Day 1: 3pm (Continued)

It is my nephew, Liam. 6’4”, and despite his twenty-eight years a boyish face with rosy cheeks, dimples, and a beard that only needed to be shaved twice a week. Covid protocols be damned we gave each other a hug. Not the back tapping, no body contact hugs of relatives at holidays and birthday celebrations but the full body contact, boa constrictor hug suitable for the return of prodigal son, winning lotto or other life changing events. There were tears. Our journey over the last few years called for them, as did the fact that it had been eighteen months since I had seen him last. During that time, the world and our universe had been altered beyond recognition.

He smiled down at me. If you did not know him as I did you would think him cherubic. But I knew what lay beyond that smile. Here was a man who over the last few years 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, he 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.

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 travelers 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 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? Cocktails and dinner?”

Waving his hand in front of his nose as if he had smelled something awful, he said “Yeah. That is a good idea. Let me talk to Hadley and the others and I’ll text you “

“Okay.” I said, grabbing my rollaboard and backpack and began walking to the taxi queue. 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 taxi que is proof of that. There is just me and a family of three, two teenage girls and a mom, in line. 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 top, 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 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 climbed into the cab, a late model silver-grey Honda Odyssey. We drove out of the airport past 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. This was the way paradise should look.

We pass a cookie cutter town home development that is set in the middle of a sugar cane field. So close to the airport it cannot be for tourists. This is where the people who work in the resorts live. 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, the angels who tended bars, 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 or 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 greeted by surfing Hawaiians, many bare-chested women, greeting him with 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 in an abundance of irony, became an entrée for the chiefs that evening.

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 Cape Horn, the most dangerous passage in the world for sailors, and almost all arrived pregnant. I have always found those logistics intriguing. (Did they schedule private time, surrender their modesty and was it just one Puritan orgy.) Hawaii must have been a huge shock for them. They had left a land caught in a mini-ice age. A place where 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 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 said, “When the going gets weird, the weird get going.”

One of the symptoms of my year spent entirely by myself due to Covid isolation is the amount of time I get caught up in thought loops. With little or no interruptions from human contact and other interruptions, my mind tends to wander like my ancestors in the desert. 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 has a will of its own. In this case, time had accelerated. The cane fields had melted away and been 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 and 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 inspire you to remodel your bathrooms when you got home, and you get the full luxury Hawaiian holiday experience. Don’t get me wrong, I am a hedonist at heart and love the wallowing 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 was 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 to stay 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 was best man at their wedding. 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 is 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 vie 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 where loathsome was the nicest word 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.