Coconut Telegraph

On the way home I usually take the waterfront boardwalk. Sun is gone, but clouds on a horizon share in glory, prattling around what a bloody fight it was today. And what a beautiful sight it is. I like to listen and watch as waves splash over the wall were some people are just getting married and further down others slowly grab their lives of the warm sand, fold it lengthwise, roll it, light it and smoke off into the thickening darkness. My evening fireflies. Not so much tonight. I heard some music at the other end of the park.   There is something about riding through green empty fields as night falls down all around you. When I close my eyes … somewhere past the sound of tires swishing through grass and nightingales rehearsing for early morning benefit, I can make out our lives echoes in the dark emptiness. And then I usually lift the fork up and ride on the back wheel for a while.  People were already there, waiting. Sitting in their beach chairs or smugly cocooned in blankets on the grass around a fence. Couples with doggy-bagged dinners and fluorescent glasses, families with rowdy kids chasing their moms, astronomers showing off their big white telescopes. There is a concert, they said, that guy who sings about margaritas with little yellow umbrellas sticking out of them. What’s his name … Jimmy Buffet I think. Music behind the fence was picking up as somebody leisurely run his hand through guitar strings. Would you like to take a look?, asked me a guy with a telescope.  I must admit, I am a HUGE Hitchhiker fan. I’ve read ALL the books and stuff and have most of them on CDs, narrated by the author. I mourned his sudden death with the same kind of self-defensive ambivalence as I did with Joseph Heller’s a few years before and which I’ll use again when J.D. Salinger decides it's time to move on. I never pass on opportunity to look at the sky.  It was is a beautiful night. We could see all of it, except a corner with Polaris over the mountains. A Hippie Mom joined us. And this is Sirius (Are you serious?) and we looked at Jupiter and its moons Europa and Ganymede which are covered with ice (Hockey players must love that.) It was a good telescope. I was able to read out a poster in an apartment with revolving ventilator some 3 kilometers away. It said Strictly Bluegrass 2. Just FYI, Betelgeuse is kind of reddish and the sky is only the third best thing about Hawaii.   The second best (of course) is the weather. You can stay up all night in the park, listening to music. All year round. Or at least until the sprinklers come in. Nice toutch on the part of Deparetment of Parks and Recreation. It stirred the field a little, but came across mostly as a reffreshing enjoyenment in the middle of the concert.   I have a theory that when the end of the world comes, we will die wet and deafened by the sound of car alarms.   But don't worry, my teacher told me that all of us are gifts to this world and to each other and it’s our duty to get it out there, all of it.   I feel so much love in my palms tonight, that if I touch a woman, she will have to marry me.  Do you remember that game, when you sit in a circle and there is a message going around and people whisper to their neighbors what they think it is? What might start as a foreign policy message can come out as a recipe for banana puffs. Or other way around.    “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the …”     I understand, it has some difficult language. Try this one: Love is beautiful. Pass it on …