Kahala Beach Wedding

I haven't been very happy lately and I've been spending far too much time cooped up in my house trying to eliminate stuff. Funny...I wrote about eliminating stuff when I first opened this blog almost 2 years ago and I'm still doing it! This isn't what I intended to write about today. It's just background information. Men hate that! They don't understand that you have to know how boxed in and overwhelmed I've been to appreciate how great it was to attend this wedding!
What a relief it was! The glorious smelling breeze had never been through my moldy air conditioning system - only breathed by God. The warm brown sand that clung to my feet was picked up from a beach and not my bathroom floor. The water that tickled my toes did not come from the hole in my kitchen ceiling. Okay, it was just great to be outside.


Congratulations and best wishes to Josh and Teresa. You are so dear to me! Thank you for allowing me to be one of the few who were present at your wedding. I loved it!

Best man, Jesse Arcangel, and bride, Teresa.

Honolulu PowWow

I was lucky enough to be pau hana by noon on October 7th. Just across the street from my bus stop, in Thomas Square, Honolulu's 32nd Annual Intertribal Powwow was in full swing so I spent a few hours there eating fry bread and watching the dances. It was soooooo blazing hot that day! I'll bet these Elwah girls from British Columbia thought they were going to be felled by heat stroke. The Elwahs passed out gifts to their audience during a gift-giving dance - a tradition common to many Northwest coast tribes but nothing I'd ever experienced personally. I was given an "Elwah Warrior" t-shirt. Sweet! This photo isn't so hot. I took it with my phone. Sorry, k?

The Turtle

I was writing about "Boys" by David Lloyd and thinking about boys and meanness and decided to tell a story that my first husband told me. He was one of the kindest people I've ever known. Maybe this story is a commentary on peer pressure. Or maybe I just want to tell you something about Andy Tamayo because he is gone.




When Andy was in elementary school he was playing with several other boys in a field when they came upon a box turtle. Andy thought he might like to keep the turtle as a pet and wondered what his mother would say about that. He immediately realized that because he was the smallest of the boys, any of the others would have first dibs on the turtle. Before disappointment had time to register with Andy, he was surprised to see the oldest of his companions pick up a small stone and bounce it off the turtle's marbled shell. Another boy did the same, and within seconds all the boys, including Andy, were throwing stones - larger stones - harder and faster - at the helpless reptile. Eventually, the turtle died. Andy went home and that night he cried himself to sleep. He was in his mid-thirties when he told me about the box turtle, and honestly, I could see that the incident still pained him. I loved that man.

Boys

I just finished reading "Boys" by David Lloyd, a book that I picked up on the throwaway shelf at University of Hawaii. The short stories contained in this volume are set in 1966, a time when I was already aware that both boys and girls could be awfully mean to each other. Terry Hald and Tracy Scanell probably don't remember the day they found the pancaked & dried frog on Liberty Street, picked it up, and threw it at me. Prissy doctor's daughters, both of them. Why have I never forgotten? David Sammon's father was also a physician of some kind. In second grade David terrorized me with threats that he was going to bring his pocket knife to school and cut me with it. I was afraid to go to school and no one would DO anything about him.
Boys...
Anyhoo, this book by David Lloyd was a good read and I think the images and emotions it conjured within me will stick. I'm going to become a teacher and I want to be a kind one. Because so many of the really poignant scenes involved adults punishing children for being the victims of other children, I don't want to forget Lloyd's characters. I want to learn to be kind from them. And, if I can't manage to teach a lick of US history, maybe I can teach kindness.

C'mon Shirley, google thyself!

Shirley Morrison of Ashland,Oregon;
don't you ever google yourself?

I can't find you. I've been looking for a long time. I know you were Shirley Clark for awhile. Maybe that lasted. I've been through a few names myself but should be k/a "Thompson" again soon. Please post a comment here telling me how I can get in touch with you.

Farewell to Karen Kennedy

Bijin

She is 157 years old.

This is the first of my ukiyo-e woodblock prints to be framed.

The artist - Utagawa Toyokuni III aka Kunisada. I haven't been able to identify his subject. I am probably not going to keep her, but for now she is gracing a wall in my bedroom. I posted her here because....

...I wanted to show off.

Update on "Blow Ye The Trumpet"

I am very happy that Kirke Mechem responded to my post of June 10, 2006 about John Brown and the song, "Blow Ye the Trumpet." I'd said that the song was a traditional hymn arranged by Mr. Mechem. While it is true that a hymn called "Blow Ye the Trumpet" was a favorite of Brown, and there are several old hymns of that title, this particular song was composed, not arranged, by Kirke Mechem. I emailed Mr. Mechem and he was kind enough to respond by sending me several interesting articles about the song and his opera, "John Brown". Not only is he a fantastic composer but he's a very nice guy!
The only recording of the song that I could find is on a CD called "Postcards" by the Turtle Creek Chorale. More information about Kirke Mechem is available at http://sai-national.org/phil/composers/kmechem.html

Freud on Tyrants and Their Followers

"We want a strong man with a simple doctrine that accounts for our sufferings, identifies our enemies, focuses our energies and gives us, more enduringly than wine or even love, a sense of being whole.
~~~
This man must appear completely masterful. He must seem to have perfect confidence, to need no one and to be entirely sufficient unto himself. Sometimes this man will evoke a god as his source of authority."

Murut Language of Sabah

Proof that you can find anything on Ebay... I just know that someone out there is looking for a book on the Murut language of Sabah. Prentice, D. J. 1971, The Murut Languages of Sabah, Pacific Linguistics, Australia National. University, Canberra -- is available at http://www.half.ebay.com . Just do a search there for "Murut" and you'll find the book. It's a softcover and I am pretty sure it's the only one available on the planet.