Sisterchicks Do the Hula by Robin Jones Gunn

Author:Robin Jones Gunn [Gunn, Robin Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56417-7
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

I looked over at Laurie. Her eyes were glistening.

“That is so fresh. Hope, do you suppose it sounded that rich and inviting to the people here the first time they heard it?”

“Better,” I said. “They heard it in Hawaiian.”

Gazing out the cab’s window, I noticed that the sun was making a late afternoon appearance and bossing the breeze around, telling it where to go sweep up the puddles before closing time. I wondered how fast the trade winds felt like working on what had previously seemed like their day off.

Returning to the hotel, we found our evening luau had been canceled due to the heavy rains. The water wasn’t drying quickly enough to guarantee dry seating on the grass mats at the outdoor luau. After much debate, Laurie and I decided to go ahead and make a reservation for one of the indoor luaus and not wait another night, just in case the weather didn’t cooperate tomorrow, either.

“Besides,” I told Laurie, “I’m better off in a chair. I’m not sure how I would manage to sit on a straw mat and then get up in any sort of dainty fashion.”

“I must remind myself how proper you’ve become ever since you moved to New England.”

“Proper? Me? Ha! Guess again. And for the record, I’m not sure any of my neighbors would consider me a New Englander. I’ve only lived there for, what? Seventeen years? I’m still a visitor to them.”

Laurie shook her head. “You don’t realize it, but the New Englander in you shows in the little things like the way you flatten out your A’s sometimes at the ends of your sentences or the way you sit in a restaurant. You’re definitely a Connecticut Yankee. They’re your people now.”

I thought about what Laurie said while we got ready for the luau. During the tour, the guide said that Juliette set sail from Boston when she was twenty-four and spent the rest of her life in Honolulu, passing away at the age of eighty-four. She certainly wasn’t a tourist. Not a visitor. Hawai’i was her home for sixty years. Had the Hawaiians truly become her people?

Laurie wore the cutest capri outfit to the luau. She had a hard time deciding between the two new pairs of sandals. I talked her into wearing the ones with the low heel because we planned to walk to a neighboring hotel for the luau.

We entered a banquet-style room where rows of tables were set with festive colors with a bowl of pineapples and papayas in the center. We signed in and were given a choice of a lei made of plastic shells or a lei made of plastic flowers.

After the amazing experience Laurie and I had that morning with Kapuna Kalala, I couldn’t bear to even look at the plastic flower leis. Apparently Laurie couldn’t either because we both deferred to the plastic shell leis. Fashionable Laurie wrapped hers around her wrist a few times and wore it as a bracelet.

We chose two chairs at a table near the front.

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