overleaf

Quiet

 

    A yellow hibiscus blooming in the Queen Kapiolani Garden near Kapiolani Park.  An ordinary picture left over from last year that I just felt like posting today.

 

Happy Holidays!

 

2009 Honolulu Marathon

    Just a few scenes from the 2009 Honolulu Marathon last Sunday.  The course runs right past my neighborhood.  This is well beyond the midway point, after the participants have doubled back toward Waikiki, and these aren't the elite runners, but each of them looks like he or she has a good reason for doing this.

 

 

 

 

     
 

Songs I Learned by Heart

    I was a little kid growing up in the 'sixties when I was introduced to the music of Peter, Paul, and Mary.  Oddly enough it was my older cousins from Japan, Sachi and Masayuki, and their circle of friends, Japanese nationals who were studying at the UH or otherwise setting out on their young adulthood, who played PP&M music all the time and had me singing along to "Puff, The Magic Dragon," "If I Had a Hammer," "Five Hundred Miles," and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?".  The trio's soulful, tuneful folk sound cut through barriers of language and age, and I can pretty much say I first learned how to sing by listening to Mary Travers's pure, soaring vocals.  Even later, when I started taking voice lessons and veered off into other types of music, I still heard Mary's voice in my head as an example of natural, supple musicality.

    Just a few years ago, I saw my cousin Masayuki for the first time in over 30 years, and right off the bat he asked me if I remembered "Puff, The Magic Dragon."  He said he has a memory of me as a young kid telling him I thought it was a very sad song.  He remembers that this made him think of the song's lyrics really for the first time, all those years ago, and made him think of me suddenly as not just some generic little cousin, but as an actual, other person, "this sweet boy," he said.

    Except that of course I didn't really understand sadness then.  A closer knowledge of loss and injustice, and an appreciation for compassion and kindness, the things PP&M sang about, came later.  And in my own young adulthood when I gave a second listen to their songs, I borrowed comfort and courage from them, and learned from them all over again.

    And so along with millions of others I mourn the passing of Mary Travers, who in some unknowable way taught me first how to sing, and then how to care.

Critical Condition

    Providing quality, affordable health care for every citizen is not some scary, immoral new concept that has not withstood the test of time and ethical scrutiny.  It is something that presidents, from Truman through Nixon to Clinton, have sought to implement in one form or another.  Universal health coverage is something that the rest of the world has long considered a moral responsibility and a necessity, it is supported by language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it is something only the United States, among all industrialized nations, lacks.

    The health care system in our country is in crisis brought on by decades of being held hostage to the rampant profit-driven greed of the powerful insurance industry, among others.  We have the best health care system in the world, we are so fond of telling ourselves, while study after study, including one conducted by the World Health Organization of 191 countries, finds that Americans spend the most for a health care delivery system that ranks a deplorable 37th among all nations and 72nd in terms of overall health of population, bankrupts hardworking middle-class families dealing with catastrophic illness, and leaves between 45 and 47 million of our neighbors, friends, and family members completely uninsured, with 14,000 more thrown out into the cold every day.

    And still there are people out there manufacturing lies out of whole cloth and brandishing semi-automatic rifles in defense of this selfish, inhumane, mega-corporate free market joyride.

    In the words of Jim Wallis, president and CEO of Sojourners, that faith-based organization whose mission is "to articulate the biblical call to social justice":

    It's time for the faith community to unite around the moral imperative of health-care reform, defense of the most vulnerable, and support for moral conscience in a comprehensive reform of the health-care system.

    It's time for the faith community to confront the distortions and lies that are being told.  It's time for the ministry of "truth-telling" and to surround the nation's discussion of health care with fervent prayer.

    It's time for the faith community to practice nonviolent tactics of reconciliation and resistance against those on either side who would threaten the public debate with intimidation, fear, and even the threat of violence.

    Please consider forwarding to your friends and acquaintances the email found here, from David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Obama.  I'm generally not a fan of chain emails, but finally securing access to quality, affordable health care for everyone is certainly worth this effort.  Please help to counter the misinformation, fabrications, and scare tactics of some of the more unbalanced opponents of health insurance reform.

Departures

    Saw the 2009 Academy Award-winning (Best Foreign Language Film) Departures (Okuribito) yesterday.  It's about a young cellist whose orchestra folds, prompting him to return to his old hometown in northeastern Japan with his wife to seek work.  Thinking he's applying for a travel industry job when he answers an ad that contains the enigmatic word "Departures," he finds himself, to his own impotent horror, hired on the spot as a sort of embalmer who ceremonially washes and prepares corpses for casketing and cremation.  This is a funny, sad, quietly masterful film about death, life, love, and art.

    Human beings like to think of each life as special, while nature has a random way of proving them wrong.  This movie's irrefutable (to my mind at least) answer to nature lies in two words:  love, and art.

    Before they knew how to write, according to a character in this film, people sent each other stones, carefully chosen, to show what they were feeling.  This film is as elemental and eloquent, and as nonrandom, as a stone.  

Allah-o Akbar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oM6l9PO6Yo

    

    Watching, praying for, and standing in awe of the courageous people of Iran.  (Video courtesy of Overstream, found via Nico Pitney's blog on The Huffington Post, and YouTube.)

My Life in Ruins

    I have been to Greece a million times—in my mind.  I minored in Ancient History in college, and in our senior year my roommate and I planned a long summer in Greece, a graduation gift to ourselves, visiting all the sites we'd read about.  That trip never happened; life got in the way, and although in the ensuing years I thought often about finally making that journey myself, the circumstances never seemed right.  I guess over time I'd built up so many expectations about this pilgrimage, and had fantasized about it for so long, that subconsciously I knew it could never live up to my imaginings, and the disappointment would be crushing.  More recently I've come to the point where I think of Greece as my own personal Ithaka:  that I will reach its shores only when the gods are satisfied I'll know how to see it once I'm there.

    All of which would seem to predispose me to hate Nia Vardalos's new romantic comedy, My Life in Ruins.  American critics have by and large panned it:  romantic flicks set in Greece are passé, they say, and they consider this one a clumsy and formulaic story of a guide who finds her missing zest for life, her kefi, as well as love, while escorting a bumbling group of tourists on a Greatest Hits sprint through Greek antiquity.  Certainly nothing like the vision of Greece that I have nurtured for half a lifetime.  And yet I found the movie human and warm and splendid, qualities I've encountered a million times as I've made that odyssey in my mind.  Maybe the critics don't know what it is to yearn foolishly for a place, or the idea of a place, as I have.  Maybe they are philosophers, asking the important questions, whereas I've come to realize that I just want, someday, to be the bus driver filled with kefi because he has the blessed fortune to view Homer's wine-dark sea from the best seat in the house.   

Angelic Disposition

    Since February, I've been doing a little gardening in containers.  My roses and geraniums are in full bloom, and the mint, parsley, tomato, and basil are thriving.  The rosemary, lemongrass, and gerber daisies appear to be dead.  The status of the bay laurel is questionable.  I also have an orchid, a masdevallia that I brought home from the Lyon Arboretum plant sale.  I knew taking on an orchid would be a challenge:  the neediness, the mood swings, the rebelliousness.  But also the flashes of unexpected sweetness and generosity.  This one is aptly named "Fractured Angel."  So far it seems to be having a great time here—it looks healthy and vigorous—but I have had to be firm on occasion.  Every once in a while I go out to greet it in the morning and discover it has had another wild night.  I find it uprooted, its pot fallen on its side and abandoned several yards away from where I left it the evening before, its potting medium scattered to the four corners,  the orchid itself lying hungover several yards further away.  I blame the neighborhood cat.  I suspect it is a bad influence....

Stand for Health Care

    Over thirty years ago, when I was working as a Congressional intern during my summer breaks from college, my particular area of interest and research was universal health care.  Only now, a generation later, America is poised to finally join the rest of the industrialized world (and many other developing countries) in providing access to quality health care for all of its citizens—if we all support the current Administration in its efforts to bring forth this momentous change.  Please go to barackobama.com and sign the declaration of support there, and then ask your family and friends to do the same.  One generation in my own lifetime has lived and died without the full and basic assurance of having its medical needs met; haven't we all waited long enough?

Hawaiian Eye 4

    A view of the lagoon at the Ihilani Resort.  I'm sorry I haven't posted anything new here for a long time:  I've been alternately busy, uninspired, depressed, you name it.  I offer this picture as a token of my pledge to do better.  Please keep visiting.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!