My friend Richie from up the street asks me, “When do you find time to write?”
“Late at night is the second best time,” I tell him, “for me anyway.” He waits for the rest of my answer. ”But my favorite time is before sunrise. Five a.m. While you’re still sleeping.”
Richie cringes just at the sound of ”five a.m.” ”You set your alarm?” he asks.
“No, I just wake up some mornings and know it’s time to write. I awake the hound (Simone, our Italian greyhound) and we go downstairs together. She goes back to sleep on the sofa and I pour a large mug of Kona coffee and head for the keyboard.
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In two timeless Christmas stories from the past two centuries, misanthropes Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch show their contempt for the world’s greatest holiday season.
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), the heartless banker Scrooge’s response to “Merry Christmas” is “Bah! Humbug!” For Scrooge, Christmas is a fraud.
In the 1957 Dr. Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch, his heart “two sizes too small,” tries to “prevent Christmas from coming” by stealing all the presents from Whoville. Scrooge and the Grinch have much to learn, and they do, because these are stories of redemption.
Read the rest of this entry »Many will recall two remarkable books by Shelly Mecum: God’s Photo Album and this time last year, The Watercolor Cat, with Peggy Chun. The astonishing and moving Peggy Chun saga did not end there.
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The sand beach that stretches nearly a mile beyond the Kalaupapa wharf was always laid smooth by the tide. Hansen’s disease plays havoc with feet, ulcerating them, crippling them. Such feet walk poorly. And in sand they cannot walk at all. Most patients in Henry’s time left no footprints in that golden sand.
In 1936 ten-year-old Henry was taken from his family on the Island of Hawai‘i and sent to Kalihi Hospital on O‘ahu. He was later transferred to Kalaupapa on the rugged north coast of Moloka‘i, where he has spent most of the past 65 years in this remote village with a tragic history as a Hansen’s disease colony. During its century as a virtual prison, more than 8,000 people were exiled to Kalaupapa, until the introduction of sulfone drugs in the 1940s. Today fewer than 20 patients remain.
No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa by Henry Nalaielua with Sally-Jo Bowman is one of only a few memoirs ever shared with the public by a Kalaupapa patient. Its intimacy and candor make it, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin, “a rare and precious human document.”
Read the rest of this entry »This July day was insufferably hot in Honolulu. Henry Nalaielua sat perspiring at the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, even though his chair was in the shade. He and some 500 others had listened all morning to prayers and hymns and speeches.
And then, near the end of the long ceremonies and ecumenical service, it was Nalaielua’s turn. The notes for his speech were under his ginger lei, in the pocket of his aloha shirt—his best blue one. He shuffled the few steps to the lei-draped lectern on hobbly feet that reminded him of his mission of honor. He had come to the palace from his home at Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i, where he was sent as a Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patient before World War II, and where he has lived most of his 70 years.
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In 1985 the renowned muralist Martin Charlot was commissioned by the McDonald’s Corporation to paint a wall mural for the company’s restaurant in Kane‘ohe. The result was Hawaiian Folkways , a 5 x 24-foot work depicting a day in the life of Waiahole Valley, the lush rural community a few miles up the coast in the heart of windward O‘ahu.
Local Traffic Only: Proverbs Hawaiian-Style brings the reader up close and personal with this wonderful work of art.
Peopled with farmers and fisherman, keiki and kupuna, cops and robbers and many others, Charlot’s charming mural illustrates more than 100 proverbs—Hawaiian, biblical and others. All the people featured in the mural are real-life friends, family and acquaintances of the artist. From siblings and children to local firefighters and an unsuspecting deliveryman to McDonald’s Hawaii CEO Pat Kahler, to then-actor, now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlot’s models acted out for him in person the proverbs depicting the good and bad sides of human nature.
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