Maui in 3 Acts

     Act 1:  Maui has a couple of different sides. Visiting Maui typically involves staying in a hotel, when someone else cleans your room, makes your bed and then you lay by the pool/beach while eating food someone else made. When I tell people my daughter lives on Maui, they usually gush and say, “Oh, she’s so lucky!” I remind them (because I’m me) that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns, she works, and you know what she does after she’s done working? She drives home, stops at a store to get some food, cooks, cleans and then maybe does some laundry. You know what she does the next day? The. Same. Thing. Sure, it’s beautiful and there are beach and waterfall days and fruit can be easily foraged. But unless you’re a member of the wealthy elite (more on that later), life on Maui isn’t quite as pretty as those lovely beaches and waterfalls.  One thing that took me aback this visit were all of the abandoned cars on the North (non touristy) side. Brother Ed said there seems to be five distinct stages of abandonment. Stage 1: The car is abandoned in an unusual spot, where you typically wouldn’t park a car but left parked anywhere for a while and your car could be mistaken as abandoned. Stage 2: Tires are removed. Stage 3: Windows smashed in, anything of value on the inside removed. Stage 4: The mechanical guts are stripped and the car is graffitied. Stage 5: Car is torched. Ed and I walked down to Jaws the other day, looked over the bluff and found an abandoned car in the middle of the dirt road on the way back - that wasn’t there 15 minutes ago when we walked the same road. We marveled at the efficiency of that particular abandonment. Those blighted cars are everywhere on this side of the island and it’s crazy.

Just up the road from my daughter’s house. Looks like Stage 3 to me. 

     Act 2: Ed asked if I wanted to plant a legacy tree on their property on Maui, pretty much everyone else in the family already had chosen one and put it in the ground. He has a go to nursery he buys the fruit trees from. When he first went there, he was looking at a dwarf mango tree, the owner of the nursery said, “I have some larger trees, but they are a bit more expensive.” Then he paused, looked my brother up and down and went on to say, “But you look like a member of the wealthy elite, you should take the bigger tree.” Note - my brother looks and dresses like me. We do not resemble members of that class and we had more than a few chuckles about their exchange. But thinking about it, it makes perfect sense. He lives on Maui, is in his early 60’s, doesn’t work and is a haole. That screams wealthy elite, even if you dress like us. A caveat to the legacy tree challenge: there were only two days left in my trip. This is an important decision. I want to ensure that whatever I choose grows and flourishes and provides tasty fruit for years to come. I surveyed the grounds to see what everyone else had planted, which narrowed my options.
     My first choice was to go for sexy. Rambutan is one of my favorite fruits, I thought that would leave a pleasant memory (and taste) in everyone’s mouth. But a legacy tree? Don’t get fooled by looks, folks. Just because that fruit is so pretty and tastes oh so sweet doesn’t mean you want to put those roots in the ground - do the dance, think about the long term match. Is it in the right growing zone? How about the amount of water/sun it needs and how big will it eventually grow - will it block your or someone else’s views? I’ve backed off rambutan and am leaning towards soursop, but want to do my research a bit more. Ed and Celine were trying to bully me into making a decision before I leave, but I can always come back and do it right. Just jumping in the deep end after the good looking fruit tree doesn’t always end well. I’ll come back at the end of the year if I’m short on miles to get to the next status level to plant whatever I decide is both sexy and smart. ‘Cause that’s what we all really want, right?
     Act 3: Ed and Celine. This is the only reason I came to Maui for - family, my brother and daughter - and it’s been a blast. Some people in our lives have tried to domesticate us, and let me tell you, all who have made the efforts have failed miserably. We are more than okay with that. Ed and I would be playing Words With Friends next to each other and he’d say, “I’m interested in herpetology these days.” I look at him and go right to WWF. He’d just played ‘snakey’. I’d snort and say, “Well done!” I make sure to slip in the same type of non sequiturs when we’re playing like, “I think I’m going to the lavatory now.” Not the type of thing I’d ever say, so he looks at his WWF, nods and says, “Good play.” We had a few adult conversations about finances, 5 -10 year plans, what we wanted our lives to look like, but mostly it wasn’t serious at all. There’s just too much wilderness in us and when left unsupervised, it’s a ridiculously funny non-stop show. We relived memories, looked at old pictures, laughed, poked, planned, competed for bed space, laughed, fact checked each other ruthlessly, sang goofy songs, made meals and then laughed and laughed and laughed some more. Straight up silliness, just the way we like it, without any real adults modulating our feral nature. Looking forward to more frequent visits in the near future wherever, whenever. But particularly in off season travel time, because I’m still a Taylor.

Not too far from Pukalani Superette, welcome to upcountry

The master closet

     We Taylors are a competitive lot. At one point, Gwyne said to me, “You know, everything in life isn’t a competition.” I said, “Ohhhh. That attitude explains why you’ve been losing so much.” We both had a good laugh over that exchange. I’m in Maui now, visiting my brother who has a house here and my daughter, who has been living here for 10 years. He has two renters living in his 3 bedroom/2 bath house, which leaves Ed and I to share the master bedroom. And master closet. One of us will sleep on the master bed, the other will sleep on a folding mattress in the master closet, based on a mutually agreed upon competition held during the day. There are no friendly challenges because they are ALL deadly serious, but they are also filled with uproarious laughter and fun, as is pretty much the entire day. My laugh lines are getting a serious work out, ‘cause that’s how we roll.  The first night’s challenge came about organically -  we were talking about real estate and business cycles. He knows real estate, and I know business cycles. We decided on the first challenge to be based on real estate prices in Boulder, Colorado, where he owns a few homes and has lived for 30+ years. Advantage Ed? Not so fast there, buckaroo. He argued prices always went up, I said they were cyclical and said that if he checked, he’d see that in 2008, prices went down. We bickered a bit about the terms. Does a plateau count as a decline? No, the median prices have to dip. As we negotiated the terms of the challenge and finally came to a mutually agreeable conclusion, he did the research. Dip the prices did, and I had a fabulous sleep, blissfully thrashing around on the master bed, thank you very much. Ed enjoyed the master closet. I enjoyed his humiliation as he closed the door to the closet.
     Yesterday’s challenge was geographical - we found a site that had outlines of 197 countries in the world and we had 20 minutes to correctly identify as many of them as we could. The exchanges, or steam of consciousness, were absolutely hilarious. Kenya, Kenya, where are you Kenya? I’d adopt an African accent (which I do fairly well), “Please my Kenyan brothers and sisters, help me, guide me and take me to your ancestral home - YES, I knew you would! Ed would be muttering to himself at the same time and saying things like, “Really? C’mon, I don’t know where St. Lucia is. Is that a real country? AHHHHHH!” I plowed through the Middle Eastern Countries as they popped up, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, UAE, Yemen, Oman and Qatar, as-slalam alaykum my friends and Ed killed it in South America. We both struggled in Africa and the Caribbean and we swore loudly whenever we incorrectly guessed where some of the countries were located. I lost due to a technicality, I accidentally closed my page on my iPad and lost my progress once, we regrouped for the second start and agreed if I dorked it up again, I would be relegated to the closet. And yes, I dorked it up again. It’s so serious, but it’s also so unbelievably fun.

     The first day was all about a visit to my daughter’s house, meeting her cat and picking up the pickled papaya (coco) she made me, then planning out the day’s food tour through Wailuku. I’m not here to do all the Maui things, I’m here to visit them, so they made all the decisions about what we did. We started off at a woodworking exhibition in the Maui Arts and Cultural Center that featured 25 pieces, each one was unbelievably beautiful. Then we started gathering food for lunch, Celine knows her way around the best places to get great food in Maui. They took me to a Foodland where they have a semblance of a live fish market and fresh ogo, seaweed that perfectly sets off a type of Poke, onwards to another old time Poke market and then we passed an Okazuya, a Japanese delicatessen where we picked up a few more treats. We enjoyed our picnic at a Korean pagoda, and wrapped the day up with a hike and a swim in a FRIGID waterfall/river and then dinner. And many, many more laughs.

     Todays gig is simple - a timed Words With Friends game using a chess clock, we haven’t decided the time each competitor will get, we’re still negotiating terms. Winner gets the bed, loser gets...the master closet. But the games in the next few days promise to be more serious. This is an 8 night trip. Taylors don’t like ties. One of us has to win. Ed suggested reviving a version of a game his sons played when they were here, jumping off a cliff into a river, swimming to shore, building a tower of 10 balanced stones and then swimming back to a pre-determined log in the river. The first to touch the log after completing the task(s) wins. This shit’s about to get real. The score is 1 - 1. And btw, the master closet last night was surprisingly comfortable...and Ed enjoyed my humiliation as I closed the door to the closet. :)