Honolulu thoughts

One thing everybody says about landing in Hawaii. You notice the air. The perfume of the air. I wanted to smell it, experience that when I landed at Honolulu International Airport. Sadly, I have to admit I didn't. I smelled cigarette smoke from all the smokers lining the outdoor walkway as I made my way to the baggage claim area.

I think this wonderful perfume scent does exist, but is for the most part manufactured in soaps you can buy at the ABC Stores in Waikiki or shampoos and body lotions you can steal from the resorts.

Or maybe you think you're smelling something tropical because you're listening to Hookena being piped over the PA system, or maybe Israel Kamakawiwaoole. Israel, he just makes me think of tropical forests everytime I hear his voice.

To get to my friend Dara, who was staying with her mom at the Ihilani Resort, I had to catch the bus from downtown to Pearlridge Shopping Center. I sat up front, and I really think the front bus window being so tall and big, affords you with the best view of Oahu in motion. The Filipinos sitting outside the Kalihi Health Center. The little crack seed shops and seafood shops and lei shops, the statues of Hawaiian royalty, the people in the cars stopped next to us, cool and comfortable in their air-conditioned vessels.

I had a copy of the latest Honolulu Advertiser with me on the bus ride and the top story was about how the housing market in Hawaii exceeded $5.38 billion in October. The lead was something like, "It's definitely a seller's market."

And across from me in the bus was an older gentlemen, probably Portuguese, wearing a blue ball cap and well worn black sneakers with only a sock on his right foot. Probably not part of that $5.38 billion market.

I kept looking at his one bare ankle, thinking of the pitiful wage I'm collecting in New Mexico, the feeling of panic threatening to wash over me, thinking I'll never be able to afford living here on my own, that it was stupid of me to have left in the first place.

At Pearlridge, I threw the newspaper away in a trash can outside the Longs Drugs Store because it was extra space in my backpack. Then Dara and Greta came and picked me up, we drove to Ihilani, and spent the next day sipping drinks by a glistening pool, the ocean a stone's throw away, and slept in a suite with a television in each of the two rooms.

Dara's mom got a discount at the resort because she was attending a conference.