Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

I am finally in the swing of things with my new teaching job-- it took a whole semester, but I feel like I've found my pace. I don't wake up in terror every morning. Only occasionally, like the other day when I woke up choking on a nightmare about a co-worker... nevermind. :) I began the year with about 4 years worth of plans all set up to get through in the first semester-- hands-on assessments and multiple intelligence projects and poems to memorize and essays to write and genres to explore and rubrics to publish. About half-way through I realized that I can plan on about 40% less class time than I have on paper, because of an endless stream of unexpected last minute speakers, activities, and field trips. And I realized that I could count on zero work being delegated to homework-- so if there was anything done, the bulk of it would have to be in class. I had to chop projects and content and readings out. I was reminded of my favorite writing advice: "Kill your darlings...

It's September. This morning I I flipped the page on the calendar over and shouted to my four year old, "hey! It's a new month! It's September!" This seemed important enough to interrupt her drawing time (detailed vignettes of fancy girls in triangular dresses, backdropped by loop-dee-loop clouds). "Summer is over, now it's Fall." She gasped: "Oh no! So we can't go anywhere?!" I was puzzled. She broke it down for me: "Because it will be cold now?" She ran to the door to look for a library book scene of corn-stalks and pumpkins and scarecrows and maple leaves. Nope, not cold. Light green kukui nut leaves, pale yellow cascades of starfruit like pinatas, hard green mini grapefruits on the trees, bittermelon vines choking the compost bins. But still, Fall. The beginning of the new school year -- that rhythm that pulses throughout a post-school (or pre-school) life. The storing away of summer, reporting on my summer vacation, con...

I read a lot of parenting books. Lacking a compound of extended family and helpful aunties, bossy how-to books fill in the gaps. They are great-- I especially like Playful Parenting , How to Talk so Kids will Listen , Parenting with Love and Logic , and Simplicity Parenting . But there are some things about Hawaii that make parenting here unique. My friend H. and I call it "Beach Parenting." It comes naturally on this island but would not be difficult to apply anyplace else, if you just "think beach." So, as an experiment in how-to parenting writing, here you go. Your own guide to parenting in paradise. 1. Sand. Get kids dirty. Sand is a miraculous substance-- take a little, it's light. Load a bucket-ful, it's heavy. It can be wet and cold to pour out into gloppy towers, or it can be crisp and hot enough to blister your feet. Put an irate bored child in the sand, and watch her relax. She will get into the zone, time will hold still as she grinds fistful...

Way back when I first moved to the Big Island, I was walking past a storefront when a flier for the Miss Aloha Nui pageant caught my eye. It was a call for entries in a beauty pageant, with a photo of an enormous and lovely beauty queen, waving, her arms tapering to small graceful fingers. The flier listed the qualifications for entrants: - Must be female - Must weigh at least 200 pounds - Must be at least 18 years of age - Must be a current resident of Hawaii A few days after the contest, the winner rides in the Aloha Week parade on the main street of Waimea, with the hula halaus dancing on flatbed trucks and highstepping all-haole marching bands. The first year we watched the parade, the winner laughed and cooed "Aloha! Aloha!" to all of us sitting on the curb-- her subjects. She was fantastic-- she filled the whole car and blew kisses and her friends and admirers ran up to her and gave her kisses as she went. The next year the winner was a quietly dignified queen, staring ...

So as a basically uninformed observer, Happy 50 years of Statehood, Hawaii! You were a chain of connected sisters in the family of Polynesia, and then you were discovered by the West, and everything changed almost instantly. Chiefs got gun-powder weapons, fought brutal battles. You became your own Kingdom-- you were a hub of the Pacific, with sudden wealth from whalers and traders and sudden death and misery from disease and consumer culture. Your people struggled and changed-- newcomers poured in to work, to live, to make gobs of money, to punish you for your sins, to learn your ways. Whalers got Hawaiian tattoos, Hawaiians wore missionary clothes and toppled their gods. Old taboos were discarded, new ones were stamped on your faces. Hawaiians poured away from the islands and scattered across the world-- marrying Indians in the Northwest, educating freed slaves in the East, and criss-crossing the continents on whalers. Most changed, learned new languages, never came home, and left tra...

So, what does your husband do? Really? What kind of degree do you need for that? How much does he make? Wow? Can you live on that? And how much is rent? Seriously, for THIS PLACE? How much would it cost to buy? How many bedrooms? Kids, did you hear that?! That's how much our house is worth! And how much do you spend on groceries? Wow. You guys have a car? Two? How much did you pay for that truck? Amazing. Wow, good thing we live in Idaho, eh honey? Well, nice to meet you!

Today we went to the beach with the playground to wear Rosie out a little bit (sun, slides, sand and surf, dude. It'll wipe anybody out.) We've only lived here since October-- that's, what, 7 months? We ran into four separate families that we know. And as the months go by, the island is only going to get smaller. Living here is my first experience with having to make a community work. Knowing that we're going to be here for a long time, with these same people, in these same situations, over and over-- makes me approach problems slightly differently than I've needed to before. My first example: the librarian is an SOB. He's notorious. Every parent on the island knows of him, and stays away from his library because he is so rude and HATES children. Every time we go to the library (every Friday, 11:30) he tells Rosie to "be quiet or get out!" This is especially annoying when she's saying things like, "Rosie! Loves! Libwawy!" I'm sorry, i...

I love-- and loathe a tiny bit-- the Local tradition of hugging and kissing. You hug and kiss people when you're introduced to them, people you see everyday, when you say hello and when you say goodbye... On one hand, it's comforting. At a wedding, I ran into Aunty Ulu who I had met once briefly at church. She wrapped me in her arms and kissed me soundly on the cheek. I felt so comforted-- suddenly grounded in the strange setting of a fancified wedding with 100s of people I don't know, clinking their champagne glasses and balancing on high heels. And I loved the time consuming tradition of kissing everybody at church before the service started-- it would be unspeakably rude to just walk past all the kupunas and go to your pew. You have to stop and stoop to brush every dry soft cheek with your lips. Kissing down the line of tutus in their bright flowered muumuus made me feel warm and included-- part of the congregation, part of the family. Kissing can also make me fee...

We've been on Kauai for almost 3 months now. The first three months someplace are usually the hardest-- no friends, no routines-- unfamiliar roads and disorienting landscape, not to mention a mountain of unpacked boxes. But not this time. This time, I think I'm in love. Everywhere I go-- out to the dry and stunning Waimea Canyon or to rainy and dreamlike Hanalei Valley-- I'm awed. Even riding my bike every day on our little muddy road and through the pastures I sigh and giggle. It's just all so beautiful! And the food! There is good food in every nook and cranny, in every little lean-to town--the ramshackle little place serving steaming bowls of rich brothy Pho with spicy basil and cool lemon grass on mismatched tables and wobbly chairs, or the cafe with the ugly ripped booths and flourescent lights serving buttery apple turnovers crusted with sugar. And my favorite, genki sushi-- where the sushi comes around on a conveyer belt and you can pluck it off like gleaming li...

1. The beach is free. 2. The Queen Emalani Hula festival in Kokee Park (also free) was free. It's also bizarre-- a woman portraying the queen rides in on her horse with her ladies in waiting, sits in a royal tent, and then many hula halaus perform for her, to proxy performing for Queen Emalani. If you came to see some hula, too bad for you. The event seems like a ritual for the dancers-- it's certainly not a performance for the public. It was quite moving to see her ride in and all the halaus run out across the field to meet her. 3. Farmers markets where you can get a small mountain of sweet potato greens, or a bag of big juicy okra, or fresh yellow peppers, or a heap of apple bananas-- for a dollar 4. High energy costs means that we've never used our dryer and instead always can hang out laundry up to get nice and stiff and crispy in the sun. 5. Neighbors are generous: we gave our neighbors a bag of oranges, they came over later with a bag of baby snacks. 6. Wild c...

Kauai is the oldest of the inhabited Hawaiian islands-- she is rutted and raked down the middle-- deeply pitted and eroded with soft jungled mountains and dizzying cliffs. And here we find ourselves, strangers in a strange land, yet again! It is a little bit vertiginous to be on an island and know absolutely nobody. We got off the plane in Lihue, picked up our rental car, and drove to Kalaheo to an odd little rabbit-warren of a hotel/shelter/historic plantation mansion/apartment building. We stayed in a tiny room with just a bed, a shower, a sink, a mini fridge and a hot plate for two weeks and got to know our fellow inmates. I mean guests. In the mornings two big boys-- 9 and 11-- came galloping like bison down the stairs over our heads, with their edgy alert dog Penny in tow. They loved showing us around the grounds-- "This is where James kills the roosters! This is where I caught a lizard and accidentally pulled off his tail! This is sleeper grass!" You can poke your finge...

This weekend we hopped on a plane and went to visit Kauai for a couple of days. Yes, the airfare was outrageous--I bought a roundtrip from SF to NYC for less a couple of years ago-- but it was an adventure. And besides, it was the patriotic thing to do-- spending a bit of our economic stimulus money on a mini vacation (which doubled as a chance for a job interview). And after four days on the Garden Isle, I went home with this profound impression: All of the Islands are different from each other. The Big Island is big. Kauai, Oahu, and Maui are small. We have vog, they have clear blue skies. They are green and verdant jungles, we are yellow rangeland plains. They have a lot of good food, we have a little bit of good food, spread few and far across the island. And maybe I'm nuts, but everyone was very friendly on Kauai. I kept nudging my husband and saying, "am I nuts or is everybody friendly on Kauai?" The museum lady let us in for free, the shopkeeper pinched baby's ...

I was browsing through the webiverse yesterday and stumbled across some very lovely talk-story accounts of the history, culture, and spiritual importance of Kawaihae . As I read it one thing stuck in my throat a bit-- the people interviewed sadly mention the vast influx of extremely wealthy mainland people into the community. They say the populations of local people are shrinking and vanishing as the haole come in , buy everything up, and then lock themselves in their million-dollar gated communities. Here's one bit: “Back in the old times, we had a really strong sense of community,” Pua remarks. “Now it’s separated. Everybody has their own thing. Everybody wants this and everybody wants that and nobody wants to come together, and make it work. ‘I want this, I want a park,’ somebody else wants this and everybody want, want, want, but nobody wants to do what it takes to make it happen. So, I say, that during my time of growing up, we were as one community and one family. Not today....

I've had several conversations lately with other malihini. The consensus seems to be that it is hard to live in Paradise. Is that extraordinarily odd? We have all made painful sacrifices to move here--leaving family and friends and familiarity back on the mainland. It's expensive to ship your car and all of your stuff. It's hard to find a job that can keep up with inflated rents and $7 a gallon milk (as expensive as Manhattan on a quarter of the income!) I know heaps of people who are desperate to move here-- who fantasize about their lives as they would be, surely, in Hawaii. The haole mainlander Hawaiian music officianados I met through slack-key camp are positively fervent about Hawaiian culture-- weeping openly about the fate of King Kalakaua and about the beauty of Aloha. People feel compelled to come here, to fulfill their dreams. People come to become cocoa farmers, to thaw out, to relax, to restart their lives. And then they get disillusioned, and according to a Haw...

Who moves to Hawaii? I've always wondered. People who move here seem to have devastatingly high expectations: leis, hula-girls, beaches. Like being on vacation every day! Just googling "move to Hawaii" brings up a cascade of superlatives. "Make your dreams come true and move to Hawaii!" http://www.paradiserelocation.com/ odyssey to paradise and on and on. Just look at the copy from any of the resort home sales and you get glossy light-saturated beautiful young tanned families strolling in sarongs along the white sand beach, and big letters spelling "you're not visiting, you live here!" This could be your lean, glamorous life. See? No work worries, no nasty cold weather, everyone happy! I suppose many people move here because it will be warm, they will be tanned all year, and in Hawaii it's supposed to be acceptable to wear loud clothes and drink Mai Tais at any time of day. The Big Island is funny that way-- the malihini here are the white t...