Pro-Cras-Tin-Ation

I'm putting off other things. What?

1. Figuring out how to challenge my property tax assessment
2. Making copies of the capital gains tax forms on the sale of our house
3. Putting up the bulletin board in my study so that I can get all these clippings and little pieces of paper off my very small desk work surface.
   
4. Eating something for lunch - it's been a long time since breakfast. My stomach is growling, yet it's getting so close to lunch . . .
5. Figuring out how to air condition one room of this place for when the heat and humidity become unbearable in August and September
6. Writing this week's Practice piece, which is to show a 'downfall' - take a character who has achieved something, or is something, and show him/her brought low from whatever forces - character flaw, vagaries of history, enemies, or simply decay.
   
7. Shopping for shoes and maybe some sort of costume to wear New Year's eve - I'm tired of black. Black. Black. Yet, when I put on other colors I feel wrong, don't like myself.
8. Need to finish transferring addresses/info to new pocket-sized address book
9. Would love to take a nap - Sachi is napping. Why not I?
   

Then there is the question of New Year's resolutions. I don't want to write them or even think about them.

And, that's enough to stop me, right here.

Blustery, gray day. I wonder what John Chase, the most visible homeless person in Kailua, is doing today. Not wrapping gifts or baking, I'm sure. Does he know, by the decorations and tinsel and the line at the post office that Christmas is almost upon us? Does he care?

It must be decades since he has cut his hair. When we first came here and I saw him on the street, a brawny, ragged, dust-colored character inching along the sidewalks over by the shut up movie house, I didn't realize that the thick, brown matting that hung over his shoulders, down to the pavement like a very long, very cheap, very old and ratty fur stole was his own hair.

My neighbor told me that someone told her that they had tried to cut it off at the hospital emergency room. He'd been knocked over in the street by a truck and taken in by ambulance. He was filthy. They cut off his layers of dirty clothes to get at his wounds, and the orderlies were trying to saw through his matted hair. It was hard enough to get scissors through, but he was fighting them. His hair, it's length, it's mattedness had significance for him. He thrashed and yelled as if he was convinced that he'd die if they cut it off.

The head ER nurse, a born diplomat, stopped the fray, and approaching him not as a crazy man who lives on the street, but as a human being deserving of respect, asked him if he would allow them to wash and disinfect it--it was full of vermin.

He calmed down immediately and agreed to that.

That was two or three years ago. He probably hasn't washed his body or his hair, or changed his clothes, since.

He is on the streets at all hours in all weathers. He leans heavily on a silver aluminium walker. He moves slowly. Sometimes he stands still for a very long time, as if frozen by some memory, as if time has stopped for him. Sometimes he sits on the weedy planter by the yoga studio across the street from the bank.

I don't know what he eats or drinks. His layers and layers of clothing make him look big. But, he could be almost a skeleton underneath them.

The woman who told me about the hospital incident also told me that someone at the hospital said that the man seemed lucid and carried on an intelligent conversation. But, the story is that he came back from fighting in Viet Nam only to have his wife and children die in a car accident a few weeks later. At that he seems to have moved outdoors and become a town fixture. He has, it is said, family in town. Maybe they feed him or give him money.

I am ashamed of myself. I want to help him, but I don't want anything to do with him. I imagine approaching him and saying hello, as if were an ordinary guy. But, I can't imagine anything past that. And, I'd be doing that for myself, not for him, to prove what a kind person I am, while not kind at all, just curious and wanting to be thought well of.

Who does the work?

Friday morning I was in the gym early, walking the treadmill. Oh, I could turn on a TV, but why would I do that with the great view of Kailua life? Instead, I watched a city maintenance crew raking leaves in the parking lot. There was something strange about the crew, but I couldn't put my finger on it - they were raking, instead of blowing - that was a little unusual. They were working hard and without stopping to chat or anything, but that wasn't really strange. So, what was it?

Then I knew - they were all white guys. I've got so used to Filipino gardeners here, that to see white guys doing this kind of work was odd. I wondered why there were no brown guys on the crew, why I never see white-guy gardeners anywhere else. I see Filipino guys (and even women) mowing and raking and sweeping and weeding and trimming trees all around town, kind of blending in with the rust-red lava-rock walls and the tropical hedges. Could it be that it's because these white guys work for the County? They have these jobs, the bottom of the ladder by which to enter Civil Service with it's excellent pay, benefits and job security, and I wonder if only white guys can qualify on the written exam or whether the brown guys are excluded in some more subtle way. They must know about these jobs and want them too, and they too must be able to read and write.

What's the story?

I'm a barbarian.

Am I supposed to cook dinner? We just had lunch, but I can feel the idea of dinner hanging over the house. Husband is downstairs, writing Christmas cards. I haven't started on mine yet. I am upstairs straightening out stuff on the computer, doing a little editing, thinking about today's poem, wondering what I could possibly do for dinner? I'm a good cook, but he doesn't much like my cooking. He's Japanese. I am not. We have different ideas about what makes a proper meal. I'm of the stew and soup and casserole school, with maybe freshly made cornbread or biscuits or a hot loaf of bread. I also love any kind of pasta. You can do anything with pasta. But, he was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes a couple of years ago and so has cut back on refined carbohydrates - bread, pasta, potatoes - my three basic food groups. What he likes are Japanese meals - seven or eight small dishes, each with it's own sauce. He loves, and I don't blame him, the table set with twenty dishes, and hashi (chopsticks) and chopstick holders and sauce cruets and sauce dishes and the order of the dishes - there is an important order to them, nothing like the order of ours except that we usually have salad first, and they usually have rice and pickles last. And, they consider pickles a vegetable. I consider them pickles. And, I have no odorless way to grill a semi-dried mackrel. Our friends in Tokyo have a state-of-the-art Japanese stove with its own special fish-grilling drawer with its own air sucking device to vent the fish burning scent outside the house. They also have a remotly-controlled Japanese bathtub. You can turn it on from a panel in the kitchen (you keep the bath filled - do your soaping outside of it and use the tub only for soaking), it will heat up to body-cooking temperature and stir itself, then keep itself just right until you're ready to use it. Pretty nifty. So, they have all these gadgets for living the Japanese life. We don't.

Mrs. Y., the wife, has walls and walls of cabinets and cupboards crowded with tiny dishes, flat ones, oblong one, round ones, some shaped like eggplants or leaves, others looking as if they'd been woven by the elves from twigs. She has platters and bowls, large and small; trays and stands, and even European stuff - mostly Limoge and Beleek tea cups and saucers. To the eye of an American housewife, nothing matches. There is no proper set of china. And, that's the idea, and that is reflected or reflects what and how they eat.

They like to say that they eat with their eyes. And they must, because portions are small. It might take some marinating, then some drying, then some basting while cooking and the preparation of a particular sauce with five or six ingredients, to present a finger-sized piece of broiled fish. Nothing is as simple as it looks.

So, when I make a pot of Tortilla Soup with luscious chunks of avocado and a bright squirt of lime for dinner, he'll eat it. He'll even say it's good. But, he'd rather have a tiny broiled fish and one baby turnip; some clear soup in a cup-sized red-laquer-ware bowl with three leaves at the bottom; a domino-sized piece of home-made tofu; a fist-sized bowl of rice and a child's tea-set-sized dish of pickled mushroom (just one) and a quarter-sized slice (just two) of pickled radish.

You'd have to eat with your eyes to get filled up on this kind of meal. I like it. But, not as much as he does. And, I feel sorry for him, obligated to cook Japanese when I can, because he's in a strange country. Indeed, he thinks it very strange. And, I'm in my own land and can have all my comfort foods without much going out of the way. But, I do like my chicken with dumplings, my pot roast, my macaroni and cheese, my enchilada casserole, my moussaka, my lasagna, my. . .well, everything and lots of it. Which proves I'm a barbarian!

'Tis the Season

Sachi plays trombone in the Oahu Civic Orchestra. If you have a magnifying glass and care, you can see him in the back row, on the right, next to the Euphonium player. Sunday, the orchestra played at a local mall. Held the audience of shoppers in their hand. I ran around trying to figure out how to use my new digital camera, upstairs and down, and finally had to dash into an electronics store because the 32 MB picture card that had come with the camera would hold only about eight photographs. I bought a 2 GB card at Radio Shack for about $25, and dashed back out onto the mezzanine overlooking the mall's center court to snap more photos of the orchestra.

The orchestra is pretty good. Violins are a little weak, and, being so high-pitched and squeaky, you always hear them. But, the orchestra rises to grand heights with loud, boisterous pieces.

They played again, last night, Monday, at the auditorium of a huge high-rise senior citizens' housing project near downtown Honolulu. The place was bleak. The auditorium was a linoleum'd multipurpose room lit by life-sapping fluorescent lights, low wattage ones. The whole complex comprises six 15-story buildings, but only about 20 people showed up for the performance. The orchestra outnumbered the audience, and the elders who did show up sat rigidly in their folding chairs, staring straight ahead. No toe tapping. No jiving. No head nodding or finger snapping. It was as if someone had sat them in front of a newscast made up of nothing but baseball statistics. I wondered if they'd always been like that, or that is just what happens when you get old.

The orchestra's got one more gig, and then Sachi's got another with the big band he plays with, and then, I guess, the holidays will be upon us and they can rest.

Reita - my friend

My friend Reita, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sent me this, showing her marching to stop mineral drilling in Santa Fe - I don't know the whole story. But, I love her hat - she is the one holding the slightly blurry sign to the right and behind the tall guy in the orange parka. She's an artist. They are known to be impulsive people.

Windward Saturday

One of our best and most interesting poets is taking a hiatus from the House of Thirty. Says that the 'background noise has grown too fierce' for his mind to be 'quiet' enough to write poetry.

I hope that it's merely the gathering pressures of the holiday season that he is feeling, and that once the Christmas-New Year's volcano blows its top, he'll be back. I'll keep in touch with him.

But, now we're down to five. Not to worry. We've been as low as three. I don't think that we're like some endangered species, we haven't reached a point where it wouldn't be possible for us to repopulate the house. After all, there's no sex necessary to increase our numbers (although that's a thought), and on the Internet, we don't have to eat (except each other's poetry) to stay alive.

All will be well.

The Windward Community College all-day writers' retreat yesterday was just what I needed to recharge my creative instinct. But, as a place to make writer friends, contacts, connect, it's a dud so far. Everyone is friendly. Everyone is talented. Everyone has something to say. There are a lot of us - at least forty, yet, when the session is over, everyone disappears. Yes, I know. I should just say, 'Here's my phone number. I live in Kailua. Would you like to get together for coffee some time next week? Would Wednesday be good? If you'd like, you could come to my place, or we could meet at Zippy's or Morning Brew or, perish the thought, Starbuck's." And the person, I'm sure, would look pleased (or perhaps trapped) and say, "Uh, sure, I guess so. But Thursday would be better for me. You wanna come to my house in Kaneohe?"

There are three or four people there I'd like to get to know - one a woman with cats. She wrote about them last time. I asked her how they were doing and she said that Tar Foot, a male is growing up, turning into a beautiful cat, so sleek, so shiny, so masculine, but that she now has to decide to get him neutered. "You haven't had him neutered?" I almost yelled. "Well, no. All that testosterone really makes him gorgeous. But, now he's spraying and getting territorial, and . . .," she explained. I chided her. I suppose I shouldn't have. She looked a little cowed. I didn't lecture. . .really.

Another woman brings her Mac laptop to the group. She has a tic. Blinks a lot and stares over your left shoulder when you speak to her. She's been attending for years. She was the breakout group leader of my group last time.

And more. But, who knows if I'll ever know any of them. There was a tall, skinny, faded woman, a poet the leader (Lillian Cunningham) said, who looked a lot like Virginia Woolf. There was a man who meditates - the only one who did the walking meditation as if he knew what it was for. Oh, yes, Lillian had us do a fifteen-minute walking meditation, down one hall, through an atrium and then back again. Everyone raced. They strode off. She'd explained what a walking meditation is, but they either didn't understand or couldn't walk that mindfully.

The second half of the day, we go off and write for an hour alone. Then we come back and are assigned to groups of four or five, and go off to read our work and critique. My group, led by a woman who works in Invasive Species control on Oahu, settled itself at a round concrete table under a big, old banyan tree. The tree and the building on the rise just above us shaded us just enough. Broad lawns sloped down to more low buildings, beyond which we could see the forest that hides a housing development and then the ocean. I marveled, yes, that's the right word, at our being in the middle of such a beautiful place doing just what we wanted.

The four of us all wrote different things - the man, the meditator, a sort of 'howling' poem, Point, about 'Now' being all there is, which was funny, stirring, fresh and philosophical all at the same time. He read, with a slight Bronx tinge to his voice. A little, polite, tidy, elegant Nisei lady read from work she'd brought with her, a poem about a visit to Matsushima bay. She's a photographer, and makes cards of her photographs with very good original poetry. She prints the poem on the left-hand side of the open card so that the person sending the car can write on the right. I thought it was just being a Japanese thing. Karen was her name. Then, Rachel, our leader wrote a very funny piece about a woman pastry chef being more intuitive and savvy than her more business-like male partner. Some wonderful lines. Good characters, especially the pastry chef.

Two things amazed me, the first, that at our table, among us four there wasn't a dud piece. I'll clean mine up and put it in the blog so that you can see - it's about both man's first step and the nail that stands out, getting pounded back down. The second-- what you can write in an hour! Most of us grump around about how we have no time to write, no inspiration, no this no that. And, yet, on a Saturday afternoon, sitting at a lunch table or on a bench or in an empty classroom for an hour, knowing that there are others around us doing the same thing, we write wonderful things in an hour. One HOUR!

I'm going to send Lillian a copy of Ursula K. Leguin's Steering the Craft. I asked her if she'd read it, and she said no, but she also seemed very interested. The least I can do. That retreat fee is only $5. I know that she is probably on salary at the college, so what the retreat earns doesn't go to her. But, I feel so grateful.

The Rainy Season

Proud of myself. I figured out how to save photos my brother sent me. I figured out how to select only one, copy it, and past it into the blog. Yay! The group of pictures to the left is from my stepmother's family album. I have no idea who the young woman in a large fur collar is, but I do like the image, and so practiced with it. I even found out how to remove and replace an image in the blog. Power!


It is raining here in Kailua, on Oahu. The air blowing over me from the louvered window on my right is, at last, cool. It sounds like pearls, or maybe pine needles, or . . .a stream or whispers or sighs, and, when it becomes intense, like a crazy soldier-boy drummer. It's been stopping and starting all day. Even from inside the house I can hear it sweeping down on the town in the same way that you hear wind traveling through the trees in the mountains.

I made Chili Verde for dinner tonight. It's the first time I've tried it here in Hawaii. It's not easy to find tomatillos here. I haven't been cooking much, either. We still haven't bought a microwave oven. So far, except for heating the milk for my morning coffee, I don't miss it. I know that I used the one we had back home all the time, but can't remember for what.

Anyway, I made Chili Verde - pork and green chili with pork chops and canned tomatillos and fresh jalapenos, and it came out very well. Lovely sauce. I was uncertain about the canned tomatillos, but they worked just fine. Now we can have Chili Verde any time. I can keep the ingredients in the cupboard.

We've just been through a mini-hurricane--tremendous winds and heavy rain, accompanied by power outages. Had no power all night Monday, and most of the town was without power all day Tuesday. We read in the paper that the whole island was hit very hard, with power poles and lines down everywhere. So, I've bought a propane, one-burner, table-top stove. Now, if the power goes, we can at least heat water or fry an egg. It's against the rules here at the Gardena Manor Condos, no open flame anything on the lanai or in the unit, but as survival equipment I think it's perfectly reasonable. Besides, how would anyone know?

The Far Shore is a Haven

I've finally sailed my little boat to the far shore, established this blog, and hope that it will become a place where others can look at the world through my eyes and my imagination.