E O Mai

Here is a miracle. In less than 24 hours I will go from the grit and concrete of this northern city to the green, wet, oceanic heaven that is Maui. Will I be blinded? Will I be able to see it? And is my heart big enough to hold it? What will it be like to walk those sands next to this child who calls out more love than I have known before? What will it be like to be a grandmother in that place?

When I was 12, 13, and 14 I lived in Honolulu and walked to school barefoot beneath papaya trees and blossoming plumeria bushes, and the whole world was fragrant of my own awakening sexuality. I took hula lessons and learned from teachers who were polynesian women of substance with eloquent bodies and long black hair. I was a stick of a flat-chested, gawky girl with short, straight, mousy hair and big feet. I longed to be a woman like they were, with arms like pillows, breasts like pillows, with powerful thighs and massive hips. My idea of beauty was to be like this woman, to move like this woman, here. When the Air Force yanked us away from Paradise, I was just about to turn fifteen, and I promised myself I would return to Hawaii and raise my children there and build myself after these beautiful big women.

I never found a way to do that. But now my son has found a way to take me back, not as a beautiful big woman, but as an old woman laughing, spinning, dizzy with joy. No lover, no partner. Just me, the lone Gran, following Bella and humming E O Mai. We can't always get what we want or what we dream. But there are dazzling surprises.