When the Holiday Ends

mixed thoughts on reality

I allowed a decision to happen: during my time away in Hawai’i, an early celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of my accidental first date with Hiro (our actual anniversary is November 23, which is Thanksgiving this year), I wouldn’t write.

Which is something of a falsehood.

I tried to write.

I’m revising my manuscript and the new second chapter is kicking my tushie—a word that autocorrect changed to gushier; ew!

And at the same time, writing brings me closer to the adult things (like debt, mortgage payments, and the sorrows of my friends) that I wanted to press pause on while away. The vacation needed to be an exercise in now. Not regrets for the past. Not the impediments of the future. Now.

And so I meditated beneath the breezes of ceiling fans. I made an effort to redirect my thoughts to the moments I inhabited. And that redirection was particularly easy when standing on a beach, facing a sunset, my husband smiling at me, and a sea turtle snoozing within my peripheral vision.

But my focus on the immediate was not an exercise evasion. On the third day of our trip, word came about a dear friend who had been on life-support without any brain activity for a few weeks after having another heart attack. Our friend Karl had been pronounced dead on November 2. This was followed a few days later by an invitation from Karl’s family to attend his funeral and internment two days after our return.

Karl was an operatic tenor and Hiro and I were lucky to see him perform as Goro in the Portland Opera production of Madama Butterfly in 2019, photographed here together with his partners Kris and Andrew.

Another dear, dear friend, someone I’ve know for nearly forty years, honored me by sharing his struggles with his parent’s impending death. We were thousands of miles apart yet I gladly shared as much love as I could via daily texts.

At one point during the time away, I tried to write an issue of this newsletter, but I stopped, three paragraphs in, disgusted. All of the worries I wanted to pause came rushing through my fingers onto the electronic page. All of the worries that I am now confronting after returning to quotidian concerns.

I deleted that overly dramatic bit of omphaloskepsis and closed my iPad.

Instead Hiro and I jumped into the car and drove north.

The original statue of King Kamehameha I, in Kapa’au, Hawai’i.

We watched surfers and body-boarders ride the heavy surf in Kēōkea Bay. I learned that a prophecy had foretold the birth of a mighty king and that after the birth of Pai’ea, the boy who went on to become that king, rival chieftains sent assassins to kill him. But retainers secreted the infant to the hard to reach valleys of Polulu and Waipi’o, beneath Mount Kohala. Kamehameha means the lonely one in Hawaiian.

The places where the retainers stopped were named to reflect the state of the infant when he arrived. Hawi, for example, means the wail of life; little Pai’ea must have been screaming. The next stop became known as Kapa’au, which is loosely translated as wet diapers. Halaula suggests that the infant was cooing in song. And Kēōkea indicates that the boy was pale when he arrived.

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We arrived back at SeaTac just past midnight, as November 15 became November 16. We left Kona at 86F. Home was 38F. The 93 pounds of luggage (including our camera and snorkeling equipment) had ballooned to 129 pounds (we bought an extra duffel in Kona), mostly because we’re addicted to jams and fruit butters (and passion fruit butter is incredible).

Yesterday, November 18, was a concentrated attempt to bring order to email and bills, after sorting things out on Thursday the 16th. I’ll be honest, dealing with money always makes me anxious, but together with Hiro’s help, I’ll get through this.

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Some interesting news from Japan arrived in my inbox while I was away.

The Japanese filmmaker, Takeshi Kitano (a man who inhabited daytime TV talk shows during my ten years in Japan as an unfunny comedian, Beat Takeshi), announced that his upcoming film, Kubi, will deal with the final days of Nobunaga Oda, one of the three samurai generals who tried to unify Japan (by force) during the late sixteenth century.

Unlike most modern and sanitized depictions of Oda, Kitano has said he will talk about Oda’s sexuality, including his (physical and emotional) love for his attendant, Ranmaru Mori. This piqued my interest because I have already written on Oda and Mori, both within my manuscript and in past issues of this newsletter, and Hiro and I visited both the temple in Kyōto (Honnōji) where the two died as well as the temple in Kyōto (Amidadera) where they are said to be interred.

Will I see Kubi? Probably not.

Kitano’s directorial style might have been inspired by the mastery of Akira Kurosawa, but Kitano leans heavily into violence for violence’s sake. Yes, the story of the final days of Oda, with the cruel betrayal of one his generals that led to Oda’s suicide and Mori’s sacrificial death to protect Oda’s body, is a gory one. But I suspect it will be gratuitously so in Kitano’s retelling.