On January 13, 2012, my oldest friend on this earth died. She was the model of modesty, empathy and a hard-work that she consistently made to look easy - in sum, grace.
On May 20, 2012, 'Iokepa and I were crushed in our automobile by ayoung man driving 80 miles an hour in a 40 mile zone - heavily intoxicated and then running on foot away from our destroyed car and my damaged body. When we met this truly nice young man days afterwards - in a jail cell - he touched us deeply with the goodness of himself and his life. We found the divine where we least expected it.
For five autumns now, ‘Iokepa and I have found ourselves strangers in unknown distant cities. Each year we’ve had to unearth a Jewish congregation from the yellow pages, and solicit an invitation to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in their large urban synagogue. Without exception, we’ve been embraced. But it is here in our tiny Kaua’i Jewish Community that we find home. Blessedly, we are home again this year for these most sacred Days of Awe.
So, Hawai'i - as in, 'I've always dreamed of...' or 'I will go before I die...' or'I once went and it was incredible...' (versions of which'Iokepa and I hear daily) - becomes the metaphor.And that metaphor is not just the fantasy of a tropical Island paradise - beaches, coconuts, and aloha. It is the fantasy of the way life can be lived, should be lived, once was lived - without greed, competition, judgement, fear, racism, war - and strangers regarded as the other.
Okay, so this is what I remember of the story I’m about to tell: absolutely nothing. It’s a black hole of a story, but it is quite a story nevertheless, as ‘Iokepa slowly reveals it to my still erratic (but getting sharper every day) Swiss cheese of a memory bank. The “Before”
It's a very funny thing about being a writer. I complete a book. I've said everything that I have to say about the matter. Then the book tour begins, and I am expected to say more - much more. And when the questions begin, silence is just not an option: not on radio, not on TV, not in print. Writing the book Grandmothers Whisper was completely in my hands. But my control stopped there. I cannot - will not - pretend to know how any single human heart and mind will respond to their reading of Grandmothers Whisper. I do know that each of us brings our own story to bear on the one we read on the page.
…Every last one us is the son or daughter of a couple of them. So choose your perspective here. I can tell my story from the only perspective I have: the singular daughter of two very specific people; the mother of two very specific sons. But like all writing, the micro or anecdotal only has meaning if it sheds light on the universal.
'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I live a life that is at odds with the person that I am - and yet it is not. This life addresses just one half of me - the half that communicates meaningfully with other humans. My very destiny is caught up with the skill, the need, the substance of words - speaking them aloud, writing them within the hearing of other ears. Both fulfill me amply; it is my nature. I grew up in a family that encouraged exactly that.
I have written about destiny. ‘Iokepa has spoken of it. He calls it the promise we made when we took on life. Yet there is persistent bewilderment among moderns who have refused it. Echoing the Hawaiian grandmothers, I have written: no one of us is born with the same destiny; we’re gifted with individual and cultural gifts to help realize our specific promises.
I first met Merrell Fort Gregory in 1969 sitting at a desk across a tiny newsroom. It was my first newspaper job out of college. The Maryland Gazette - calling itself "the oldest continuously published paper in America" - was a weekly. We were two of a staff of six. I was twenty-two; Merrell was a year older with twelve months experience. On the strength of that experience, I thought she was the epitome of a seasoned reporter.
We flew from Kaua'i to Seattle on December 27. On December 28, we had an incredibly glamorous Grandmothers Whisper book event in a hair salon! The following day, we claimed our parked Camry and winter clothes from a friend's home within site of Mt. Rainier - and just three days ago we began our cross-country drive for the eleventh time in just over four years. We have only six nights to make the crossing East.
We’ve been off Island long enough to see (without blinders) the changes. After more than a full year away, it has felt important in these past months to explore our old haunts, to revisit the paths we’ve walked together for fourteen years, the beaches where we’ve sunned and surfed, and the mountain where we’ve slept to the accompaniment of bird song. So when there is sufficient money for gas, and leisure time too, we do just that. We revisit; we reminisce.
I want to speak about our friend Francis Xavier Warther - and I want to speak about a great deal more as well. Francis Warther, now crowding ninety years old, grew up in my hometown - Baltimore. His childhood and mine were light-years apart, by generation and ethnicity. He grew up German, in downtown Baltimore. early in the 20th century, and was educated by priests at Loyola. I grew up Jewish, in the suburbs, after World War II, and celebrated my bat mitzvah at Beth Jacob. But our unlikely paths crossed a dozen years ago on an Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean - me, securely in middle age, Francis already an elder. Who could have known?
There was a time on our Island, not very long ago, when there were independently owned bookstores. But maybe thirteen years ago, the chain store Borders set up shop in the dead center of the Island. One by one the independents dropped off the map. It is pretty near impossible for an independently owned small store to compete with the mega-store and its deep discounts.
There are two distinctly competing versions of this story. Both are equally true. In both stories, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I have just returned home to Kaua’i – the northwestern-most Island in the Hawaiian archipelago – after more than a year on the American continent. In both versions we loved touring the U.S. with our new book and in both versions we were yearning for home. In the first version: last Thursday, we put up our great-in-the-rain-and-cold, but less-great-in-the-tropical-heat donated German tent. It is our fourteenth tent in thirteen years without a house on the beaches of Hawai’i.
In early April we met the editor of a Virginia business magazine over lunch in Roanoke, Virginia. Unexpectedly, three full months later - on the very day we arrived home to Hawai'i - this book review greeted us. We thought we'd share it.
Like all good stories, this one has a beginning, middle, and an end. After thirteen years writing and rewriting, drafting and re-drafting, Grandmothers Whisper found its miraculous way to a bound book that could actually be held in your hands (or alternatively downloaded onto your Kindle) just last Thanksgiving.
There is nothing more humbling (or exciting) than attendance, in one short and compressed week at: the international Book Expo of America; the Jewish Book Council's kick-off of their nationwide authors' tour; the Flying Eagle Woman's Fund annualcelebration of women who have powerfully contributed to justice for indigenouspeoples. Nothing at all like the week that 'Iokepa and I (and the book, Grandmothers Whisper) just experienced.
I was born on Mothers’ Day, the much valued daughter after two sons. Mothers’ Day has always had a resonance to my little family. It is a terribly long distance from the Hawaiian Island that ‘Iokepa and I call home to the places where my sons and mother call home – six thousand miles to be exact. But this year, by happenstance, we landed in Baltimore (between a book signing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and a scheduled speech in New York City). I was able to share Mothers’ Day across three generations with my ninety-nine-year-old mother and my thirty-year-old, first-born son.
The material and successful life that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani surrendered fourteen years ago - to take up arms (heart and soul) against the deception, the greed, and the oppression visited upon his people and his nation - included a house on a lake, seven cars “and a hot rod.” Despite the fact that his lavish passion in these last years has been cultural - language, history and spiritual practice - for the first forty-six years of his life focused an equal dose of passion on cars that go very fast.
It looked something like this. 'Iokepa and I had just had an enormously successful Grandmothers Whisper book reading and discussion at the Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota the night before. We had a free day before the next book event on the Ojibwa Reservation in Grand Portage. We decided to do that rare thing for us: be tourists for a single day.
