Reflections in a Green Glass Bowl

Memories are triggered by some seemingly small and common things. I was doing the dishes yesterday and began washing a dark green glass bowl distinctively shaped with dipped edges. I use it as a fruit bowl, or a fancy serving dish for salad and the like when entertaining. It's a simple but beautiful dish. As I washed it, memories of my lovely Aunty Lani came flooding back. It was a bowl I inherited from among the things she left with us.

My Aunt came to live with us when I was about 15 years old or so. My father had been divorced for several years and was raising my younger sister and I alone, while working two or three jobs to pay off the debts my mother had run up before they got divorced as well as taking care of the normal living expenses. Aunty Lani was also divorced, her children were grown and married. She needed some place to live and we needed a woman's influence. I'm not sure if that's how it really played out as I was never really told why she was coming to live with us, but it worked to our advantage.

Living with my aunt was like having Auntie Mame in our house. She was in her late fifties or so, and had lived an interesting life full of twists and turns. She was an avid reader - philosophy, poetry, literature of all kinds. The bookshelves in her room were full of interesting books on a wide range of subjects, everything from current novels to Nobokov and Steinbeck and the I Ching. She was knowledgeable in our Hawaiian cultural roots and the genealogy of our family. She would tell me stories about our grandmother Lu'ukia who was a kahuna lapa'au (Hawaiian herbal healer) and other relatives I wasn't old enough to remember. She was apparently a bit of a rebel in her youth - my father called her, my aunt Elaine and uncle Elton 'beatniks' which always made me laugh -and was worldly in a way I had never come across. Well travelled, she was interested in art, jazz, wine, science, Hawaiian history, opera, foreign films, and often went to lectures at the museum or the university. She never stopped learning. It was she who took me to see 'Ulysses', a film based on the book by James Joyce (my introduction to Milo O'Shea's glorious eyebrows) and 'The Marriage of Figaro' at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii; it was my first look at opera and I loved it. She opened my provincial eyes to the wide world and all its glorious arts, and encouraged me to grow and develop my interests. Her politics were left-leaning and humanitarian and we would often have longs talks at night in her room about the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement in which I became heavily involved.

Aunty was always kind in simple ways. When my younger sister went to visit her friend Gina, Aunty Lani would wrap some Hawaiian dried fish and send that with her to be sure to give Gina's tutu (grandmother) as a thank you for her hospitality. It was Aunty's close friend, celebrated Hawaiian artist Allen Akina, who designed my wedding holoku (dress) at a fraction of what it would have cost as it was made with his original hand printed fabric design. And even though she was unable to come to my wedding as she was in the hospital dying from a cancer that had wrapped itself around her spine, she sent me her beautiful cameo to wear on my wedding day.

Little things I do now - always having fresh flowers in the house, sending hand written thank you notes on beautiful little note cards, or filling my house with photographs and works of art - show her influence in my life. She showed me that art is not limited to paintings hung on walls, but can be found in every day objects like simple note cards, Chinese vases overflowing with flowers, or that green glass bowl full of fruit. I guess what she ultimately did was show me that life itself can be an art, and that living it well is a choice that brings beauty and joy into not only your own life, but the lives of others.

So now that green glass bowl is clean and ready to fill again. The pears I brought home from the market this morning will have to share the space with all those memories I have of Aunty Lani. They're both pretty sweet, but the pears won't last nearly as long.