Hawaii journal: 2008 part 1

The birds frantically greeting the day seem as happy to be in Hawaii as I am.

I am seated on a piece of furniture unique to me – a couch four feet deep. My legs are as comfortable as they would be on a chaise lounge, and I am wondering how this would go in the apartment in Hoboken. The couch is in the sitting room of of our B&B apartment in Waikiki, on a hill a ten minute walk from the beach. The ornate ceiling fan looks as if it came from Thailand.

The “& B” part of our stay is wafting across the spacious open porch called a lanai ten lush feet from me, barely visible through the foliage. It is as if nature were upholstered, so naturally does the furniture live on the lanai. Am I outdoors, or indoors? It is the meeting place for all the people who live here or are staying here. Exactly who lives here is a little inconclusive. The rooms and living quarters are splayed over a large footprint which it is difficult to comprehend, so dense is the vegetation.

Terry spotted a red-white-and-blue scavenging sort of bird unlike anything I had ever seen before alight on the road ahead of us yesterday, then fly away. I have no confidence that either the trees, flowers, or birds are anything that I am familiar with, so would never even try to figure out what it was. What was that enormous spreading tree with the gnarled embracing aboveground roots and the dry-looking tentacles hanging down from its branches, hanging down to the ground, where their tentacles spread out to make structures like the base of a table? The tree with sideway-reaching branches as long as my house is tall is a double-pod acacia. I saw no flowers on the hedge along the driveway yesterday, but last night there were large white flowers dotting it. They were fast fading flowers, with the last night’s blossoms lying limp and spent on the ground.

My brain was a gumbo when I arrived. Where was I? What time was it? I felt as I often do on New Year’s Eve – okay, now it’s time to get excited. But I wasn’t, just a little awestruck. This morning my tummy is giggling with excitement, after a fish dinner on the beach, sitting comfortably watching the sun go down over Honolulu, and ten hours of sleep.

Privacy is a mutable concept. In Europe, for example, I sometimes feel violated by peoples’ standing “too close” to me, or touching me "too often." In Zimbabwe, one had to figure in servants, who were going about their business, but often on a path that collided with mine. Giving access to my private life to a total stranger, even if that stranger was an employee, felt odd. In Hawaii, privacy is commonly secured by visual blocks – huge plant leaves, draping vegetation, screens of all sorts – that windows are wide and open. Air is so vital that even the bathroom has small rectangular open screened windows high on the wall. Terry and the hostess of this B&B were talking on the lanai while I peed three feet away in the bathroom, with two open windows. I was aware of a slight embarrassment, but aware also that sounds are dispersed here, coming from all directions, and constantly. My sounds were swallowed in the chirping of birds, the sighing of wind, the movement of leaves, the sounds of other people in the open house. It was not as if two people were having a conversation in the hallway outside my bathroom where the sound of tinkling would be the only sound they heard. There are doors in our apartment, both between its rooms and to the outside, but I can’t even figure out how to close some of them, or haven’t yet attempted to do so.

The beach in Hawaii is the center of far more varied activity than anywhere I have ever been. Last night, in the two hours we sat in the lanai restaurant in the New Otani Hotel, we saw a cruise to nowhere pass from right to left, then an hour or so later, come back left to right, smaller sailboats and yachts, five outrigger canoes, a young boy paddling on a surfboard, getting his sealegs, surfers, swimmers (and I mean swimmers – swimming parallel to the shore for long distances), paddlers and dabblers, kayakers. Nothing with a motor on it, and no fishing so far as we could see.

The fish at the restaurant was freshly caught, and tasty. It was mother’s day, and many of the women at the restaurant tables had a lei, or two, or three, around their necks.

There was also a surfeit of buff bodies, a depressing surfeit of buff bodies. We’ll get to work today, with a drive to Waiamea Beach and a swim someplace. SWIMMING in the ocean – that’s my kind of place.