With my parents outside the Honolulu Academy of Arts, now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art. August 2002. My dad was 89, my mom a year younger. As I recall, we went there for lunch to celebrate my birthday.
We received a wonderful little postcard yesterday from The Merwin Conservancy, the foundation established by the late poet W.S. Merwin.
It captures so much in just a few words.
The card reprints William’s hand-written note found late in his copy of a 1995 zen reader by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker.
Foster grew up in Hawaii, was long associated with Robert Aitken’s Honolulu Diamond Sangha, and has become a well-known and respected Zen teacher at a zen center in Massachusetts, after years of commuting between Honolulu and a zen center in the mountains of California. His dad was James Foster, who served as director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art) from 1963 to 1982.
Merwin’s note is deceptively simple.
To the Book Beetles
You need the bindings I see
Please leave me the pages
The postcard notes the binding was almost completely gone when the note was discovered.
The simple note tells us so much.
William took a simple moment–finding that bugs were eating one of his books–and turned it into a moment of poetry in this simple request directed to the book beatles.
And even while writing out this simple statement, he took the care–and the time–to immediately focus on, reread, and then edit his first version in order to make it more to his own liking.
“Just leave me the pages please,” became “Please leave me the pages.”
It’s the care that made him a great poet and a great observer of life.
On the Maui-based Merwin Conservancy:
It conserves both an extraordinary place—a lush and rare, 19-acre palm forest that two-time Pulitzer prize winning poet W.S. Merwin beckoned into being from land designated as agricultural wasteland—and it conserves the sense of wonder that brought forth both Merwin’s poetry, and his garden.
We returned from a somewhat rain-truncated early morning walk and watched the rain falling on the back deck with a sense of detachment while sipping our morning coffee and snacking our way through some fruit and whatever we were able to scrounge that might pass as suitable for breakfast.
After posting photos of today’s dawn and dogs, I was enjoying a New Yorker column by Calvin Trillin, “Some Notes on Funniness/Lessons in humor, from grade school to Johnny Carson.”
He started the column with an description of his years as an “insanely well behaved” youngster (something I could easily say about myself), and the subsequent unleashing of his inner humorist when Trillin found his voice mocking an authority close at hand, in this case a teacher who Trillin describes as “a rather pedantic and self-important man, [who] was droning on about a passage in Psalms.”
The result was predictable. “The class exploded with laughter,” Trillin writes about his own contribution. “The teacher simply exploded. I was ejected from the room.”
Trillin then wondered: “Was I then transformed into the class clown—the kid who sneaks a whoopee cushion under the pad on the teacher’s chair and is regularly sent to the vice-principal’s office?”
That simple question hit me like a slap on the side of the head as I flashed back sixty years–yes, 6-0 years–to that moment in my 8th grade classroom at University High School, sometime in the 1960-61 academic year, when I dropped a pool of fake rubber vomit on the floor next to my chair and then slumped down, face down on my desk, moaning quietly as if I had been suddenly taken ill, while those “in the know” stifled laughter and waited for our teacher to take the bait.
The target of our adolescent humor was one of our student teachers for the semester, a foreign student who I recall was from Indonesia (although that could be a trick of memory). The school, which functioned as a teaching laboratory for the University of Hawaii College of Education, subjected a succession of aspiring teachers learning to practice their chosen craft with a group of smart and generally well-behaved students with a mildly rebellious minority, of which I was one. I never really thought of myself as the “class clown.” I considered my role somewhat differently, a sometimes “wise-cracking meta-critic” perhaps, finding different ways to tweak the silliness of authority figures.
I recall the teacher as being quiet and friendly, a little stiff, perhaps a little intimidated, but trying very hard and quite earnest. I can’t say why we picked on him for this little prank. Perhaps there was no reason. I don’t recall thinking it was malicious. It was just, well, funny. Of course I couldn’t keep my eyes closed and peeked, opening one eye to see what was going on, and almost laughed out loud as he somewhat hesitantly made his way along the aisle through the middle of the classroom, wastebasket and a crumpled sheet of newspaper in hand to take charge of cleaning up the “mess.” As newspaper hit fake vomit, the pent up laughter in the room was released. I hope he laughed, but I just don’t recall what happened at the actual moment of discovery.
I’m pretty sure the faux vomit was from Pop’s Novelty Shop downtown on Alakea Street, a source of endless amusement. Should I be surprised that modern versions are still available, even from Amazon?
What I don’t remember is who put me up to it, or at least who had egged me on or signed on as co-conspirators. And I don’t recall whether there were any repercussions as a result of my disturbance of the morning’s good order. At this point, I don’t recall any.
Perhaps one of my classmates will recall a little more about this incident.
Years later, I recall seeing a small article about the teacher, probably in a UH alumni newsletter of some kind. He had gone back to his home country and apparently excelled, returning to Hawaii as a government or university official, or so the story in my head goes. Perhaps by that time I felt a twinge of regret, so I wrote a quick letter saying I remembered him and had appreciated him as a teacher. Some time later, I got a gracious reply. I am quite sure that the return letter is saved somewhere in my stored boxes of assorted personal and political “stuff.”
That little coda seems like a long way from the original humor theme, but I suppose that’s just the way it works out sometimes.
It’s been a strange week around here.
Monday night just before 11 p.m., there was a home invasion robbery of a couple in their 70’s (yikes!) on the other end of Kahala, about a mile and a half from our house. Two men broke into the house by removing glass louvers, used zip ties to bind the woman’s hands and feet while her disabled husband watched, then went for her jewelry. But she was able to escape and scream for help, apparently interrupting their search of the house.
Tuesday morning around 8 a.m. The body of a man was found in the stream that runs through Waialae Beach Park. It was likely there overnight. His car, a BMW, had been found in the parking lot when it was closed for the night. The man had taken off his shoes and shirt, and set his car keys and phone down. These were found in the morning. The body went unnoticed until well after dawn, when it was noticed by a woman coming back from a swim. We walk along the stream twice every morning, once as we are starting out and once on our return. I remember that there were seven ducks in the stream Tuesday morning, but did not see a body.
Tuesday at about 5:45 p.m. It was wine o’clock on our back deck, when we heard multiple sirens, then blasts of a deep horn as a fire truck tried to make its way through relatively heavy traffic along Kalanianaole Highway. A few minutes later, Hawaii News Now reported a fire in the Naniwa Gardens condominium in Hawaii Kai. I immediately recognized it as the building where Buddy, the elderly Maltese we see most mornings, lives with his person.
I sent off a quick text to check on them.
This morning we learned the fire was on the sixth floor, just two floors below, and one unit over, from their apartment. Luckily, Buddy was fine, having apparently slept through the whole affair. Their apartment is fine, apart from some smoke damage on the lanai. But all the units below the sixth floor are heavily water damaged, and the building elevators also sustained water damage and are out of service (at least the ones servicing that part of the complex).
And then, while not on the same scale, a small personal loss. My favorite umbrella appears to have died during our walk this morning. This is one I bought at the Umbrella Shop in Vancouver years ago. This family owned and operated store manufactured their own umbrellas and took great pride in their work. Their umbrellas came with a lifetime warranty, and mine was been repaired once. But the store closed its doors a few years ago, and this brings ends my tangible link to the memory of our visits there (yes, it became one of our regular stops when visiting Vancouver).
I admit to being at least a little concerned about what other unusual events might await us this week.