Octopus tree

I heard her weed wacker next to the chain link fence before I saw her. She pushed up the windshield over her face. "See those branches there on the ground? The tire tracks? That's an octopus tree, and they like to use the berries for lei. Drove up to the fence, pulled down the branches. Someone saw them--they left quickly and I found their slippers." The branches are on state property, but she's responsible for them because she's the custodian of the park on the other side of the fence.

 

Her sister's godson works at the cemetery. "You lazy ass, why you still there?" she asked him. "The big ugly security guy; he was living in my [public] bathroom. When I ask what he doing there, he says he was laid off. Of course, was taking all those drugs. In Hawaiian terminology," she added, "kapakahi--crooked." She's going to have to get her men to move the branches soon. They're not going to like that.

 

Prison visit two

 

He sits in the law library hour after hour typing letters to send to legislators. Hundreds of letters. If he makes 25 cents an hour and stamps are 70 cents; if each envelope costs 10 cents; if there is paper involved, it's hardly a winning proposition . . . he writes to call attention to prison conditions, as he once wrote to ask for drug rehab. He was sentenced to 20 years for using meth. Where do these letters go? he asks the local politician on the other side of the circle. They're probably filed away, the politician says, her face pointed down, her eyes uneasily up. 

 

"When do you feel outside of community?" was the evening's central question. The word of the evening was "judgment." Why we judge others, even though we hate being judged. Why judgment hurts. The men on the inside have particular knowledge of being outside community. On this evening, the organizer shows a short film about trans-men in Samoa. Fa`afatama do not have the honored place of fa'afafine (trans-women) in the culture. Where I sat, in a curve of the circle, there was grumbling. "What is the world coming to?" But the grumbling faded out like the end of a 60s rock song. The film over, the group talked about choices, about creating community where there was none, about filling roles, about the wedding of a fa`fatama that ends the film. 

 

"You get to choose who you are," says one inmate. "Do you think of yourself as a convict, or as something else?" he asks a more skeptical colleague. He's the wisest among them, at least for this evening; says he's a bad dad, absent from his kids. "I want to be a trans-good-dad," he says. 

 

"If I could vote," another man says, looking at the local politician, who is running for state-wide office, "I would vote for you." "Why?" ask other men; "explain yourself." "You've come to spend time with us more than once," he responds. The man next to him looks at her and says, "You seem to think of Hawai`i not as a business, but as a community.

Another pink slip

 

I've had a hard time remembering his name for more than two days running. Always offered a kind greeting at the front gate and a "walk safe" to Lilith and me as we headed in. I told his mother once how much I like him; she also works for the cemetery. As we approached our friends at the top of the hill, I asked them why I hadn't seen the young man lately. O made a throat cutting motion. Why? He'd missed too many days of work. But, said O, he had a doctor's note for every absence. "He was over this place," the guys said, and I agreed, "but quietly." H smiled. "The whole security crew is getting cut," O continued. "Well, no need for them if you've got all those cameras on high poles," I opined. "Humph, half of them don't work." 

 

It began pouring rain as Lilith and I walked downhill; we'd seen gray sheets of it coming from the ocean. We ducked into a covered area where a funeral was going to be held and waited out the worst of it. The Ko`olau assumed their misty aura; in this scroll, the men using weed whackers are the scholars of old. A long row of drops formed along the tent's metal supports. Lilith was drenched. My bright red Springfield Cardinals shirt could have been wrung out.

 

The guard shack at the front is being renovated to include two rooms, more windows, and a computer stand. It's still white, not the dusky maroon color that for many years matched the temple. I wonder what the young man's mother is thinking. I hope he gets another job. I'm glad I got him a cup of coffee from McDonald's a couple of months ago. It took an hour inside "the most scenic McD's in the world."

A prison visit

 

I facilitated a poetry workshop in a prison the other evening. I was reminded of my mother's Alzheimer's home: here were men shut off from (and, more importantly, by) the outside world, locked in and locked out. As I left, I remembered closing the door with a thud on an old man in her home who wanted to leave. 

 

One man who stayed late said he'd taken English 100 at another prison. "It was so much fun!" he said. I told him I hadn't often heard the word "fun" used for that course. "We wrote five papers," he reported. He wants more classes. He'd promised his father he'd get his degree. "Education is everything," he said. His aunty had taught Hawaiian Studies at the local college.

 

We wrote "I remember" sentences (not so possible in my mother's "home," which would now be called a "memory care facility"). Locking up involves a lot of loss: one man had a sentence each for his children; another remembered how to skin an animal and how to fish; another remembered his first kiss with his wife, 40 years ago; the young guy remembered wanting flares at a fair, saying "but they're just flares!" after his father said no. He's the pastry chef in the prison. "Good haupia!" the others exclaimed. He remembered the flight to Arizona (where lots of Hawai`i prisoners are sent). And he remembered taking photos of his dog, which for some reason worried his mother.

 

One man made his every memory and later, his every moment in our exquisite corpses, about ice cream. He was truly the emperor of it.

 

 

Dementia Blog: a kind comment

 This appeared on my Facebook page the other day. I'm gratified that this book, nearly 20 years on, still has currency, though I'm sorry for the reasons why. 

Hi Susan--am finally reading Dementia Blog (the first volume) with admiration and pleasure. You manage to keep the focus on the local conditions surrounding your mother's dementia, giving her a space to be in both her and your world. The blending of clinical and geopolitical spaces during this period is important for placing the body/mind in the world, not separate from it. You've found the appropriate tone for an experience that for most would be traumatic or, rather, that the trauma of your mother's memory loss is experienced through your careful, patient record. It's a great accomplishment.

Best wishes,

Michael Davidson