Mahalo: Part Two: (Blessings and Royalty)

overview

lily pads

palace

queen

food

ruins

Part Two: Blessings and Royalty

In the morning we stopped at Linette’s alma mater, the Punahou School, which is located in the hills above Honolulu. Founded in 1841 as a missionary school, it's the largest independent school in the United States, with a reputation for excellence in athletics and academics. (A boy named Barry Obama who attended in the 1970s would become its most famous alumnus.)

The school was built on the lands of Ka Punaho, named for a natural spring that still flows today beneath the campus chapel. I had an impulse to enter the chapel and I tried every door but it was locked. We lingered instead at the lily pond fed by the waters of the spring, and as we stood there, sunshine did a dance with misty veils of rain. What can I say? It was magical.

And I realize this will sound a bit jarring, but an email came in on my cell phone at that moment from an old friend I was close to in junior high; she and I have recently begun corresponding after decades of separate and probably un-relatable lives. For my friend the underlying theme of life has been her ceaseless and diligent searching for God, and she talked about this in her email.  I read her words  as I stood in front of the Ka Punaho lily pond:

And still, I look up at the sky at night, and I just wonder at the immensity and grandeur of it all. It could not have just happened. …[If] we look at the amazing details--you know, the way a flower or a bird looks hand painted--then it seems more like an act of love. That's what I believe it all was: an act of love from a creator who loved his creatures.

Love did in fact seem manifest in that instant, and it washed over everything: the shining and fragrant air, the tropical foliage, the morning light, and once again, the kisses of the sky upon my face.

And I have to tell you this, whatever you believe: I felt blessed.

We headed now over to downtown Honolulu for a tour of the beautifully restored ‘Iolani Palace, and I recommend this as an excellent orientation to Hawaii for anyone who wants to better understand its history and heritage. 

Before entering, we were asked to sit on benches outside and put little cloth booties over our shoes to protect the wood floors within, and it’s a hands-off, no photography kind of place, but our guide was so knowledgeable and passionate that the stories came alive.Forgive my compulsive retelling here, but we learned about King Kalakaua, the first king to visit the United States (in 1874), and the first to circumnavigate the globe (in 1881).  A bon vivant, Kalakaua was known as the merry monarch, but he is also credited for preserving the language and oral tradition of the indigenous Hawaiian culture, and he was a great patron of the arts.

’Iolani, which was completed in 1882, had the best of modern amenities, including indoor plumbing, gas chandeliers soon replaced by electrical fixtures, and a newly invented device called the telephone. The palace proclaimed Hawaii’s sense of itself as a culturally diverse and sophisticated land: many of its furnishings were built by the finest craftsman from Europe and Asia, and its guests included dignitaries from all over the world.

King Kalakaua  died (while visiting San Francisco) in 1891 and was succeeded by his sister, Lili`uokalani, who was to be Hawaii’s last monarch. She yielded her authority in 1893 to opposition forces (many of them sugar plantation and businessmen) supported by the United States. Two years later, an attempt by Hawaiian royalists to restore her to power resulted in her arrest, a sham of a trial before a military tribunal, and imprisonment within the upstairs bedroom of the palace.  (A hundred years later, President Clinton signed a Congressional resolution in which the U.S. government formally apologized to the native Hawaiian people.)

The most poignant point of the ‘Iolani Palace tour was when we stood in the room of the queen’s imprisonment. The quilt she made during this time is on display beneath a glass case, and today's Hawaiian school children still sing Ke Aloha O Ka Haku, the prayer she composed while incarcerated within her palace and her sorrow. It concludes:

Behold not with malevolence the sins of man, but forgive and cleanse. And so, o Lord, protect us beneath your wings and let peace be our portion now and forevermore.

No bitterness. Forgiveness and peace.

Familiar yearnings we still hold in our hearts.

Our guide, who had one of those melodious Hawaiian names that sound like flowers but fly away quickly from mainland minds like mine, had tears in her eyes as she concluded her talk. “If we know who our ancestors and are family were and remember our stories, then we know who we are. Only then.”

We stayed and talked to her about home and ohana. She was an interesting woman who had grown up in Hawaii but lived and taught for many years in places like Boston and New York and now was back to stay, volunteering as a docent purely out of love.  She urged us to go downstairs to the gallery to look at photographs and artifacts, and we planned to stop by later, but now it was time for lunch; Linette had promised to take me to a genuine Hawaiian place guaranteed to be empty of tourists.

She did. It was a no-nonsense storefront restaurant called The People’s Café, off the beaten track, hard to find, and exactly as she predicted, not a tourist in sight except me. We ordered a variety of foods so that I could sample everything, including poi, a mauve-colored paste made from the roots of the taro plant. Linette seemed to enjoy it, but I think it is an acquired taste. 

We also had something called long rice -- glassy, glossy bean threads, a bit slimy in texture, to be honest, but not bad. There was fishy butterfish in a light broth, luau chicken in a sweet coconut spinach mash – delicious despite appearance, very salty strips of beef, and a fat-rich wedge of roasted pork wrapped in big green leaves, sort of like dark cabbage. We had enough to eat.It was hot in Honolulu, but the amazing thing about the Hawaiian Islands is that a short drive can take you to an entirely different climate.

In the afternoon Linette and I ascended the mountains to a cool misty jungle-like place to meet her brother for a hike to the ruins of Kaniakapupu, the summer palace of an earlier king and queen, King Kamehameha III and his Queen Kalama. We paused along the way for some climbing in the mother of all banyan trees -- well, I was just an audience, but an appreciative one. Then we walked a bit further along a well-worn trail beneath arched leafy branches -- and there it was.

Set in a clearing amidst luminous green foliage,  the old stone blocks and volcanic rocks have a ghostly hush about them. At the threshold, people have hung leis, now withering in the sun, and a bronze sign says that the summer palace, which was completed in 1845, was the scene of entertainment of foreign celebrities and the feasting of both chiefs and commoners.

“The greatest of these occasions was a luau attended by an estimated ten thousand people celebrating Hawaiian Restoration Day in 1847.”

Ten thousand people? I tried to picture it, but even when I closed my eyes, it was impossible to imagine the din and festivity of a crowd that large; I listened for the residue of stories, some murmur in the wind, but the place held only silence.

As we walked back, we encountered a young family heading towards the site with bright fresh leis and an offering of food wrapped in broad green ti leaves, a merry procession of four. They were carrying a little girl in a portable stroller lifted off the ground; she wore a flower tucked into her dark brown hair and looked like a miniature queen.