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Rain on the brain

October 1 marks the start of the wet season here in Hawaii. Oh goodie. Here in beautiful Glenwood, mud capital of the Pacific, we received 107.46 inches by month's end August. Stats for September aren't in yet, but today's deluges (there were several), should put us well on our way to a fat, 200-inch year. Did you know that algae can grow on car paint? Mold too. Our cars don't get dirty in the traditional sense here. They just grow creeping, slimy plant and animal life. Ferns sprout from the house gutters.

As I drove home from tutoring this afternoon, squinting through the water-logged windshield, I cranked the volume to hear the radio over the din of the fast, fwap fwap of the wiper blades. Some cheesy song played, lamenting the crooner's location somewhere on the cold, snowy mainland. She longed melodically for sunny Hawaii. I wanted to poke out the dial, to jab it with the point of my enormous, still dripping unbrella, but I was driving. To grasp the improvised javelin with both hands would have been tricky while hydroplaning, even for an excellent driver like me. So I turned the nasty thing off and mumbled some self-pacifying explitive under my breath. It's all enough to dampen the spirits of the cheeriest person, which I am. Ask anybody. I consoled myself with not one but two fat spam musubis with furikake from J. Hara store. Fresh, warm, tasty. It's Hawaiian comfort food with no ingredients that come from Hawaii. Rice, spam, nori. Sort of like lomi salmon. Technically the tomatoes and onions can be grown here, but the ancient Hawaiians didn't grow those, nor did they eat said fish. Yet it's a tradition offering, served at every luau. I defy even the most proficient angler to catch a salmon off the cliffs at South Point. In this warm water, that would be one sluggish buggah.

Why is Pago Pago pronounced Pango Pango? Why don't we change the English spelling of the place to reflect the native pronunciation? These things eat at me. Why is Worchester pronounced Werster? Bejing was once Peking, right? Should we not spell Phuket (Thailand) differently when using standard Arabic lettering? Fookette, maybe? Nah. I like misprouncing that one.

A hui hou. Aloha.










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