Category Archives: music

Maui Diary 11 – Aloha Oe

culture, food and cooking, music, travel,

On Maui we stayed in the town of Kihei, where 50% of the permanent residents of the island live. This plebian environment was more our style than the resort life we observed just south on the beaches next to Wailea’s villas and grand hotels. Just strolling on the beach path that winds past their perfectly groomed and gorgeous grounds, I became a little self-conscious about my commoner’s clothes every time we passed the hotel guests.

Staying in a condo rather than a hotel also made for a relaxing and homey existence, at least for people like us who like to set up housekeeping for ourselves and actually prefer to eat breakfast “at home.” We bought sweet Maui Gold pineapples at Safeway and ate of them in the morning while I was still in my nightgown. Each of us had one day that we were under the weather, and we could just laze about our apartment, and grill steaks or fish for dinner on the barbeque outside.

 

Our place had a view right out to the beach, and one evening I sat in front of this scene and counted 27 palm trees within my range of vision. The stars came out and were as bright as in the high mountains; I couldn’t get over how well I could see without my glasses Orion’s belt and even his sword.

I wouldn’t complain if someone gave me a week at a resort and I had to eat at its restaurants, but as long as I’m paying, I’d just as soon stay in a less expensive condo like the one we were blessed with and enjoy the food at the many places the locals also enjoy.

The Coconuts Cafe with its deservedly famous fish tacos is a fine example. The coleslaw, normally in the tortilla but which I had on the side, was made with a refreshing coconut milk dressing that I’d love to try to replicate.

Mr. Glad has for some time enjoyed Hawaiian guitar music, so we had looked forward to being in Hawaii and hearing some good examples. One evening we went out for some live sounds that turned out to be not that great and not traditional, but the luau on our last night was fulfilling and very fun in its historically accurate dancing and music.

Over the radio in our rental car we heard a new-to-us contemporary Hawaiian sound that was maybe not traditional musically, but in the easy-listening messages conveyed it was all about loving the motherland and listening to the forefathers who will teach you how to be honorable Hawaiians.

Shirt Mr. Glad gave me for my birthday

This harkening to cultural roots and the ancestors generates a desire on the part of parents to put their young children into classes where they will learn the Hawaiian tongue. It seems that though Hawaiian names and phrases are floating through the balmy air everywhere, currently very few people actually have any real ability to communicate in that language. I wonder if that will change, or if the children force-fed this artifact will respond with disdain as have the Irish I know who were made to study Gaelic in school.

Besides the reverence for the land and the history, we noticed in the popular and melodic songs we heard a phrase repeated in nearly every one: ka puana. Eventually we were able to investigate and discover that this means something like “It’s fun to be with you.” It often went along with words about Having a Good Time, which easygoing theme was one of the unique scents in Mauian atmosphere.

How would it be, we mused, to live as a permanent resident in this place, where one might reasonably believe that even people with jobs and families display the Hang Loose symbol and attitude? It’s almost certain that we will never know the answer, even if we sojourn there again.

Ages ago, at my 8th grade graduation, our school chorus sang an English version of the Hawaiian tune “Aloha Oe,” (“Farewell to Thee”) and it made a big impression on me, so that I can still remember some of the words in our translation, and find that they don’t exactly match anything to be found online.

At least I did find a nice guitar rendition of the tune (just below), with lovely pictures, to wrap up my Maui Diary. As you will guess, many of the pictures are of scenes I didn’t see, but they convey something of the Hawaiian heritage and natural beauty.

I won’t end with that video that someone else put together, because I do have one of my own making! It was recorded on a windy afternoon on the beach by our condo, so the only sound in the movie is that of the tradewinds. It’s a 360° view, starting on the beach, and taking in a row of condominiums. Ours was the flat-roofed one somewhat in the middle.

And at the very bottom of the page, the refrain of the song as I remember singing it. Good-bye, Maui! Until we meet again….

Aloha Oe, Aloha Oe,
The winds will carry back my sad refrain;
One fond embrace before we say good-bye,
Until we meet again.

Rain Songs

family, music, nature, water, , ,

Rain is falling and I’m happy. Recently I refreshed my memory bank of rain songs by means of the recording, “Rainy Day Dances, Rainy Day Songs,” by Patty Zeitlin and Marcia Berman. We used to borrow an LP from the library when the kids were little, and the songs have lodged in my mind forever.

On the recording there was also an instrumental tune, “Over the Waterfall,” played on the hammered dulcimer. I can’t find anything on YouTube by the musicians who gave us this collection that so blessed my children and me, but I did find a similar, simpler rendition.

I loved the silly dancing and singing we did to songs like “I Don’t Care if the Rain Comes Down,” “Windy Day,” and “Why Can’t I Play in the Rain?”

I bought my CD copy of the album from the Bullfrog Ballades site, where you can also hear samples of the songs. Today I’m having a lazy day being thankful that God is watering the earth again, as I let my thoughts slosh about in rainy images like this one of me (on the left) with my sister a long time ago. If you can’t play in the rain, perhaps a puddle will do.

Glorious Mud

music, play, poetry, video,

Homeschooling Beach Babies enjoy playing in the mud. The sight of these darlings and the memory of my own children in similar settings brought to mind the song I used to sing to them. Nowadays it’s easy to find such things on YouTube, which I did.

It turns out what I had gleaned from who-knows-where was only the chorus of a long song titled “The Hippopotamus,” by Flanders and Swann, which tune and words form the soundtrack of a suitably watery video.

One can find the words of the verses online, but they aren’t really for children. The chorus alone was sufficient to spark up our family’s muddy excursions, and it goes like this:

Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow,
Down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow
In glorious mud!

Have fun!

Funny Wasp Thing

music, nature, ,

The wasp approached in the afternoon as I was sitting on a leafy patio listening to my companions’ leisurely conversation. He quickly got down to business and stung the back of my knee. I don’t recall ever having been stung by a wasp before, so I didn’t know what to expect, having seen and heard of extreme reactions.

I decided to go inside the restaurant and ask for some ice to put on the spot, to calm things down, and when I got back I explained what happened. Nearly all the people sipping drinks under the umbrellas were nurses or doctors, so they wanted to be sure I was o.k., but after I assured them that the ice was working fine, we went on talking about other things in the world.

Yellow Jacket

But I haven’t got to the funny part. On the drive home I had to leave off icing that still-stinging place, and it did start hurting again; the heat was spreading and stabbing a little, too. I’ll just have to take some Benadryl when I get home, I thought.

I switched on the radio in the middle of “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” but perhaps because it was not exactly a bee that had got me, I didn’t think anything of it. At the end of that piece, the announcer said that after that he felt he really must play “The Wasp Overture” by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune — or what was surely a little medicine custom-formulated by God. The remedy seemed to work, because by the time I got back to my town, the site of the sting was not swollen or painful anymore, and there was only a little red dot where that (probably) yellow jacket had attacked. Mr. Glad called it a musical form of homeopathy: like cures like.

I didn’t even take the whole remedy, because the overture was still playing when I had to turn of the engine and go inside. It was a beautiful piece, more evocative of the lovely aspects of a summer afternoon than the wicked wasp himself — that is, what I noticed of it.

Mostly I was amazed, as I listened, that anyone would compose music with that title, and that I was hearing it for the first time after my recent insect encounter. Since then I’ve learned that it was written for a production of Aristophanes’ play The Wasps, and is a fairly popular piece. But at the time all I could think was, Could Vaughan Williams have written such a thing if he’d ever known a wasp the way I did that day?