Right: so.

The term is finally over, and Mt. Grademore and I have cast conniving, sidelong looks at one another, packed our weighty selves into suitcases, and left for Hawaii.  No kidding: Mt. Grademore on parade takes up half my freaking luggage.  But now, after only four flights and a total of 27 hours of travel, here we are in sunny Oahu.  And within 24 hours of arriving in Honolulu, I could already cross "hug a cylon" off my to-do list. Such is the benefit of having a partner who works on Hawai'i Five-0.

Best story to come into our lives recently as a result of D's time in Hawaii?

When D was last with me at Farfara (our new house in Nova Scotia), he got a message from the friend who'd been his replacement on the show for the previous three weeks. "I came back from a hike and started your car," it read, "but it was making a terrible squealing noise.  When I lifted the hood, I discovered that there was a mongoose in your engine."

"In Halifax, do you occasionally find a moose under your hood?" asked one witty friend of ours, upon hearing this story.

"No," I replied, "but D did find a mink in the woodpile the other day."

"Mink in the Woodpile," chimed in another, "Best lesbian bar name ever."

I couldn't help it: "'Mink in the Woodpile, Mongoose in the Engine' sounds like the title of a conference paper I'd write." I paused to reflect. "It's subtitle would be 'Constru/icting Sexualities from Atlantic to Pacific."

"Mieux vaut un mangouste dans son moteur qu'un tigre (Proverbe Chinois du 3eme Millenaire BC)," intoned a French friend, who then sent me this video:

Pop quiz. Which of the following things did Sycorax Pine see or step over on her walk home from the library yesterday?

1. A mongoose
2. A gecko
3. a desiccated gecko skeleton
4. a full 180 degrees of rainbow
5. a toilet in the middle of the sidewalk 

Mongoose: 'Let's go to the library.'

Gecko: 'No, look! There's a rainbow to follow.'

I'm in Hawai'i again (without having caught up on my London blogging - curse it!), where, as I may have mentioned, my partner D works.  He has long days of filming, I have somewhat shorter days at the University of Hawaii library doing course prep and research.

I'm fairly sure that my mental processes are exactly reversed in Oahu,"transformed and inverted," as King Shudraka says in the Sanskrit drama I spent the afternoon reading, "even as an image reflected in a mirror is reversed so that the right becomes sinister."

Twice this week I've embarked on the fifty minute walk home from the UH library just as it started to rain at some length.  Both times I thought, "Oh good, this will make the walk pleasanter, and my hair will look better when I get home."  Both times this mental statement was untouched by even the slightest trace of sarcasm.

The effects of the rain

Who is this curly-hair optimist living in my brain???

Apparently “tomorrow” was a bit of dream-promising, just a tiny bit of planning beyond my means.  Sadly, I did write a long and glorious review of the first show we saw (a week ago), but it’s gone the way of all mortal (and unsaved by Blogger) things and disappeared to lands unknown.  Let me try an exercise in resurrection….

It’s a week we’ve been in London now, and we’ve seen as many plays as we’ve been here days.  Bliss, really, is what it is: dramaturgical bliss.  We’d been here for less than 36 hours when we frolicked blithely off to our first show (well, I frolicked, while D merely galumphed in my shadow) at the brand new Bush Theatre at the old Shepherd’s Bush Library.

The space not so much brand new, in fact, as half-born. It’s a no-frills evening in a space brought up to code, but not yet transformed into a professional theatre.  You walk in to scraped-clean rooms covered in mad aspirational scribblings - “Bookshelves here,” “We’d love it if people donated plays for the library here…,” “Fill,” “Widen?” - and fanciful sketches of an odd country club future with wood-burning stoves and grandfather clocks that are (for the present) merely outlines on the wall.

“The bar is made of cardboard,” says D, and it is - of piles of small, cardboard boxes, precariously placed.  Every part of the half-finished space begs for your input - starting with the staff, who ask for suggestions, however “silly,” about the new building (so much vaster than their old theatre, around the corner and above the pub).  Just write us a post-it note, they say, and that’s when we begin to notice that little yellow suggestions line the walls (“Love the cardboard bar,” one exclaims, “but how do you keep it DRY?”).  Some couldn’t wait for the post-it pad to come round, and wrote directly on the walls, child-like wickedness fusing with the helpful impulse.

The sills of the lobby are lined with playtexts, casually stacked, from the history of the old pub theatre.  It makes my fingers itch.

The evening promises us three short plays featuring three different theatre arrangements (in-the-round, thrust, end-on).  To allow for this experiment, the crew valiantly shifted the seating and staging drastically during long intermissions, and we were urged to spend the time exploring the upper floors and backstage spaces of this old library in the process of becoming a theatre. Every nook is filled with exercises in crowd-sourcing: Should the Bush do a musical? (Yes, the world needs more small, avant-garde musicals.) Where do you come from? (Los Angeles, Nova Scotia) What is the theatre? (A seeing place, a dancing space) What style of seats do you like best? (Green plush benches!) Most people took the opportunity to leave post-its asking for "Working toilets, please!" or "(Organic) cider at the bar," but D left a note filled with microscopic instructions for setting up the most versatile lighting grid.

All in all, a fascinating piece of environmental-theatre-meets-community-crowdsourcing.  But the intermissions weren’t, strictly speaking, the main theatrical event.  Several of the plays themselves were, unfortunately, more half-formed than the theatre itself.  Perhaps they were overburdened by ambition and constraints.  The playwrights started with a long line of props donated by the National Theatre, ever-so-easily explained items like a giant strawberry and a necklace of fingers, props that had to be integrated over the course of the short script.  Then they had to grapple with a series of mandatory stage directions by the likes of Michael Grandage and Alan Ayckbourn that would form the spine of the play. These were paraded before us with Brechtian glee before the start of each piece. Ayckbourn’s stretched for three pages - so long that they were obliged (with a wink) to give them to us as a programme-handout rather than reading them aloud, as was their wont.   Ideally, constraints like these force authors to feats of bravura ingenuity; here the constraints never became organic structures of the plays, giving them instead the jerky awkwardness of a marionette.

It's how new playwrights are made.

The first two plays opted for farcical comedy as a way of explaining away these mechanical shifts of prop-driven plot. But if you’re going to play something this broadly, you need to make it sharp as hell, and this is a feat that only Nina Sosanya manages completely among the quite skilled group of actors.  The last play of the evening, Jack Thorne’s “Red Car, Blue Car,” opts for a wholly different tone - a surreal juxtaposition of two narratives traveling in different directions to the same, chilling narrative point. I’m reminded of that famously palindromic Michel Gondry video in which a split screen shows backward motion on one side and forward motion on the other, until the characters meet in the middle and switch directions.  The somber tone of Thorne’s play absorbs the oddity of props and stage directions better (his last one, provided by Josie Rourke, is “She does something no one has ever done before.  She does it again.”), because it takes them less literally.

So the plays, despite the whimsy of their beginnings and the strength of their casts (Francesca Annis, I adore thee), are not in general of the quality I generally associate with the old Bush.  But that’s not really the draw or the delight of this evening out.  The space, the space’s the thing….

Last year, my first as an emigrée, was also the first year I had ever been apart from my family on Thanksgiving.  It hit me hard.  I spent the whole day wandering about in a ravenous daze, compulsively eating and never feeling satisfied.  It was like something out of Dante's Inferno.

Never again, I vowed.  So this summer I arranged my entire teaching schedule for the year around this one week, making it possible for me to go home on the day before Thanksgiving without missing any class.  Here's what happened:

Rapid exit from my last class of the day, while the students are doing their end-of-term evaluations of me.  (My students are very excited to hear about my travels; one even writes me an email the next day, hoping that I have a good time in Detroit, a city I have no connection to and would not be visiting.  I don't know.) Panicked exodus to airport, where I have arrived absurdly early for a flight I had forgotten was domestic and not international (I'm connecting to my hometown of Washington, DC through Montreal).

Halifax doesn't want to let me go.  Freezing fog.  45 minute delay while we de-ice.

Result?  Panicked run in high heels (still dressed for lecturing, you see) through the Montreal airport.  They have been holding the plane for me, and are just closing it as I hobble up to the gate.  I collapse exhaustedly into my seat with a sigh of triumph, and we begin to taxi to the runway.

An hour later: still taxiing. Right back to the gate.  Unnamed technical trouble.  We disembark into the now-empty airport.

"Mesdames et messieurs, we apologize for the problem that has brought your plane back to Montreal.  Your replacement plane will arrive from New York in an hour; we will groom and then board you.

"The terminal is closed, but you are free to use the restrooms if accompanied by a uniformed escort.

"There is an exercise occurring in the terminal: if you hear dogs barking and people screaming, don't be alarmed."

But the only person screaming was a fellow American passenger who (surrounded by Quebecois travelers who received the news of the delay with Gallic shrugs and jokes about how there was undoubtedly a woman at the root of it) roundly and screechingly cursed the gate agent first in English and then in salty, fluent French.

I just sat there, working my way through Mt. Grademore, thinking, "The closest thing the modern experience has to the ancient Athenian feeling of total subjection to fate is traveling on Thanksgiving weekend.  Well, and the DMV."





Nineteen at our Thanksgiving tables.  Many of them people I haven't seen in a couple of years, because of the Thanksgiving manqué last year.  Documented for the ages (and in Dutch!) by one of our friends, who brought two visitors from Iceland for their first Thanksgiving.  Because the best Thanksgivings are the ones involving strangers as well as friends.

I realize that it really isn't Thanksgiving until the tale of my father's groping Jackie Kennedy is told. 

"Was she wearing a corset?", our friends asked.

"Yes.  She was heavily girdled," my father replied, and got a faraway expression in his eyes that indicated that this - this moment in his early twenties - might be the most vivid single memory of his whole life.

"How did it happen?", the Thanksgiving collective nudged.

"I was standing in the hallway backstage at Carnegie Hall after a concert, holding my viola above my head to protect it from the crush, when I noticed huge men standing on either side of me, with hearing aids in their ears and huge bulges under their arms.  Then I realized that there was a small woman with big hair standing in front of me, and I thought, 'This is the opportunity of a lifetime.'"

The rest is history, and Thanksgiving legend.  As my Canadian friend said, "It's important to have traditions." Don't you all remember learning about the first Thanksgiving, when the pilgrims regaled their new friends with tales of their pre-conversion encounters with Anne of Denmark in the hallways of Greenwich?  I do.

We heard the tale that night, and again two days later at the traditional post-Thanksgiving dim sum with all the same people.  What say you, Père Sycorax?  Did I do it justice here?
Some people watch football on Thanksgiving.  I can't get into a sport that is a battle of tactics instead of a drama of character.  So instead I spent Thanksgiving addicting my parents to Friday Night Lights.  It's a hard sell: Texas, sports dramas, beautiful people, American productions, and high school narratives all rank high on the list of things my parents are NOT intrigued by.  All I could do to counteract these demerits was assert that it is really, really good.

I only realized upon my third viewing of the opening season of FNL how exceedingly Canadian Tim Riggins's Texan accent is.  I keep waiting (giddily) for him to be drawn into more conversations aboat Texas, and how he never wants to get oat of his beloved home town.  Texas forever!

I think I am beginning to miss Canada.

(I am skipping ahead through my O'ahu diary to bring you this very important update.)


The day before I left Waikiki, D turns to me and says, "You know what my biggest regret is?".

"What?" I reply tentatively, since the mood of this last day has been melancholy, to say the least.

"Five weeks you have been here, and I have never gotten you a lei."

"Um," I brilliantly riposte. "Have you been reading my blog?" (I had posted this late the previous night.)

"No," he says, offhandedly.  Then, suspiciously, "Why?".

"No reason...."

He whisked me off to the florist, post-haste. "I look forward to seeing what you choose," I told him.  I don't say anything more to him, because that's the kind of testing nightmare of a beloved I can be, but secretly, I hoped he would choose one based on scent rather than appearance.  Really I am giddy about getting a lei at all, just as I had resigned myself to flowerlessness.

He emerges a few minutes later and hands me a box.  As I open it, he says, "It wasn't the most beautiful one there, but I smelled them all, and this one was the best."  I grin at him.

And then I don't take it off for the rest of my time in Hawaii.

Just a little insight into the daily crazy that D endures: I am convinced that if you actually request a lei, it undercuts all the pleasure of being given a lei.  A lei, in my mind, must be freely bestowed in order to be infused with the spirit of aloha.  The result?  Nary a lei has graced my neck in five weeks of Hawaiian residence.  Poor D, every time we encounter a lei-seller, turns to me expectantly, with the words "Would you like a lei?" tripping off his lips.  And I, mysteriously, say no, looking dejectedly at the ground.  He must be totally perplexed by now.

You might be asking yourself why I don't just say, "Surprise me with one." But this question would show a remarkable lack of crazy-literacy.  All crazy-aficionados know that this would be like a meta-request for a lei, undermining all future lei offers.  You might also ask yourself what D will say when he reads this blog entry after I have left O'ahu.  I think I might characterize his future response as "extreme frustration."  But don't worry, D - I wasn't torn up about it.  I made my own floral way around the island.  And when I think of flowers as gifts, I can't ever help but think of Dorothy Parker, whose birthday it is today:

A single flower he sent me since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet-
One perfect rose.


I know the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.


Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Even excluding leis (and I do love a lei), O'ahu is an island of flowers.  Intense, expansive flowers.


Notice how the center of this flower glows. I am not ruling out "alien life form" as a possibility.

I fell ill this week, so I wasn't good for much but the occasional wander through the gardens around the hotel and stroll around the nearby beaches.  But, as it turned out, there was plenty to see there, if you focused on the details.  It was then that I noticed, for instance, that a man in full Hawaiian costume comes around every evening just before sunset and lights all the torches that surround the hotel.  Or that the flowers in the gardens are somehow constantly in bloom.  How do they manage it?


Even the food sometimes has a bit of a floral leaning...


We had our best meal on the island (including this dish - was it ginger and panko crusted onaga?  I can't quite remember) this week at Alan Wong's, which I gather was at the forefront of Hawai'i's great local food movement a decade and a half ago.  D started with a plate of Chinatown Roast Duck Nachos that featured ten-inch antennae that may have been transmitting reports on us to the mother ship (or possibly to that flower at the top of this post), and followed them with a steak showdown between two local beef ranches.  I had the five course tasting menu (when I was little we used to call this the "little pig" menu, when contrasted with the "big pig" seven course menu) which included, among other things, a Pacific lobster on a truffle puree..  Let me tell you, this is another beastie entirely from the delectable Nova Scotia weight-lifters I'm used to.  But a lobster in the hand is worth two in Halifax:  it was delicious.  I can't lie, however: my heart still belongs to Atlantic lobster and Maryland crabs.  Roam though I may, I am a girl of strong culinary loyalties.

Truth to tell, our meal was exceptional from start to finish, but the highlight was the drinks menu.  We are neither great drinkers of alcohol nor caffeine, but I have to say that the sweet honey tea was one of the most instantly addicting drinks I have ever tasted.  When we went to Wong's other Honolulu restaurant, The Pineapple Room, a few weeks later, I tried another of his signature drinks, a watermelon lilikoi mojito made with various savory herbs, and was almost as smitten.

Some weeks after that, D and I have come to a well-fed conclusion: we miss the gym.  I have formulated a challenge for us which will go something like this: in the thirty days after I return to Halifax, we must spend at least twenty hours apiece in cardio exercise. If any one of us manages thirty hours in that thirty days, however, we can claim a reward.  Mine, I have decided, will be the complete DVD edition of The Wire, which you can get for quite a discount nowadays.  D is still plotting what his choice will be....

Hmm.  I've fallen terribly behind on my O'ahu diary, I'm afraid.  Chock it up to the combination of sun-induced lacksadaisia and a looming article deadline.  OK: casting my mind back to several weeks ago, when I left off.

We had better luck escaping Honolulu on our second attempt, D's next day off.  This time we ventured straight up the windward side (the island's eastern coast) to a beach in the Mormon town of Laie.

After the crowded shores of Waikiki, where the sea is lovely and the smooth sand is obscured by all the bodies lounging, flirting, playing, drinking, smoking on it, the beach around Laie was just how I like it: deserted.


It was also, sad to say, quite dirty - it must be a trick of the tide, but huge swathes of sand were marred by trashy flotsam.  Not, luckily, the section where I camped out in the sun with my books and my tube of SPF 70.

D has been reading too many Hawai'i Five-O scripts at his job, with the unfortunate effect that, where I see sun-bleached beach towns and family picnics, he sees opportunities for police intervention.  When he cautioned me to choose our beach carefully, lest we become embroiled in a local gang war, I knew he needed a day off to swim in the ocean.  And there he is, a tiny speck in the first photo, having his first total submersion in the Pacific ocean on this trip.

The beach, I hasten to tell you, is patrolled not by the 5-0 nor by rival gangs but by a group of extremely territorial roosters.  Chickens seem right at home in the sand, to my surprise.


I continue my evening walks all week along Waikiki beach, tucking a flower behind my ear each evening and seeing how far I get before it flies off into the surf.  Sometimes D is still at work at my preferred sunset hour, but sometimes he comes with, exhausted.

Every once in a while we remember that we are on LOST's terra natalis, usually when we see a rope, half-buried in the sand, leading off God-knows-where. "You know what's at the end of that?" I say to D, "Alison Janney in a toga."


The evening's the most peaceful time, especially around the lagoon outside of our hotel, where the water is somehow colder than the actual ocean fifty feet away.  Every day I see a different bride being led out to have her wedding photograph taken here, and I wonder about the industry of the image - all this endless sameness on what is supposed to be (surely) a unique day.


But it's a hard image to resist, eh?

The sunset walks continue.  They provide a fertile combination of people-, light- and water-watching that I can't seem to resist.

Each day, for instance, I think that I have witnessed the smallest bikini the mind of man could possibly conjure, and each day I am proved wrong. (The other day I found myself contemplating trying on a Ferrari-brand, blaze-red bikini.  I pulled myself up short: I think this is the sign that I may have been too long in Waikiki.  A Ferrari bikini.)

But the beach here is marvelously motley, I have to say.  And aesthetically catholic, with - I hasten to say - a small c.  A panoply of chiseled forms are certainly on display, but virtually every other body type imaginable is as well.  And no one ever bats an eyelash to see a woman wading through the deep surf at the same hour every day, archly self-fashioned as an Ophelian Edward Gorey damsel in a soaked Grecian dress.





Of course, as the signs (complete with ominous shadow) chide,  this beach is meant for "passive enjoyment."  What a phrase.  But who am I to argue with the authorities of the beach, particularly when that beach is sans souci.

So I set my mind to passivity.





And if this passivity took the form of light-gazing in previous days, this time it was the clouds' turn.


Which is really another species of light-watching, to be honest.  I like to think of it as a Baroque pursuit.


Speaking of Baroque pastimes, the fireworks display was, as I hoped, a weekly event. This time I watched it from the edges of the Lagoon, legs stretched out in the sand, face turned up to the sky. 


Perhaps next week I will try to get closer still.  There is nothing that I love better than that feeling of being right under fireworks, so that when they burst, they appear to be rushing towards you out of a flat sky.  The whole of heaven falling on you like a Hitchcockian dolly zoom.

There is a place along Waikiki beach where the sand narrows to nothing, and flaneurs are forced onto a stretch of concrete walkway between the softly melodic performances in the hotel gardens on one side, and the rocky ocean on the other. In fact this is one of the loveliest portions of the walk, since it is a dangerous area for swimmers and a fruitless one for surfers.  In other words - it is quite empty.

Apparently I am not the only creature to notice this.  At midweek, when I walked up the stairs at the end of this walkway, I noticed a group of people who had gathered to look intently at the ocean below.  Peering over the railing near them, I saw why: the lonely strip of unpopulated water attracts giant sea turtles, who will come right up to shore to frolic.

And now, as promised yesterday, the pictorial O'ahu diary. 


It was overcast at midweek, to the undoubted distress of those who had only a few days here to crisp up their tan and make up for fifty straight weeks of cubicle dwelling and vitamin D deprivation.  But the ocean manages a gunmetal beauty regardless of the weather.


And of course the sunsets are all the more dramatic for peeking beneath a drapery of clouds.


You get a sense here of yesterday's point about the way the seascape rings changes on any number of saturated colors in a matter of minutes.  These photographs were taken over a period of about forty minutes....

On Monday, D actually arrived home in time and with energy to go to dinner with me.  We picked our way, barefoot, down Waikiki beach in the dusk to Duke's, there to eat macadamia-crusted opah amidst the tipsy, bikini-clad crowds. 

I have made an evening habit of this beach walk in the days since, although D hasn't since gotten off work in time to join me, wearily citing all sorts of cinematic anxieties about losing the light.  Each day I walk a bit farther, till the stroll to the end and back talks me about an hour and a half. 

It was the day after our dinner that I saw these dragon boats, with a toddler peering at their keels and a man fast asleep in the hull of the one on the left.  I was particularly charmed, somehow, by the way the dragons peeked out over the parking barriers, as if exhausted and in need of a bit of a chin rest.

I have settled into a contented pattern here, one that looks something like this:

Sometime between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., D gets up and goes to work.  Somewhat, um, after that, I get up.  I read, I blog, I sit on the balcony looking out at the ocean.  I clean, deal with email, work, snack on fresh pineapple. 

At some point, I gird my skin with a veritable armor of sunscreen, and venture forth.  I pick up a fallen blossom from one of the trees in the hotel garden and tuck it behind my ear. I wander around the lagoon to the ocean proper, kick off my sandals, and wade into the surf.  Then I walk, past delighted toddlers on their first visit to the ocean, experienced surfers with the world's most flawless human forms, and (on one occasion) a couple of women posing sexily in front of the sunset ("Don't worry - it's for our husbands!" they cried when I paused to let them take the photo.  I guffawed.  Well, that's all right, then.). 


I walk and walk over the wide variety of textures the sand takes on along Waikiki beach (is this a trick of the tides, or does each hotel haul a different quality of sand in to supplement their own patch of waterfront?).  The waves crash up around me - by the time I go back to the room to meet D when he gets back at 8 or 9 my dress will be drenched up to the waist - and I gather soaking folds of fabric up in my hands as I wend my way.  The whole world seems saturated in color as the sun sets, and the landscape changes drastically from minute to minute.


The result, I fear (I hope?) is that my O'ahu Diaries from this point forward will become decreasingly narrative and increasingly pictorial, a series of color studies in cloud and surf.  Be forewarned.

When I woke up on my second morning in Hawai'i, I looked in the mirror and discovered how closely I could come to resemble little orphan Annie, given a little bit of humidity. Or possibly Harpo Marx.  Or maybe this orchid.

It was a slow day, all in all.  I lounged about on the balcony, gazing at the Pacific and feeling, well, pacific.

As evening wore on, it became clear that the performance space for an expansive luau is just below our windows.  As I read, the music floated up and over me.  After the sun set, I leaned out into the night air and watch fire dancers spin their flambeaux and toss them back and forth.

Some days later, I called my grandmother and told her about the sights to be seen from my private theatre box.

"May I tell you my own balcony story?" she said. "When we were forced to leave Baghdad*, we were staying in a hotel in Tehran, and our balcony looked out on the courtyard where many weddings - Islamic, but also Jewish and Christian - were taking place.  Everyone would make much of the bride and groom, but they were also making much of their guests.  At the end of every wedding, a beautiful car was driven into the courtyard, with every nook and crevice covered in flowers. The bride and groom would get into the car, along with the bride's parents, bid their guests farewell, and drive off.  And that was that."

The next day was D's first day off since arriving.  He's exhausted - the average workday starts between 6 and 7 a.m., and ends sometime between 7 and 9 p.m.  We headed off for some remarkably bland and greasy dim sum at Legend in Honolulu's Chinatown, discovering along the way that it was right next door to the Foster Botanical Garden.  Never ones to refuse a good botanical garden, off we went.

The Foster is the smallest and the oldest of Honolulu's botanical gardens.  Many of the trees were planted by a mid-nineteenth German botanist who had been given the land by Queen Kalama, and upon his departure the garden passed into the possession of Captain and Mrs. Foster.  Mrs. Foster, as it turns out, was the daughter of an English shipbuilder (there are some references to his having been shipwrecked on Hawai'i) and a descendent of Hawaiian royalty.  She was a close friend of Queen Lili'uokalani at a colonial moment when power was being wrested away from native Hawaiian social structures.  The queen herself was deposed and imprisoned. Mrs. Foster, like many of her peers, developed an interest in a particular variety of spiritualism (part Hawaiian mythos, part theosophy) that was at least in part an act of counter-cultural resistance. Eventually she became a practicing Buddhist, bringing a descendant of the Buddha's own bo tree to Hawai'i and planting it in her garden, where it still stands.

I smell the seeds of a brilliant piece of historical fiction. (More on seeds in a moment.)

The garden is looking a bit dilapidated, and traffic rushes too obviously by for it to be the oasis it could be, but it is filled with delightful moments nonetheless.  In Mrs. Foster's day, giant turtles she had been given as gifts by admiring sailors wandered the garden.  Today gangly white birds frolic in the sprinkler system like slippery toddlers:

The age and rarity of many of the trees is the major draw of the gardens.  Every variety of palm imaginable makes an appearance, including the only palm native to Hawai'i (!) and the Talipot palm, which blooms only once in its life before dying.  Quite a swan song.

But for me the real stars were the seeds and the fruit.  The cannonball palm produces masses of (naturally) ammunition-shaped fruit.  D, who had nearly been killed the previous day when a falling palm branch fell from forty feet up and landed a foot away from him, gave the cannonball palm a wide berth. The innards, we were told, contain an odiferous blue goo which attracts peccaries, pigs, and chickens.  Don't touch, the signs warn us.  I can't help but feel that the garden's owners have rather a low opinion of our porcine leanings.

Or consider the earpod plant.  "It has been placed on the endangered list since Apple introduced the iPod," I murmur to D.  The look he gives me says that he is considering joining the birds in a sprinkler frolic rather than listening to any more of my lies.


Some of the seeds are a gift to purple-prosed romance readers.

In that spirit, I give you this gourd-like piece of produce.




But the matriarchy can't be allowed to steal the show, you know.  It requires constant vigilance to ensure that phallocentrism doesn't fade from this earth.

Enter the sausage tree.
I don't think the reasoning behind the naming of this one requires much glossing.  If you remain perplexed, the sign says it all: sausage-like fruit used for external medicine.

You might notice that this sausage fruit looks a bit, I don't know, shriveled and dessicated.  Not to worry: on the tree the fruit is much more, um, turgid in appearance.

I may in fact have turned to D upon viewing the tree and said "You know, they are more like corn dogs than like sausages, strictly speaking."

He gazed stoically off at the butterfly garden.

You can see a few of these corn dogs growing, pendulous, in the picture below.  And, of course, this sight gave me the unique opportunity to cry, "There's a monkey in that sausage tree!".


After the botanical gardens, we set off with but a single goal: get out of Honolulu.  Several hours of aimless but increasingly desperate driving later, we were still tangled in strip malls and endless, tired suburban developments.  Utter exodus fail. After getting out of the car and breathing the ocean air, we turned for home.

Next time we bring a map.  This isn't Nova Scotia, as it turns out.  You can't just follow the ocean and see stunning things around every corner.  (Hear that, Hawai'i?  You're no Canada.  I bet no one's ever lobbed that accusation at you before.)




*Because diplomatic relations were severed in 1967, when my grandparents were serving in the Embassy.

It was a long trip into Honolulu.  Last Wednesday I flew into Los Angeles, where I had thought I would be spending the rest of the summer.  D, whom I haven't seen in two weeks, had flown out of California less than twelve hours earlier.  He had been told that his work was shifting him to the remake of Hawai'i 5-0 just a few days before, and had rushed to get everything in order at home.  He doesn't know, you see, when he'll be coming back.

That's the way of Hollywood, I've learned.  I don't get frequent holidays (barring the decadently long summer break), but I know when they will be months in advance, following the steady rhythm of the academic calendar.  D, on the other hand, frequently calls me to say that he has gotten word of a couple of days off, and he will be in Canada tomorrow.  So this is how it works: one day I am spending the rest of my summer hols squirreled away in the UCLA library, the next I am buying a ticket to Oahu.  You don't see me complaining.  I like a bit of impulse.  (D, poor fellow, does not.)

I try to cram as much friend-seeing as possible into my 18 hours in LA.  D calls to say that he is sending me a picture of the view from our balcony.  "How is it?" I ask. "Meh.  It's fine," he replies. I store that away, pickled in skepticism.

And right I was.  Another six hour flight and I am in Hawai'i.  Our room feels vast (to my relief, given that we will be here for at least six weeks), and sliding glass doors cover one whole wall of it.  Here's what I look out on, even as I type this:

Meh, he says.

D rushed off to the set at the crack of dawn on my first day here, which is fine, because we are both up well before then, groggy with the feeling that the world is six hours off its axis.  We try to calculate the magnitude of our jet lag, but we have been on so many flights between so many time zones that we find ourselves befuddled.  A bit of arithmetical contortion determines that I am now twelve time zones away from my parents in London.  Does that mean that I am exactly on the other side of the world?, I wonder fuzzily.  I try to taking a dashing, devil-may-care stance.  I scoff at time zones.  This summer, I have spent significant time in five.  Pshaw, I say.  Pshaw.

I go out to explore the town, and get creatively lost.  We are staying in Waikiki, which feels to me like a cross between Beverly Hills and Las Vegas, with the best qualities of neither. (Although, to be honest, I can't quite put my finger on what the best qualities of those two places would be.  Elaborate burlesque performance? Opportunities to deride tiny-dog-carrying B-list socialites?)   I don't feel heartened.

The weather is warm, not hot, but the sun beats down on me as I walk along the streets of Waikiki.  I think of the long foggy winter in Halifax, and turn my sunglassed eyes upwards as I walk.

A muscular man with a practiced tan walks towards me, staring with a perhaps not entirely sober intentness at my neck and chest.  Uh oh, I think.  As our paths cross, he says something quiet, almost to himself.  It takes me a moment to register what it is: "Beautiful skin."  And then he walks on.  That's it.  No harassment, just a fascination with my pallor.  What can I say?  One man's pastily anemic is another's alabaster glow.

Still, every person I encounter takes one look at me and says "So, you just arrived in Hawai'i?  Where from?" and then nods knowingly when I say "Nova Scotia." I try to buy some sunscreen, and the saleswoman takes one look at me and pushes the SPF 90 across the counter.

My exploratory goal that first day in Waikiki is a noble one, I think we can all agree: the fabled Puka Dog.  I get my dog with papaya relish and Lilikoi mustard.  That's right.  Then I take it to the beach to eat.  I wander lazily home through the surf.  The Pacific is warm around my ankles.  Even in a couple of inches of water, tiny translucent fish swim in schools past my toes.  Besides the fish, I am - without a doubt - the palest creature on the beach.


 I like to this of this as my Regency pose - preparing to have my silhouette cut, hair nonchalantly a-curl.  Mind full of acerbic Austenian understatement.



It isn't on any account to be confused with this, which is my Napoleonic, chin up, eyes-on-the-idealized-future pose.  The English mode vs. the French, you see.


Everything I know about posing for photographs I learned from historical romance.


When D gets back late that evening, the sun has already set.  It does that earlier here than I am used to, since we are closer to the equator, and apparently don't observe Daylight Savings.  We ponder the question of dinner.  Suddenly there is a huge explosion over the lagoon, just outside our window.


I can only hope this is a regular Friday occurrence.  What is a month in tropical paradise without your own weekly fireworks display?  Nothing at all.

Satisfied that we are not suddenly and unexpectedly at war (Pearl Harbor and our innate urban anxiety obviously lurking at the back of our minds) and more than a bit in awe, we apply ourselves to our evening foraging.  On the advice of the estimable Chowhound, which we consult like a Delphic oracle every time we travel to a new city, we decide on nabe (a Japanese noodle soup that you cook in broth at your table) at Ichiriki in Honolulu.  This was a new venture for us, and thoroughly delightful.  While the broth comes to a boil, the waiter brings a platter of raw ingredients to your table (I chose the mushroom nabe), leaving you to toss them gamely, one by one, into the bubbling brew.

I love a good piece of dinner-as-theatre interactivity.

On the wall of a tube station:

A quiet complaint:


So shy.