OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Is Nothing Sacred, Nothing Holy in Hawaii?

Some who read this piece will know whom I am writing about. My fantastic, gutsy woman friend taught me how to be compassionate and caring when I was a young woman, and I am certain she died not understanding the depth of what she imparted because I was never able to tell her in life. I had planned to—but it was not to be, and this explains my yearly pilgrimage to Palauea in the month of her death. Death stole her when she was helping a young native man get to the store. Fate conspired with death and intervened in the specter of a fatal car crash that spared the young man but took my friend to be with the ancestors of a people that she came to love and whose culture “brought music back to her soul.”

My spiritual guide’s resting place is being desecrated and it fills me with anger.

You could never say we were close over the years. We wove in and out of each other’s existence, but always found a way back in unexpected ways. My rascal friend’s personal challenges caused her to literally disappear from life and music—and music was certainly her muse. It is said that she taught Bob Dylan the banjo—what the Hawaiians remember is that she played the banjo for the Makawao library at Christmas, and came dressed as Mrs. Santa Claus to boot. The research librarian helped me find the accident site, where my friend does not dwell, but where shards of the demolished car are still scattered in the rocks—four years after she danced away with the ancestors.

My friend is part of my personal mythology and the musical lexicon of Chicago where she sang her heart out for many years. The producers who would visit the clubs to hear her talent would come away shaking their heads that she was certainly gifted, but not pretty enough, and way too gay in the 1970’s to be of any importance or commercial viability.

I often wonder if this heartache and uncertainty caused her to lose her way for so many years, only to find it again under the great Hawaiian skies. She wrote to me and told me some of these things, and of her own uncertainty, and that maybe she had changed in ways that I would find unacceptable. I think all great teachers change. It did not concern me, and I never had the chance to say so.

What I can say with certainty and conviction is that my friend found peace in her final days—a peace that was closely tied to Hawaiian myth and belief. Her remaining songs are testimony to this in ways more profound than I can explain here. So, also, is a photo she sent to me weeks before she left this realm.

I am angry that her sacred ground and beautiful bones are in danger.

What my friend did not know was how she shaped my life by an action that she thought to be insignificant, but an action that forever changed my life and cemented her forever into my personal sense of spirituality.

When my friend was singing in Chicago, I was a destitute college student and literally had safety pins holding my clothes together. I worked when and where I could, and some of that work involved filling in doing staging and lighting gigs here and there—mostly on college campuses. My gang of friends would go to hear her sing, each nursing one drink all night long because we could not afford anything else.

My friend and guide, whose resting place is in danger of desecration, would graciously sit with us, making us feel welcome and not strangers at all to her world. John Prine, Steve Goodman, and Fred Holstein—all shared the stage with her.

One day she called and asked me to stop by the next time I was in her neighborhood—that she had something she wanted to give me. When I finally showed up, the “something” turned out to be her car! Of course I protested. I could not accept a 1967 gold Karman Ghia roadster! The strength of her determination and a fifteen-year age difference sealed the deal and I drove the car home and quite simply parked it for two weeks.

I called my teacher and friend. “I cannot possibly keep the car,” I wailed.

“Why not?”

My friend/kahuna would never give me reasons WHY I should keep the car—it was up to me to present reasonable, rational reasons why I should NOT keep the car.

I see now that the lesson was about me, and not about her extraordinary generosity. There was never a string attached, but the situation demanded that I reason my way out.

It was my initiation into the adult world, and I had no other adults to guide me. I depended upon a teacher, and like the kahunas on Haleakala, my friend became a great spiritual teacher.

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