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Flying

A difficult passenger, a stormy ride, a passionate encounter

Sunbeams

A boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.

Plato

Past The Breakers

Part of Charlotte’s mystique was her complete lack of fear. Even during rough-surf warnings and undertow advisories, she swam out past the green breakers, avoiding skates and jellyfish and rafts of seaweed. I’d see her head bobbing or her arms doing a demonstrative backstroke in the jade swells. She had learned to swim while growing up near Boston. “Wheatley isn’t afraid of anything,” my mother would say proudly. I never had the guts to go out that far.

Sunbeams

We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.

Phyllis Diller

Holding On

Cradling a baby, climbing to safety, clinging to the past

Appetites

A forbidden treat, a secret stash, a sexual obsession

Clothes

A suit of armor, a pair of blood-red high heels, a “cast on” butterfly dress

Haole Boy

We all have to borrow in life. We borrow money to buy a home or to travel. We borrow from our independence and our spirit to make a living. I borrowed from my health to try to become Hawaiian. And somewhere a ledger is tallied.

A Boy’s Girl

At fifteen I know the word molestation, but it is something done to you by strangers, not brothers who build you forts and make homemade peanut-butter cups.