Where the elite meet to eat meat

What a coincidence. I had no sooner put down an August 31 Time Magazine article on "The High Price of Cheap Food" when I received an email from the nice people at Omaha Steaks offering me a one-day sale for--for example--four four-ounce filet mignon steaks marked down from the normal $56.99 to $19.99.
Suddenly the Time Magazine article should have been renamed "The High Price of High-Priced Food." It worked out to $20 a pound for four little pieces of meat.
There would be an additional charge for shipping to my home on the water in Hawaii, of $37.99.
That means the REGULAR cost of this meat for me would be $96 a pound.
Just to be fair, I calculated the same costs if I sent the meat to my son in Seattle. Then shipping would be only $13.99--but then it would still be costing me $34 a pound for a steak. Maybe I should just go to Safeway. Google tells me their filets are $8.99 a pound.
I did check the cost of organic filets from an outfit called Blackwing. They had a deal where I could buy 14 six ounce filets for $128.60 for 5.25 pounds. The shipping for that would be by UPS: $79.98 : UPS 2nd Day Air
$126.46 : UPS Next Day Air. So if I am willing to wait two days, it would be only $208 for 5.25 pounds of organic beef.
One message here is that organic meet from Blackwing basically costs no more than non-organic from Omaha.
The other message is that it is kind of obscene to be talking about spending $208 for some steaks when that is more money than some people in the world have to live on for more than five months.
Or maybe I should just eat a carrot.
In the hour or so I have spent writing about this, I could have been earning at McDonald's enough money to feed, clothe, shelter and provide medical treatment for someone in Central Africa for a week.

Blog is the loneliest number

It is the artificial Tuscan village. It is my hometown in California where I grew up population 10,000, high school enrollment 600. We knew everybody. People dropped in and if they didn't they saw you on the street anyway.

In "Passage to India," the author E.M. Forster says "only connect."
But like facebook a blog is connection lite. And any sound like the word love or death or hate bounces around as it does in the caves at Marabar and comes back an echo: boum, ou-boum.
What can compare with the look in a lover's eyes when she gets you, truly understands you and likes what she understands? What can compare with the lively glance from your friend over a glass of wine and a backgammon board?
Not blog. Not face book.
I now invent a new social network. It is called face. You cannot join until you are here, looking me in the eye, smelling my sweat, watching me move however slowly in real time, moves that disappear like flashes of light on ocean waves, never to be seen again.
Friendo, if I could "friend" someone in Uganda that might be something. But do I want anyone in Uganda to know of both our common humanity and the equally common disparity between the $3 a day he and his fa
ily live in and the $3 I just paid because I was a few days late returning a DVD to the library?
You want a technology that will change the world? Watch out what you wish for.

Hurricane Felicia says, "It IS a gift......."

Living, and living in paradise as I do, can lull us into taking life for granted.

Two days ago, drifting into my afternoon nap in a bedroom that looks out upon Kaneohe Bay, the islet Mokoli'i, and the Ko'olau range of folded volcanic cliffs that divide Oahu like heavy velvet emerald green drapery, I said to my Maltese pup, Kea, curled up beside me, "This, my friend, is as good as it gets."

I wanted to share this moment with someone dear to me, so I made a telephone call 2,500 miles to my daughter in Seattle, who is the one who once explained the mysterious purpose of life to me very concisely: "It's a gift, Dad. We are meant to enjoy it."

She, and all of us who know her, appreciate that gift even more in these first few months since she has been diagnosed with cancer. She is undergoing chemo therapy. It has cost her most of the hair on her head, so she went to the barber who normally shaves her husband's bald head, and had a shave herself.

"Does it itch?" I asked her. "No--it feels like Velcro." Do you stick to things? Sort of, a little, she said.

But even the horror of cancer can be forgotten on such a beautiful day in such a beautiful place.

I told her how absolutely perfect the moment was. She said, "I think about your place in Hawaii a lot."

Well, I started to say, you can come down--

"No, I mean I think about it a lot in meditations, I use it," she said.

Tonight, waking up in the same bed with the same pup at my side, I walked through an opening in our wall of glass doors into the light of a waning moon, and I watched the weather changing moment by moment as Hurricane Felicia spins toward Hawaii like a top thrown by a careless child.

The sea, that had been combinations of aqua and turquoise and ultramarine, was a dark slate stretching to the horizon. The puffy dazzling white cumulus clouds were gone, and in their place a coverlet of milky chiffon was being drawn down the sky, obscuring those few Perseid meteors that could otherwise be seen tonight despite the bright moonlight.

She is weakening, Felicia, to a tropical storm, but she will drop a foot of rain when she grinds right over our heads on Tuesday, and she threatens to to churn our eastern shores with a surge that could toss boats around against our harbor walls, and even send water over our seawall, through the boathouse, and into the cottage we call The Pavilion, or, less grandly, the Fish House.

So Felicia, lucky destructive girl that she is, reminds us all once again that in that very same spot where you felt only days ago that this is as good as it gets, it can become, as it has in hurricanes past, as bad as it gets as well.

I have decided to start a blog. I want to share some of the moments and marvels of my life in beautiful Hawaii, of growing older and calmer in Paradise

For example, it was one of those evenings when, while driving home, whole chunks of time, and roadway, seem to disappear without a trace.

Oh--YOU never have those evenings? Well then this is worse than I think.

Rolling along in my 1999 GMC Sierra Extended Cab* pick-up, still going strong after 120,000 miles, I followed the off ramp from the H-3 Freeway onto Kahekili Highway without difficulty. But that's when the neva vu syndrome set in.

Deja vu is the situation in which you feel you have seen this before, been in this place before, felt this way before.

Neva vu is when you look up and say, "Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-the-hell am I?" Cars rolling by, bright reflective (3M?*) highway stripes gleaming as if the asphalt was an inefficient cover for some vast halide-lit marijuana farm down below.

You feel, as we say in Hawaii, "I nevah wen' view dis place." Neva vu.

Kahekili thus was delivered to my wandering mind in short strips of roadway, each decorated by my fearful and amazed conviction that I had never seen this particular spot before.

At 69, already dreading the onset of the Alzheimer's Disease that felled my mother Alice and not yet prescribed for Aricept,* I was worried that the dementia might have begun, in earnest.

Then I arrive home, and Jane my wife, a native of Vietnam, makes Cinnamon Toast for the first time, somebody's brown bread, someone else's sugar, and Starbucks Cinnamon,* all sprinkled across a slice of bread slathered with somebody's butter. It is a steadying, reassuring moment.

I pick up the iPhone* sitting next to me on the dining room table and head into my office to sync it with my Mac G5 desktop computer*, and see neva vu voice mail on it.

I touch the play button, and the fellow named Fischer, already identified on the voice mail list, says his lease hasn't been signed and this is getting critical, and by the way (Beta Tango Whiskey) can he bring in another tenant.

"When did I talk to this guy?" I wonder quietly. "I signed a lease with him? He sure doesn't sound very pleasant.

Next is a message from a Realtor* I hardly know. How do these telephones identify people I have never heard of, I wonder.

No, this is worse. This is neva neva vu land, the abyss. I check the message times. I seem to have lost the better part of a day, conversations, contracts, all disappeared like so many political prisoners in Pinochet's Chile in 1973, los desaparecidos And then I look more closely at the iPhone. It is my wife Jane's phone and the messages are for her.

But it is a preview, my own version of that moment when, after arriving in my mother's home returning from a trip to Europe, after greeting her in her bed and urging her to come to the kitchen for breakfast, and telling her of the trip, she interrupts her animated and amused replies to ask:

"And who are you to me?"