“If only the house would burn down, “ wrote Mark Twain, “we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Heleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, not yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with the godly beech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and never house-keep any more....What I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea."
One doesn’t have to burn down the house to move to the isle of the blest, burn a little bridges maybe...
After his four month and one day assignment on the Islands, Mark Twain yearned to return, but never did. He wrote a novel with a Hawaiian setting, but sadly it was never published. Only 17 pages of it exist unless it turns up in someone’s attic. A visitor at the University of California at Berkeley can view those 17 pages in the Mark Twain collection.
I have the first paragraph of the novel. I will copy it for you on a later blog.
I have been feeling narcissistic writing about me all the time, but I’m the one with my fingers on the keyboard. Unless you write to me, and some are, bless your hearts, it is just me and the white page. And then I throw my ramblings into a bottle, called cyberspace, where it floats all the way from Hawaii to the mainland
Isn’t technology grand?
But being without it is traumatic. I couldn’t get Internet connection for a few days and I quaked, finally got ATT, but my signal is still weak.
I am sitting on the edge. One day I fall into discouragement. The next I’ve had an attitude adjustment. I’m fragile like the Noni fruit growing on the tree behind our house. They don’t look fragile, but are large lumps of gnarled white fruit that at first glance look like breadfruits. The trouble is ours are either green or black. Either too green to eat, or black rotten. I ate a bite of one I picked beside the road--tasted like green.
Noni’s are sold mainly as juice, and a company in the vicinity places the juice into capsules. There is a Noni company in the vicinity that puts the juice into capsules. Noni’s will, so they say, cure anything.
While in Hilo getting the car from the Port, and the Broadband from UPS, daughter Dear, Baby Dear and I took ourselves to lunch at a charming place called The Ponds. It had the Hawaiian slide windows that make an open wall, and no mosquitoes, and outside a freshwater pond where two guys were practicing the surfboard paddle. That is standing on a surfboard with a long oar and paddle oneself around on it. It was the bunny slopes. The advanced riders ride the Pacific’s waves.
It was perfect at The Ponds. The temperature was perfect. The weather was perfect. We drank iced tea with Liliqoi fruit juice in it. The Liliqoi is a yellow passion fruit and everything we have had with its juice is delicious. The iced tea looked like a Tequila Sunrise-- dark on the top, beautiful yellow on the bottom. DD had a hamburger, I had sashimi. We had a Liliqoi chiffon cake for dessert that was so light it melted in our mouths like cotton candy. (They told us we had Liliqoi on the property but so far we have not been able to find any.)
A Hawaiian lady sat at a table beside us–I have great respect for a woman to takes herself to a fine restaurant and is willing to eat alone. She ordered the full fare, escargot, a salad, lamb chops, wine. She was charming, lived in Dallas Texas for awhile, but came back here. We talked about our children, and she told us that living as we were will make us appreciative everything. This island is healing so she said. Also she told us that we must go to the Tsunami Beach. There you can find treasures, glass rolled up on the beach for mosaics, she found a complete brown glass Purex bottle with the Purex imprint on the glass. Now that was even before my time.
She lives in the Tsunami zone, but if the water rolls out, she is not taking the car, but has a tandem bike where she will put her child on the back and they will head for high ground. Usually there is ample warning, for Tsunamis are created from some geological event, usually an earth quake a long way away.
It is my favorite time of the morning. The sun is coming on. We have had a monsoon all night. The sound on the rain on our roof almost drowned out the sound of the Coqui frogs. If I listened carefully, though, I could hear their little chirping behind the driving rain. I have come to rely on the nighttime singing of the frogs. Now that it is light they are silent.
And so I changed the name of my webpage to The Frog’s Song. It is fitting, the old name I once used for my journal that some of you graciously read... Little did I know then, with Life’s Twists and Turns where I would be now, or that little chirping frogs would lull me to sleep.
Aloha from me to you.
http://thefrogssong.com/
P.S. IceRyder "Yes."
