Day 1: 3pm

Hawaii smells as heaven should.

It felt that way because for the last fifteen hours I had been on an airplane wearing a KN95 mask and after smelling my own breath for that long anything would smell heavenly. But I don’t have halitosis and for the past sixteen months most of the breathing I had done outside my own home had been filtered the same way.

Hawaii just smells good.

This even though 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 logic is not a word that applies much to Hawaii. Maybe. Everyone says that Hawaii is magical. They are right. Or perhaps it was just old sensory memory. I have been to Maui before although it seems 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 was where I needed to be, the world smelled new again and I was open to what it might bring me.

I took a deep breath. 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 and fresh purified by the thousands of miles of Pacific that separated it from the world we live in. There were hints of the floral. Jasmine or Hibiscus. Their scent wafting in and out. Elusive like so many things these days.

I was not in hurry to go anywhere. And, after spending much 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 queue that was bathed in sunlight, and it looked to be an ideal place to sit for a moment and let the day come to me. I made my way to it and sat down and soaked it 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. 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. That was then. 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 bus, we would 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 the cure all to life’s miseries in those days.

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 fateful and dazzling evening I met my wife, Nadine.

Today, 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 they had never been to what Cook named the Sandwich Isles. (This always amused me due to my impolitic love of puns.) The trip was 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 a glow in orange and yellow above a navy sea, I asked my father, the scientist and skeptic, about an urban legend popular wherever people gather to watch the setting sun. I said, “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 watching the sun end its daily journey without an 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.” We 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 own private joke.

It reminded me. I had not called my mother yet to let her know that I had arrived safely. I know. It seems a little age inappropriate for a middle-aged man to call his parent to let him know he arrived safely after a journey. My rationalization is that it made her feel better. The truth is that it made me feel better too. For the longest time, she was the only one who genuinely cared where I was and was safe. Reaching for my iPhone I am dialing her number when I hear “Uncle Danny, Uncle Danny!”