I didn’t step onto an airplane until I was 18 years old. A high school friend and I had somehow convinced our parents it was OK for us to take some time off from school to take advantage of a cheap trip to Waikiki. For less than $300 we could fly to Honolulu and stay three or four nights at The Monarch Hotel. I can still remember the full page ad for the trip in the travel section of the Sunday paper which featured a stylized image of a butterfly.
Eighteen years of age is kind of like the larval stage in a butterfly’s life cycle. Caterpillars are growing so quickly that they eat continuously and I remember spending those few days, unstructured and unsupervised, chewing up new experiences as fast as I could, for better or worse, and returning changed by it.
As far as flying for the first time, I would marvel (as I still do even as airplane travel has become routine) at the fact that one could get into a metal tube in one place and be transported to somewhere completely different. Hawaiian music played on the airplane and the flight attendants wore Hawaiian print outfits and gave us free drinks! Wow! It was big deal for most people to go to Hawaii in those days, and most of the ohter people on our plane seemed to be celebrating an occasion, be it an anniversary or honeymoon.
On Super Bowl Sunday, I met a woman in the security line at Oakland airport who had never flown before. She was dressed in 49ers merch and was on her way to Las Vegas. Her daughter had bought her a ticket and she was belatedly bringing her her Christmas presents and overstuffed bag, like our travel guitars, had been pulled aside for extra screening.
We were on our way to Honolulu, which because of Kwame’s work, has become one of those recurring places of my adult life with little doing. Instead of honeymooner’s our plane was full of families, some returning home, as well as people on work trips. A little girl in the seat in front of me was more interested in playing peek-a-boo with me than looking out the window as our plane came in for a landing. Her fingernail polish was the exact color of the turquoise waters outside the window.
Every time we drive from Honolulu airport to Waikiki, I think of that first trip, how surprised I was to see the ordinariness of the buildings between the city and the tourist area, and how the muggy tropical air felt on my bare arms. Decades later, it doesn’t feel any different. The Monarch Hotel even still exists. I looked at the map and saw we’re staying about six blocks away.
The game was on in the lobby when we checked in. By the time I finished unpacking, Usher was taking the field for his half-time show, which I’m always interested in seeing, whoever is playing. Like the Grammy’s last week, I was most excited by the performances of the women: H.E.R. and Alicia Keys, both looking and sounding powerful and assured.
While judging from my social feeds, many of my pals and associates are disdainful of the whole Recording Academy enterprise, I unabashedly enjoy watching the Grammy’s as much as I do a halftime show. Even if I actually listen to a small sliver of the music being presented, I enjoy seeing what people wear, whose performances fly and whose don’t (despite the high production values!) and who looks nervous in the all-star crowd. I thoroughly enjoyed Miley Cyrus’s diva antics (and multiple costume changes!), as well as Olivia Rodrigo’s turn of her ‘Vampire,’ but like seemingly everyone else watching, I was most moved by the Joni Mitchel and Tracy Chapman performances. ‘Fast Car’ and ‘Both Sides Now’ are two truly great songs, masterclasses in songwriting that have only gotten better with age, as were Mitchel’s and Chapman’s performances. Everyone else seemed young, less-dimensional, in comparison.
I’ve been thinking of time and age a lot lately. How one can feel mature and young at the same time, which I felt again, walking around Waikiki on Sunday, remembering my eager, experience-hungry 18-year-old marveling at the new sights, while my present-adult-self checked out the birds at a small side-street park before heading to the beach.
This week, I seem to be finding Monarch butterflies as much as birds. The day before we left Alameda was a warm springlike day. Everything felt renewed by the recent rain. I stopped to take a picture of some pretty flowers and realized when I was home that I’d taken a photo Monarch butterfly as well.
Now there were a bunch of actual Monarch butterflies flying around Waikiki1. They were flying in the plants outside the hotel when we drove up and now they were fluttering through the park and higher.
If a human life was equal to one butterfly life cycle, this is definitely the adult phase, although I like to think I’ll keep transforming. Something about now feels like a starting over, which still seems pandemic-related, and then more acutely, about feeling better after being sick a lot of the winter. One thing about adult butterflies that I just learned: they have two eyes, just like humans, but their eyes are compound, meaning they can see a whole slew of different things in multiple directions all at the same time. Not just both sides, all sides. Now that feels like adulting.
North American Monarchs are long-distance migrants, but it’s not entirely clear if the Hawaii Monarch butterflies got here under their own power. Like so many of the nonnative birds and people and other animals now living in Hawaii, the Monarch butterflies arrived in the 1850s, sometime after milkweed plants were introduced and have since colonized the islands.