Hawaii smells as heaven should.
Perhaps it felt that way as for the last fifteen hours or so I had been on airplane wearing KN95 mask and after smelling your own breath for that long anything would smell heavenly. But I don’t have halitosis and for the past sixteen month most of the breathing I had done outside my own home had been filtered the same way. Hawaii smells as heaven should.
This despite the fact that I was just outside the main terminal at Maui’s Kahului International Airport. Logic would suggest it should smell like jet fuel and car exhaust. But perhaps logic is not a word that applies much to Hawaii. Maybe. Everyone says that Hawaii is magical. Perhaps they are right. Or perhaps it was just old sensory memory. I have been to Maui before although it seemed like a lifetime ago. But what didn’t. The pandemic had drawn a line in everyone’s life. Our life before and our life after. But what did it matter if it was real or my imagination. My brain didn’t care.
I inhaled it as a sommelier would savor a vintage wine of note: deeply, with utter satisfaction The first note I caught was of the ocean. Caught on the trade winds that caressed the island it was briny, fresh and having been purified by the thousand of miles of Pacific that separated it from anything else. There were hints of the floral. Maybe Jasmine or Hibiscus, which wafted in an out and were so elusive that every time I thought I could identify what scent it was it would drift away just like so many things these days.
I was not in hurry to go anywhere. And, after spending the majority of the last year and a half indoors and the last sixteen hours locked in a metal tube, I was not anxious to get into a cab. I saw a white metal bench, directly adjacent to the taxi cue that was bathed in sunlight and decided that I would sit there for a moment and let the day come to me. The sun was bright, despite my Maui Jim sunglasses and my Red Sox travel cap so I closed my eyes and soaked in the sun like it was an essential nutrient for my spirit. Perhaps it was.
A gust of wind brought a new scent. I could not identify it but it was deeply herbaceous and made me wonder what it might be like for someone with no sense of smell to be here on this island. Covid had robbed so many of their sense of smell in the last eighteen months and that horrified me. My memory is often triggered by his sense of smell. I once broke up with a woman when I found out she had no sense of smell whatsoever. I know. Probably a little shallow of me. Especially these days when so many have lost their sense of smell due to Covid. But don’t judge me by what is happening now. This was then. You remember. When the world was a little simpler. But I digress. At the time I could not see a future with someone whom I could not share the gloriousness of the scent of fresh baked bread, newly pressed sheets, or lilacs in bloom. Scent transports me. Reminds me of people and moments in time. Not just brief flashes of memories but often fully cinematic experiences where I can replay full scenes word for word, minute by minute.
It doesn’t need to be perfume. Or even pleasant. When my brother and I were young our father who worked only a couple of miles from where we lived would take us to pick up our mother who traveled each day to her job as an editor in the city by bus. When we would see our Mom stepping off the boss we run to her and invariably just as we would reach her the bus would depart belching black diesel smoke. To this day, the smell of diesel bus exhaust reminds me of those precious mother’s hugs that would cure anything when you were young.
Patchouli reminds me of the first time I made love. It was the essential oil Brigitte Conlin wore the night I lost my virginity.
A whiff of Kenzo L’eau Par instantly brings me back to the dazzling evening I met my wife.
This day, the smell of Hawaii brought me back fourteen years, to the last time I had been here. I had convinced my parents to accompany my girlfriend and I to Maui. Dad had just turned eighty and Mom was in her mid-seventies and despite having well used passports had never been to what Cook named the Sandwich Isles. (This always amused me due to my impolitic love of puns.) The trip had been wonderful. My frequent flying had managed to get us all upgraded to first class for the entire journey. We had rented a large modern townhome on a golf course in Kapalua with an unobstructed view of the Pacific and as, it turned out, of the sunsetting into the Pacific. After a day of activities, and before dinner, we would gather on our deck and have a glass of wine or cocktail and watch the sun’s descent into the sea.
One night, just before the sun plunged into the sea with the western horizon a glow in orange and yellow above a navy sea, I remember asking my father, the scientist and skeptic, about and urban legend popular wherever the suns end it day by a plunge into the sea. I asked. “Do you think the green flash is real or is it just something that tourist boards make up to get the rubes to gather in one place so the locals can sell them trinkets.”
Dad is Viennese. Fleeing the Nazi’s, he had immigrated to the United States at fourteen. He had never lost his accent. As a consequence he sounded like central casting had placed him in the role of a scientist. Mind you, it was not something that I could hear. Unless it was a word like snorkel (schnorkel) and the occasional “w” would come “v.” I thought he sounded like Dad but my friends could hear it so …He replied with his feint but distinct German accent “Wat is dis green flash.”
I said “I don’t know. Whenever I go somewhere like California or Key West, or anywhere they consider watching the sun setting a sacred obligation, I hear them talk about a green flash. Supposedly, it happens just as the sun dips below the horizon. I was just wondering if there is any science to it or it is a myth people made up.”
Being the scientist he was, a man trained to wonder whether the other side of white sheep were black, he said “Vell, vhy don’t ve vatch and see.” We spent the next few minutes in silence with only the quiet rustle of palms, and the occasional mewing of a seagull breaking the spell and watched the sun end its daily journey without apparent flash.
He said “Did you see a flash?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Neither did I.”
“So…”
“Vell’ he said with a twinkle of mischief “You know I cannot confirm it until I can observe the phenomenon but then again I cannot conclude that it doesn’t exist. There is not enough data so perhaps we should make sure to watch the sunset each night to see what we can observed. ” And we had both laughed. In fact, it had become a long-standing joke between us. Whenever I talked to him from California or anyplace where I could see a sunset he would ask “Did you see the flash.”
As I never did, I would invariably reply. “No.” To which he would respond “I guess you will just have to collect more data” and we both would laugh at our private joke.
It reminded me. I had not called my mother yet to let them know that I had arrived safely. I know. It seems a little age inappropriate for a middle-aged man to call his parents to let him know he arrived safely after a journey. My excuse is that it made them feel better. The truth is that it made me feel better. For the longest time, they were the only ones who truly cared where I was and was I safe. I pulled my iPhone and was punching in their number when I heard “Uncle Danny, Uncle Danny.”
He smiled down at me. If you did not know him like I did you would think it cherubic. But I knew what lay beyond that smile. Here was a man who over the last few years he had to make decisions and sacrifices that I had not had to make until I was well into middle age. He had gone through gauntlets that even cruel fiction writers would not have imagined for their protagonists. He had done so without an utterance of self-pity. No wo-is-me for him. He had faced each crisis as it came head on and while not always maintaining his composure, who could, had gotten up every time he was knocked down. His resolve unbroken, ready to face whatever the next crisis was head on and often with a sense of humor.
Even though he was my nephew through convention, not blood, I had loved him since birth. However, in the last two years I had grown to admire him as a person. I could not have been prouder of him if he were my own son.
I was not surprised to see him. I had arranged my flight to arrive at the same time as his. But somewhere along my fifteen-hour journey I had decided that I would make a quick exit at the airport and meet up with him and the rest of our fellow travel companions later that day. But, Hawaii had distracted me and made me forget my plan. And instead of getting a few more hours on my own, to build up my strength for what was to come, here he was.
“It’s good to see you shrimpy.”
This elicited a big grin. I had been calling him that since he was a toddler and following me around the house on one of my frequent visits to his parents’ home. It was actually a simplification of my original sobriquet for him, “shrimp toast.” I don’t remember how I came up with that. It is not even an item that I usually included in my Chinese takeout order. I just liked how it sounded and he loved having a nickname back then and when, as a teenager he began to sky above me, it became ironic, and we both loved it even more.
“You too Uncle Danny.”
“Where is everybody else.”
“At the carousel waiting for the luggage. I saw you out here so I thought I would say hello.”
“You didn’t pack…” I said letting my voice trail off.
He laughed “God no…in a rollaboard. Couldn’t trust them to the luggage handlers.”
Smiling I said “And who said you were not bright boy. Listen, I am desperate to get to the hotel. I smell like a skunk and have some phone calls to make. Can I catch up with everyone at the hotel. Maybe cocktails and dinner?”
Waving his hand in front of his nose as if he had smelled something awful, he said “Yeah. Maybe that is a good idea. Let me talk to Emma and the others and I will text you “
“Okay.” I said grabbing my rollaboard and backpack and began walking to the taxi cue. I had only gone a few steps when I hear a shout “Uncle Danny, I am glad that you are here.” It is Liam’s brother, Duke. He is standing near the exit of baggage claim, and he is waving at me.
I grace him with the half smile the forlorn show to others when we want them to believe they are doing fine and yell back. “Where else could I be?”
I hate lines. Doesn’t everyone? My father once told me the reason he became a psychologist was the line to become a zoologist was too long. One of the only positives about the pandemic is that it has made lines more manageable, people no longer crowd together, and of course there are less people. The tax que is proof that. There is just me and a family of three, two teenage girls and a Mom, online. The girls are wearing, from what I can infer from the social media posts of nieces and nephews, typical travel outfits for their age group: pajama bottoms, Good Mythical Morning T-Shirts and Ugg Slippers. Each has a black North Face backpack and burnt orange hard shell roll-a-board. They seem underwhelmed by their surroundings and very put out for having to wait for a cab. They barely look up from their iPhones. Their mother, a petite woman wearing faded, low rise,boot leg jeans, a white embroidered peasant to, is doing her best to navigate the line with a large rolling suitcase and a dark blue Tumi backpack that is working double duty as purse and briefcase. She is very attractive. Not in the glamourous way they depict in fashion magazines, all cheek bones and facial angles. Instead it is the type of beauty that gets better with age. It looks like a face you could spend a lifetime staring at and never get tired of the view. She catches me looking at her and I blush when she smiles at me and gives me the smallest of head nods hello. In my embarrassment at being caught out I look down. When I raise my head, they are gone, and my cab is pulling in.
I put on my red KN95 mask and get into the cab, a late model silver-grey Honda Odyssey. We drive out of the airport past a Krispy Kreme, Costco and Target and Safeway. It strikes me how “all-America” Hawaii is.. This was “paradise.” Yet, it looked like middle America. That was never my idea of paradise. In fact I spent most of my life trying to avoid anything that even hinted at being a part of the normal. I wanted to be a little different. Not that there was anything wrong with living a check list life of middle America. If that made you happy, I had no beef with that. But I didn’t think it was for me. Yet here I was, in Paradise, surrounded by the trappings of middle-class life. Perhaps I had made a mistake in my journey. Perhaps this was the way paradise should look.
I had read in the run up to this trip one of the biggest problems on the islands these days was housing. Not for the wealthy and the rich. There was an abundance of domiciles for them. However, for those who made the made the illusion of paradise work, the angels who tended bar, waited tables, who cleaned, collected garbage and sang soothing songs to the paradise seekers there was little affordable housing. They were forced to live far away from where they work, in developments that were built on the cheap.
Was it ironic of just sad that those who visit paradise live a better life than those who make it possible for them to be here? Why was I not surprised. It is the heritage of these islands since the time of Captain Cook. When he “discovered” the island he was reportedly greeted by surfing Hawaiians, many bare-chested women, greeting him the “aloha spirit” which according to an article I read “is the coordination of mind and heart within each person. It brings each person to the self. Each person must think and emote good feelings to others. It means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return.” Cook and his crew had little or no appreciation for the spirit in which they were greeted. Eventually the Hawaiians caught on and after a particularly egregious offense where the crew on orders from Cook, attempted to desecrate a burial ground and seize the king, the Captain was murdered and it a fit of irony, cooked.
After Cook came the bible thumping missionaries from New England. Often newlyweds, as missionaries were required to be married, packed eight to a tiny cabin, they endured a six-month journey around the horn and almost all arrived pregnant. Those logistics I have always found intriguing. What must it have been like for them. They had left a land caught in a mini-ice age. A place where literally one of the main exports was ice (Queen Victoria’s favorite ice came from Wenham Lake north of Boston) and arrived in a tropical paradise where the average temperature was in the 70’s. Of course they set out immediately to spoil it. Nakedness was the first to go as it offended Christian morality and within fairly short order acquired most of the land rights from the natives who had little understanding of property ownership, deposed the King and established a “republic” and in the process wiped out much of the native population with the diseases they generously shared with the natives who had no immunity.
It reminds me of the book I have tucked away in my bag. “The Curse of Lono” by Hunter S. Thompson. I brought it with the intention to read as an homage to my friend Conor, Liam’s Dad. He loved Thompson and before cosplay was cosplay would don Hawaiian shirt, aviators and smoke cigarettes out of a holder when we were in partying mood. Since we were here to honor him, I thought it righteous addition to my luggage. I hadn’t opened the book yet out of fear of the emotions it might evoke but thinking of Cook reminded me of Lono. The Hawaiians had thought Cook was Lono. And one of the reasons that had for clubbing, stabbing and then roasting him was he was not who they thought he was. Always a disappointment when someone you know is not who you thought they were. But sadly most people are not who you think they are. They are projections of either your hopes, or fears, or both. Which really is not a problem until you realize that your impression of them is not real. As Dr. Thompson might have said “When the going gets weird, the weird get going.”
One of the symptoms of my Covid isolation is the amount of time I get caught up in thought loops within my own head. With little or no interruptions from human contact and other interruptions, my mind tends to wander like a meandering river. It is at best a badly designed time portal where time could either pass very quickly or seem hardly to move at all. It would be great if I had some control over it. But it seems to have a will of its own. In this case, time had accelerated. The cane fields had melted away and replaced by the Hawaii of brochure, poster and Instagram posts. On my left was the Pacific glittering like a thousand diamonds and to my right steep, verdant, volcanic mountains. A sign tells me that Kapalua, my destination, is only eight miles away.
I am headed to the Ritz Carlton, Kapalua. It is a wonderful if not magnificent hotel. Some even consider it one of the best hotels in the US. Why not? Located on a promontory overlooking the Pacific, the islands of Lanai and Molokai guests can see Humpback whales breaching from their rooms. Combine this with two championship golf courses, world class tennis facility, multiple pools, its own wildlife preserve, six dining facilities, a luxurious spa, and rooms that inspired you to remodel your bathrooms when you got home. Don’t get me wrong, I am a hedonist at heart and love the luxuriating that this type of resort has to offer. But considering what the pandemic had done to my business, it had all but evaporated, this was not the budget option I was originally seeking. I wanted to find a small apartment on Airbnb or budget hotel but my vote was not considered.
Even if I had the capital the purpose of this trip was not a vacation. I had not come to Hawaii to spoil myself. How could I? The world was on fire. Despite the vaccine tens of thousands in the US were catching Covid every day, hundreds were dying. It is not that I didn’t get why after sixteen months of lockdown why folks would feel the need to let loose and enjoy life in the best way they could. I did. I felt that as deeply as anyone, but survivors guilt can be a bitch. It makes you feel guilty for enjoying what providence had blessed you with instead of savoring the things in life that had been denied us since March 13, 2021.
But six hundred thousand people were dead in the United States alone. . Thirty-three million had suffered through the disease only to face an uncertain health in the future. My conscience had a hard time justifying me being pampered and luxuriating when so many were still suffering and sacrificing.
I thought of my friend Alice Liddel . A pulmonologist, she had been on the front lines of the Covid epidemic. Endless shifts in ICU’s trying to save people’s lives. She had tried to describe to me what it felt like to know she was doing everything she could to save someone’s lives and knowing there was little or nothing she could do to save them. How it was made more difficult because her patients were dying alone because Covid protocols meant no visitors. The dying only had her and the other health care workers to comfort them as they suffered and then died. This would happen dozens of times a day with not enough comfort to go around. It ate at her soul like acid on metal. There was no respite for her. No comfort from her family as she could not risk infecting her small children or husband. In war, soldiers who had been in battle were sent to rest camps where they could reset and decompress. Health care workers had none of that. They had no respite for a year and half. Shouldn’t they be here. Not me.
I know. I should feel grateful for having the means and the ability to be here in paradise. And I did. But I could not shake the guilt. Nor the sadness.
Ironically, it was the sadness that brought me here. Sadness at the loss of my best friend Conor. He had perished six months into the pandemic. Not of Covid. Brain cancer had taken him. In his last days, he asked Liam and I to take his ashes to Hawaii to be dispersed. The islands had been his idea of Nirvana and he joked the only way he knew he would get to heaven is if he would scatter his ashes there. At the time it had made me laugh in the sad way when a joke cuts too close to the bone. When he died it had become our mission to grant his final wish.
And if I was being truly honest with myself, my reluctance at staying at the Ritz, while certainly influenced by the pandemic and my feelings surrounding it had more to do with who had chosen the hotel and was to join us there: Delilah Peterson Kennedy. Delilah was Conor’s former wife, Liam’s mother, and self-made millionaire if that term applies to people who get large insurance payouts when their ex-husband, whom they helped kill, die.
We had once been great friends. Great friends. I had introduced her to her Conor. I had been there for the birth of both her children. I had taken weeks off from work when in the late stages of her pregnancy with Liam she was ordered to bed to care for her and baby “Duke” her first born. I had spent holidays in her home and spoiled her children with gifts, and experiences. And despite the fact we didn’t not share the same world view, she being a Fox News Republican, and I a MSNBC democrat, I had always tried to treat with respect and like a sister. Which is not to say that we did not have our disagreements. We did. One or two that had even escalated to the point of silence and benign neglect. Eventually, we would forgive each other. Perhaps not forget but forgive. That is, until a few years ago when a fuller picture of who and what she was revealed when after 32 years of marriage she had left Conor for a man that she had met online.
It was not that she was divorcing Conor that angered me. Shit happens. People grow apart over time. My buddy was not easy and had never been an angel. C’est la vi and all that. But as it turned out, she was not interested in merely divorcing him. Her goal was to destroy him. And in the end, she did. As irrational as it sounds, I blame her for the cancer that claimed him. After that, bridges burned, crops scorched, and prisoners executed. The idea of spending even a little time with her filled me with disgust and revulsion.
None the less, I had to be here. That is what friends did. Or, at least that is what I believed. What friends do is show up. Always. Regardless of circumstance or sacrifice. You showed up. Explanations were not necessary. Excuses were not given. Sometimes you didn’t even wait for the invitation. You showed up. I had when Conor got sick. I was there when he was dying. Now that it was time for the final goodbye, you showed up even if it meant being with a person whom loathsome was nicest world you could use to describe them.
Even if it meant spending time with a murderer and destroyer of universes.
Why was she running the show? She was, I had learned from bitter experience, a master manipulator who when she didn’t get her way became an agent of destruction. Liam didn’t have a chance against her. I never questioned why she was coming along on this trip. I knew. But I did ask Liam when he was letting her do all the planning and his response was “She wanted to” and “You know her Uncle Danny. It is just easier to go with it. Besides it is a great hotel. The type Dad loved. You know that.” I didn’t have the courage to tell him that it was too expensive for me. It was off brand and embarrassing. So I shut up and do what friends do. I showed up.
Blame it on Rio 