Rainbow Connection

Aloha Voyager!

Welcome :)

thompson_richard 1 hour ago
"There were concerns in the late ’90s of gay men walking across the gangplank in feather boas and high heels,” retired Lt. Cmdr. Craig Jones of the British Navy related (The New York Times, May 23, 2010). “That just did not happen.”

Second Lieutenant Edward George Seidensticker of the Fifth Division of the United States Marine Corps, who had previously lived in Hawaii, arrived on the first day, having glimpsed Mount Suribachi, and surviving under its contours many of his longest days and nights during the battle of February 19 through March 26, 1945.

He wrote of his Iwo Jima experience: "I was told not to stand there like the fool I unquestionably was but to get to work on a foxhole. Only a few feet away was a conspicuous and macabre object: a bare Japanese arm, raised from a heap of litter
as if in some last gesture of exhortation and defiance. The rest of the corpse was under the heap."

Seidensticker later won the National Book Award and also the Order of the Rising Sun for his translations of Japanese novels into English. His royalties from his literary career alone made him a millionaire. His work at the battle of Iwo Jima was of a rudimentary sort, e.g. Bazooka wa doko desuka? Where is your weapon now?
At the end of Seidensticker`s visit to Iwo Jima, any Japanese citizens remaining on the island of Iwo Jima were corpses. At the time of his death in Japan, he owned more land in the State of Colorado than any other private individual.
Seidensticker lived for 20 years in the Hawaiian Islands (counting his Marine Corps training on The Big Island).

Contrary to common belief, John Wayne and Errol Flynn didn't climb Mount Suribachi.

But my good friend Ed, a gay man, did.

Polynesian Paralysis

Aloha, to YOU :)

Home again in the gloaming. . .



"Every parting is a form of death,

as every reunion is a type of heaven."

~Tryon Edwards

Hawaii people remember those who went before. . .



"Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember."

~Seneca




"Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:

you find the present tense, but the past perfect!

~Owens Lee Pomeroy




"Ah, how good it feels!

The hand of an old friend."

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It always seems to me that the flowers are dancing & singing. . .



"There is a bit of insanity in dancing

that does everybody a great deal of good."


~Edwin Denby


"Dance till the stars come down from the rafters

Dance, Dance, Dance

till you drop."


~W.H. Auden



"We're fools whether we dance or not,

so we might as well dance."


~Japanese Proverb

Oftentimes it is more lip-service
than a deep, living culture; I have seen much
change in Hawaii in 20 years - but magic remains. . .




"Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love,

the things you are,

the things you never want to lose."


~From the television show The Wonder Years


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Can you feel it?

We call it "Polynesian Paralysis"
(at least I do :)

It is that state of being mesmerized by the sun, the sky, the warmth,
the teasing breezing,
the faces and tanned bodies of people on holiday.

Perhaps you feel the indolence if it is Summer where
Y O U are. . .

I wanted to write about the International Alzheimer's Conference
meeting here in town
but
. . .

now what was I saying?


You have a special, one-off kind of day!

And thank you, Mahalo, for visiting and leaving your

comment-calling card.


It means a lot. . . .


it means


ALOHA, cloudia