paradise ali

This is one of my favorite songs.  It was released after Anna died.  She would have loved it, too.  She lived this way. 

Like You’ll Never See Me Again

 If I had no more time
No more time left to be here
Would you cherish what we had?
Was it everything that you were looking for?
If I couldn’t feel your touch
And no longer were you with me
I’d be wishing you were here
To be everything that I’d be looking for
I don’t wanna forget the present is a gift
And I don’t wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me
‘Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed

So every time you hold me
Hold me like this is the last time
Every time you kiss me
Kiss me like you’ll never see me again
Every time you touch me
Touch me like this is the last time
Promise that you’ll love me
Love me like you’ll never see me again

Oh oh oooh

How many really know what love is?
Millions never will
Do you know until you lose it
That it’s everything that we are looking for
When I wake up in the morning
You’re beside me
I’m so thankful that I found
Everything that I been looking for

I don’t wanna forget the present is a gift
And I don’t wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me
‘Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed

So everytime you hold me
Hold me like this is the last time
Every time you kiss me
Kiss me like you’ll never see me again
Can you do that for me baby
Every time you touch me
See we don’t really know
Touch me like this is the last time
See everyday we never know
Promise that you’ll love me
I want you to promise me
Love me like you’ll never see me again
Like you’ll never see me again

Ooh oooh oooh oooh oooh

–by Alicia Keys and Kerry Brothers, Jr.

Saturday is Anna’s birthday.  I want to celebrate her life, to be proud of what she accomplished, to be happy for the time that she was here.  I AM grateful for her love and friendship.  

So why am I crying and missing her so much?  Why am I still angry at her for dying?  Why does it still hurt so deeply that it feels like my chest will cave in with every breath?  Why can’t I just let her go and accept that she’s an angel driving the big rig of her dreams? 

It comes and goes.  Most of the time, I’m fine.  Every now and then, I’m an emotional wreck. 

Today is just one of those days.

Okay, I know I’m not the only one that does this.  I really like to look at other people’s houses, yards and garages.  Not in a peeping Tom or stalker way but as I drive by, sometimes I catch a little glimpse into the lives of the people who live there and it’s interesting.  There are families sitting around the dinner table laughing and enjoying what I imagine to be a fantastic meal, Tata patiently pulling weeds one by one out of an immaculate front yard, six custom Harley Davidsons all lined up in the driveway, huge garden filled with colorful petunias, Sponge Bob on a  big flat panel TV, fishing poles and huge ice chests in the garage, homemade picnic tables and benches underneath a double wide tarp, big trampoline with an enclosure, hunting dogs in kennels next to pickup trucks — the nice list could go on without end. 

Every now and then, though?  I like to hear my neighbors yelling at their children to clean their rooms or see a dining table piled with papers or boxes stacked in the garage threatening to overflow into the driveway or an overgrown jungle of a yard or a rusty roof or a house painted an off color.  Why?  Purely selfish reasons!  I like to see that other people also love their children but sometimes want to hug their offspring really, really hard . . . around the neck. Other folks have problems with clutter.  We’re not the only ones who need to save money to replace the roof.  Someone else out there picked the perfect paint sample in the store only to find out that it looks 10 times brighter on the house than in the store, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging anyone or taking joy in the misfortune of others or sending out bad vibes.  I guess what fuels my voyeurism is I want to remind myself of the good things that I already have and that are to come in the future and to also have the assurance that we’re all only human.  I’m not the best or the worst or the only one to take missteps and make mistakes.  We all do.  It’s a common experience.

I signed up with the user name “paradiseali” for a Twitter account a little over a month ago just to check it out and see what the buzz was about.  I started out following a few Hawai`i people that I remember from back in the day and it just expanded from there. 

And guess what?!  People tweet about family, what they’re eating, about traffic and weather and surf, share cute things about their children and pets, confess that their house or office is a mess, that they unclogged a toilet, where to go for KC Drive Inn waffle hot dogs or sushi or Hawaiian food and then some. Sometimes these tweets are linked to audio/video clips, pictures, books, event sign ups, and all sorts of juicy online tidbits. 

The best part is . . . I get a peek into other people’s houses/yards/offices/cars/lives without getting into my car and taking out a loan to cover the price of gas! 

My heart goes out to all the Aloha Airlines ohana.  It’s a terrible shock to all of us that they are shutting down operations at the end of the day.  I don’t even know what to say.  While it is a sad inconvenience to the public, frequent flyers and, especially to the Merrie Monarch visitors here on the Big Island, the thought of so many jobs lost is devastating on so many levels.  Some have been employees for over 30 years and they will lose all their accumulated sick leave, vacation pay, and medical benefits with only a day’s notice.  There a few married couples who will lose both incomes.  It’s just tragic. 

Good luck to all of you and stay strong!  Depite everything, I have to believe that something better is waiting for you.

When we bought our present home a few years ago, our plan was to pay rent for an extra month at our old place so that we would have time to set up the new house and sort through everything at the old house. The idea was to move only the things we really needed and wanted to keep and take the rest to donate or to the dump. Despite it’s size, our old home sure had a lot of storage space. Well, as the Universe would have it, our best laid plans were tossed out the window when we couldn’t extend our rental.

Our next plan was to move everything from storage in the old house to the storage in the new house. We threw baby clothes, school art projects, kitchen items, receipts, photos, text books, children’s books, and you name it into boxes and bags and hauled it all up here with no labels, no real groupings of like items, just a hurried mess. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have a fair amount of storage in this house, too. We painted almost all of the interior living spaces, moved in new appliances, and settled in. The storage items? For the most part, out of sight, out of mind. Well, intermittently, we’ve gone out there and made a small effort but lately it’s been really nagging at me.

I just read “Celebrate Discardia Starting Today” over at Lifehacker.com and this fits so well with what I’m currently trying to do–clear out clutter. Not just physical clutter but also mental clutter, bad habits, anything that is no longer working for you. It was started at “Discardia” (Imagine that!) in 2003. What I like about this made up holiday is that it takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. That means that the time varies and it happens four times a year. The first Discardia for this year starts today, March 19th and runs until April 5th. Perfect! There’s an end in sight and no pressure to hurry through it half assed just to finish because there’ll be other Discardias in June/July, September and December.

You know those late night infomercials for “Hits of the 80’s” and “Smooth Soul” and other compilation CDs? They play just a tiny snippet of the song and move on to the next snippet while a bunch of titles and artists from the melodic past scrolls through the screen. I love that! It makes everyone else crazy but that’s how I listen to the radio. I watch TV like that, too.

Yesterday, I followed a link on Alltop (great site, by the way) to this article called “Describing Twitter in Plain English” at The Cranking Widgets Blog. At first, I thought, “Why would I want to broadcast the mundane little details of my life?” Well, after watching the little video, I decided to give it a try. It’s kind of fun! It’s perfect for attention deficit disorder me! Short–no more than 140 letters at a time. It’s interesting to read little blurbs of people’s day.

True, it’s not very productive (it’s filed under “distractions, practical, technology”) but it is entertaining . . . at least it is for now. There’s a Twitter thingy in the left column. Go sign up so I can stalk, just kidding, I mean follow you!

EDIT:  The Twitter Badge is in the right column now.

Sugar Cane and Rainbow by Omega Man

I was raised in a rural sugar plantation/farming community.  My folks usually had a garden with plenty of lettuce, beans, corn, mustard cabbage, carrots and all sorts of things.  Even if it wasn’t in full production, there were always the staples of green onion and chili pepper.  We also had aloe.  Not to eat, it’s good for burns.  (We had animals, too, but I’ll save that story for later.)  It was nice back then, we gave our neighbors vegetables and mangoes and they gave us fish.  The hunters would share pigs, goats, pheasants and smoked meat.  Nobody ever called it bartering or trading either.  No one thought of it like that.  It was a gift from the heart with no expectations of reciprocation.  It was life.

People would come together to prepare the pig to kalua (bake in the ground) and dig the imu (underground oven) for a baby luau or party.  It was a time consuming process (I’ll spare you the gory details of pig prep), usually overnight, and it would be a mini party right there.  Primo and Olympia beer flowed freely and then there was the music.  Not just singing, mind you, they had ukuleles, guitars, bass, drums, harmonicas and even accordions!  Later, at the party, people would get up and do an impromptu hula or sing a favorite song. There was no such thing as karaoke–the backup music was live and unrehearsed!  It wasn’t uncommon for the singing and merry making to last a few days, especially when family from other islands came in to visit.  There was the cooking for the party, then the party, then the clean up where folks broke down tables and took the rubbish to the dump and then lunched on the leftovers.  (There was always food leftover.  Just about the worst thing that could happen would be having too little or running out.  That would be “shame”! )  It was a blast! 

Besides the parties, other things were based around food.  It was a culture of food.  The first thing you’d hear when you went to someone’s house to play was, “Come!  Come inside and eat!”  It didn’t matter if all they had were crackers and sardines, it was offered.  Oddly enough, in the humbleness of local style, if some aunty or uncle (every adult was aunty or uncle out of respect) asked if you were hungry, you had to say “no” even if you were starving.  Aunty would bring something out to eat anyway and you had better eat whatever was put in front of you and say, “thank you!”  How you behaved reflected directly on your family.  In a more formal visiting situation, you’d bring a gift of food with you.  Whether it was fruit from your backyard or homemade goodies like sweet bread or sausage, you wouldn’t think to go empty handed.  Same if you traveled to O’ahu or some other place, you’d bring something for your host and you’d bring back for family and friends things like King’s Bakery Sweetbread, Liliha Creampuffs, Chinese food from Chinatown, Kona coffee, Atebara Potato Chips, Kaua’i Cookies and other endless goodies.  Food is the universal language of love!

What were parties and food traditions like when you were growing up?

I’m supposed to be doing our taxes right now.  Numbers kind of make my head spin.  Kind of like in, “The Exorcist.”  It’s an irrational thing.  It’s probably a mini anxiety throwback to elementary school where I struggled with the times table.  Showing my age here, those were the days when calculators were humongous and expensive and a computer took up a whole building.  (Okay, you can stop laughing now.)  I did eventually memorize the darned thing and go on to high school and college.  Even got a better than passing grade in statistics in college.  I’m fully capable of doing math and, sigh, I have no excuse now.  Hangs head and drags self off to do a spreadsheet…

The following is something I wrote a few months back after one of my best friends passed away very unexpectedly. We never found out what exactly happened but she supposedly fell off a third story lanai at a local apartment building while trying to help a friend who had locked herself out of the apartment. That was typical of her, always taking care of her friends and family without a second thought as to her own comfort or safety. She was the type that really would give you the shirt off her back.

I find myself expecting my phone to ring, expecting to hear her voice say, “Hey there, you sexy bitch, you!” I hold on to our last conversation, clutching it tightly to my chest, to my heart. I had no way of knowing that her huge, loving heart would stop beating that very night.

She was happy. The AC was fixed on her truck. Cool comfort for the heavy traffic on the Kona side.

She asked what I was doing and I gave her the standard answer, “laundry.” She laughed at me like she always did, knowing my disdain for domestic matters and my inability to keep things neat and tidy like she did. She said she hasn’t done any laundry since she moved back home.

“My Mommy does it for me! She even put out a hamper for me! Sweet, huh?”

She happily explained that, although she still had clothes in her nephew’s closet, she had a plastic storage thing on their porch now to keep her clothes. She had more clothes than she had room to store it.

She laughed,

“I get so much! I must have everybody else’s one!”

I giggled, remembering that we gave her those “Anna’s Lounge” shirts. She liked the two ugly gray polo shirts that both men refused to wear.

“Speaking of home, how are things going?”

I knew that sometimes things got a bit tense.

She said that she loved playing with baby and spending some time with her other son. (Both her sister’s kids look a lot like her!) She worried that sometimes her mother took on too much but she didn’t know what she’d do without her. And although she and her sister had their moments, she understood why and couldn’t really blame her sis if she had doubts. Anna took responsibility for her dark times and knew that it might take a while to earn back the trust.

Changing the subject, she asked and answered her own question.

“How’s ‘Boto Boy’? He being good? Must be if he’s still there! I hope he stays that way!”

“Me, too! If he ever screws up again, I’m going to throw all his stuff in the yard, keep the money for the car and never speak to him again! This is his very last chance! “

We both had a good laugh at that. She knew all about the numerous “last chances.” She had patiently listened to me bitch, whine and moan and complain about the same problems over and over again! Still, I knew her loyalties lay with him and that she would lie and try to cover for him if she could. She wanted to kick his drunk ass many times and I know that she could do some damage but she always held back. Playful punches only. Even if her feelings were hurt. She loved him. That’s just Anna.

She said that she envied him. He had many of the things that she wanted. She wanted to settle down and spend time with someone special. She wanted to fall asleep every night next to her lover and wake up in the morning cuddling her. She wanted to find little love notes packed into her lunch. She wanted to bring home flowers and cook and share romantic evenings at home and take care of all the little things that would put a smile on her dream girl’s face.

Ok, now it was my turn to laugh! Teasingly, I asked,

“Oh, please! Ummm, wasn’t that you who once complained that a certain girl was all over you, breathing YOUR air?! And how come every time you start to feel close to someone, you find some excuse to run away? Are you, like, waiting for a man or something? Come on, you can admit it! You’re turning straight on me, aren’t you?!”

And when the giggling subsided a bit, I added

“Don’t worry, the right one will find you when the time is right. You are VERY romantic!

And her typical response,

“Yeah! Cause I’M the sexy one!”

We chit chatted about this and that and she was happy it was pay day. We ended our conversation with our usual “I love you!”

The next morning, I got a call saying that she was gone. It’s been a few days and I still keep expecting her to call. . .