Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
People on the mainland sometimes wonder how we cope, living on a little island in the Pacific Ocean, or, as they kindly put it, "way out there in the middle of nowhere." Hawaii seems to be
the center of a
very small worldThey don't realize that it usually seems that Hawaii is in the middle of everything. As that great philosopher Walt Disney put it, "It's a small world after all."
Thanks to technology and rapid transit, Hawaii is a part of that intricate neural network that causes adults in rodent costumes to dance in the streets singing about how small the world is. But even more than being plugged in to the global nerve system, things have a scary way of happening somewhere in the world that have a direct connection to our islands. Last week was a good example.
Our state health officials had to go on alert because there's a chance that a deadly flulike virus called SARS, originating in China, could hop a plane to Honolulu. It used to be that deadly viruses stayed in the country where they belonged. Now, because Hawaii is such a travel hub, every deadly germ in the world is just hours from vacationing here.
Then we learned that four Army soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing at a roadblock way over there in Iraq. With hundreds of thousands of troops involved in that war, what are the odds that one of those four soldiers would be from Hawaii? Sgt. Eugene Williams was. He had been stationed here in 1998 and married a local girl.
When he was sent to Kuwait from Georgia, his wife, Brandy, returned home to the islands, only to find out last week how small the world is. Her husband, a hero, had been killed in a most despicable manner. Saddam Hussein will soon learn that in such a small world, evil cannot hide.
THEN WE LEARNED that after a tense standoff at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, a man hijacked a plane from Cuba to Key West, Fla. Hawaii resident Rod Williams had a ringside, or at least, bar-side, seat to the drama. The white-bearded Rod, who looks enough like Ernest Hemingway to be drawn to the author's old haunts, likes to slip away to Cuba every now and then. He had e-mailed me just days before the hijacking to say he had stopped in Havana for a spot of rum and a good cigar, the first anyone of his friends or family had heard about his whereabouts since he decamped from Kaneohe on one of his solo global jaunts.
He learned of the hijacking while sitting in a cabana where Papa liked to drink. He figured the hijacker must have been suicidal, because the old Russian turbo-props like the one hijacked "haven't seen any maintenance since the collapse of the Soviet Union." He signed off when some Swedish girls mistook him for Hemingway and asked to see his typewriter. At least, in this small world, that was his story.
Finally, we celebrated my daughter's 15th birthday last week with clam chowder, sent overnight at extravagant cost from my favorite chowder restaurant, Mo's, on the Oregon Coast. My daughter loves chowder, and I wanted her to try the best. Thanks to technology, fast planes and a father with little financial sense, we enjoyed fresh chowder from Yaquina Bay while overlooking Kaneohe Bay. It's a small world. It's also a short life. While enduring the bad, we need to remember to taste the good.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com