To write this month about anything other than losing my mother would be impossible. Impossible. Just impossible.
It’s a long story as to how my mother-from-Italy ended up in Hawaii, but I’ll make it a short one: Her second husband was a ukelele player.
Fo’ real.
Most people from Seattle fly to Hawaii to feel the skies open. Lately, for me, everything closes in — the color of cement.
What I mean is, nothing can prepare you for the huge, tight seize of sadness when someone you love has a stroke that claims her very consciousness.
But I’m not going into all of that.
I will say that, upon lift-off from Honolulu, no one cheers the way they do upon landing. Back-to-reality is a little too painful for clapping.
This feels especially kind because my own pain is crushing. It is already killing me. I look older by years, decades.
And if you don’t think aging so quickly is possible, the security guard sat up and looked at my license and back to my face three times. My headshot is of a face that does not look so scared and helpless.
I saw the guard’s uncertainty. I felt her aversion. She was startled, not by the likelihood I could be someone else, by what really troubled her: that one day she would age enough to look so completely tired when fully awake.
When she finally handed my license back to me, she did her best to smile.
I did not.
A different view
On the plane, I must have sighed louder than I thought. “I know, right?” my seatmate said. “I’d never come back to this island.”
As horrible as I felt, her comment made me feel worse. I could understand a critical comment or two aimed at Waikiki. A lot of us find out how disappointing Waikiki is the hard way.
But the entire island is not the Disney version — I wondered if she’d bothered to find this out.
My first drive around the island enlightened me to the unaffected grace much of it still is — provided, of course, that I ignore the fact that most of it is slated for development of one kind or another.
But my seatmate seemed like the kind of person whom the word “complainer” would always be true. She was small, wiry, and I know about certain small, wiry women: Their capacity for muttering out of the sides of their mouths about everything they find wrong is enormous. To them, grumbling is conversation.
“The homeless were everywhere,” she said. “I can go to Pioneer Square for homeless.”
I leaned away. Below us, the Diamond Head crater seemed to say, “Good riddance.”
Finding the heart
I resented her take on the island — I resented the hell out of it. Beyond the hotels, there is the heart of the people, for one thing.
I thought of my mother’s husband.
And if I dressed him up into a Mainland man, all Haole, imagined him in a semi-business shirt, nametag hanging from his neck like the Amazonians in my neighborhood, in a pair of pants and Ecco Oxfords, instead of board shorts and slippahs, wine in hand rather than a Longboard, he would say coolly, “You are having a perfectly balanced response to our island, Mary Lou.”
I realize this image must be his way of saying, “Eh! Mary Lou! No let anyone talk stink about your muddah’s island! No can!”
And my mother would have looked at her Moke, love gathering like a wave getting bigger.
I suppose this is what happens next: I finally begin to understand my mother.
MARY LOU SANELLI’s latest book is “Among Friends.” Visit her website: www.marylousanelli.com. To comment on this column, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
