THE THREE OF US settled into a routine, more or less. Pearl left early every weekday morning (about the time the brothers were arriving) for her job, and returned in late afternoon. Eva meditated and read, came and went, looking for something stable or purposeful in her life, looking for direction.
For a while, she and I were taking long walks in late afternoon. We would walk a mile or 2 down one of the straight, unpaved streets in the neighborhood, then turn and go to the next street, and walk back on it. We talked about spiritual things. Eva had a guru in India, who would be in Oregon for a time in August, and she was planning to attend the gathering there.
I was reading, at that time, the final book of a trilogy by David R. Hawkins --
I: Reality and Subjectivity -- and loaned it to Eva. She was not much interested in it, but she loaned me a book that I loved greatly:
Tales from the Night Rainbow (Koko Willis and Pali Jae Lee). It's a beautiful story of life in old Hawai'i; things passed down from generation to generation, from the times before the
Ali'i (royalty) and the
kapu (taboo) system. The days when the people had true spiritual power (there's an amazing story of foreign conquerors arriving in boats, slaughtering and subduing the people on all the islands except Moloka'i; when they attempted to land on Moloka'i, the inhabitants lined up on the shore, stood there and chanted, and the energy of the chanting was so powerful, the would-be invaders were pushed back into the sea!).
We talked about Hawai'i, how it must have been in the days before
Ali'i and
Kahuna ("keepers of the secret"), before government and secrecy. And what do we see happening now, not only in Hawai'i but worldwide? Governments trying harder to justify their existence and maintain control -- and people becoming increasingly free of them. The time of the secret-keepers is coming to an end; all the secrets are being revealed.
MYSELF, I USUALLY did Reiki in the morning. Then email. I would write my messages and put them on a diskette. I would get a ride to Hilo every 2 or 3 days, get to the public library and use the allotted 50 minutes of computer time to send the emails I had put on diskette and to download the next batch to be answered.
I spent a fair amount of time standing at the roadside with my thumb in the air. If I didn't get a ride within 30 or 40 minutes, I figured it was not my day to go to town, and I walked back home. But almost always I would get a ride within 5 or 10 minutes.
I continued offering Reiki at the Farmers' Market in Hilo, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Pearl would usually take me on Saturdays. On Wednesdays I would hitchhike with my 2 folding chairs and my signs for the space at the Market.
The ride to Hilo took around 25 minutes; plenty of time for interesting conversations. One day I was given a ride by a Thai woman. Her name was Benjamas ("Chrysanthemum" in the Thai language). We talked about Reiki and energy in general, and the marvelous intelligence of the universe. Benjamas owned a piece of land in Paradise Park, and had visions of building a healing center there.
Another day, I was picked up by an ethnic Hawai'ian man, whose name I have forgotten. His age must have been close to 80 (and I know he told me that, too, but I don't recall the number now). At heart, he was very youthful, to say the least.
He said he was picking me up because he knew how it felt to be hitchhiking. He had been without transportation just recently; his driver's license had been suspended for a few months.
I asked why it was suspended. "Impersonating a Police Officer," he said.
"Were you actually doing that?" I said.
"Nahhh...." He said they had only charged him with that because he had pointed a handgun at someone. It was all a misunderstanding, he assured me.
All the way to Hilo, he told me stories of his life: who he had worked for, the women he had loved, his triumphs and heartbreaks.
Another day, I got a ride that I almost wished I hadn't got: a woman with a hyperactive, little dog. The passenger seat was normally the dog's domain, and my presence there made no difference in the canine mind.
The woman's attachment to the creature was undeniable; there was even a photo of it on the front of the dashboard. And moving the dog to the back seat would never have entered her mind. So it spent the ride to Hilo in my lap, hyperventilating and thrusting its paws, one after another, against my "private" parts, and occasionally jumping up to lick my face.
OUR ROUTINE -- Pearl's and mine -- also included looking for another place to live. Pearl was supposed to be getting her loan for buying the B & B "any day" -- but weeks had passed without it happening, and we knew we couldn't count on it. We looked at several other houses for rent, as far away as Honomu, north up the coast. None of them was right for us.
One afternoon in downtown Hilo, we were driving along when a man on a bicycle got our attention. It was a rickety old bike. The man had long gray hair and chin whiskers and an old, straw hat shaped sort of like a volcano. We didn't recognize him, but he seemed to know us. We returned his wave and drove on, and it was soon apparent that he wanted us to stop.
We pulled over to the curb and he caught up with us....and we realized it was Norman the Bee Man -- the guy we had met the first day we had gone to look at the Bee House; the guy who was there consulting with the brother-in-law about getting rid of the bees!
He caught up with us on his bike and asked how things were going in the house. He said he had some information that might be of interest to us. He was doubtful that the woman who claimed to own the house really did own it, and wondered if she was even a real estate agent.
He had never been paid for his work at the house, he said, and eventually had gone looking for the real estate office where she worked, to demand his payment. He had gone to the address on her business card -- and it was a regular house in a residential neighborhood. Some people were outside having a party. Norman showed them the card and asked if this was where the woman worked. No, they said, they knew nothing about this woman or any real estate office.
So Norman suspected the woman and her brother-in-law were pulling some kind of major scam. He figured they didn't even own the house. When we told him that we had never been given copies of the rental agreement we signed, he was even more convinced. He wanted us all to go to the police station right then and tell the cops our story.
Well, it certainly was suspicious that the woman had a bogus address on her business card. But it seemed a bit of a jump from that to assuming she was not in fact the owner of the house. We thanked Norman for his information and told him we would find out who did own the house and, if it was not her, we would be ready to go to the police with him.
At the public library in Hilo, there was a whole room -- with a very impressive, locking gate -- of nothing but books of property ownership. I went there to find out who actually owned the house we had rented....and could not figure out the labyrinthine coding system that would presumably have led to the answer.
I was intending to try again on another day; but then I happened to mention it to a friend who said he knew how to find such information on the internet. He looked it up for us -- and the woman we had dealt with was indeed the owner of the house. We didn't contact Norman again, but his story of the bogus real estate office stuck in our minds.
MY 50TH BIRTHDAY CAME AND WENT, on the 20th, and we were still looking for a place. As it worked out, Pearl's friend Denise was buying a house in Hilo town -- she had been in the process of buying it for months -- and the deal finally went through just then. It was a 3-story house, 100 yards from the ocean, at
Onekahakaha Beach Park. Denise was going to live on the top floor and rent the others, and she invited Pearl to rent the bottom floor until things worked out for buying the B & B.
Another friend of ours, Rob -- who had looked up the ownership information on the Bee House for us -- was just then looking for someone to rent a room in his house in
Kapoho, and I decided to do that.
We were both eager to get out of the Bee House, and obviously the owner and her brother-in-law felt the same way. One day in the last week of the month, the brother-in-law told Eva that Pearl and I were being evicted on the first of July! This came as a total surprise, of course, and Eva said something about it being very little notice (knowing that, by law in Hawai'i, no one can be evicted without 45 days' advance notice
in writing). The man said, "Oh, they already know." Then, a few minutes later, ending the conversation, he gave away the lie by asking her to tell me that I was being evicted!
Pearl moved to Denise's just before the end of the month, and I sent a load of my belongings with Rob to his house. He was going to pick me up the next day.
He had just left with my things, middle of the afternoon, when a silver van pulled in the driveway. I was still standing in the open garage, and Eva was there too. A woman got out of the driver's seat of the van and came to meet us. A man was getting out of the other seat. The woman introduced herself as Renée and said that she had bought the house and would be moving in on Saturday (this was Thursday, as I recall)!
Eva and I were totally surprised, to say the least. The first words that came out of my mouth to Renée were, "Oh, I'm so sorry for you!!" They popped out before I could even think. They must have shocked her a little, and I guess she must have asked why I was saying that, and I told her it was because the people who rented the house to us had not lived up to anything they had said.
We told her this was the first we had heard of anyone buying the house. Told her that Pearl had already moved, and that I was leaving the next day, but that the brother-in-law had told Eva (just a few days before) that she could stay another month!
None of this seemed to impress Renée much. She was sorry for Eva, she said, but we would all have to be out by Saturday, because Renée and her husband (who was standing beside her now) and their kids (who could be heard in the back of the van) were moving in then.
I ASKED IF RENÉE KNEW ABOUT THE BEES in the house. She said she had been told about them just earlier in the day, when she had given a check (for a large amount of money) to the woman selling the house. She was a little disconcerted by this -- but the woman had assured her that it was a minor problem and that the bees would be gone by Saturday (possibly they had been given eviction notices also!).
I told her not to count on that -- because the other woman had been told the same thing when
she bought the house, and had been trying to remove the bees herself ever since....and that Norman the Bee Man had come to the conclusion that the only way to get rid of the bees was to tear down the entire house, because they had thoroughly infiltrated the inside of the walls. (He had also told us, that day in Hilo, that, after his work at the house, in the proximity of the poison that had been used on the bees, he had been sick for days; I don't remember whether I mentioned this to Renée or not.)
Well, she said, they would
have to get the bees out, because 2 of her children were highly allergic to bee stings; in fact, she said, one of them would be dead before they could get him to the hospital in Hilo, if he got stung!
It looked to me like one of those "My mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts!" situations. Here was a person confronted with the fact of legal residents in "her" house....and of bees in "her" house....and of her own child who would be dead if a bee stung him -- and she was still intent on moving her family into the house on Saturday!!
She was seemingly not upset with the woman who had sold her the house while renting it at the same time to other people (and neglecting to mention the resident bees until Renée had signed the final papers and given her a large chunk of money for the purchase). No, she was upset with Eva, for daring to mention that she, Eva, had the legal right to continue living in the house. This woman was ready to put Eva out in the street with nowhere to go, and to sacrifice the lives of her own children by moving them into a bee hive, without blinking an eye! (Eva told her there was a steady stream of bees getting into her bedroom, through the wall somehow, and that she had been stung several times before finally abandoning the bedroom and moving into the dining room!)
None of this mattered. The woman was dead set on her objective. She could have been Hannibal crossing the Alps, or the great Scott on his Antarctic suicide march!
After she left, Eva and I went inside and Eva telephoned Legal Aid, who told her that no one -- not the owner, not the police, not the sheriff -- could legally move her out of the house until 45 days after she had been given written notice of eviction.
In any case, this new turmoil did not exactly contribute to Eva's quest for inner peace.
When Pearl arrived, a little later, to haul the last of her things to Denise's house, and we told her the latest news, she said to me: "Get your things, I'm taking you to Rob's."
"No," I said, "he's picking me up tomorrow."
"No," she said, "I'm taking you right now. Get your things. I don't want you spending another night in this place; no telling what's gonna happen next!" She was determined, and I must admit I had no desire to spend another night there -- so I grabbed the last of my things and let her drive me out to
Kapoho, the easternmost point on the island.
I felt bad about leaving Eva to face her new predicament alone. The proverbial rat-deserting-the-sinking-ship came to mind -- but it didn't stop me from leaving. I would have been gone the next day anyway; Eva was going to have to find her own salvation. I told her to call me if I could be of any help. Then Pearl and I got in the car and drove off into the next chapter of our lives.