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Under the Sun Cynthia Oi |
Everyday incidents
resound through a yearNEAR year's end, the newspaper's wire services send over long lists that fix dates from January to December to a couple of sentences recounting momentous events. Seldom does anything about Hawaii appear. Importance or significance is weighed on the national or world scale, and splashes and eddies in our little pond don't amount to much on that level.
You could count that as good. Anything list-worthy would have had to have been awful or tragic, that being the nature of interest nowadays.
Local publications run through a similar tread, describing 12 months' worth of ups and downs, episodes of calamity and scandal perhaps freckled with notable achievements and triumphs of individuals who've bested adversity.
These become touchstones of time, an acknowledgment of the planet's beats around the sun in cadence with the finite pulses of our bodies. Although much the same as on any other day, ticks of the seconds tonight from 11:59 to 12 a.m. fuse optimism for the future with a disquiet about the unknown that is more pronounced in these days of orange alerts.
Even if observing this transition seems a rather arbitrary and curious human act, it presents a chance for reckoning.
Among the plaintive is the tally of the dead in Iraq, soulless numbers from the government giving just the facts: date, service, rank, name, age and hometown. These are trailed by spare, clinical words describing the circumstances of death: non-hostile action, hostile attack, land mine, drowning, helicopter crash. There are men and women, ages 19 and 41, 33 and 55; from famed cities like New York and Los Angeles and unheard-of burgs like Tickfaw and Clifton Gorge; places as far away as Cuarte de Poblet in Spain and as close as Mililani.
Counted thus far are 474 Americans and 87 others in coalition forces, numbers that tell nothing about the individual who had a favorite song and candy bar, who perhaps had a nickname by which they were known to fathers, aunts, brothers and boyfriends. Uncounted and likely to remain so are thousands who called Baghdad and Mosul home and who also had favorite tunes and foods.
The year's casualties of sullied images run from Martha Stewart and Kobe Bryant to Rush Limbaugh as the public's "how-the-mighty-have-fallen" obsession ran unchecked. Gossip crawled relentlessly at the bottom of "all news" screens, becoming visual background noise to scenes of metal debris next to wreckage of concrete structures along streets without names somewhere in the Middle East or other regions.
Yet alongside suffering and niggling grievances, the good stuff sticks tight. I'll remember 2003 for holding a humid afternoon when a nephew gathered feathers caught in a spider web on the steps, his concentration on the delicate task aided by softly singing to himself, "... where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play."
From midsummer will come the musty smell of wet jackets mixed with an aroma of spices as visiting nieces, grown into fine young women, gobbled pizza with the rest of the clan in a warm restaurant while a cold rain dribbled outside.
Recollections will include a manager at a busy hotel who juggled reservations and other guests when an emergency compelled family members to find lodging near a hospital. They will dwell on a hospice nurse whose graceful compassion helped us bear illness and loss.
I'll mark the year every time I run my fingers over the silky surface of a wooden box hand-carved by my best friend who learned new skills to create the simple container. Passing by a neighborhood park will bring back a twilight conversation with a sister that drifted from food to school days and thoughts about the hereafter.
Exterior forces of the world prod the direction of life, but events ordinary and subdued are more eloquent and persuasive. They are incidents that don't make headlines or annual lists and they shouldn't.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.