Middle-Aged Midwesterner at Waikiki Again

The surfers beautiful as men can be ride the warm blue green swells and the white sand is alive with girls. Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in as the native warriors did. I tried to swim and tried to look, but ended up just going back: a huge, perfect black man at the beach somehow drove me away a block to St. Augustine’s Church. The bodies were giv- ing me a fit and I have come to seek the momentary calm we find sometimes in the musk of Christ (when he was awake and sweat- ing blood as others slept, or like a furious bouncer hustling out the money changers). The bodies of Mary and Christ both still live, we’re told. They’re alive and thus must have dealt with the stress of that long time of turning on to being young. I speak of teens. Fifteen and ten years ago when I first confessed, it was in this same church built then as a gigantic shed where the strange Hawaiian birds (I forgot their names—no matter) flew in and out of the high wood- en rafters like the whimsical winds of grace, and grace gives back to sight what beauty is— as that loveliness at the beach. Now the church has been rebuilt in pointed stone across the street from a much higher new hotel where at lunch I almost spilled and found I could not eat the purple orchid in my drink.