Ā Hui Hou Aku

After Lani gave me the whistle I remembered Kona and showed it to him. Is that confusing enough? Here's how it worked. I was there with my Mother, so in my mind, Kona was with me, instead of back at home. I had been Alaka'i while speaking and translating Hawaiian. But Kona was there and he would want to see the whistle, so I let him. Which made Kona take over from Alaka'i.

While the Kona personality was playing with the whistle Lani actually spoke with my Mother in broken English for a bit. I didn't catch it all but noticed when he asked about my little brother. My Mother said there is no little brother, there's just him, pointing to me. I looked up at her as Alaka'i again and said, "That's not true, little brother is right here. See? He's playing with the whistle." And I switched back and blew into the whistle.

My Mother laughed and said he's just talking about an imaginary friend he made up. But Lani, who had heard me talking about a little brother for a long time in earnest, looked worried.

Then he crouched down to my level and said, "Who am I speaking to now?" in Hawaiian.

I said, "Alaka'i."

He said, "I had hoped you'd make your last visit alone. I was going to take you away someplace safe from them. Now I'll never see you again. I'll never have another chance."

"I'll come back," I said.

He said, "No. You won't be able to."

Then a tear down from his eye. He said, "Even if you come back, I won't be here. I can't stand the thought that you'll never escape. I'm going to go away. Please don't look for me."

My Mother interrupted. She told me we were going to be in big trouble when we got back to my Father, for being so late. The sooner we got back, the better it would be.

The thought that I really might not see Lani again made me think of uku.

Uku is the law of reciprocity. If someone gives something to you, whether it's good or bad, you have to give them something in return of equal value, to keep the universe in balance. I thought I was obligated to give Lani something that was as important as the whistle he gave me. Ordinarily I could wait and do it later, but not if I'd never see him again.

So I picked up the ball and held it out to him, and told him he had to take it.

My Mother said, "You can't give him that, that was from your Father. Your Father will be upset."

I said, "Daddy will know I had to give it to Lani." I had a higher opinion of my Father's good judgment than was justified by my experiences with him.

Lani tried to refuse it. He said that uku didn't apply to a hō'ano'ano gift.

I should have listened to him about that. He was right, of course. The hō'ano'ano giving was completely outside of uku. But I couldn't see that in the short time that I had.

Finally, I talked Lani into taking the ball, and we said goodbyes. "Ā hui hou aku" -- until we meet again. Then he waved for a minute as my Mother, and the dog and I walked back home.

The last I saw of him, he appeared to hang his head in sadness, and turn away.

The Growing Gift

Even at the time, at the ridiculously young age of 3 and a half, I had enough sense of irony to realize what a joke it was that my Mother suspected Lani of being a pedophile. I think now it was based on 1) racism, 2) the fact that he was much older than she expected him to be (she later said she thought he'd be six or seven), and 3) she was a rapist, so it was easy for her to think anybody could be.

I've often noticed that the people I most have to worry about stealing from me are the ones who most often voice such suspicions of others. They suspect others because they do it themselves. If a priest berates his congregation about tithing every week, I bet he cheats on his taxes. My Mother taught me the pattern early.

Seeing me talking with Lani set her at ease, though. I assured her he was good, but I think what really settled her was how comfortable I was with him.

I explained how suspicious my Mother was to Lani, and pointed out the irony. I told him she thought he was evil like herself. He asked if I was really sure she didn't understand Hawaiian, and I proved it by looking at her and insulting her with a smile on my face. She just smiled back.

My Mother began asking him questions through me. I already knew the answers to a lot of her questions but she insisted on answers from him, so he had to say he was from Ni'ihau and a maintenance worker, etc., so I could translate and say the same things I already knew to my Mother.

Then she asked him things I didn't know the answers to. She asked him how old he was. The answer was a word I didn't recognize. Lani then showed that he knew some English words after all. He said in English that he was nineteen.

She asked him how well I was speaking Hawaiian. He said I was speaking just right for my age, and was ready to start school. She was surprised and said, "Start school? How old do you think he is?" He said he thought I was five or maybe six. She laughed and told me to tell him how old I really was, and I held up three fingers plus one bent finger to show the half.

So all along Lani and Lono had thought I was about two years older than I was, probably because I was bigger than a typical Hawaiian child my age, and they'd grown up among Hawaiians on Ni'ihau.

Lani said that, if I was that young, then my speech was very good for my age. He said my main difficulty was with number.

That one stray comment had a major impact on my life. I now realize that he meant grammatical number. Grammatical number is much more complicated in Hawaiian than in English. As well as singulars and plurals, there are duals, and additional sorts of "we" and "us" depending on how many of us there are and whether you are included in us, and different kinds of theys than in English, and I hadn't got it all down yet.

But I thought at the time he meant counting numbers. So later on I became obsessed with learning all about counting numbers, thinking I would make Lani proud. This ultimately led to a doctorate in mathematics.

Had I understood better what Lani was saying, it might have been a doctorate in linguistics.

I showed Lani the ball my Father had given me. He said it reminded him of something he had for me. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled out something. It was a sliding whistle. On top of it was mounted the carving he had been working on for months. It had turned into a bird which was painted red. The basic whistle itself, he said, was store-bought. It was white to begin with, and he had added decorations in red and black along the sides. He attached a feather to it. He apologized for not being able to get an 'i'iwi feather. It had to be a dyed feather. He also apologized for the shape of the bird's beak, he couldn't do a long 'i'iwi's beak with the wood he had.

He said that he made the whistle thinking I was older than I was. It was made as a hō'ano'ano gift.

'Ano means kind. 'Ano'ano means seed or to grow in accordance with one's kind. Hō'ano'ano means to help cause something or someone to grow the way they are meant to grow. Lani said that it was a tradition for a kahuna expert in such things to give a hō'ano'ano gift to each child when he or she reaches the appropriate age. Since human beings are creatures of ideas and imagination, the seeds of humans are ideas also. The gift is designed by the expert based on his knowledge of the individual child, to point to and stir the germinating idea that is already trying to grow in the child.

Lani said he was giving me the whistle even though I was younger than he thought, because he wouldn't be able to give it later. He told me I was supposed to meditate upon it once a day. It wasn't the physical object that was important, but the idea of it.

That, he explained, was why he worked so slowly and carefully on the carving. It was why he only carved it in my presence. Seeing him carve it was part of the gift.

He explained a little of the symbolism. The red bird is my 'aumakua because I was drawn to it by its song. Therefore there must be a song inside me, as part of my seed. Some of the decorations on the whistle represent the drum music I loved, and some pointed to questions about life I asked. There was a design that stood for flight, and for imagination, and the feather also did that.

But the main idea was that the bird needed the whistle to sing. The bird was very red and very Hawaiian, but he needed the white non-Hawaiian whistle to be heard. Lani said I wouldn't be able to sing my song to the world in Hawaiian.

[Below: Just an artistic suggestion of it, not really accurate.]

Mother Meets Lani

As the time came to leave Hawaii my Father took an entire week off, so it was looking like I wouldn't see Lani and Lono before we left. I wasn't really clear on the concept of that. I thought if I missed them that week I could come back the next week and see them. Fortunately there was a final meeting, but not with both of them.

It happened because the dog had to be walked before we left. My Father usually did that, but he was a control freak about packing so this time he had my Mother do it. I begged her to go with me to see Lani and Lono. My Father said not to take more than half an hour. I think my Mother went along with the idea just to get away from my Father, because he was getting irritable. Packing always made him surly because he didn't have any spatial sense. He blamed the suitcases at first, then anyone standing around.

So my Mother, Koko and I set off for Stoneman Field. Of course, my Mother had never been to see Lani and Lono, so she had no idea where we were going. I grabbed my ball as we left. I'd finally be able to show it to them.

A lot of what I know about my visits to my friends became evident through this walk. The reason I know about how many blocks down Leilehua Road I had to walk every day to see them is that on this one trip my Mother provided the count. I had only just recently learned the Hawaiian word for five, now I learned the English word.

My Mother was astonished that I had been wandering so far from the house every day. She complained that we'd used up half our time already, just as I spotted Lani. She was saying we'd have to go back right away.

When Lani saw me, he called me over to his side of the Avenue. At this point I was crossing the avenue myself as long as Lani or Lono was there to wave me over.

I started to cross but my Mother grabbed my arm and started yelling to Lani, "Who are you? What have you been doing to my son?" After that she let go of me to step off the curb to march over to him to confront him. But by then a car was on it's way. I ran and yanked her by the skirt and told her, "Not now, a car is coming!" It shocked her to realize that I'd prevented her from being hit, after all the times she'd told me not to cross unattended.

When it was clear again, Lani called out to me in Hawaiian to come over to his side of the street. It's odd to me now that I remember that the word for side he used, 'ao'ao, was one I didn't know before. But I got the idea and I led my Mother across.

My Mother was still wanting to know what horrible things the man was doing to me when we walked up, but if Lani understood anything she was saying he didn't let on. He just looked at me for help. I asked him in Hawaiian where Lono was, and he
told me Lono was out sick. It was another new word for me, 'ōma'i. We talked at length about the meaning of it. The word was funny to me because I knew ma'i to mean genitals. My Mother looked confused through the whole thing, then I explained to her that Lono "had a cold" because that was the only kind of sick I knew.

She demanded to know from Lani why he wasn't talking to her, and I told her it's because Lani didn't speak any English, but I could help. And I began translating back and forth for them.

I believe that my memories of Lani and Lono would have been lost forever if it were not for this one conversation. Up until this conversation my world had been in two pieces, each with its own memories consisting of a separate web of associations. The next 15 or 20 minutes of conversation, translating between Lani and my Mother cemented the two worlds together and made the memories of one world accessible through the other, because they intersected for that time.

Last Chant Learned

The last new chant I learned was the Kamanomano chant. There was an unusual prolonged torrential downpour that drove Lani and I indoors. We were in the gymnasium near the tennis courts. Lono was off somewhere else. I begged Lani to sing a chant and he lost patience and reminded me that the chants are spiritual. You just don't sing them any place, any time.

I must have looked really hurt and made him feel horribly guilty, because he immediately came up with a chant that he could feel comfortable singing in a gym. Years later I found it performed twice on tracks 13 & 14 of the Smithsonian Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants album. It was translated by Mary Pukui in the notes this way:

1. 'Eia o Kalani Kamanomano
[Here is the heavenly one Kamanomano]

2. Kamanomano heke o ke kapu
[The highest and strictest of the tabus]

3. Ka honu pe'ekua wakawaka
[The thick horny shelled turtle]

4. Pip'i ka unahi ma ke kua
[With scales up the back]

5. Hiolo ka unahi ma ke alo
[And scales that come down the front]

6. Ma ka maha 'opi o Kalani
[Along the sides of the heavenly one]

7. Kalani ka hiapo, kama kapu
[The first born, a tabu child]

8. Hānau mua o Hawai'i
[First born chief in Hawai'i]

9. Ka 'īlio nūkea ma ka lani
[A snout raised up to the heavens]

10. 'Eia la ke 'o nei
[Lo, here he is!

Lani's interpretation was unusually clear and specific. He said it was about something you could see in the sky at night. He gave a different translation of line 6, saying it meant, "in the cleft temple of the sky." That referred to a place where the Milky Way appeared to separate and return to itself. So it isn't a constellation, but a relative void of stars. The song is describing it as looking like a fabulous long necked turtle with snout raised and jewels sprinkled over and under it, and suggesting that he is an apparition of a great ancestor.

He touched the right side of my head at my temple, to explain the meaning of the word "maha." The touch reminded me of the car's strike, and it burned Lani's meaning into me.

Designing Mind

My last few months in Hawaii were frustrating. When my parents found out they would be leaving soon, they wanted to get last minute sight-seeing and beach time in. So my Father started taking vacation days and sick days off for excursions. Of course I wasn't in on the planning of any of this. I'd just wake up one day thinking I was going to see my friends, and instead I'm dragged off to some must-see tourist-trap.

On top of that there were hours spent in a hot car in a parking lot while my parents shopped at furniture stores for the kind of cheap island-style bamboo and wicker furniture that they had to have to remember Hawaii by.

The worst thing that happened was the arrival of relatives. They had to see all the sights all over again, that my parents had already seen. Here's my Grandmother and one of my cousins with me and my parents and the dog at a beach. Doesn't my Grandmother look like she's hearing a voice telling her to wade home? I think my Mother is getting ready to strangle me, as soon as the shot is over. My Father looks like he's having a rare Jeff Goldblum moment in his head. Ordinarily he wasn't at all Golblumesque. I'm much more Goldblumesque than he ever was.


The later conversations with Lani and Lono that did take place were all over the map. Literally.

There was a long conversation in which Lani talked about his theories of Atlantis and Mu. He talked about the lost continent of Mu as though it were a traditional Polynesian idea, when I am sure that it was mostly a Western European fantasy based on misreadings of Mayan texts. I think he mixed up the continent with Hawaiian legends of people also named Mu, who were said to have inhabited the islands before the Polynesians arrived, and might still reside hidden in the mountains.

There were stories of other predecessors of the Polynesians, including cannibals. That was just creepy.

When Lani brought up the Menehune, who were a legendary short-statured people of the islands, he managed to mix them up with Leprechauns. All in all, the sense I get in remembering it all is that I can't rely on much as being genuinely ancient Hawaiian. He filled in gaps with anything he could find.

There were some things that I'm sure hailed back to pre-colonial times. There were ghost stories. There was a strange tale about two shape-shifting gods or demi-gods chasing each other from island to island.

Then there was talk about the Huna. I don't know what to make of that. Could it be ancient, or was it extrapolated from Buddhist and Hindu beliefs? A lot of the natives who ended up on Ni'ihau, though they spoke Hawaiian, had mixed ancestry, including Japanese and Chinese. A strong Buddhist influence on the non-Christian holdouts wouldn't be very surprising.

At any rate I remember some of what Lani had to say about the Huna, traditional or not. He said that just because the word means "hidden" everybody thinks it's an occult secret, but the joke on everyone who thinks that is that the Huna isn't itself hidden, the Huna is about "hidden-ness."

He illustrated by pointing out that when he held the palm of a hand up to me, I couldn't see the back, and when he held the back to me, I couldn't see the palm. He said that the Huna begins with the simple observation that you can't be aware of everything all the time. There are always going to be aspects of reality that are hidden from you, and if you look at them, other things will go hidden. The Huna involves learning respect for what you can't know.

A related idea was the idea of mental states. He said there are many different mental states a person can be in. One state is good for one kind of understanding. Another state is good for another kind of understanding. There is no state that is good for all kinds of understanding at once. That's why there isn't just one god, but many, because there isn't just one way to understand and organize reality. Only mana comes in touch with everything. But mana has no mind.

Minds, by their nature, organize and prioritize. Therefore as soon as our minds awaken and we look out and see the world, our minds impose order on that world, which order is never universal. Some things come forward, other things recede, in accordance with who we are and the sort of state we are in. It even depends on how hungry we are, and what we eat. if we are flies, we look for shit everywhere, and we're happy to find it.

Once we know that there are different mental states that provide access to alternate views of the world, Lani said, that the next thing that Huna does is offer ways to move among the states.

Only one such method was discussed. It came up in a conversation a few weeks before it was time for me to leave Hawaii. I was told about sleeping mat designs.

This is something I've confirmed: Ni'ihau is known for its sleeping mats. The people make sleeping mats which are decorated with geometric designs called pāwehe. The designs featured repeated triangles and squares. There are checkerboard patterns, rows, and a few patterns that seem to grow out from a point.

The Bishop Museum has samples online. See artifacts numbered 02560, 02562, 02564, 02565.

What Lani added to this, which I haven't confirmed, is that long ago the designs weren't just for sleeping on, but were for meditating upon.

The idea was, the meditator would sit and by some means, draw one of these designs. There were chants suitable for different designs depending on the state the practitioner wanted to achieve. While singing the chant the meditator would add to the drawing as his mind and aims moved him. The design would be an evolving ki'i of the state he was reaching toward.

I don't know if the Huna really involved such practices, or if a Taoist injected such ideas into the blend of post-colonial tradition after Ni'ihau was established as a native reservation. Or did the original Polynesian settlers in Hawaii bring such ideas with them from Asia?

What I do know is that a lot of this thinking would later be very difficult to integrate with my Sunday School lessons.

Tiki, or Ki'i

I followed Lani's progress closely as he worked his carving every day. It was slow; he only worked on it during lunch for at most five minutes any given day. Some days he wouldn't work on it at all. He would appear to meditate on it. I eventually found out he wasn't working on it except at lunches. He wouldn't say why.

Lani's carving was a ki'i. That's Hawaiian for "tiki".

People think tiki are idols. Here are six tiki or ki'i:


Ki'i are images. They can be drawings, diagrams or sculptures. They can be visages or representations of visages. They can be accurate or schematic, abstract or concrete, realistic or symbolic. The word tiki, or ki'i means image, not idol.

By the way, the one above that looks like an idol, at the lower right, is a symbolic expressionistic image of a Maori ancestor, and is no more an idol than Michelangelo's realistic but equally imaginary portrayal of Adam at the upper left.

Keiki Kona

It was days after my Mother arrived home from the mental ward before she spoke to me. She was drunk a lot of the time. She kept in her bedroom. Finally she came out and I tried to say the nicest thing I could think of saying. I asked about the baby that was due.

I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.

Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.

She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"

Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"

Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.

In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.

I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?

So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.

Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.

To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.

I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.

So I called little brother Kona.

When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.

Reconciliation

I got surgery for a ruptured penis. Even though I was under a general anesthesia I woke up from it with dreams of horrific pain. I dreamed my body was being sawn in half from the crotch up, with dreamed pain to match. That pain I remember.

When it was over and I could go home, I had to wear a cup for a month or two.

My Father drove me home from the hospital, and for the next two weeks took care of me. My Mother wasn't around. When I asked about her, my Father just said she's resting up in the hospital.

My Father got to know me more in those two weeks than he had in a year. I felt a bond forming.

At the same time, I wanted to get back to Lani and Lono. I believed that all the horrible things that had happened since I stopped seeing them happened just because of that. If I had not turned away from them I wouldn't have taken up with Jackson. If I hadn't taken up with Jackson my Mother wouldn't be in the hospital.

But my Father wasn't negligent in the way my Mother was. He wouldn't let me run off for hours in a day. I had to stay by the house while he was taking care of me.

I had a birthday coming up, in July. My Father asked me what I wanted most, and I told him I wanted a ball. I had in mind a rubber bouncing ball like one I'd seen Jackson play with. Dad said it would be easy to get me a ball, and asked me what else I wanted. The only thing I could think of was to beg him to go to Stoneman Field with me so he could meet my friends. He said, no, he was too old to meet my friends. When I told him my friends were big people too, he just laughed, like he didn't believe me.

Finally, the two weeks were up and my Mother came home.

In those days mental patients often had to dress just like convicts in a penitentiary. That's the way my Mother was when she stepped out of the car. She was wearing striped pajamas with big black and white stripes so she couldn't get far without being seen if she ever escaped. Her head had been shaved and was still bandaged.

As she came in the house I stood waiting. I'd been coached by my Father to say "I love you Mommy." I squeaked my line out as she glared at me. She said, "Get the fuck out of my way, you filthy freak. I don't want to ever see you again. You did this to me." She went to bed and didn't come out for the weekend.

Then the weekend was over, and my Father had to go back to work. That morning I ran off to see Lani and Lono.

When I saw them I rejoined them in tears. I told Lani I was sorry for being angry with him, and he was right, I should be outside the kapu, I wasn't meant to live like normal people.

Lani told me that he was the one who had been wrong. It was wrong of him, he said, to laden me with all his hopes and dreams and not consider my needs, and it was wrong to talk about the old ways as if they were perfect and the way things should be now.

He said he had already known that the kapu was wrong, but he was just clinging to everything, and you can't do that. Some of the old ways are best left dead.

I told them everything that had gone wrong during the month since I'd last seen them. Then Lani took out a piece of wood he was carving, and got ready to work on it. It was a different piece than I'd seen him working on before. He said he'd been saving it in the hopes of seeing me again, he wanted me to watch him carve it from the beginning.

I asked what it was going to be. He said some sort of animal. He said it would be a gift for a special little brother. I said I didn't know he had a little brother, that I thought the one he had died. He said this is for a different little brother. Then he started carving, while Lono sang a chant.

Giving Voice

I have a special memory of being told creation stories. I remember only a few details of the creation stories themselves. I can try to reconstruct it. What struck me in the telling wasn't so much the actual stories but the way Lani and Lono took turns at telling them.

I think Lono started it by telling the Christian story of genesis. Lani countered by saying that other people had a different idea of what happened, and he told of how all there is sprang out of the primordial god Kanaloa.

Rather than argue which of the two of those ideas was right, Lono said there were still others who had a different idea. He told another story from the tradition, how the sky god Lani and the earth goddess Papa made love and Papa gave birth to the other gods and eventually Kane, who made people from rocks.

Rather than argue which of those three ideas was right, Lani said that there was another view, that was like that, but said that Kane made people out of clay.

Lono said that there was widespread agreement that men were made from clay, which was why the red clay was sacred, as well as the color red, but actually there was another view, that it wasn't men who were made from the clay, it was the taro plant, and men later descended from the tarot plant over many generations.

Pretty soon the words, "but other people say" had me in stitches every time I heard it.

I understood the joke. Anyone who says they know how the world began is wrong. Nobody was there to see it. But that doesn't prevent us from talking about it. The real creation is the recreation that happens every time you tell it a new way.

Whenever I hear Creationists and Evolutionists debating I remember that conversation, and laugh all over again.

Substitute Puppies

Lono's involvement in my spiritual education was mixed, in motivation and outcome. To get at the difference I will try to get at the difference I see between what religion should be, and what it appears to me to be to most everybody else.

There is a distinction between psyche and pneuma that meant something to the ancient pre-Christian Greeks, less to the Christians, and maybe more to me. Generally people translate them as soul and spirit respectively.

Christians say Jesus is all about saving our souls. But when it comes down to practice, there's very little food for the soul, just some meager wafers of unleavened bread and sips of wine, compared to the massive airlift of supplies for the spirit that Christianity provides. You could really get the idea that Christians are using "soul" as a synonym for "spirit".

In fact, when I raise this point with individual Christians, the one response I get most often is that the point makes no sense, "of course they're the same," they say. They say soul is just another word for spirit.

So I say to them, "Why don't you say Jesus saves spirits?" And they answer by telling me that "Jesus saves souls" is just an old phrase that's become set in the language. They could say "Jesus saves spirits" and mean the same thing, but they don't, because there's no difference anyway.

Well, to me there's a huge difference. To me souls and spirits are two different things, and my chief complaint about Christianity is that rather than saving souls it mangles them and leaves them for dead, in order to save spirits.

To illustrate the distinction between soul and spirit, I will use a very familiar common scenario, the Substitute Puppy scenario.

We have all had this happen to us or known someone who has. Let's say a boy of six, I'll call him "Bean", is given a puppy, let's call it "Bottom". Bean immediately adores Bottom because Bottom is so cute and cuddly. Bean feeds and waters Bottom every day for a month, and takes Bottom for walks, and tries to run and play with Bottom, even though Bottom has such very short pudgy legs so Bottom doesn't run so very well. Bottom rolls and stumbles more than runs.

But one terrible day, Bottom rolls and stumbles clear to the edge of the avenue and over the curb and into the avenue, and a double semi sweeps by and rolls over Bottom and the driver doesn't even feel a bump, and he keeps on driving and doesn't even know he hit anything until he stops for coffee in North Bend, and then he thinks by the looks of it that it might have been a squirrel, because the stain is too little to be anything else.

Bean, who actually witnesses Bottom's demise, cries his brains out. Bean brains, Bean tears, everywhere you look.

You know what's coming. I didn't call it the Substitute Puppy scenario for nothing. Dad, probably a Christian, goes right out, that very afternoon, and obtains a substitute puppy. He brings home another cute puppy, and announces proudly that he has solved the problem, here's the solution. He even suggests a name. "Why don't you call it Bottom Too?"

Bean needs only a split second to observe that Bottom Too is NOT Bottom. Bean, having already cried his brains out, is now crying out sensory organs, trachea, esophagus, and getting ready to cry up lungs, stomach, and guts. Let's skip further discussion of that and leave Bean to it, while we instead get back to our point.

Our point is that the substitute puppy is a solution for the spirit, not the soul. I call Christianity the Substitute Puppy religion, because Christianity seems to encourage these kinds of "solutions" more even than other doctrinary religions.

When Bean starts crying at the loss of Bottom, he's grieving. He doesn't have a problem with his soul. His soul is working, doing something souls do well, albeit slowly. He doesn't need a fix, he has a soul that will do the fix. He doesn't even have a problem with his spirit. His spirit is just getting out of the way, to let the soul do the emotional mending that's called for. Dad, however, doesn't see Bean's soul work as Bean. He sees the crying as Bean not being himself. He thinks Bean has to get back into his former spirit.

That's Christianity all the way. It's all about trying to get people into the "right" spirit. Fixing the spirit when it doesn't need fixing. It's worse than totally neglecting the soul, which, to begin with, especially in unbroken children, is a far better emotional doctor than any that Christians can come up with. What they do is worse because it interferes with the soul in such a way as to damage it.

Far from saving souls, the religion that Christians blame Jesus for founding actually destroys souls, so that Christians lose the ability to grieve effectively, among other things. They are only able to find substitutes for grieving. Whole cultures that have had their soul-based religions crushed and replaced with Christianity are now all about finding substitutes for all their losses, which are enormous, beginning with their former traditions.

The Evangelical Christians will say that all that's a good thing, so long as the substitute chosen is Jesus Christ. I say that's sick, and it dishonors Christ Himself to make Him out to be only the best substitute puppy in the shop.

So, getting back to Lono. Lono and Lani both suffered the same family loss, before they met me. The "younger brother" who died would have been close to both of them, whether he was a brother in our sense or not. Lani took it hard, and Lono, the Christian, wanted to fix Lani's spirit. Lani wouldn't accept Jesus, the universal substitute, so Lono had to settle for an alternate substitute. I was to be Lani's substitute puppy.

So Lono colluded with Lani's spiritual (I should be saying soulful, but spiritual is the word set in the language) adoption of me and allowed his education of me in Kahiko to go forward, in order that I help in a grieving process that didn't really need me. But Lono was still a Christian, so all of this was done with misgivings.

Ironically, Lani began to take me as a substitute puppy in much the same way that he might have taken Christ if he had accepted him. As more and more of my previous troubles with my parents came out, as they learned of my eidetic memory and my conviction that I was a replacement of the original me, he entertained the idea that I might be a kind of Kahiko messiah.

In 1952 Hawaiian Kahiko was held in low-esteem even by most natives. The few that still wanted to preserve the old religion and traditional ways had to mostly keep company in secret. As often happens in such situations, many of those holdouts clung to a dream that there would one day come a savior who would be able to restore the old ways to common practice, and maybe even drive the haole out at the same time.

Lani told me at one point he thought I could be that Hawaiian messiah. The fact that I was the white son of a white Army officer only made it seem more believable that I might have eventually, when I grew up, the real-world power needed to pull off the revolution. The fact that I seemed to him to take to the Kahiko as if I were born to it made Lani believe my changeling idea. His version of it was, the gods saw that Kahiko needed a savior, so they put one of their children in the body of a dying white boy whom they took up to heaven when his parents didn't want him.

The child of the gods (me!) would not only bring justice to the evil white parents, but he would also set the Hawaiian world back in its upright position.

Bloody Vision

After hearing about my parent's attempt to kill me on my first birthday, Lani and Lono conferred together about me, about what they could do about my parents. They talked about it that day, and the next. They couldn't think of anything that wouldn't put me in danger.

There was no such thing as Child Protection Services then. All they could do was report what they had heard me say to the authorities. But the authorities wouldn't be able to act on it, because it would be a toddler's word against his parents. I'd be left with my parents, who would now know that I was accusing them.

Worse, they were in danger. They were 18-year-old men seeing a child every day. The authorities would consider that strange and were likely to suspect undue influence, if nothing else.

Around this time they told me a changeling story about a boy abused by his parents. The gods take the boy away and replace him with one of their own children, who punishes the parents. I told my friends I identified with the changeling. They warned me against thinking that way. They said you don't want to be that loved by the gods, it only brings trouble.

I thought about that. I said it looked like the gods loved the original me too much.

The thought that I could bring grief to my parents, especially my Mother, motivated me to want to learn English faster. The dog Koko was present for a breakthrough.

I was sitting around in the front yard when troops marched past. Their boots hitting the pavement reminded me of English. Then I thought of a nearby stream, and it reminded me of Hawaiian. It seemed at that moment that I could never speak English fluently. But then the dog ambled by. I had a sudden vision of Koko "Blood" being chopped up into a dozen bloody pieces. Then the pieces are reassembled to make a new animal shape. It's still dead and bloody, but I imagined life moving into it, and a new dog getting up and walking off.

Immediately after that vision I found myself able to think in English finally. Could the vision have caused the breakthrough, or was it just a sign of it happening?

Big Maka, Little Maka

Lani wanted to teach me Kahiko. He never had time to teach much, but he wanted to teach as much as he could. The biggest barrier, besides time, was the lack of props. He tried to explain the old living arrangements, but it was tough getting the ideas across without the aid of pictures or models. Likewise, with just Lani and Lono to talk to I never got to hear women speaking, or interactions between men and women.

Early in my teaching Lani focused on the cast of spiritual characters and spiritual entities that made up the Kahiko world. The major gods were described. Their dependence on mana was emphasized. Mana was all important. Gods were nothing without mana. You can get too much. You can get more mana than you're ready for.

Moving down the hierarchy, there's the great ancestors. These were the 'aumākua, who acted as family and personal gods. You could have more than one. An 'aumakua could take the form of any sort of animal, or even a plant. The taro (kalo) plant was an 'aumakua to everyone. Poi is made from it, that's why you don't argue when the poi can hear.

Lani and Lono told me a story about a shark that protected and saved someone from danger. I was a little bored by the story itself. I think they thought it would interest me because the protagonist was a boy, but I didn't care about the kid in the story. What I wanted to know was, what's a shark?

Try it yourself. Try explaining to a 2 or 3 year old what a shark is, without the use of pictures. We ran into additional confusion because of a peculiarity of the word for eyes in Hawaiian. Maka doesn't only mean eyes, it also means face. So when they said the shark has a big wide face with little eyes, it came out "big maka, little maka." I don't think I knew what a shark looked like for another two years.


I asked if I had any 'aumākua. They said they couldn't know what my family's 'aumākua could be, but asked if any animals had seemed special to me. I mentioned the red bird that I'd seen the day my Father went to Korea. I imitated the red bird's song from memory. They both recognized the song and could name the bird. I believe now that they said it was an 'i'iwi.

Then I told them for the first time about how my parents had arranged to run me over with the car, and how seeing the red bird in my imagination saved my life. I figured that if the red bird really was there to save my life, that would make him an 'aumakua for sure, but since he was just there in my thoughts it didn't count.

Lani's answer to that was that thoughts count more than anything. Thoughts are driven by mana, thoughts are how the gods work on people. If a thought of a red bird saved you, that's mana flowing through you. The 'aumakua is anyway only a sign for that working.

Meanings Are Keys

My memory of my time in Hawaii is mostly of meanings rather than actual words. So I need to explain how it is that I know that my friends were named Lani and Lono when I don't really have a direct memory of hearing their names.

I know their names thanks to knowing their meanings.

Right after Lani finished his ritual adoption of me, while we were still in the patch of woods, he stared into my eyes and said, in Hawaiian, that my eyes shined like the sky.

My eyes were very blue. Hawaiian, it turns out, doesn't really have a word for blue. There are phrases for different kinds of blue. Maka ālohilohi like me lani, eyes that shine like the sky, is such a phrase. Very blue.

But when I heard him say that, my answer was "Like you?" Because Lani's name was the word for sky. I hadn't known that. I never knew before then, that lani also meant sky. He proceeded to tell me other meanings of lani. It means heaven, it refers to the sky god. He said he was actually named for the sky god. rather than the sky.

When we returned to Lono I asked him if his name meant something. He mimed a plant growing. I didn't get it at first. I thought he was indicating a wooden stake being driven into the ground. Finally, I understood he was talking about plants growing. He was named for the god of fertility. Well, that's Lono.

That's it. That's how I know their names.

Spiritual Adoption

One day at lunch I asked Lani and Lono to explain a song about the demi-god Māui. After explaining the song's reference to Māui, I wanted to hear more, and they started telling me more. After all, Māui is the sort of character made to appeal to a two and a half year-old. He's like a mild-mannered super-hero. He's got a great sense of humor. He let's himself get put down and then triumphs.

In one story he fishes the islands up out of the sea. In another he slows the sun down because the days are too short for people to get anything done. He's always doing things that benefit people. He finds out about death and he considers it an injustice and an insult to living things. He's told that the goddess of death, Hine-Nui-Te-Po, has a weakness. Her curse of death will be dissolved forever if anyone can enter her body and pass through it so as to exit her mouth.

I should probably mention that this may not even have ever been a Hawaiian version of the story of Māui's death. It definitely was told in New Zealand. I have other examples of Lani and Lono telling me stuff that came from all over Polynesia. I take it as evidence of the paucity of the preserved Hawaiian tradition that they needed to range outside Hawaii to supplement it. Later, I'll give examples of even non-Polynesian influences in Lani's "tradition."

Anyway, the story went, that Māui had the power to make himself as small as a mouse. In the version I was told, he whistles as he approaches Hine-Nui-Te-Po, and his whistling entrances her, so she goes to sleep. Then he enters her, and begins to make way toward her mouth.

The rest of the story goes: her body muffles Māui's whistling, she wakes up, she feels something moving inside her, so she crushes it. So Māui died in his attempt to bring immortality to all, and so that's why we all still must die today.



[I painted Death of Māui in the 90s]

I managed to just barely hear all that. it was hard, because what was going through my mind was just that he entered her and made his way to her mouth. I asked them to explain that bit over again, I thought maybe I heard it wrong.

They were a little embarrassed by the question. They said I had to use my imagination. So I said my imagination told me that Māui would have had to go in where pooh comes out, like my Mother does to me sometimes.

This revelation changed everything. Lani said my Mother was a evil female dog, 'ilio wahine 'ino. There was long quiet.

After a few minutes I said I had to go pee. Until then Lono always took me to the nearby woods for that. This time, he told Lani that he ought to do the honors. I'm now sure that he knew that Lani wanted to be alone with me, and why.

We went to one of the little patches of woods that grew at the corners of Stoneman Field. Lani helped me get my shorts down. When I was done, he lightly tapped my penis with one hand, while holding his other hand under it, so a drop of urine fell on his hand. He then recited a ritual formula. The speech, as I remember it now, amounted to a promise to take care of me, all my seed, and all my progeny from all my seed. It was a kind of adoption. The ritual required that my urine touch his hand so that he could carry the adoption without my parents' permission.

It was a spiritual adoption, that gave him the right to educate me in spiritual matters, because he now was sure I wasn't getting the help I needed from my parents. And even though Lono was Christian, he'd decided to step aside and let Lani go ahead with it, because he knew Lani felt so strongly about it.

Some mana, you want to get out of the way of.

Hawaiian Kung Fu Toddler?

The other way I dealt with not being able to follow Lani and Lono around at work all day was to go back to wandering and to play closer to home.

Since I was still not speaking English easily, I didn't connect with other children. Maybe that increased the bullying more than it would have been otherwise. I mentioned problems I had with bullies and also with snarling dogs to Lani and Lono. Lani said I should carry a cane for the dogs. He cut a branch off a nearby tree and showed me how to use it to hold off dogs.

To deal with the bullies Lani and Lono both spent time teaching me some moves that would help if I was cornered by one of them. Their main advice was to run away. But failing that they wanted to me to defend myself nonviolently. They showed me what they said was a Hawaiian version of Judo. I don't remember what the moves were, there can't have been much, but I do remember drawing upon these lessons as late as age 7, and finding them useful in protecting myself from children as old as 11. So there must have been something to them.

After I started walking around with the cane people in the neighborhood began referring to me as "the little old man." I don't think it was just because of the cane. My talks with Lani and Lono were having an effect on my outlook. I was feeling alienated from the other people around me. I was a foreigner among what should have been my own people. Plus, the conversations with the Hawaiians had depth. We started conversations typically picking apart an old song. The old songs were deep, so the talk was philosophical.

Here's a picture of me during this period. You can see it in the face. I'm at a birthday party for one of the neighbor girls. I had to put my cane down to hold a frozen-Kool-Aid-sicle I was given. Those are my first ever homemade frozen Kool-Aid-sicles! I remember it well. I also remember being bored by the other kids and considering them childish, even though most were older than me. The knock-kneed look was remarked upon at the time by adults. I never figured out where it came from. It eventually went away.

Ripples in History II

The decision to have me meet Lani and Lono only during their lunch break meant I had to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. One of the things I did was follow them around at a distance. I did that mainly when they were working on my side of Leilehua Road. I learned new songs that way, listening to Lani sing while he worked.

At the beginning Lani sang what I would call post-colonial songs at our lunches. There weren't lyrics about the old Hawaiian gods, for example. But when I listened from a distance he would often sing the older songs, including prayer chants.

When I asked about those songs at lunch during our Hawaiian period Lani got upset and walked away. I asked Lono what I said wrong. He told me Lani was afraid of hurting me. That made no sense to me at all. I couldn't imagine either of them hurting me. When Lani came back I insisted that he tell me himself what was wrong.

I was so determined about it, Lono said it was like I was from Ni'ihau myself. He explained that there's a saying that people of Ni'ihau lean against the wind. The rest of Hawaii considers them stubborn and contrary.

They started telling me history. They said that a long time ago, after White People came, the old Hawaiian customs were overturned and the people who hang on to them had to do it in secret, and that was still the case then. They said that even in their own family Lani's following of the tradition was not appreciated. Most of the family was Christian. He had to learn from a grandfather. His own parents didn't approve.

They also told me about discrimination against Hawaiian people, in addition to the rejection of the old culture. They described an incident in recent history of a Hawaiian man who was killed because people were quick to believe accusations against Hawaiians without evidence, and his murderers went free (they were probably referring to the Massie-Kahahawai Affair). They said this incident proved to them that Hawaiians could get no justice from the haole, and therefore it was very important that nothing be done that could arouse suspicion.

They said that telling me about the ancient gods could get them into trouble, because it would look like they were trying to make me non-Christian. They also said that for men their ages to be too close to a boy my age, could be seen as bad, because people might think they were doing something wrong with me physically.

I said, oh, like what my Mother does? I described how my Mother touched me.

At that, Lani began to cry. Lono just stared ahead for a minute. Then very quietly he said, "Let's try this. Do you know what a secret is?" I said yes. "Can you keep everything we tell you about the old songs secret from everyone, including your parents?" I said yes.

They talked about it between themselves a minute more. Then they told me they believed me, and that they could tell me about the old songs.

Rise Up! Seize the Cookie!

At home I observed my Father in uniform and later described his insignia to my Ni'ihau friends. They told me my Father was a Captain. They were clearly impressed. The word for Captain in Hawaiian is Alaka'i, which also means boss or supervisor, the only name they had for me. They pointed out the connection, and suggested I was taking after my Father already. I had thoughts of becoming a soldier.

I asked if they ever wanted to be soldiers. Lono said he might, for a while, but eventually he wanted to study English more and teach school. This one remark was very important to me. What's English? The language of Britain and of the U.S., where I was from, they said. Not Hawai'ian, but a separate language. It was a revelation that took a while to absorb. There was also a reminder of school. I learned where I would have found it. It was almost twice as far as I had searched.

Lani said he wanted to be an artist. He took a carving out of his pocket and showed it to me. It didn't look like anything but a lump of wood, but he said in time it would look like an animal. When I asked what animal, he said whatever it wanted.

I remember at the time being more interested in Lono's goals than in Lani's. It was about this time though that I learned they were brothers. Lono said they were non-identical twins. They were born at the same time to the same Mother. But they were so different. Lono was so extroverted. Lani was quiet and distant.

At home I had a new kind of problem. The new dog Koko was getting cookies all the time, but my Mother still was not feeding me when my Father was at at work. I was beginning to reach the point where I could start to pronounce English but the words wouldn't come out. I was sure that if I could tell my Mother what was wrong everything would be solved.

I came up with the idea of translating Hawaiian into English. I worked for a long time and came up with the sentence, "If dog gets cookie, boy gets cookie." I tried it out the next time my Mother was dishing out cookies to Koko.

It was probably January, 1952. I'm sure it was after Christmas. I was 2 and a half and it was 18 months after my first word. My Mother's jaw dropped open. Her eyes opened wide. Then she smiled, gave me a cookie and said, "All you ever had to do was ask."

When I told Lani and Lono about it they were stunned, too. Not that I had spoken English, but that I hadn't been doing so. This was they first they knew of it.

It was already decided that I couldn't follow them all day and distract them from their work. Now they laid down a rule that the hour's lunchtime would be divided into equal halves. The first thirty minutes of each lunch break would consist of Lono and I practicing our English. The second thirty minutes would be all three of us speaking or singing Hawaiian.

Lunches were at 11am to noon. I was taught just enough about telling time to know when it was getting close to 11.

About this time, I began to feel bad that my friends were always bringing food to the lunches and I never had any to bring. I think I was picking up on the Hawaiian value of uku, reciprocity. So I worked out how to say, "Want cookies for friends."

Once again, mother was stunned. This time, it was that I had friends. She asked a lot of questions, but I couldn't answer any of them because I hadn't prepared. The only thing I could do was nod yes when she asked if they were bigger. I could only say sentences I'd worked on and practiced for an hour or so. Finally though she agreed to give me a bag of cookies.

A typical day would consist of me getting up around daybreak, playing by myself in the house or close by while my Mother slept off the previous night's drunk. Then around 10:15 or so, I would go into her bedroom and start yelling, "E Māmā, e ala e! E ala ala e!" Once she was up, she give me a bag of cookies for my friends. She knew they were older kids, but had in mind 4 or 5 year-olds, 6 year-olds, maybe. She never dreamed I was meeting 18 year-olds for lunch every day.

Ripples in History I

As I spoke more Hawaiian I asked more questions. Every day I had to be led back across Leilehua Road, and Lani and Lono left. Where did they go? Where did they come from? Would they come and meet my parents? Why not?

At one point I asked them if their Mother gave them the food they brought for lunch each day. They said no, it was their own food. Then they said they didn't live with their Mother, she still lived back home. So I asked where home was, and got an answer that meant nothing at first. Home was Ni'ihau. All I could imagine was a house, maybe half a mile up further than I'd been. I asked which way was it, and could we go there.

So that led to a long discussion about the concept of "moku", or island. O'ahu is an Island. Ni'ihau is an island. We'd need a boat.

What's a boat? They described the old wa'a to me, the traditional canoes. They sang an odd Hawaiian chant about the crew of a war canoe asking their captain which way to sail, and repeatedly having their question put off. I remember the gist of one verse. The warriors ask which way, meaning which way to war. The Captain answers by silently pointing to the leeward, the calm side. I've never been able to find the chant in the literature, but I'm sure that verse was in there, and I know it was sung in Hawaiian, not English.

But after we talked about that, it led to more talk about war. Lono was prompted to recite the Charge of the Light Brigade.

I was fascinated by it all, and asked if they knew any warriors I could meet. They laughed at that, and said, look around you. This is an Army base. All these men in uniforms are warriors. They said my own Father was probably a warrior. I was skeptical, but determined to try to figure it out. They told me what to look for in the way of insignia.

When I said I was sure nobody was doing any killing among my Father's friends, they brought up the attack on Pearl Harbor. They pointed north to the green Ko'olau Hills and told me that on a day just like that day not long ago (it was ten years earlier at the time, but "ten" could have meant nothing to me) Japanese planes appeared from exactly there and flew over Schofield Barracks and beyond to Pearl Harbor, killing many American soldiers like my Father, who then took up arms and went to war against Japan.

The history lesson provided an insight into what my father might be about. I remember wondering if he was picked to be a soldier because of his fits of anger. Maybe anger is good in a fighting man.

But that's not what the song said. The song said, if you want to know the right way to war, look to the calm side.

No Arguing Over Poi

Even though my English vocabulary must have been fairly large by the time I was speaking Hawaiian, I wasn't thinking in English. It's hard for me to believe that, but I know it's true because I have numerous memories from the next few months of trying to think in English and falling back on Hawaiian.

My Hawaiian friends didn't know that at first. They thought I was just holding back.

I started singing the songs Lani sang. I wouldn't sing when he did, because I thought that adding my voice would spoil it. But afterward I would repeat the songs. One day I surprised them by singing a song Lani had not sung for days, and which they hadn't heard me sing before. Lono asked how I could remember so well. I said, I didn't know, I just could. I told them I could remember every single one of the songs, by the sound of it, without always knowing what the words meant.

They asked me what was the first song I recalled. I said I remembered a song from before I met them. When I agreed to sing it for them I'm sure at that moment they were both thinking they were finally going to hear me speaking English. Instead I sang the entire 19 lines of the Kaulilua song that I had heard once when I was 5 or 6 months old, nearly two years earlier.

The Smithsonian Folkways series has a tape and a CD called Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants (at the link you can hear excerpts). It has archival recordings of numerous old performances. There are 25 tracks on the tape. Tracks 10, 11, 18, 20, and 22 (110, 111, 118, 120, and 122 on the CD) present different versions of the same Kaulilua song. The liner notes include the words and two translations one from 1935 and one from 1952, both by Mary Kawena Pukui (mistakenly called Pukai in several places on the CD information page). A version of this is what I had remembered phonetically:

1. Kaulīlua i ke anu Wai'ale'ale
2. O ka maka hālalo ka lehua makanoe
3. O ka lihilihi kukū iā no 'Aipō
4. O ka hulu a'a 'ia o Haua'iliki
5. A i pēhia e ua 'eha ka nahele
6. O māui e ka pua 'uwe 'eha i ke anu
7. O ke kūkuna wai lehua a'o Mokihana
8. Ua hana 'ia e ka pono a ua pololei
9. Ua hā'ina 'ia aku nō 'iā 'oe
10. O ke ola no 'ia o kia'i loko.
11. Ki'ei Ka'ula nānā i ka makani
12. Ho'olono ka halulu o ka Mālua Kele
13. Ki'ei hālō Maka'iki'ole
14. Kāmau ka 'ea i ka Hālauaola
15. He kula lima 'ia no Wāwaenoho
16. Ma ke pūko'a hakahaka iā i Wa'ahila
17. Ka momoku a ka unu Unulau o Lehua
18. A lehulehu ke ka pono le'a ka ha'awina
19. Ke ala mai nei o ka puka o ka hale.
[some versions have "Ka hauna" replacing "Ke ala"]

Here's the 1935 translation:

1. Doubly cold it is at Wai'ale'ale
2. Where the stunted lehua blossoms grow
3. They are the fringed flowers of 'Aipō
4. Like the bright feathers that cover Haua'iliki
5. Pelted by the rain, the forest is bruised
6. Crushed are the flowers, they weep with the cold
7. In the sunshine that shines on the waters of Mokihana
8. All things are done and done well
9. I have told you before
10. This is the way that the keeper of the pond made his livelihood.
11. Best watch within and toward Ka'ula
12. Question each breeze, note each rumor, even the whisper of Mālua Kele
13. Search high, search low, unobserved
14. Here is life, it is breath from the body
15. A fond caress by a hand most constant
16. Like fissured groves of coral
17. Stand the ragged clumps of lehua
18. Many are the houses, easy the life, you have your share of love
19. Humanity stands at your door, yes, indeed.

I can hardly quibble with Mary Kawena Pukui (she literally wrote the Hawaiian Dictionary, along with Samuel H. Elbert) but Lani and Lono would have. I know because when I asked them at lunch to explain what the song meant (it made no sense to me then, and very little now, even looking at two translations) they broke out into what bordered on a shouting match over the meaning of the key line, number 10.

When I embedded the excerpt of the song back at the Early Music Memories post, I ended with line 10. The song naturally falls into two halves and that middle line is the transition. It receives dramatic emphasis. It has to be important.

It was at this point that I learned that Lono was Christian and that he had a Christian interpretation for line 10. He said it was a reference to Jesus. That's who the keeper of the pond was, really.

Lani was not Christian. He was traditional. He said the song had an underground meaning. It was all about how the Hawaiian culture and the power of the people had been undermined, but would ultimately be restored. He interpreted 'pond' of the 10th line as being about the inner soul of the people, that still lives on, because it has a keeper, in the guardianship of those who are preserving it.

Mary Kawena Pukui said it's about a ruling-class love affair.

At each of Lani and Lono's lunches, held on the grass on Stoneman Field, there was always a covered pot of poi. When the argument between Lani and Lono got too much for me, I took the lid off the pot and waved my hand at it. They both quieted down, because when the poi is exposed you have to be civilized, the ancestors are listening. So I was told. Anyway, the argument stopped.

By the way, I had no idea at that time what a Christian, or a non-Christian, might be. Neither meant anything more to me than a lehua blossom, which so far as I knew then, I'd never seen.

Bloody Dog

As I've said before my first word was "Daddy", prompted by my Mother saying, "tell Daddy who your present [the shit] is for!"

After my parents were both dead I found an old album they had of me. It was called Baby's Album, or something similar and equally obvious. The album had ready-made entries for "Baby's first smile", "Baby's first steps", etc., with room for snapshots where appropriate, and blank lines to be filled in with dates and other details.

The entry for "Baby's first word" had originally been "Daddy", but was later struck through and replaced by "shit" in the kind of bad handwriting my Mother had after she came down with arthritis in the Seventies. So maybe she remembered it a little differently. But clearly our memories aren't significantly different.

A few hours later I parroted "Goodbye Daddy" from memory. Then I went to the hospital and didn't speak a single word again until sometime toward the end of November, 1951. I don't remember what I said now, but I remember Lani and Lono placing it in time for me, and saying I had told them they had forgotten to do some one of their chores. It was an entire sentence in Hawaiian.

Things moved quickly after that, and already by December I was carrying on simple conversations with them, entirely in Hawaiian. It would be several months yet before I spoke any English again. But, unlike my insensitive parents, Lono was alert to the fact that I understand a lot of English, and so he alternated Hawaiian and English with me. Lani spoke only Hawaiian.

After I began speaking Hawaiian, Lani began to warm to me. One of the earliest conversations I remember was one I had with Lono when Lani had to leave us for a few minutes. He told me Lani had been keeping his distance because he had suffered too much from the loss of a younger brother. The discussion took some time because I didn't know what a younger brother was.

I still thought Hawaiian and English were one language and every night after going over the day's events and conversations in my head I would try to make English sounds in the hope of extending my speech to that part of "Hawaiian". I deliberately babbled, with the conscious goal of mastering the consonants and consonant combinations.

That was the main problem. Hawaiian has 7 consonants plus a breath stop: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, '.

The brain injury affected my speech motor control. I could whistle like a bird but I couldn't say hard g when I wanted to. Double consonants like gr and bl were even worse. So I worked on making those sounds constantly whenever I was alone. I recall sessions that went "tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, dok, dok, dok, dok, ..." on and on like that, until I fell asleep.

Speaking of "dok", we got a dog right about this time. He was nominally a Christmas present to me. My Father, who was back from Korea in time for the gifting, was sure that the dog was half Springer Spaniel and half Miniature Schnauzer. He named him Koko Head after the Hawaiian promontory east of the more famous Diamond Head. It was a common name that all the haole would give any pet that had dark fur on its head. Get it? "Koko": sounds like "Cocoa"!

But I already knew "koko" to mean "blood" in Hawaiian. I didn't like the idea of naming something with sharp teeth "Blood". I was very suspicious of this "gift", as you can see for yourself. This is the best picture my Father ever took, in my opinion.