The Smell of the Moon

By Lemanatele M Kneubuhl

In The Smell of the Moon American Samoan novelist Mark Kneubuhl tests the sparkling waters of making bold life changes and he jumps into the deep end of the blue Pacific Ocean. If you've ever flirted with the idea of chucking it all in for the good life then you'll enjoy this whimsical, satirical and wise take on trading it all in for a slice of paradise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Huia Publishers
• Release date: Aug 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781869694630

Book preview

1

There are no sex scenes in this book. No foreplay, no drawn-out juicy prose, not even a quickie in the broom closet. There are many characters but none of them even get past first base. There are island aunties, cowboy cousins, ex-drug-addict musicians, honest-to-goodness royalty, a seven-foot-tall voodoo-priest handyman, and my old neighbour, a microbiologist who plays with genes all day.

This is a tale about people, you and I included. Minus the sex.

The story came to an end a couple of years ago. It was then, although not part of this story, that I was bequeathed the chiefly title Taimaioleotaotaitafatafailefaleo’o on the South Pacific island of Ha‘akula. The ceremony was sanctioned by the island’s highest chief and ruler, Sebastion Rabu. The title literally means ‘to pick up the rubbish next to the house’, although there is a myth that goes with the name that implies something altogether different. Everyone now calls me Tai.

Ha‘akulan blood runs through my veins along with an odd cocktail of European varieties. I’m a middle-aged man. Not quite old enough to really relax and enjoy the beginnings of this new and last phase of my life, but old enough to understand and come to terms with what’s going to happen when it’s over. And when death does finally come to my front door, I’d just as soon have it equipped with a battering ram and take me by complete surprise.

On my kitchen wall, above the refrigerator, I have one of those cheap wall clocks with paper faces that depict anything from flowers to fish. My clock, which I received as a gift from my old neighbour, depicts Michelangelo’s statue of David. The minute and hour hands extend from David’s midsection, making for an impressive dual extension of an otherwise rather average appendage.

Life is a lot like my clock. You bring it home from the store and you place that single skinny AA battery in the back and hang it on the wall. Months turn into years and every once in a while you look at the fishes or the flowers and wonder how it can keep on ticking so long on that skinny little thirty-cent battery. And then one day, without warning, it just stops.

My David clock has been running for the better part of three years and never missed a beat. But it will stop someday.

Aside from the realisation that we all are destined to die, and given its physical limitations, there is an upside to growing old. It is true that with age grows some sort of wisdom, and, best of all, we just don’t sweat the small stuff anymore. We forgive and we forget.

It’s the greatest single blessing bestowed on the elderly: all those once seemingly important psychological pings and pangs of life become of little consequence. You now realise that your ‘unfair’ upbringing was not a planned event. Your parents were not evil co-conspirators, nor were certain events in your life any more predictable than the paths of tiny bubbles lying in the wake of a small boat just trying to stay afloat. As the adage goes, no person is perfect, but intentions can be. And I’m sure that there are no parents, alive or dead, who ever wished the worst for their children. Things just happen!

I cry a bit more now. Probably as much as I did when I was a little baby. Maybe more. But my tears today are not the result of sadness or fear or anger, which was the case when I was younger, but rather they come now every time I understand some new aspect of life’s great picture. And every time now, when my eyes gloss over and my vision slowly blurs, I say quietly to myself, ‘What a shame.’

♦

I was born fifty-four years ago. It was 1949 and I weighed into the world at a hefty nine and a half pounds. My mother — let’s call her Mom — and my father — let’s call him Cary Grant — welcomed me into their new family and all of its trials and tribulations.

Cary was a suave and debonair young man from the island of Ha‘akula. He was a people person. He loved to talk and was liked by everyone. I wasted half of my life blaming him for all my misfortunes, imagining they resulted from my parents’ divorce. It was convenient to me at the time to look upon him with contempt. He was my scapegoat. I believe many people need a scapegoat at some time before they grow old enough to learn to forgive and forget. My first dad is very old now and for several years we have been good friends who love and care very much for each other. Now we both realise that things don’t always turn out the way you plan.

At the time of my birth I had a four-year-old sister, a brother just eighteen months older than I, and a younger sister about two years away. My parents were in their twenties and struggling to slice out their piece of the American Dreampie. Today, I am now twice the age they were then and for many years had faithfully observed the same eight-thirty bedtime I had when I was in the fifth grade. In retrospect, I strongly believe that bedtimes should be abolished. I was a zombie unless I had my uninterrupted nine hours in the sack. For this I blame my fifth-grade bedtime!

I am not old enough to pretend to completely understand life, but I have begun to realise the scope of life experiences. (This is a forgiving way of admitting that I still don’t know squat.)

What I do know is that time can be one’s most persistent critic. I also believe that knowledge is a high-octane fuel for that supersonic ship called discontent. It was the knowledge of certain things in my life and my subsequent restlessness that caused me to put all future plans on hold and eventually realise the reason I was put on this tiny little planet in the first place.

Cary Grant was a good-hearted man and a good father, when he was around. The cause of my parents’ unbonding was that he wasn’t around very much. He was just too busy talking to people on his way up the ladder of success. My mother simply got tired of looking at cheap wall clocks and reheating cold dinners.

My second dad — let’s call him John Wayne — was straight out of the wild Midwest and responsible for my Indian uncles and cowboy cousins. He also had a little brother in the Secret Service who used to protect President Eisenhower. John was a member of the old school who believed that if you didn’t have to sweat to get it, then it wasn’t worth getting. His school also believed in dying for one’s country, which he desperately tried to do in Korea. He failed. Once again, the winds of life had changed direction. After Korea, old John had to change his college major from music to business. He was a great pianist at one time, but after returning from the war he couldn’t play ‘Chopsticks’ to save himself.

At a young age, long before he should have had to, John accepted his fate. When he returned from the war he was empty. I can’t think of a better word to describe his state of mind and condition. He was just empty.

Like all good cowboys, John was honest to a fault and about as hard working as a person could be. He had a bad back and fallen arches from his younger days when he used to throw hundred-pound bales of hay onto a moving truck, and he had all sorts of stress-related ailments as a result of his later corporate vocation. The bad back and fallen arches hurt him a lot. The stress from corporate life almost killed him.

Fortunately for John, the winds of change blew twice during his adulthood. Old John never liked business. He never liked the cold and often unethical corporate wheeling and dealing. Cowboys have unwavering ethics, values and morals. But being the good cowboy that he was, he stuck it out for over twenty years, faithful to one company until the end. (At which time, he marched right up to the president and CEO and gave them a long and elaborate speech on the social responsibilities and obligations of big business.)

John decided that he wanted to teach. He felt that very human desire to pass something on, to leave some sort of mark, to do something meaningful in life. It turns out that he was a very good teacher. He became full again. He told me once that teaching is like playing music. He said that if you suck, everyone falls asleep, but if you’re good ...

Actually, old John never said the word ‘suck’. He never used any form of profanity other than the very rare ‘goshdarnit’. This he used only under extreme duress. He would always apologise afterward.

Cary and Mom had gone their separate ways when my brother, my two sisters and I were in our formative years. Some say we became very ‘interesting and unusual’ as a result. This is a cowboy way of saying that we were a little fucked-up in the heads. Fortunately, we grew out of the interesting and unusual stage and all became normal and predictable.

Old John had a lot to do with us kids becoming normal and predictable. He did this with a whip and a crack, which is probably what we needed. And it was he who was responsible for instituting bedtimes. That is the only thing I will never forgive him for.

Mom and John had two kids of their own, little John and Genevieve. Genevieve has embraced the cowboy ethic and excelled in everything she has ever attempted. She is now an astrophysicist. She writes scientific articles which are posted on the internet, although her web page has probably had fewer hits in the last seven years than the average porn page gets in seven minutes.

Like his father, little John has become quite accomplished on the keyboard, but of the PC kind. He’s a software maestro who roams the planet with the click of a mouse, performing a concert of zeros and ones in cyberspace.

My mom and John were divorced when I was away at college. I got the call at nine pm. It was my eldest sister. I was in bed. I was quite shocked at the time. I had never even heard my mother and stepfather so much as argue. I understand now that cowboys don’t argue much.

A couple years later my mom married my third dad — let’s call him Jimmy Stewart. When I was little, prior to becoming my dad, Jimmy was my paediatrician. He was the paediatrician for most of the kids in the small town where I grew up. Jimmy came from a family of doctors and told me that he never once thought about being anything but.

Jimmy was also divorced by the time he and my mother got married. He has four children from his first time around. That is a complete novel in itself and I will only add that he and his biological children (now adults of course) have long since doused their heart-pains with kind and civil reconciliation.

Now that I am older I realise that divorce is all about the parents. It only involves the kids in the same way perhaps that a fallen tree might affect a bird’s plan for nesting.

♦

Jimmy has recently retired and now plays a lot of golf. The only patients he still sees are his grandkids, of which he has a lot. He has no regrets in his life. That is something I hope I can say in the not-too-distant future.

Grandpa Jimmy — as he is now called — was, and still is, about the kindest man you’d ever meet. He’s as kind as old John was hardworking and Cary Grant was friendly. That works as a paediatrician. He is also terribly unselfish. That also works.

I was already out of my teens when he and Mom got married. I have no psychological battle scars from that union. Grandpa Jimmy just accepted me for what I was, and loved me to boot. I was comfortably messed up before he came along. I guess of all of my three dads I should be most bitter toward Jimmy because with all that love and understanding he thoroughly confused the whole issue.

As a result of having three dads my family tentacles are more far-reaching than that of the average two-parent home. I have a diversity of wonderful relatives.

I have many grandparents too. Grandparents are a special breed. One of my grandfathers, who filled in as dad between Cary and old John, spent his whole life doing what I love doing most: fishing. My fisherman grandpa was very much the free spirit, which he probably inherited from his great-uncle, the explorer David Livingstone.

One of my physicist relatives has been trying to figure out what the tiniest particle in the known universe is. He’s been working on this for about forty years. Another relative writes plays for a Hawai‘ian audience and still another is a clarinet player in a swing band. The clarinet player was a medical student before serving in the Vietnam War as a field nurse. During the war she began to use morphine to help make an unbearable situation a little more tolerable. After Vietnam she supported a hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit by playing clarinet on the street corners of San Francisco.

My Vietnam field nurse cousin is clean now and swears that words, not music, come out of that tube she blows on Friday and Saturday nights. She says that those words are telling the audience the story of her life.

2

I was eleven years old when the 1950s ended. For me, as for American society as a whole, it was the beginning of the end of innocence. What I remember about the fifties is not so much the sights and sounds, but rather the odour. Everything back then seemed to have a peculiar and unique smell. Our car, which was older than me, smelled like the pages of a mouldy comic book. My neighbour’s house smelled like furniture polish, while my neighbour himself smelled like corn on the cob.

Now that I’m older, it’s not sights or sounds that trigger my memory. Smells can open a floodgate of imagery and instant recall. Every time I eat corn on the cob I think of my old neighbour who was one of my good friends and now works as a genetic scientist.

My old neighbour always wanted to be a medical doctor like Grandpa Jimmy, but medical schools at the time thought that he was too smart and too white to be accepted. Back then everyone was looking for variety. Nevertheless, he is very happy and content with his present vocation. He tells me that he plays with genes all day long. When he goes home, he says, he falls asleep thinking about genes. He tells me that he never gets tired of playing with genes. He says, ‘There are soooooo many of them and they do so many different things!’ My old neighbour’s parents were married a few years before I was born. They’re still married today. Good for them.

I have had more fathers than today’s average American family has children. Each of my fathers has had his own family priorities arranged according to his own unique design. My mother also had her own priorities, which remained consistent throughout her three relationships. Had it not been for my mother and her fragile thread of routine normalcy, I know things would be very different today.

Consistency is good. I once had a friend who would read stories to his three children every single evening. Nothing got in his way. He would turn down night games at Candlestick Park or happy hour at Scully’s so that