Cities Of Memory

Takashimaya New York

“Will you miss anything?”

It was one of the final evenings of 2008, and one of my first evenings out after returning to New York following a ten year absence. Two of my dearest friends were treating me to dinner and conversation at the Firebird Russian Restaurant on 46th Street in Midtown. Guests at an adjacent table, oiled with imported vodka, were speaking loudly of New Jersey property taxes and the rising costs of psychotherapy sessions. I considered the question, asked by one of my friends regarding Honolulu, the city I had just left, as I spooned wasabi-infused ova from the flight of caviar spread before us onto a buckwheat blini.

“No,” I said finally, emphatically, before popping a forkful of the caviar concoction into my mouth and relishing the bursting of the eggs on my palette.

My dinner companion scoffed at me incredulously. “Come now,” he chided me, “you’ll miss nothing about Honolulu?”

I cocked my head and furrowed my brow in mock deep thought before saying, again, “No. Absolutely nothing.”

And for the duration of the dinner, and for nearly an hour afterward, I actually believed myself.

THE BENTO BOX

I remembered the Shirokiya bento box several hours later, walking home, alone, at three in the morning, through a bleak and deserted section of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Following the conclusion of my fabulous dinner with friends, several shared Marlboros on a 46th Street sidewalk, and laughter, I had agreed to meet someone I considered a potential romantic interest for drinks at The Ritz, almost right next door to The Firebird. The meeting had not gone anything like I had imagined it would, but as I did not care, because I was home, with or without a potential romantic interest, I left Manhattan early, dashing off into the night in the middle of 46th Street to do something I always remembered doing when I had lived in Brooklyn years before: walk home.

After taking the L train until I was across the East River, I memorized the major surface streets on the subway map on the station wall, and spent the next hour walking home, alone with myself, and my thoughts of the evening, and my memories of years past. Of course when I had walked home in my Brooklyn of years past, it was in Sunset Park, and my walk had been better memorized. It was also done in the summer. So it was not long before my teeth were chattering in the chill December winds, and I remembered the Shirokiya bento box.

One of my favorite places during my final months in Honolulu had been the Japanese department store Shirokiya, in Honolulu’s Ala Moana Center. Because their bento boxes of rice, gyoza, and katsu were inexpensive, I would buy one for lunches, along with several pieces of variously-flavored mochi for dessert, and eat them, in the sun, on the beach at Ala Moana Park. On some days, if it was warm enough, I would strip down to my board shorts, tanning myself as I smiled up into the sun and wiped tonkatsu sauce from my chin.

“All right,” I conceded to myself, aloud, into the crystalline Brooklyn morning. “I will miss the bento box lunches on the beach.”

I chuckled, fired up a Marlboro, and continued on my way until I reached home.

ON THE CORNER OF PERRY STREET AND YESTERDAY AVENUE

My friend’s question, however, “Will you miss anything?” continued to haunt me over the next several weeks. Did I, would I, miss anything about the city I had just left? Was it wrong in some way for me to feel, as I continued to feel, that I did not miss anything about it? And, perhaps a more intriguing question, why was I not missing anything about it?

I did not find that out until several weeks after my dinner at The Firebird, when I met my dear friend Rowland for my first Power Lunch since returning to New York, at Perry St. All the way across the Village, at the West Side Highway and the end of Manhattan, I was treated to a divine lunch and inspired conversation in the Richard Meier-designed building, and literally could not remember being happier. Following an amazing dessert, coffee, and a handing-off of one of his sets of the first season of “Battlestar Galactica” on DVD so that I could catch up, my friend hailed a cab on Seventh Avenue to return to his office.

And I, once again, began walking.

Alone, with no appointments nor responsibilities for the rest of the day, I wandered through the Village, through Gramercy, and through memories. I did not dare stop to brandish my Nikon to capture photographs, since I feared I already looked enough like a tourist, wandering as if lost, yet feeling perfectly at home, looking up at the facades of each of the buildings that I recognized, that I had been in, years before, lips stretched widely in goofy smiles prompted by memories of this city, and of myself in it, of years before.

Even its bad memories made me smile.

Several hours later, I realized with a start that I was hungry again, and was even more startled to realize that I had walked quite a ways uptown, nearly to Central Park. Glancing across Fifth Avenue, I smiled wistfully as I saw the front of Takashimaya, Manhattan’s higher-end version of Honolulu’s Shirokiya, and I dashed across the street to have tea with an old friend. Because I remembered that even during his frugal, meager days as an Editorial Assistant at HarperCollins, he would treat himself to a Takashimaya Tea Box lunch, every payday, all by himself. And I remembered that, by the time the final course of dessert rolled around, no matter what worries he had nor problems he faced, he was always assured that he would be all right, one way or another, as long as his city was all around him.

Much like the variously-flavored mochi, following my Shirokiya bento box lunches, always made me feel, way back in Honolulu.

And although this time the dessert, a single wedge of tangerine jelly served in a tangerine peel, was far more elegant than any variously-flavored mochi, it still made me feel the same way. And I realized, finally, why I did not miss anything about Honolulu: because, much like that young man of years before, who sat with me, ghost-like, as I made my way through my Takashimaya bento box, is still with me, so is my old Honolulu, right there alongside my old New York.

Because past cities, like past selves and past loves, are easier to not miss when they are so faithfully, poignantly, impressed on one’s memory.

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BLOGGER’S NOTE: This piece was largely inspired by, not only my own memories and experiences, but also losing myself this weekend in the stories of City Of Memory. An interactive urban story map, it is a repository for all of New York City’s greatest stories and experiences. If you are as much a fan of the city as am I, I highly recommend taking an hour or two (or, if you are me, an entire weekend) to explore its brilliant archives of stories, the majority of which are considerably less esoteric than the one I attempted to tell above.

Filed under: Food, New York, Writing , a-list, being servicey, cityofmemory.org, defining moments, firebird russian restaurant, home, linkage, love each day, memories, needful reminders, perry st, takashimaya, urban appreciation

Designing A Sustainable Future

We Are Not From Kalamazoo - Proposal For La Reunion Artist Residence

Sustainable design, the philosophy of designing products, architecture, and services to comply with principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability, has been one of the fastest-growing trends in the world of design for the last several years. A movement to eliminate all negative environmental impact via innovative design, it is a philosophy that may be applied throughout all fields of design, from large-scale urban planning to small-scale product packaging.

Design Green Now, a touring think tank of leaders in sustainable design and development, is an invaluable resource for any designer or entrepreneur who wants to know what designers are doing to improve the current state of our environment. The Design Green Now collective has confirmed three New York City panels to take place during the month of April, during which panelists will address the challenges they face and methods they have utilized to succeed in designing to achieve sustainability.

• Innovative Materials: 01 April 2009 at Pratt Institute; featuring Dan Rubinstein of Surface Magazine, Paul S. Mankiewicz of Gaia Institute, Jason Salfi of Comet Skateboards, Andrew H. Dent of Material ConneXion, and Mitchell Joachim of Terreform 1.
• Totally Wasted: Reusing, Recycling, and Reclaiming Resources: 02 April 2009 at FIT; featuring Andrew Personette of EcoSystems and Tiffany Threadgould of TerraCycle, Inc.
• New Approaches To Energy: 13 April 2009 at Parsons The New School for Design; featuring Susan Szenasy of Metropolis, Serge Appel of Cook+Fox Architects LLP, Stephan Von Muehlen of Energy Hub, Brent Baker of TriState BioDiesel, and Anthony Pereira of altPOWER.

Design Green Now has also been selected as a March 2009 Finalist at ideablob.com, and thus has the chance to win a $10,000 grant toward fulfilling its goals of educating designers, entrepreneurs, and the public on the importance of sustainable design to the environment and to the future. Voting for Design Green Now is possible from now through Tuesday, 31 March 2009, and requires only a quick verification of email. I voted for Design Green Now because as a designer who is a strong proponent of sustainable design, I believe in the programs and education that this collective is affording me and my peers. I voted for Design Green Now so that it can continue to reach designers and entrepreneurs with its messages of design change. And I voted for Design Green Now in order to help myself and others become not just designers of pretty things, but agents of transformation, as well.

Won’t you join me?

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RELATED ARTICLES

• Props to Design Green Now from Core77: 24 March 2009.

Filed under: Architecture, Design, Editorials, New York , conferences, design green now, environment, green, linkage, sustainability, video

Happy Inauguration Day 2009

Happy Inauguration Day 2009.
It’s about time!

[Image by Lauren Farmer via The Inaugural Tumblelog.]

Filed under: Blogging, Net Culture, New York, Photography, Politics , defining moments, egreetings, emotional landscapes, linkage, love each day, needful reminders, washington dc

Like Caviar Licked Off A Nipple

It all began with the prosciutto.

It seems odd, I realize: that my ruminations regarding the conclusion of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 should have started over three weeks ago, during my final ten days in Paradise, over several slices of Prosciutto di Parma.

But they did.

Because it was at one point during that time, on a sultry island afternoon, following a break for cigarettes and coffees in the cool trade breezes, that my best friend for life, surrogate little sister, and general partner in crime, AV Flox and I actually…paused…over prosciutto. Here’s all that happened: we returned to our hotel suite, decided to dine on a light snack before returning to our respective desks, laptops, and writing, and each reverently folded delicately thin slices of Prosciutto di Parma onto water crackers before simultaneously popping them into our mouths.

And we…paused.

The moment I felt the silkiness of the ham on my tongue, the second I tasted the meat’s salty richness, I immediately closed my eyes to better savor the sensual experience in its entirety. After a few seconds of culinary orgasm, I opened my eyes to see that AV had been doing the same thing. We both began giggling throatily, and after we had finished chewing and swallowing, she asked, exasperated, “Why don’t more people do what we just did? Why don’t more people just…stop, and truly savor, the tastes and sensations in their mouths?”

“Dude,” I said, laughing, “I dunno, but I’m taking the time to savor another slice of that pig like right now.”

She joined me in laughter again, and as we laughed I couldn’t help but marvel to myself how truly simple my basic needs and requirements had actually become over the past twelve months. The first taste of bitter, sugared coffee every morning. The comforting smoke from a cigarette on the back of my tongue, around midnight. The cured saltiness of pork flesh against my sensitive palette, at two o’clock on an island afternoon.

It would be these things that I would think about, three weeks and 4,968 miles (7,996 kilometers) later, as I welcomed the new year from my new home.

SEX IN A TUB OF ROSE LASSI

I was still thinking about this experience of the sensual, this experience of taste, of texture, of truly appreciating and savoring the sensual experience, when AV and I walked into the Honolulu sunset early that evening for our usual dinner at Café Maharani. Our dinners at the South King Street Indian / Pakistani restaurant had slowly become our own personal tradition whenever we were both in Honolulu at the same time, and we always delighted in ordering our tried favorites, while mixing things up a bit and ordering dishes we had never before tried.

This time, we ordered Indian Rosewater Lassis to start. A traditional yogurt-based drink originating from the Punjab region of South Asia, they arrived, frothy and innocently pink, to placate us until our plates of hot and buttered Tandoori Paratha arrived. We each wrapped our lips around the plastic straws at the same time, sucked the sweetened cream to the backs of our mouths and…paused.

[I was actually going to type "came" there, because that is really a far more accurate description of what we did, but for the sake of parallel construction I decided to stick with "paused".]

We closed our eyes as we sipped, slowly savoring the slightly rose-sweetened froth, swallowed, and opened our eyes to grin at each other.

AV emitted a seductive chuckle and said, “I have decided I need to have sex in a tub of rose lassi,” before picking up her mobile to Tweet said missive at that very moment.

Our conversation evolved radically and passionately, as it never fails to, over course to course, addressing the cuisines of different cultures, and desire, and sensual experiences of all kinds, and the importance of being open and receptive to all such experiences. It reminded me a great deal of a passage we had discussed months previously, from Anthony Bourdain’s 2001 novel, A Cook’s Tour.

“Think of the last time food transported you. Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips… steak frites when you were in Paris as a teenager with a EuroRail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of rumsteck (rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days… a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off… your grandmother’s lasagne… a first sip of stolen ice cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies… left over pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge… steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore… rice pudding from the Fort Dee Diner… bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun… dirty water hot dogs… a few beads of caviar licked off a nipple…*

“‘A few beads of caviar licked off a nipple,’” AV had written at the time. “What a simple, gorgeous celebration of touch, and of taste…”

It would be a conversation I would think about often over the coming three weeks and 4,968 miles (7,996 kilometers), particularly when asked about my resolutions for the new year.

“GOODBYE” TO LOVE FAILURES AND LONELINESS

In my first New York cab ride in over ten years, from Newark International to my new home in Brooklyn, I couldn’t help but stare out of the windows, in the chill and brightness of a nearly January day, and marvel at how the leafless winter trees, which I had not seen in years, seemed so much more vibrant, alive, and full of stories and promise, than any of the perpetually green flora I had left back on Oahu. I exhaled my Marlboro, and smiled widely when I realized that the white vapor issuing forth from between my lips was no longer carcinogenic smoke, but instead that of my own breath, visible on the wintry air. My smile grew even wider as my cabbie slowed the car to a stop at the still-familiar final light before entering the Lincoln Tunnel…and the still even more familiar first glimpse of Lower Manhattan upon emerging from it. I blinked, nearly in disbelief, at the numbers “212″ on storefront windows, and awnings, and signage.

The feeling that was swelling my chest and forcing my lips wider across my face only grew when I stepped across the threshold of my new home, La Casa de Awesome, and glimpsed, in my peripheral vision, a Linzie Hunter illustration hanging on my roommate Damien’s wall that read, “Say ‘Goodbye’ to Love Failures and Loneliness.” There was something about that sentiment that just seemed so…right, and made me, well…pause.

Because it was only then that I realized what that feeling was: the knowledge that I was, finally, “Home.”

I guess I’m recording these rather inconsistent and highly imperfect thoughts as a preamble to finally answering that question that’s been on the lips of so many acquaintances and friends lately: “What are your New Year’s Resolutions?” Because the truth is? I don’t really have any. And if I were pressed for any they would be only these: to smile as I say “goodbye” to love failures and loneliness; to always pause to savor the full sensual experience of licking caviar off of a nipple, of swallowing a slice of Prosciutto di Parma, or of the touch of someone else’s flesh against my own; and to always, always, run laughing into The Abyss.

But I think I primarily wanted to record them to remind myself, years from now, just how perfect it feels to be back Home, and just how much I never again want to leave it.

So those are my ruminations, over three weeks, and 4,968 miles (7,996 kilometers), later, shortly after midnight, on a January Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York morn.

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* Note: As cited in AV Flox’s 11 October 2008 piece, “Uncommon Sense,” at OMG. OMG. OMFG!

Filed under: Art, Food, New York, Photography, Writing , a-list, alucina, defining moments, dick lit, emotional landscapes, erotica, hawaii, home, honolulu, humor, linkage, love each day, memories, needful reminders, oahu, urban appreciation

The Boy I Was Supposed To Be

In the Broadway play “Passing Strange,” the narrator Stew says, “You know how one morning you wake up as an adult and you realize your entire life is based on a decision you made as a teenager?” If that description applies to you, Cancerian, 2009 will be the best year ever to do something about it. In the coming months, you will have the power to correct errors or misjudgments you made way back when. You’ll be able to figure out how to start over in an area of your life that you’ve always assumed you were doomed to accept just the way it is. You may even find that you can, in a sense, change the past and reconfigure your memories.

—Cancer Horoscope for week of 18 December 2008, Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

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DEPARTURE

“Atherton? Did you hear me?”

I started just far enough out of my reverie to realize that my boyfriend, Gavin, was asking me a question, but did not turn to look at him as I nearly croaked, “No. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

His hand on my left shoulder. Further realization that I was leaning far forward in my airplane seat, neck craned into the window’s porthole, eyes fixed on that which was growing ever smaller beneath the roar of the jet’s engines: LaGuardia Airport. Queens. Brooklyn. The East River. Manhattan. The Hudson River.

New York City.

“I asked you if you were all right,” Gavin apparently repeated.

My gaze never wavered, now trained on the towers of the World Trade Center, slowly receding from my view. “Aren’t you going to…to miss it?” I whispered into the window’s surface. Both hands clutching my seat’s right arm rest. Knuckles white.

I felt him remove his hand from my shoulder. Heard his familiar derisive chuckle.

“It’s just a city, Atherton.”

“Just a city…” I repeated, as tears began to stream, unchecked, down both of my cheeks, and the towers of the World Trade Center vanished behind a line of thick morning clouds.

It was at that moment that I began to hate my boyfriend Gavin.

THE ART OF COMPROMISE?

Gavin and I had been together nearly four years when we flew out of LaGuardia Airport together on that final flight in the summer of 1998. We had become a couple during his freshman and my junior year of undergraduate college in Westchester County, and had been nearly inseparable ever since that first evening (The Coming Out Dance, 16 October 1994, me rolling high on ecstasy, determined to capture his smile and his light for myself). A veritable Campus Institution, Gavin and I became well-known party promoters, DJs, and academics: the friendly Latino and the bitchy blond gay boys whose first initials matched those of an Italian fashion designer, and whose combined knowledge of comparative literature and philosophy spanned ten genres, 27 countries, and five continents. We were hot. We were hip. We were happy.

We also had a deal.

The deal was this: following my graduation in the spring of 1996, we would move into Manhattan, and I would take a job to support us while he finished college and I took a year off from academia to prepare for entering a doctorate program in comparative literature. Once Gavin graduated in the spring of 1998, the roles were to be reversed: I was to quit my job to focus solely on what I was confident would be a program at Columbia or Yale, while Gavin was to enter his oft-romanticized industry choice of public relations and provide for us until I acquired my Ph.D. and a tenured faculty position at our alma mater.

Except it didn’t happen that way.

I fulfilled my part of the agreement, working in the book and magazine publishing industry for two years while studying for my general and literature subject GREs in whatever spare time I had, until Gavin graduated. But when Gavin graduated, he decided that he had had enough of New York. New York was “too hard,” he said, “too expensive,” he whined, and “just not fun anymore,” he cried. So when his graduation arrived in the spring of 1998, my dreams of a life in New York, of a career in academia, of being constantly surrounded by all of my friends and family in the city, were darkened by a single decision on Gavin’s part: that after his graduation, he was moving back to his home to be with his family. In Denver.

It suddenly became painfully clear to me that the art of compromise does not always work both ways; that, as time goes by, as people and as relationships and as lives change, so does any prearranged agreement or compromise. And that, in my case, I would be the only one making any sort of compromise. Of course, it was my decision. I could have chosen to remain in New York by myself, to break up with Gavin then and be done with him, to move on with my own life, onward and upward, etc. It was not as if Gavin was particularly begging me to accompany him back to Denver. But after a month in Denver with him and still another month in Chicago with my mother, during which I nearly left Gavin, I chose him over my life. And followed him to Honolulu.

And to a life together that would continue to be all about compromise: mine.

And even though I was following him, even though I knew that there was no one to blame for the decisions I was making but myself, I grew to hate Gavin ever more.

THE RUSE OF SACRIFICE

I loved Honolulu for the first two weeks of my time here, lounging poolside at Gavin’s sister’s palatial Kahala home, dining at the finest restaurants, inserting myself, with Gavin, into the gay nightlife scene, and looking for jobs in what was at that time in the autumn of 1998 one of Hawaii’s worst economic periods. Eventually we found jobs that we enjoyed (or, if not enjoyed, then at least tolerated due to their impressive compensations); in time we moved into our own one-bedroom condo at the 2333; and finally, Gavin and I settled into a safe, predictable Honolulu…routine. We furnished our condo. We forged small and intimate circles of academic and gay friends. We threw parties not dissimilar to those we used to throw together during college, trading the DJ tables and the plastic beer cups for MP3s on the iMac and canapés and martini glasses. We were…happy.

Yet New York never left me. And although my new career of graphic design was a constant source of inspiration for me, the spectre of my lost academic career never left me, either. Gavin and I took vacations, which despite my suggestions of returning to visit our old college friends in New York, always seemed to be his choice: the wedding of his childhood friend…in Denver; Madonna’s “Drowned World” concert tour…in Washington, DC; always, forever, some place other than New York, until I wondered if I would ever again see the runways of a New York City airport rushing up to greet me.

The events in New York on 11 September 2001 symbolically marked the beginning of a downward spiral in my relationship with Gavin. We began openly flirting with other men, both online and in real life, in front of each other. We stopped having sex. We reached the point at which it seemed as if we were nothing more than roommates who shared finances and the occasional conversation, both doing all he could to spend as little time as possible with the other: Gavin working in his office until ten or eleven in the evenings, and me crawling into my Internet world with two bottles of wine for hours every evening. I began to consciously resent Gavin, to resent him as the cause of my presence in this Hawaii that I now loathed because of him, and to hate him as much as I had hated anyone in my life.

Because sometimes it’s difficult to know when one has crossed over from the land of compromise…and into the more dangerous land of sacrifice. But when one realizes that one has done just that, it is far easier for one to jump, either consciously or subconsciously, from accepting responsibility for one’s own decisions…to blaming someone else for them.

Four weeks following our break-up conversation in the spring of 2003, which I had initiated, we crossed the threshold of the condo that we had shared for the past four years for one final time. It had been an amicable split, for the most part, with very little emotion displayed by either party. Until the moment at which I turned around in the hallway and pulled the door shut with a decidedly firm thud. I slid the key into the deadbolt, and stopped when I heard Gavin whisper hoarsely behind me.

“Don’t you want to say anything?” he asked.

I turned to him, smiling, my left eyebrow arched. “Whatever shall I say? About what?”

“About us,” he nearly croaked, tears already making their way surely down his cheeks, “about all of this. It’s ending. We’re ending. About our apartment. About this place that we’ve shared for the last four years.”

I turned my head back down to stare at my hand on the key in the deadbolt, too-long blond curls falling into my face and obscuring the metamorphosis of my lips from wide smile to cruel grin. And all I could hear were his derisive chuckle, his dismissive words, of years before, spoken about my city.

So I repeated them to him.

“It’s just an apartment, Gavin.”

I heard his sharp, shocked, pained intake of breath behind me, flipped the deadbolt locked, removed the key, and turned to strut purposefully down the hallway without looking back, leaving him to remove the knife that I had just stabbed so firmly into his side by himself.

And suddenly…I did not hate Gavin anymore.

ARRIVAL

It’s been five years since Gavin and I broke up. After an initial period of attempting to be friends, Gavin chose to cease all further communication with me, save for recent indirect communication in the form of juvenile games played on the field of Facebook that are more suitable to a boy of 12 than to a man of 32. There have been many men for each of us since our separation, our lives have grown and matured, and I have even heard whispers of his own return to the mainland this week…back, once again, to Denver. I do not hate Gavin anymore. I no longer resent him, nor blame him for the decisions that I made to leave New York, to come to Honolulu, because they were ultimately my own to make. And because they all, ultimately, good or bad, taught me about love, about life, and about myself.

I thought about Gavin a lot this afternoon, following the final booking of my own flight back home, to New York, exactly one week from today. If he did not bring me here, to this place, then he certainly exerted enough of an influence on me that he inspired my decision to come here. But I have only myself to thank for the decision to return, ten years hence, to the city I left for him. I will not be returning to the same city, nor to the same life. Those twin towers I watched vanish behind our plane ten years ago are gone forever, as much a figment of memory as my once cherished dream of a career in academia. But I have no interest in returning to that same city of my past, no interest in pretending that the preceding ten years never happened, and picking up where I left off. I do not want to change the past, nor do I want to reconfigure memories.

I do not want to be the boy I was supposed to be.

I want to explore the man I am, through the eyes, through the experiences, and through the lessons that the last ten years in Honolulu have given me.

Since moving to Honolulu I have often been asked, “What on earth brought you to Honolulu from New York City?” I usually answered with the vague nutshelled version, “I moved here for a boy.” I suppose I wrote this today in order to record the more complete story. For it is within this story that the rather simple answer to the other question I have been asked of late, “Why on earth would you want to leave Paradise to move back to New York City?” lies: because it is where I belong.

It is home.

And this is what I will be remembering, seven days from today and ten years from yesterday, when I once again see the runways of a New York City airport rushing up to greet me.

Filed under: Academia, New York, Photography, Relationships, Writing , defining moments, emotional landscapes, hawaii, home, honolulu, linkage, love each day, memories, needful reminders, oahu, urban appreciation