai’i Prince Hotel in Honolulu due to a late arriving flight from the mainland.  The curious Japanese appointments in the room.  Looking out that first morning to Waikiki beach.  The blue stretching away and away while white rollers hit a sandy beach. The palm trees.  All so other to a transplanted northerner. 

    Exercise at 5AM, taking advantage of the cool before day break, walking on the wet beach sand, packed and unyielding.  Salt spray, ozone and suntan lotion, coconut oil still redolent from yesterday’s sun worshippers at their ritual obesiance.  Passing hotel after hotel, lounges closed, beach chairs chained together, patio cafe chairs turned up on their tables.  Onto to the common sidewalk, sweating.  The sun rays striking the apex of the sky long before light, as if Lady Liberty lifted her crown just behind the ancient volcanoes of Maui.  

    Hikes up Haleakala.  One night up there well before sunrise with crescent moon low in the sky, breaking clouds scudding over its face.  The cold.

    Dinners at Mama’s Fish House.  Ti leaves with rice and banana.  Fish caught that day, the fisherman’s name on the menu.  The windsurfers in their colorful rigs tempting fate on the sharp rocks.

    Two times, both on Kauai, where I’ll spend two weeks this trip.  On a trail in the Waimea Canyon State Park.  I followed a trail, noticed it thinned out and got narrow, but I felt I could handle it.  Then, the rock and sand giving way, my hand grappling with a root, below me a 900 foot drop to a rocky canyon floor.   It was not the trail.  I had missed it.

    The other time, on the Kalalau trail that winds along the Napali Coast.  Steep, rugged.  Up and down with slick rocks.  I explored a bit, going back up one canyon all the way to the wall, where the waterfall dropped from the canyon rim–the same distance I would have fallen–and splashed into a pool of water.  On the way back, I’d been on the trail 5 or 6 hours, I sat down, exhausted, drinking.  “Are you o.k.?” a kind woman asked, “I thought you might be having a heart attack.” 

    Papaya.  The sunrise and the sunset.  Gentle winds.  A temperature which fits the human body.  More, so many more.  

    All these memories begin to wend their way across the ocean, over the mountains and plains to ensare me as I sit here in the middle of the North American Continent waiting for the plane.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • A Retreat, Then An Advance

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    19  82%  21%  omph ENE bar29.90  windchill19  Winter

                 Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    A DVR.  Hadn’t planned on getting one, but the hdmi connection with the TV demanded it over the HD converter box alone.  Surprise.  I like it.  Already I’ve taped two movies, Cronicas and Killer of Sheep.  When I’m watching a movie, I prefer to start at the beginning and the start times of movies often don’t conform to my schedule.  In the past I would check the replay schedules and try to find a time that worked or I’d skip it.  Now I can press the record button and the DVR records the movie and I can replay when I wish.  Kate’s also used it to tape a TPT series, Jewish Americans.  Guess you never know.

    No more tours until March.  I have ten days before I go to Dwelling in the Woods, days I’ll use to finish the garden planning, edit my sermon for Groveland and produce a 1-page Transcendentalism for Brights, work on my new novel and a short story.  Also, I’ll do the various pre-trip preparations like stopping the newspaper, the mail, reserving a ride on the Airport Shuttle, packing. 

    Also have to plan a one-hour presentation to the brothers, something I want to share with them, a passion or a part of my life right now.  Could be anything.  We switched to this format last year and we liked it.  The way we’d done it before involved a focus on a theme and a common thread in what we presented:  Fathers, Mothers, Death, Myth.  Last year we had a theme, Darkness, but the suggestion was to present the theme in a creative manner.  I chose a ritual of darkness which involved reading poetry excerpts (Dover Beach, The Night by Rilke, Stopping by the Woods on A Snowy Evening that sort) and, in a room lit only with candles, extinguishing a candle with each reading.   This year, don’t know yet.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Travel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged