Dad's Ashes

The dive boat we had used since he and I took our course through PADI in 1985.
I was almost 15. Tom Yoho was always our captain. They were always
different boats, but if Tom was there, it didn't matter. It was a consistency,
one of our few traditions -- to greet me whenever I deplaned in Honolulu
International Airport.

The boat rode low, there were so many people chain-smoking Viceroy Golds and
drinking scotch out of tiny paper cups. Little chips of ice ratcheted at the
hollow plastic bottom of the several ice-coolers on the boat.

The lights of Honolulu and Waikiki sparkled. On clear nights, it always
appears that lava is rolling down the mountains from the Koolau mountains, down
Manoa Valley, and along the ridges of Pacific Heights and Hawaii Kai. The
light of homes along the ridges mimics this flow. The coursing streetlights and
the softer lights of the homes, of lava hardening.

Inside the oak box (there is no gravestone, no marker except in our hearts, in
his images) I was surprised to see a gray plastic bag. I felt strangely like
a consumer as I untwist the wire and tasted the ash as it wafted up from the
brisk tradewinds offshore.

We held our Glasses high, some of the amber fluid leaking. Someone wanted
to pour some whisky into the box. Some wanted to give the ash a cigarette.
I kept the box close and insured that the ashed were deposited into the sea,
none of it to be kept. I gave the box to his partner. My mother looked
quite affronted by the burial. Not by the burial, but rather by the drunken
dandies and hussies making such a spectacle of themselves, offering booze and
smoke to the remains, the ashes of a man who had died.

All the while, a gentle breeze, the flowers riding the waves having been thrown
in after. The leis slowly wilting on the string: carnations, orchids, tuberoses. 
Thrown to the waves and little fish, the eels, turtles, anemones
taking the ash into their bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.