Hawaii

Somewhere down on that beach my granddaughters were surfing on their boogie boards and no doubt planning to return as teenagers to join those people out there on real surfboards waiting to catch a big wave.

My surfing was taking place just a block away on the landward side of this same beach, at the WiFi hotspot outside the Apple store in Waikiki. At the end of the day the girls could show off their new tans. I had my e-mails saved on my iPad. Hey, both activities are "surfing", right?

It's a tourist ritual to hang out at Waikiki Beach to watch the Tropical sunset, all five minutes or so of it. The sun just plummets into the sea on the horizon usually in a spectacular display of color. Visitors from higher northern latitudes, accustomed to the long twilight there cannot help but marvel how there is no long transition from daylight to
nighttime here. Sunset is like throwing a switch, with just that magnificent spark as day and night break contact.

Then the hotels illuminate their palm trees:

And a fire dancer energizes the crowds.

Of Coconut Palms and Daffodils

The SMS along with the almost live cellphone photo of the beach in Hawaii, the swaying coconut palm trees ( ok, it was a still photo, but aren't they always swaying, in a cool, gentle breeze? ), the azure ocean and clear blue sky, was meant to be an ironic taunt dripping with crocodile tears:

"Sorry about the weather".

And it was effective, as I had just come in from a sunny but chilly Seattle afternoon. Images of pale wintered bodies, basted generously with coconut and pineapple scented sunscreen being slowly roasted in the friendly Hawaiian sun seemed a desirable fate, never mind health warnings.

In sheer retaliation I shot back with a picture of golden daffodils that my wife had happened to snap quickly with her iPhone as traffic slowed while we were driving through the University of Washington campus a few minutes earlier.


That will show them, my lucky offspring frolicking in paradise, without us, I muttered as I dashed off my e-mail.

Then I began to understand why those British colonial masters who had forced us in our school curriculum to marvel at Wordsworth's "host of golden daffodils" had never reciprocated by including our coconut palms swaying in a heavenly Tropical climate in their curriculum in the UK. They had never mentioned that those daffodils, bright and golden as they were,"tossing their heads" in their "dance," were really shivering in the chill of Spring. There might have been a mass exodus from bleak motherland Britain to the Tropics, never mind their poetry.

Up against that beach in Hawaii, you lose, Wordsworth.