Friday Feel Good

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"He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh."
Anonymous

"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly."
M. F. K. Fisher

Public Servant

"I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again." William Penn

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one." Oscar Wilde

Glad to see you! Come on in . . .

Our old friend Sharon Black, who we met at Christmas time providing a gigantic outdoor feast for the homeless (link to December blog post: "Gilding the Pill" is http://comfortspiral.blogspot.com/2008/12/gilding-pill.html )

has been recognized with the President's Volunteer Service Award for more than 20 years of direct service to Honolulu's neediest.

She started out pulling the food around Chinatown in her son's little red wagon, and her Great Danes always accompany her because "They make people smile" she says.

Every Saturday, hundreds of hungry people join them for the feast.

A L O H A! Cloudia

Friends Like These

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"The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
James Baldwin




"Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion."
Hegel





"The heart that loves is forever young." Greek Proverb

Here in Waikiki, the green forested Ko`olau Mountains are a vision at the end of long, high-rise & palm tree bracketed streets.

Tough kitty!

"You looking at me?!"

My best gal pal was wondering what to do.

Her formerly good friend, someone she had been close to, had listened to, and had encouraged through many emotional storms & alarms, had married a possessive Pete. My pal was jettisoned without even a 'thank you.'

Then, after months of silence my friend recieved a baby notice from that person. A transparent attempt to solicit a gift? My normally very giving friend felt sorely used. To be abandoned after years of "service" was one thing. To be solicited for a contribution just added insult to injury. She wanted to tell this person that it is NOT OK to be so self centered.

Which got me thinking about my "friends" who only phone when they want or need to talk. I support them. I do love them - but. I knew just what my pal was talking about. And this is what I told her:

We have at some point offered these people unconditional support and they have taken us up on it.

No one forced us to do it, we set our own boundaries after all.

We even knew that it wasn't "equal" from very near the start.

To get angry now seems pointless - or worse.

Our attention & support are golden gifts. And we gave of them freely.

This is the true coin of our caring; saying much more about ourselves than about the other person. To abdicate the generous role that we originated and have played only demeans us, somehow. Worse, it is a self inflicted wound. We may honorably fade away - relationships come and go throughout life. But to present a 'bill' for what we have freely given?

"Don't debase your coin with a grievance." I told her. "Send a gift, or move on."

What do YOU think?

A L O H A!

Cloudia

Characters and Plots

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"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct."
Benjamin Disraeli

"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers

"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."
Anais Nin

Youth has a great narrative drive and plot: Get bigger, get freer; find out about life, others and self. Everything's exciting: the "best" or the "worst" EVER!

Adolescence is a love story, a comedy, a drama, a farce. A collage of fears, first times, and aspirations. All seem tailor-made for a story arc, for songs, or movies; not to mention fodder for gossip.

Girl chases guy, or the other way around.

The world must be saved! (Again).

Grownups just don't understand. We'll never be like them!

Then they kiss, and the credits roll.

All this, mind you, takes place in the first thirty or so years.

Then, offstage, distracted by work and by children

-by the negotiations and nuances of marriage -

we tread the mill Monday through Friday,

Fall to Summer vacation, year after year.

Till we look up to realize with surprise that we are not the young stars anymore.

But we're still years (God willing) from the end!

Though the best roles seem to be passing us by, to younger actors.

Our cozy character work fits us like a glove.

Besides: it pays the bills.

A fixation on beauty is common to the young, engendering an involuntary aversion to the blemishes and badges of age.

But fortunately (skeptics will call it self-serving) we see at last the deeper beauties of maturity. The light from within illuminates the merely physical with lovely survior-ness.

The plot lines of maturity are not necessarily dark, it just takes greater skills to write them. Maturity in a writer is not a bad thing. As illusion is stripped away, we find the truffles of satisfaction where we may. Unexpectedly we cherish the homely hearth that once seemed a prison.

A L O H A! Cloudia

Strolling Along

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"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to."

Oscar Wilde

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."
Edward Gibbon

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Mark Twain

The face of comfort.

Every teaching of spirituality is a heroic attempt to share the inexplicable in words.

Traditions and teachings can only point us in the right direction - but unless scripture awakens an answering resonance from within, it will remain only mental.

The mind contorts and con volutes to make itself grand. But wisdom looks on with the quiet pleasure of comprehension. . .

Light, color, bird song are all vibrations. A bed of flowers is a massed choir: harmonies and soloists respirating each in their own voice. . . Stop and listen!

Whales sport off Maui. In neighbor island uplands, fireplaces warm and scent the crispy nights. On the Big Island, lava is flowing into an indignant sea. Typical Hawaii February weather: high clouds, brief showers. . .

What will happen next?

None of us knows.

So keep your eyes half open, like kitty does (above) even as you lay your 20th Century burdens down.

Inventing a better future is fearsome work. So why do we whistle as we stroll through the wreckage?

A L O H A! Cloudia

DoG the Beauty Hunter

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Sun Yat Sen remembers his Honolulu schoolboy days. Nice lei someone brought him!

"Effective leaders know that you have to touch peoples hearts before you can ask them for their hand."

Frederick Douglass

"Fans (and fans of irony) got to meet Dog the Bounty Hunter at the opening of Wolfgang's in Waikiki

"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There is something idescribable:

sunlight gilding the fronds of a palm.

As the palm hulas in the wind

the light dances accross the leaves.

How describe the play of pure light?

Green? Silver?

Silver-green?

Poetic but not true.

Just pure light dancing

with the leaves.

But even in Hawaii

few consciously enjoy them

or contamplate the cloudscapes

where the people of old

saw movies from

Akua. *

*Hawaiian word for the Divine, or God. A L O H A! Cloudia

Deli Memories

Last night as I slept in Waikiki I dreamed of long ago . . . when I awakened, it was to the reality in the next picture . . . still . . . .

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" Time is really the only capitol that any human being has, and the one thing he (sic) can't afford to lose."

Edison

"Intellectuals are reliable lagging indicators, near infallible guides to what used to be true."
Charles R. Morris

"The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little."

Thomas Merton

Sweet Akita! Love your red lei-

Although I enjoy the local foods of Hawaii (a lot!) there will always be a special place in my heart for authentic Deli (delicatessen) handed out with jokey brusqueness in an urban (read: "gritty") setting. And no corporate chains, please! I did, after all, grow up on the East Coast. So only a family owned & operated place, one where you stand at the counter, qualifies.

I still remember the Koch family: Sid, Frances, Louis & Bobby, who operated a very tiny, crowded, neighborhood beacon, cop hang-out, and social service agency (for all the college students from the nearby universities: Penn and Drexel who over ran the West Philadelphia from Fall to Spring).

I was a neighborhood hippy/artiste cleaning banks at night for MY father's family business. I was proud to be working-class, and was therefore stubbornly alienated from the college kids AND the cops, but I shared Philly born & breds with the Kochs, in fact Sid had known my taxi driving grandfather.

The wait was long at Koch's Deli, but they passed around so much good sliced cheese and cold cuts on waxed paper that you were full by the time you got your sandwich. And what a sandwich! Even the glorification of memory does not exaggerate, I'm certain. Only the TOP quality stuff available, but rarely purveyed, always demanded by Sid. All piled ridiculously high on a real Italian roll that had been baked fresh that morning at Amoroso's bakery. Huge, long and "two-meals" heavy - no gristle, unnecessary fat, or additives. Just pure nourishment and joy! All proceeding from the decency and Philly Aloha of the Koch family at 47th & Locust, around 11 blocks from my grandparent's house on Cedar Avenue. These were the streets where my parents grew up, met and married.

I find myself longing for those sandwiches sometimes. Unfortunately I judge all pretenders (and they are all pretenders) by those heroic Hoagies. (you might know their pale descendants as Po` Boys or Subways).

I also pause sometimes and remember the Koch's themselves - all gone now - with love and gratitude for their generosity of spirit, roast beef, and a "tab" on long weekends with no cash. They quietly did a lot for the neighborhood oddball (trying to be a writer) now that I look back with the eyes of an adult.

And so I remain, grateful for the food, love and life lessons I learned hanging around Koch's. Returning to Philadelphia for a business trip decades later I was ready to remind Bobby who I was. "I know who you are." he said first, as if I'd been there the day before. He was the last of them and died years ago. A friend from back in the day called me here in Hawaii and sent me the obituary.

I sure would love to spend a half hour in that past, to laugh at Louis' crappy jokes (lovely man!) one more time. So thank you, Koch family. You were family to so many people, so many generations of college students. And truly to me. Nobility behind a slicer. RIP.

Today's post is dedicated to the memory of Milton Parker co-owner/operator of New York's iconic Carnegie Deli since 1976. He began each day's lunch with a foot-long hot dog. This week his daughter placed one in his coffin. He was 90 years old. And don't get me started about REAL sour tomatoes!

A L O H A! Cloudia

Begins Today

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Morning Full Moon

" The more I think about it, the more I realize that there is nothing more artistic than to love others."

Vincent van Gogh

"Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed." Voltaire

"The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it."

P.B. Medawar

Forty years ago, the lyrics of a song called "Aquarius" brought the dawning of the new age into our collective awareness:

"When the Moon is in the seventh house
and Jupiter aligns with Mars.
Then peace will guide the planets
and love will steer the stars. . ."

At dawn today 14th February the Cosmos actually embodies this perfect alignment!

Some folks believe that this event will help us to actualize our collective longings for love, and true peace.

That it heralds the actual dawning of a real "Age of Aquarius!"

Astrologers, and others, believe that this alignment carries the opportunity and energies to help us to heal the schisms that have separated us for so long; That it favors collective humanitarian movements and the co-creation of social justice.

Perhaps we can finally begin to experience this "Shift" throughout our world.

Finally, the old paradigms will really begin to give way to hope, to practical altruism and to the inspiration that each of us cherish. . .

At 7.25am on 14th February - and for the 18 minutes of the alignment - you are invited to add your own best intentions for love, peace, and cooperation; To be a co-creator of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in whatever way feels appropriate for you.

You may choose 7.25am (UT) or 7:25 am your own local time to join the energizing wave of intention that will surge around our Earth.

I'm so happy to share this with YOU.

A L O H A! Cloudia

Thanks & Aloha to astrologer Jude Currivan PhD:

http://www.judecurrivan.com/media-articles/articles/the-aquarian-alignment-14th-february-2009/