In the morning the bed began to shake, as if the island was being rocked by a major earthquake, and my eyes shot open, only to see the old man in the bunk above me, climbing down from the ladder, his legs as thin as white railings, his ass flat in his underwear.  He was making a break for the bathroom.  When he came out, I watched him through squinted eyes as he got dressed and put on his cap.  It was no surprise to see him eating his breakfast, plain oatmeal, when I went down to the kitchen.  I sat down and introduced myself. 

Jerry, as it turned out, was an evangelist.  He had a week off from his job as a security guard in Cleveland and was here to witness to the lost and disenfranchised of Oahu.  Waikiki is the epicenter for them, so he’d come to the right place.  He already knew that, however.  It was his third time preaching on the islands.  The last time he’d actually been mugged and assaulted in the park. 

I was careful not to tell him too much about my father and his ministry in Hawaii as he seemed eager to take on a partner or apprentice.  He’d be there as long as I would so I had to strike a fine line between being friendly but not too friendly.  I had plans of my own.

Taking leave of Jerry, I made my way to the closest ABC store.  The hostel was right next to the Queen Kapi’olani Hotel.  When I’d come to Hawaii with my parents in 2012, my father’s old church, Our Redeemer Lutheran, had been renting one of the banquet rooms for its services.  There had been a small handful of people who’d known us from back in the day, nearly fifty years before, but no one had offered any help on extending my stay.  Those few months I’d still made it a point to attend every Sunday service. 

It had been a great relief to get a job at a university in the Middle East right before my money ran out.  I’d been able to save some face without letting on what an unnerving disaster the whole experience had been.  Now the church was gone, moved to a new location a few miles away.  I thought about visiting, but had also seen on their website that my father’s old friend, who’d been pastor for many years, had recently retired and moved to the mainland to live with his kids.

After getting a coffee, muffin, and banana, I was back in Kapiolani Park with my ukelele, sitting on a tattooed bench beneath the banyan tree of my youth.  How many hundreds of hours had I racked up in that park?  Too many to mention, often daydreaming about pitching myself off one of the skyscrapers.  On some days there’d been so many homeless people in the park it had seemed like an episode of The Walking Dead.  On this morning, I felt good, however, and could feel the mana energy blowing off of the sea and gathering around the base of the tree.

I launched into my signature shuffle style and got caught up in a new melody, inspired by the site of a homeless man rising off the ground and brushing off his clothes.  It felt like I’d been sitting in that park my whole life, like I was one of the trees, a brother of the sea, a relative of the grass, a grandchild of Diamond Head.  Later, I got up and walked to the seawall, taking my melody there for a spell, staring into the clear waves, the green coral below, with small yellow fish darting around it.  There was something about my music that was tied to Hawaii.  When it got turned on, it stayed turned on. 

Just then I heard some beautiful notes bending in the breeze and recognized that they were coming from a lap steel.  I got up to investigate and found a man sitting right by the Surfer on a Wave statue, coaxing a moaning, reverb-laden solo out of a guitar that he held on his lap, picking the strings with his right hand, and running a steel bar across the strings with his left.  I got to talking with him and found he was selling a book on Hawaiian music and the development of the steel guitar.  I had to have one but needed to run back to the hostel to get the money.

When I got back, another passerby stopped by right when I was exchanging the cash for the book and monopolized the conversation from there on out.  At least I had something new to study up on, even if I didn’t manage to get another word in.