Susan M. Schultz's Blog

Prison visit two

2026-08-06T13:41:43.243-07:00

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

2026-08-03T12:44:59.361-07:00

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

2026-08-01T10:16:33.469-07:00

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

2026-08-01T10:01:57.443-07:00

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

from Startles

2026-07-28T17:55:44.272-07:00

Not the image itself, but a memory of the image. Not color or black and white, more a pattern with feelings attached like nuts that burn in the light. Deer fleeing the fires run from between trees in France. The caption tells me there’s a barrier they can’t cross. I turn the video off.

A scrum of men on the street in Madison; three or four on top of another man-shape. They don’t move, at first, image of violence without the act. The caption reads that one of them executed the man on the ground, calmly put gun back in holster. I turn the video off. And I turn it off again when the scroll comes back.

Blurry image off a video of boys in a boat. Diptych of dialogue from 911 call, white words on black screen, no names attached. Someone has cleansed the audio of superfluous sound. “Don’t die, Nolan!,” someone yells. They’re already planning the cover-up. I push past that post; it’s a cue ball in my heart space.

Horses run through a French village, down the street, headlong. Behind them, plumes of smoke. They were ok; they found the beach, the caption reads. Still I cannot watch, even if there’s beauty in the terror of their galloping. I’m sick to death of terrible beauty.

I cannot see what happens in the interval between a man running and his lying on the ground. I cannot turn that interval off. There’s no memory there, but there’s still blood and enough syntax to recollect. Michael Brown in his Cardinals cap, dead nine hours in the sun. I cannot turn the video off, because it’s not on my screen.

A scroll can be sacred. To scroll is action (a movement between messages) and it’s also heresy. An old philosopher ascends to heaven, perhaps, but not these men, these women, these horses on the ground. Ground is verb not noun; there’s no ground on which to stand when it burns away. Woke up scared.

Susan's house-hunting tour of Volcano

2026-07-26T18:56:41.348-07:00

Volcano, HI.

"I'm not interested. Trespassing isn't my thing," said Jill, before Evelyn and I walked onto someone's property. There was a sales sign at the unpaved road (Sotheby's, no less) and no sign of inhabitants. Evelyn and I walked around, looking in the windows, noting the single red chair in the living room. No other furniture to be seen, though the water pump went off occasionally, as there was a leak under the house. "Where's Jill?" I asked. Oh, farther down the hill at an old one room shack made of old and new windows, transparent roofing (used for walls), an old fold-down couch with cell phone charger cable on it. She was already taking photos. The space was hardly empty, though, as there were cat toys (a stuffed mouse), an earring, a larger toy (for dog?); the walls all bore writing. Not poetry, per se, but thoughts, a lot of them. About relationships, some lists, quotations, and references to Harry Parch and Philip Glass. You needed a ph.d. in literature to parse those lines, scrawled in pencil and pen! Some of the handwriting resembled that in Albert Saijo's notebooks, capital letters. The other writings reminded me strongly of something I had seen somewhere else. I thought maybe the man who builds canoes had written similar phrases and lines in his workshop, the one I took photos of that now appear on a Hawai`i journal's website. The photos he gave me permission to use, later objected to, and later again acknowledged in a friendly tone.

We made our way back to the side road. In one direction was a larger side road, in the other a burned down house we'd already visited. There was a story there that we could almost remember. It had to do with a squatter, a fire, and a woman who'd been attacked. Evelyn dashed off to the right to pick up a piece of wood she liked from the junk pile. She did not return quickly. Jill said we should just keep walking and Evelyn would catch up. It felt like a pattern.

She did, a bit out of breath, as we approached Haunani Road. She'd met Andy!!! He's building the small A-frame next to the lot with the burned out house. He's a photographer and a poet!! (Evelyn is possessed of a marvelous enthusiasm.) He told her who the guy who lived in the shed was, and he was indeed the man I thought he'd be. A carpenter, very well educated. (He'd once told me he's half-Hawaiian, half-Nebraskan, military family; he seemed to know a lot about chickens.)

As we walked back toward my home, we saw evidence of the carpenter to the right side of the road. I walked toward the house he worked in front of and called out to see if anyone was there. Someone saw Jill and Evelyn, who hastened to tell him that it was their friend who wanted to say hello. He greeted me with, "Oh the canoe connoisseur!"

Somewhere along the way, Jill and Evelyn had asked if they could be Lilith for this walk. Oh yes, I said, it's a Lilith story. "Let's trespass together again," said Evelyn, by way of farewell.

from Startles

2026-07-20T13:22:59.794-07:00

She misses her furniture. Her ex-husband, late father-in-law, childhood bric-a-brac. Anger’s sturdy as a plank; depression a constantly popping balloon. Her blind dog grows deaf, his nose banging against walls; he has his own issues with furniture, though he still wanders outside and returns to see if she’s in her chair. The word “clustering” was changed to “chair sharing,” marking the diminishment of faculty and resources.

Meditation clears the one, if not the other. My bookcases were all marked “dispose” on my last day in the office. Grieving stored in my hips, I couldn’t walk for two months. The chair I lived in bore witness to morning shadows, late afternoon light. I took photographs of the lanai floor, snail trails, murky puddles, moss.

Kan`eohe would have been a nuclear sub harbor, according to one state master plan. The master always has a plan, and this included industry where the cemetery is. The dead lack industry, but landscape crews do not. Cameras on poles watch them mow and whack and weed. The cyclops is myth, but what it watches is not, is the history of late capitalism, vision folded into threat.

Vulture capitalism. Buddha sits in his temple in the valley, surrounded by signs that order you not to wear beach clothes in his presence, and by others that beckon you to a cultural event of the corporation’s construction. Bon dances have been replaced by photo shoots of tourists in expensive fake Japanese coats. You can ring the bell after the long line dies down. Sacred greed, release us.

Homeless (not the) wander like tourists down Kahekili. They are our furniture, set out at the curb to be taken away. Old man end-table, young woman torn blanket, dog tongue. We can’t set up house with them, but once we clear them out, we see so much less through their eyes. Even unfurnished, the rentals are extravagant, unaffordable.

from Startles (Volcano)

2026-07-18T13:29:12.552-07:00

Playing the changes. Dissonant ones. Bright and dull orange rust barrel, fern shadows magnified in a pool of orange water. Circles inside of circles. Metallic sunset that’s all sun and no set.

Forest battered into rock and dirt road; orange circles of cut trees, laid down like corpses beside flat planks. At the back opening, a rock strewn circle around a rock strewn hole in the ground, overseen by yellow earth mover framing `ohi`a trees. To the right side, on a dirt hill, two pigs sniffing. At the road, a pile of tires, shredded, punctured, heaped up, a memorial of sorts. Behind me, a large rock, positioned to be decorative, in front of the hole in the ground, gray and rust colored.

At the road’s end, boat, large stuffed animal, and abandoned cars gone. Abandoned house still empty, weeds installed in the gutters like front facing cow licks. What was abandoned is now gone. Nothing’s been restored, just cleared, except for cans and a card that reads “Humility, Respect, Honesty” on one side, “Disorder, Enemies, Distrust” on the other. Both bear a faded ALOHA at the top.

The card had been a rectangle, torn on its right side (which was the right side), or left on the other side (which is that of “loneliness” and “suspicion.”) I had to flip it to reverse the field. A less forgiving geometry than the circle, which might ease the transitions, if not acknowledge opposites. Two cats sit on the lanai, mother and daughter, one calico, the other black. They are not abstractions.

Abstraction is reality cut out of context, which is what renders it confusing. Do I see part of something larger that I cannot intuit? Or do I see a pattern adjacent to another that might be a sign (like Texaco) or the fullness of sunset (with the set). Do I inherit flat rectangle or circle? Is circle a burnished orange or is it a rock filled hole in the ground?

If one, or the other, there’s no moral to be taken. Momma cat cocks her back leg, puts it down again. Motion is thought is my seeing of it turning. I’d believed the words so long I couldn’t see the evidence of smudge, orange, a morning light as vivid as Robert Glasper’s tear, which is the music running down his cheek. The black cat came inside and disappeared.

See/hear Glasper here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oj_ex4NgcDw

More Io ed! Section 3 in italiano

2026-07-13T17:41:27.352-07:00

Sono contenta che sia stata pubblicata sulla rivista I Martedì, nella rubrica #Poeta in angolo, la mia nota allo splendido poemetto di Susan M. Schulz, tradotto da Pina Piccolo e Lou Vezzali! Auguri a questo libro ecologico, filosofico e originale nella struttura e nei temi.

Poeta in angolo

a cura di Loredana Magazzeni

Susan M. Schultz

Eucalipto ed io esistiamo fuori contesto; io sono

l’occhio dell’occhio della macchina fotografica

mentre si fissa su una goccia di resina rossiccia che

proietta la sua ombra come un’esca. Io e il testo non

siamo la stessa cosa, anche se io guardo la sua goccia

nera su una pagina virtuale bianca. Ma tutto il resto

vive nella sua luce. Non è una luce sacra, a meno che

non ci si inchiodi sopra una targhetta di bronzo con

un nome a renderla tale. L’albero è luce nella misura

in cui riflette; stamattina sono luce anch’io, a quanto

pare, col variare del sole. Ieri ho sperimentato una

simulazione d’eternità, immutabile sotto la pioggia

grigia. Stamattina i colori si distinguono. È tutto nel

contrasto. Una donna sta ferma accanto a un albero

(la sua cagna dal guinzaglio rosso strattona), scatta

foto senza capire il perché. Se si tratta di fermare

il tempo, l’eucalipto è già piuttosto lento. Se è per

commemorare il momento, il momento insiste nel

dichiararsi vivo in quanto flashback (termine tecnico

per memoria). Questa è l’eterna origine dell’arte:

l’essere umano che si confronta con una forma che

attraverso di lui vuole diventare un’opera. L’albero

è allora una forma con cui mi confronto? Oppure

la forma è la foto, che opera attraverso di me a un

secondo grado di distanza?

[…]

Da Io ed Eucalipto, traduzione di Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali, Diálogos, 2025

Susan M. Schultz, scrittrice, poeta, critica letteraria e docente di Letteratura Inglese, nata in Illinois, Stati Uniti, vive a Kaneohe e Volcano, nelle Isole Hawaii. Fra le sue ultime pubblicazioni Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 (Wet Cement Press), Lilith Walks (BlazeVox), I Want to Write an Honest Sentence (Talisman) e una serie di raccolte Memory Cards a cura di varie case editrici. Scrive di memoria e di oblio nel contesto di storie personali e pubbliche. Ha diretto la casa editrice Tinfish Press e ha fatto da portavoce per la salute mentale presso la University of Hawaii di Manoa. Io ed eucalipto è stato tradotto per la prima volta in Italia da Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali.

Un piccolo, innovativo lavoro di poesia e filosofia è il poemetto Io ed Eucalipto (edito da Diálogos), un’opera sperimentale della poetessa statunitense Susan M. Schultz, che intreccia prosa, poesia, fotografia come fonti di dialogo e conoscenza. Il rapporto intimo e filosofico tra essere umano e natura, tra civiltà e sua possibile dissoluzione per cause ambientali, fa di questo libro uno dei più potenti e innovativi libri di ricerca, che sa spaziare fra i generi e le arti per avviare un più profondo discorso su natura e umanità. La poeta americana parte dal pensiero di Martin Buber per riscrivere la dualità fra l’io e l’altro, dialogando con un albero, grazie a ripetute e lunghe passeggiate, dialoghi e silenzi, che mostrano anche la profondità e necessità per tutti noi di un diverso approccio alla natura. Il poema si articola in 21 capitoli, ciascuno accompagnato da uno scatto dell'autrice, e invita a una riflessione ampia e approfondita che attraversa il senso della vita, le relazioni umane, l’ecosistema, il desiderio di preservarne pluralità e bellezza, come unica forma possibile di futuro per l’umanità tutta.

Posted on Facebook by Loredana Magazzeni

What you don't know won't hurt you

2026-07-13T17:38:01.040-07:00

We'd no sooner left our house this morning, then Raschelle called to say she saw us in the cemetery. Oh, a woman in a red shirt. One problem only: no dog.

Up the hill at the back of the cemetery, Lilith was getting her good attention from Ola and Hoku. I asked what the odd smell was. They pointed down the hill near the maintenance shed to a puff of smoke rising from the trees. The crematorium. To no one in particular I said, "it's my job to be observant, and I missed that for ten years?" "All day every day," said Ola.

"Now you know, aunty," said Hoku.

Dementia Blog conversation with Richard Hamilton, part two

2026-07-05T13:09:55.784-07:00

Part two is about part one of the sequence, which is only just.

https://rh4075.substack.com/p/part-2-interview-with-author-susan

Please support Richard's substack, if you go there. It's well worth the visit.

Essay about Albert Saijo's Backpacking book

2026-07-01T22:37:43.262-07:00

https://lithub.com/one-of-the-best-american-backpacking-books-was-written-by-a-japanese-buddhist-beat-poet/

I happen to love the backpacking book, its instructions on "how to walk," and the prints by Albert's brother, Gompers. Highly recommended.

Albert's old cottage in Volcano is for sale for an incredibly high price! We have such fond memories of spending time with him there before he died in 2011. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/19-3994-Kalani-Honua-Loop_Volcano_HI_96785_M94276-67411?from=srp_next

Unnoble truths

2026-07-01T15:23:26.521-07:00

H does not like to drive the gators/carts. Today he was driving with someone who is not his usual partner. When he saw me, he headed up past an arrow pointing the other way, and stopped. "Where's your dog?" he said, sounding worried. I explained that while she gets dental treatment, I paid $5 to get into the Temple as a walk-in senior kama`aina. He looked a bit drawn, said he was being trained in a new job that involved little flags (arranged at the back of the cart). I asked him to say hello to O for me and Lilith.

I visited the temple as a writer doing research, and as a Buddhist, stung by the commercialization of the place where Lilith and I walk most mornings. It was early; I only saw large tour buses on my way out, four of them parked backwards in the recently-expanded parking lot, nestled bumper to bumper behind the orange cones.

I posted photographs. The implacability of consumerism (as Rachel Blau DuPlessis might put it) confronted my every attempt to find a quiet moment, an unsullied image. Even at the meditation gazebo, which was open and--briefly--empty, signs screamed at me not to feed the animals or run or jump or make a lot of noise. I was not wear beach attire. The word "respect" came up more than once. Other signs screamed the availability of niches and plots at "the Eternal Resort." I took my shoes off and went inside to visit the Amitaba statue. Buddha appeared calm, seated on his still lotus. I lit a stick of incense, put it in sand in a bowl beside him.

Outside again, ads for having your photograph taken. You can be "iconic"! You can partake in a "cultural" moment! You can buy something "more than just a photo"! Inside the gift shop, I caught sight of yet another camera, like the ones on polls throughout the cemetery. Cyclops with an eye on you and you and you. Another sign indicated that bad karma comes to those who steal. Who was not stealing?

First impressions

2026-06-30T13:49:06.272-07:00

Her name rhymes with Michaela. She moved to Washington State a year ago to be with her daughter and grandchild, after years of working at Christian school here. But she's back, circling the "heart" (or cul-de-sac) at the top of the cemetery. We'd agreed once that our first impressions of one another were poor, I in my "Make Racism Wrong Again" hat, which from a distance could be confused for what it parodied, and she in her Christian themed shirts. "What's going on around here?" she asked me in her high, but not soft, voice. "The vibe is bad! And where's Scott?" I told her about the trees, the bushes, the missing cats, the missing men, the untended scars on the landscape. She yelled. "But S's wife is here," she said, meaning his late wife's grave. "He comes very early to visit her," I said, so I don't see him. She saw rhinoceros beetles the other day, dead but; Makoa says they've attacked the palms. (Without the lines of palms this place would really have a bad vibe.) There's some guy who comes and injects one of the trees, I noted, but only one it seems.

She misses this place. The image is in her mind at all times. She can't imagine being a grandmother, but she is. When she's here, she walks many times up and down the last hill. After Ola and Makoa come up the hill, she reaches out to give Ola a hug. She'd given him a present when his baby was coming, but she gave it to the wrong guy.

We peel off, but she comes down hill after us, apologizing for saying "you've got to get rid of that cap!" No harm. She walks with us again as far as her late ex-husband's grave on the hill where an American flag flutters. There's a long story there, but clearly her visit isn't one of anger but of a more loving remembrance. Lilith and I walk toward the exit, just past where four cats lie under a gator to avoid the ever hotter sun.

The American dream

2026-06-26T09:44:24.026-07:00

968869c7

I took a nice photo of Lilith with him the other day; she jumped up onto his cart to get his attention (and mine). At the back of his cart is an upside down broom and a row of flags of different colors. He's the worker who sets down flags before the graves are dug. A young man with a long tattoo down one arm, an earring in one ear. I see him either leaning over to put them down or zooming around not-quite-recklessly on his gator. Yesterday, we met at the back of the cemetery, where the large water feature makes the sounds of running water and revving machines. He asked where I live, and I pointed north toward the townhouses on the other side of `Ahuimanu School. "May I ask how much it costs to rent one?" he asked. "A lot," I said, only later telling him that a three bedroom went for over $3,000 a month. I told him that my kids have to pay nearly everything they make in rent in Seattle and Virginia. Then he asked about mortgages, how much the townhouses cost to buy. I told him that we paid off our mortgage after my mother died. We'd paid under $200K in 2001, but they're now going for well over $700K. He said his dream is to own a place.

The other day I took a photograph of a man wearing a shirt that read, in modified cursive, PRIVILEGE. As if growing through the top of his cap, a pole wore a Hawai`i state flag.

Conversation with Richard Hamilton about my second dementia volume

2026-06-23T09:46:45.864-07:00

Recently, Richard Hamilton and I had a long discussion of my book, "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Volume 2 from Singing Horse Press. Richard has put the conversation on his substack, which is worth visiting in any case.

The second volume of DB kind of disappeared into the ether, so it's good to see that it's getting notice now. It's the most formally inventive of my books, using bureaucratic forms, photographs, inventories, children's stories and other materials to tell the story of my mother's last years. It's also a portrait of an Alzheimer's community, one in which people have long conversations, fall in love, fall down, and experience emotions. I miss them.

https://rh4075.substack.com/p/revisiting-shes-welcome-to-her-disease

The covers for both volumes were thoughtfully designed by Gaye Chan.

On a day too hot to walk much

2026-06-21T12:23:03.929-07:00

"If I ever met Barack Obama," the retired airplane mechanic said, "I'd tell him how much I admire his oratory, but how much more I admire Michelle's." I told my story about Obama and the skinhead, and then about the time I saw Michelle leaning over to look at me through outstretched hands as she shook mine at Ke`ehi Lagoon. (I felt her husband's hand on mine, but he didn't peak.) Alison, with whom we were walking, counted the six degrees of separation she had from Obama, including a cousin who went to Punahou with him when he was Barry.

Up the hill from those stories, she and I ran into the woman who lives on the corner, her house always dolled up with flags and signs. A loud house. We talked about the heat, how she suddenly wished for the rain she'd wanted to have stop just the other day. She said she ran a lot of things in Honolulu, including the zoo, the Shell, the Blaisdell. She was really happy that they might make the zoo into a sanctuary for old elephants. Her expressiveness manifested itself several times in exclamations of "Oh shut up!!" as when Alison said she'd been at the circus when Tyke killed her trainer and ran out into the streets of Kakaako, only to be shot dead by police (1994). The police are still traumatized, she told us. Not her daughter, who was only two at the time. Her husband had told her to close her eyes when the trainer was killed, and she did. I said Tyke has a memorial stone in the pet cemetery nearby, though her body was disposed of in the Waimanalo landfill, which is somehow in Waianae. "Oh shut up!!" said the woman, who said she'd go look for it soon. She was pleased that the new zoo director used to run the zoo in DC; he also used to work for Obama, who made him ambassador to Australia. A good man, she said of the former president, whose 2008 campaign shirt I was wearing.

Ozymandias in `Ahuimanu

2026-06-20T12:29:36.483-07:00

"I'm a senior influencer," the tall Asian man said to me and Raschelle yesterday, as he asked me to retake his photograph. It needed to include his feet, decked in bright blue Hokas. The hat he wore over his white hair and pony tail also read HOKA. His daughter works for the company in California, and the photo was for her. He lives on the other side, near Skyline (the billion dollar rail system on stilts). Everything's so noisy over there, he'd rather live over here. Now, if only the Japanese had built Skyline, it would go all the way to Hawai`i Kai by now, through Waikiki (in a tunnel under the Ala Wai), and to UH Manoa. Their speed trains were built in the 1960s and there have been zero accidents. What are they doing putting all those sculptures on the Skyline poles anyway? (I suggested they made them look a little bit less boring.) But with everything so expensive already, why decorate a pole? The trains are elevated so that they don't have to have drivers, he said.

Today, another walker told me that the Chinese man whose odd Christian nationalist patriotic American tomb sits at the top of the cemetery has been detained for a year now. She called up a story from Hawai`i News Now last week. "A Chinese millionaire who has invested more than $100 million in Hawaii real estate is fighting deportation by the U.S. government, claiming he fears retaliation for supporting democracy while officials say he smuggled aliens and has communist ties." You've gotta read it to believe it, and even then it seems fantastical. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/.../chinese-millionaire.../

I showed Bryson the photograph I took of him petting Lilith yesterday on his John Deere gator. "I saw it already!" he said, "Hoku and Ola showed me" He said he'd seen John, who is doing ok, better, somehow has taken a good turn. No, he doesn't have a new job but, Bryson said, as he stared off in the distance, "you've got to put yourself in his hands." He raised his toward the sky.

Land deals

2026-06-16T12:57:58.585-07:00

He was a storyteller. His sentences moved from subject to object and the subjects then turned into pronouns and the pronouns got detached from their subjects until I realized I could never tell the story back. We met him at the top of the last hill; his small white dog ran at Lilith from a white Tesla whose logo bore a Santa Claus hat. He was an Apache from Texas who'd grown up with Mexicans. San Antonio, El Paso. Now lives near the shore off Kam Highway. And he was here to visit his grave plot. It was up for 60K, but he'd bought it for 40K because he's a fully disabled veteran. I walked to the plot with him; a small red flag marked the space, and he leaned over to pull it upright. He wants a tomb, with a statue of the Virgin Mary on it that he'll design himself. And yes, they keep calling to ask if he wants an upgrade.

I asked how he ended up in Hawai`i. The pronouns gathered like a rainstorm over the Ko`olau, while he communicated the story of how he and his wife came into a lot of money. Land deal in LA was at the center of it. "She" paid off everyone's houses, including his and his wife's, and they had a huge party near the graveyard in Culver City, and the other one, where the Jackson Five are. They did the rosary up there. He also inherited responsibility for a Catholic community that sheltered abused women. And he gives to St. Ann's here (later, he'd say that he needed "to go feed the poor at 11:30.") He's not a materialist, like the Mexicans in his family, but so much material came to him through his trail of pronouns. He arrived at how he'd gotten to Hawai`i, but by then all I could think of was Catholicism and land deals in California.

We returned to an earlier topic, the large number of transgender people he sees here. Yes, I told him, they're mahu, and I read him the definition of the word on my phone. They have an honored place in Polynesian culture (if not, alas, in the state of Hawai`i) as third gender persons. He said he supposed it didn't matter much, he was simply perplexed. We exchanged names and took photos; I sent him his as he wandered down the hill with his noisy dog. Also part chihuahua, also a hunter.

Lilith and I learn about "death care"

2026-06-14T11:03:51.363-07:00

Uncertain weather. Uncertain left knee. Lilith's supine on the floor, only half-expecting a long walk, her eyes drifting closed, then open, closed again. A season of new birds; the smaller, duller colored, Brazilian cardinals chase their parents for food, though it won't be long until they'll need to find their own. Mynas squawk. Doves do what doves do, coo. Other mysterious cheepers add to the not-quite-dissonant cacophony.

Valley of the Temples was opened in 1963 by Paul Trousdale, a continental developer who built tract homes on the windward side of O`ahu. Waikiki also bears his imprint. The cemetery pre-dates the Temple that sits within it by five years. I've already written about the Buddhist clergymen who worked at the Temple for many years, ending in 2019, with the death of Bishop Fukuhara. By 2001, the property had been purchased by RightStar, led by John Dooley, a funeral management company (now called "death care" by the happy euphemists who write PR copy). According to one source (yes, I'm doing investigative journalism these days), RightStar had links to a Christian music group, The Imperials. I've been told that there were frequent concerts outside the administrative building.

By 2009, Dooley, who'd been fired years prior, plead guilty to stealing nearly $51,000 dollars from RightStar's clients. After being indicted in 2006, he'd been picked up for speeding in Oregon and brought back to Hawai`i for trial. The fraud had been much greater than that. By 2012, none other than former Governor John Waihe`e had suffered the consequences of being trustees of RightStar. Waihe`e had earlier lobbied for the corporation. Jim Dooley wrote: "Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe`e and three associates have agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle claims by the state Attorney General that they helped to illegally divert some $30 million from funeral and burial plans sold to thousands of Hawaii residents." Large amounts of plunder came from the trust funds set aside for upkeep of the cemetery, which were paid into by those who bought burial plots. You can see an extravagant pay schedule for Waihe`e and other trustees here: https://www.hawaiireporter.com/exclusive-new-allegations.../

The state controlled the properties (which included other Hawai`i cemeteries on Oahu, the Big Island, and Maui) until the business was bought by the current owner, NorthStar, in October, 2011. This is the corporation headquartered in Houston, with no local ties to this place, which is currently milking the Buddhist Temple for all it's worth (and more--or less, if you're a Buddhist--). The general manager--said to be very honest--who'd repaired RightStar's damage was promptly fired. Plans to raze the Modernist/Hawaiian administrative building were made, but fortunately never enacted. Instead, NorthStar renovated the main building.

When Lilith and I started walking the cemetery in early 2017 there was still a local feel to the place. The Temple grounds were mostly quiet. (I read somewhere that young Barack Obama liked to visit, which tells you something about the pull on local introverts. He and his family visited in 2009, as well.) The graves were laid out mostly according to ethnicity/culture: there are Chinese, Korean, Japanese sections, along with a large Catholic section. Up the hill farther, there's a "patriotic" section that tells the story on a large plaque of how immigrants made America great. Something about "tilling her soil." At the very top, a newer tomb, vast, including many as-yet-uninhabited niches behind black stone, fronted by stone (cement) images of the White House, the Capitol, and likenesses of Lincoln and Washington. Christian iconography is everywhere, as well. It's owned by a rich Chinese guy, young, I'm told.

Something about this last reminds me that there's a UFC event tonight on the White House grounds between fighters who yesterday walked down the Lincoln Memorial steps, flanked by a military honor guard. It's intended to celebrate America's 250th, but just happens to coincide with Trump's 80th birthday.

Notes:

https://www.hawaiireporter.com/former-governor-waihee.../

https://www.atomic-ranch.com/.../retro-road-trip-valley.../

https://ag.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2008-19.pdf

https://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/.../hawaii910280350.html

https://docomomo-hi.org/exhibits/show/subdivisions/centex

The end times

2026-06-13T12:53:08.444-07:00

"Yes, you told me before," I said to the woman at the desk who only wants to live three more years. She's scared she'll live longer, because she's so healthy. Never had the flu, hadn't been sick in over 20 years. (But she needs new knees and had serious kidney stone surgery a few years back, remembers exactly how much it cost.) "It's so hard living in this body," she said, nodding at her walker. Her last roommate left such a mess that her friend's husband came over and cleaned the room out in two hours. It would have taken her days.

She did have two covid shots because she works here. "You know people spit on you when they talk," someone told her. Her face wrinkled. She believes in Jesus, in heaven and hell. Worries about her son, who does not. She prays for him. She left a small church (of 300) because they didn't do any social distancing. One woman died of covid. Now she's at Calvary, where the pastor preaches about the end times. 150,000 tune in on zoom to hear him.

The other year she stopped doing her Christmas tree; she'd collected ornaments for decades. She spread them out on the table, Macy's style, and gave them to her children and grandchildren so they could start their own Christmas rituals. One son is in his mid-50s.

Lilith and I moved out of the way of a woman with a large white flower display attached to a frame. There were lots of funerals today. Lilith and I wandered up hill. On our way down, we saw the man in black, showed him the photograph I'd taken of him, told him S was happy to hear about him, got a quick hug and hurried home in the hot sun. Lilith's on the couch now, nose on her blanket.

Valentina Meloni writes about Io ed Eucalipto / I and Eucalyptus

2026-06-12T17:01:21.884-07:00

Here is the essay in Italian: https://www.rivista-diwali.art/io-ed-eucalipto-susan-schultz-recensione/

There's a translation function that pops up, which seems good enough, though it keeps referring to me as "he," which is disconcerting.

And here is something about the essayist, https://thepunchmagazine.com/author/valentina-meloni

And here is the essay in English. Google doesn't do pronouns, apparently.

In the silence of eucalyptus: Valentina Meloni reads Susan M. Schultz

12 June 2026 Valentina Meloni InEvidence, InNews, InVerso, InVerso (poetry) 0

“Me and Eucalyptus” by Susan M. Schultz: the metaphysical relationship between man and nature in nature writing

There are books about trees that teach to recognize species, others that tell the forests as places of salvation, still others that transform the landscape into autobiography. Me and Eucalyptus by Susan M. Schultz belongs to a rarer category: that of books seeking a relationship.

In the great tradition of nature writing — from Henry David Thoreau to Roger Deakin, to the most recent books dedicated to trees as living, symbolic, almost interlocutory creatures — Schultz chooses a very personal path. He doesn't cross woods, he doesn't build a botanical atlas, he doesn't tell nature as a refuge. He remains next to a single tree. A eucalyptus observed day after day, photographed, interrogated, heard.

From this fidelity comes a surprising, hybrid and luminous book, which continuously oscillates between poetry, meditation, diary and philosophical reflection.

The author looks at the tree as you look at a living being capable of presence. Not an object of the landscape, but something that exists next to her, in the mystery of an impossible yet real reciprocity:

“Eucalyptus and I cannot communicate, even if we are in communion.”

Perhaps this is the phrase that best guards the heart of the book. Schultz knows that the tree will never speak the human language, and yet he continues to turn to him. He observes the bark, the resin, the colors, the wounds. He photographs it obsessively, as if each image could bring it closer to something essential.

And the images, in these pages, count as much as the words. Photography is not just documentation: it is a way of being in the world, of measuring the distance between what we see and what really exists.

“Focus is presence.”

But the presence never coincides with possession. Schultz understands it continuously: every attempt to capture the tree risks turning it into an image, into an “object”, into something separate. For this reason, the book dialogues underground with the thought of Martin Buber and his distinction between “I-You” and “I-It”. The eucalyptus always remains on the border: a real creature and at the same time irreducible, near and far.

The writing proceeds by lightning, fragments, intuitions. Schultz naturally passes from personal memory to philosophy, from the contemplation of the tree to the violence of the contemporary present. In the book enter the war, the media images, the technology, the chatbots, the digital photography, the incessant noise of the modern world. Yet the eucalyptus remains there, motionless, almost to guard another temporality.

Some passages reach an extraordinary poetic intensity:

“Your silences don’t bother me. They protect me.”

or:

“The tree is broken (however it stands.”

In these sentences you can feel something that goes beyond ecological discourse. The tree becomes a figure of human vulnerability, of resistance, of memory that continues to live despite the wounds.

Yet Eucalyptus and I never indulge in easy sentimentality. Schultz does not idealize nature and does not transform it into consolation. He knows that every look is partial, that even photography can lie:

“To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.”

It is precisely this awareness that makes the book so contemporary. The author does not seek absolute truths: she seeks a form of attention. A chance to stay by the way without dominating them.

As in Roger Deakin's most beautiful books, here too the landscape becomes an inner experience; but Schultz is more fragmentary, more philosophical, more restless. Where Deakin recounted the cultural relationship between man and nature, Schultz stages an almost metaphysical relationship, made of silences, images and unanswered questions.

At the end of the book there remains the feeling of having inhabited a space of rare contemplation in contemporary literature. A place where a single tree still manages to oppose the speed of the world, forcing us to look better.

And maybe that's what Susan M gives us. Schultz: not a lesson about nature, but an exercise in presence.

Ceci n'est pas un conte de Lilith

2026-06-12T10:15:31.898-07:00

The frame shop on Sand Island is located in the grittiest (and that is kind) part of Honolulu. It puts the warehouse in warehouse district; the streets are flat and hot; battered mattresses and rusted metal, old buses and motorcycles seem flung down like dice. Go down an alley, ring a bell and you're ushered into a windowless space that's quiet except for the yapping of a small dog. It's like stepping into a bunker. One of two or three women give you a mask before you enter. There's a large table to the left where they measure photographs and paintings for frames. The last time I was there, the large table was nearly completely covered by a canvas that exploded into the dull room, awash in bright colors. "What's that?" I asked, startled. "That's a David Hockney; someone just bought the painting at an auction." RIP

Shadow boxing on Kahekili

2026-06-11T12:45:35.485-07:00

The man in black--black baseball cap, black Raiders sweatshirt, black pants, black running shoes--usually runs down the other side of Kahekili from us, stopping occasionally to use the guard rail as his gym equipment. Other days he runs on our side up past the cemetery entrance, boxing with the flexible bollards. Thwack thwack go the bollards.

Daniel, for that is his name, is one of the very few people who remember mine, but not Lilith's. It's because his father had a girlfriend named Susan. I said she must have been born in the 1950s or 60s, before the name died out, and he nodded. We talked a bit about the cemetery, the cut trees, the cut employees, the cut community.

I asked him what he does when he's not out exercising. "I'm my dad's caretaker," he says. His father is 80 and has Alzheimer's. Daniel is his sole caregiver. It's hard when they don't recognize you. But he's a healthy man!

I tell him about my dementia books. He says how good it is to talk to other people who've had similar experiences. I take some pictures of him, his lined face, his big smile. He heads off to the district park, past the blue couch that was dumped there the other day. Lilith and I walk toward the cemetery, heading for the ritual grooming by O and H. Lilith is training the new guy to pet her, too.

See less

Job openings

2026-06-10T13:33:48.900-07:00

"The bishop--he was one of a kind--," O said, when I asked after the Buddhist clergyman who used to work at the Temple. "He watched me and my sister grow up" (he held his hand out to the height of a child); "took my sister to McDonald's all the time. My mother worked in the gift shop; the whole family worked here." He remembers bon dances at the Temple.

In 2014, I read, the current management wanted to tear down the main building near Kahekili. Designed by a resort architect, George Pete Wimberley, whose work was "'exuberant and odd,'” says Mike Gushard, president of the Hawai‘i chapter of DoCoMoMo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement)." (I quote from _Honolulu Magazine_ from November, 2014, on-line.) It was slated to be replaced by a 30,000 square foot funeral home.

"When did the new owner buy the place?" I asked O. He didn't remember, though he did know that the previous owner also had a "Star" in the name. He thought it started with Red, but I find an abandoned web site for Right Star funeral home, with the VOT Kahekili address. The domain is possibly for sale. Their Hawai`i address (they still operate here in Nu`uanu, I find) contrasts with the current owner, whose corporate headquarters is located in Houston, Texas. Go to the corporate website and you find that "Empathy meets Opportunity." "A culture built around people." The photograph underneath these words is a view of Valley of the Temples "heart" feature at the top, close to the mountains, the place with good Feng Shui.

The leadership team on the website of the Houston business features 12 white faces, only one of which belongs to a woman. Closer to home, I find this notice of available jobs: "Current openings around Oahu include positions in Kaneohe, Waipahu, and Honolulu, with hourly rates ranging from $16 for reception/gift shop roles to over $28 for licensed embalmers." The CEO's salary is not listed publicly, but the corporation, I find, pulls in between $100 and $500 million a year. You try living on $16 an hour here.

On Indeed, I find the following 1 star review of the corporation. "What is the most stressful part about working at the company? Toxic work environment due to poor management What is the work environment and culture like at the company? Toxic because of egotistical managers. Management is to money focused What is a typical day like for you at the company? You help families and fight for your right with management"

Lilith and I walked in gentle--then less gentle--rain this morning. The mountains were out of scroll paintings; the place was quiet. It really did feel like a sanctuary (before opening time). We met a couple from Arkansas in the parking area. She was carefully examining plants. "Oh yes, she's VERY interested in them," opined her husband. They have a family cemetery in Camden, Arkansas, which they maintain themselves. I point out the ex-trees nearby. Ever the bearer of bad news am I. Last I saw them, they were climbing the stairs to the Cambodian/Chinese altar. Someone still puts incense and oranges there. Tinny music emerges from a small speaker.