There is a new member of our family, and all words feel patently ridiculously predictable. "Miraculous" doesn't replicate the adrenaline rush, the heart-thumping anxieties, the feel of that newly exposed-to-our-atmosphere skin. 'Iokepa and I were immutable fixtures just outside the door at the moment ofher birth (and for ten hours before). We were inside that door with baby in arms immediately after. (At the climatic moments I was literally on my knees with my head glued to the door.)
The last three months on the road with The Return Voyage have been snugly scheduled with just a bit of breathing room. Our schedule page tells the story. We've just returned fromour spin through the southeastern states; we're back at our base camp here in the northern Shenandoah Valley. We are now doing something that 'Iokepa and I very seldom do - we are waiting. We do not wait, because indigenous Hawaiians did not wait. Like all tribal peoples, they lived every moment - no, every breath - with absolute awareness that it might be their last. There was only today, this breath. Everything else was illusory; everything future was unknowable. To expect, to wait, was to refuse to live this breath fully.
It is winter on my skin and in my bones. I am bundled from the top of my head to my wool-encased feet. The plunge from eighty degrees to twenty degrees was abrupt and challenging. The first question we've been asked during the past couple weeks in Seattle and Portland, in Baltimore and now in northern Virginia is: "Why are you here in the winter?" We are here in the winter because that is when folks choose to come out of their caves to attend book events, to listen to the itinerant speaker - to invite us to share our story. In the summer and autumn they are traveling and active in other ways.
This is a story that I’ve never before told. I hesitate even now – perhaps twelve years after the fact. My hesitation still hinges on Thanksgiving, for goodness sake. Thanksgiving: uncontaminated by commercialism; serving up my favorite foods; and celebrating gratitude. It’s a hard holiday not to love.
Racism: it’s in no way subtle. But neither is it consistent. There are ironies that would be laughable if they weren’t so painful. Like a bad joke, it only hurts when I laugh. So our president, Mr. Barack Obama – whose mother hails from Kansas and whose father was the son of an African tribal chief (making our president by any mathematical calculation half white and half black, and royalty to boot) – had his fate sealed in American eyes, word, and deed. He is simply “Black;” no subtleties are permitted.
The ancestral grandmothers have spoken. ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I are on the edge of our seats with excitement. Huliau–the Return Voyage is about to shift into an entirely new direction. The goal remains the same. Within the authentic Native Hawaiian experience lies the answer for a contemporary world tormented by rage, greed, and war. It is ours to seize the ancients’ gifts – to return to that which all of us are born knowing. We carry it in our very bones, this memory of another way.
Tell me why it’s so much easier for modern men and women to delineate – to draw big black lines around our thoughts and our hearts, to categorize, to isolate, toseparate – than not. Oddly, this ability has come to pass for intelligent, educated discourse, for a level of sophistication. I suggest that it is none of the above. Now tell me why aboriginal men and women (the ones whom we tend to dismiss as primitive) saw only unity, only the connections, the relationships, the whole. They could not, in fact, see other than that.
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.
