Garinìon

Now Garinìon, they're going to tease you for dawdling and taking short cuts...the same ones who'll be leaving the keys to the kingdom in any old cafe or on a park bench when here you'll come jingling what once was lost, behind them. You see, Garinìon, we're all a bit lost, really, so it's a good thing, you're arrival, on this day the 18th of June and only two days after the notorious Bloomsday! It's the 'after' we're examining here. As I was saying, don't pay any attention to that lot. They don't meant it. They'll be taking good care of you, that's for certain, but there will be so much they will never understand about your progress, my Garinìon's progress, let's call it, as you move through the world. Your one and only Auntie has some notion about your entrance onstage so to speak, but you're on your own, really, and then again you're not, that's the contradiction and the paradox rolled into one but here's the thing: you're a great risk-taker in your first hour cut loose and that's a splendid way to begin because without taking a chance there's little meaning in anything...

so here's to your first hours...

me when I heard you were here--the news came to me out of the mouth of your own Seanmathair--I put on my favorite lauhala hat with the chukar partridge feather band and went to the navigational heiau at Nishimura where I looked hard into the clear water, caught a flash of yellow tang, and laughed when I saw the offshore wind skipping and glittering over a field of quick little waves as I stood there with my back to the big rocks that stopped here so long ago when they first caught sight of the ocean. I sang He Halia Ia three times and Kau Mai Kala for you, my Garinìon...