Last year, driving home over the crest of a hill near Punchbowl (and the National Cemetary of the Pacific), I saw plumes of smoke over Pearl Harbor at 4 p.m. Startled, I was able to say to myself, "it's just a movie. They even got the time of day wrong." When the twin towers fell, people on TV said, "It's like Pearl Harbor," or, "It's like a movie."

My friend Miriam says if they didn't keep telling her it was real, she'd think it wasn't.

My mother remembers Pearl Harbor. She didn't know where it was. Who does not know where Manhattan is? The Pentagon?

I wish Allen Ginsberg had levitated the damn thing.

Ala Moana Shopping Center, once the largest in the USA, closed on Tuesday, as did public schools on the Big Island (though not those on Oahu).

Two days after the bombing, I saw "wanted" posters on telephone poles in Kalihi, a working class neighborhood in Honolulu. On the posters were color photographs of Osama Bin Laden.

Terrorist cells: cell phones (last calls).

Emails and more emails. Gaye sends one to say her son saw two people jumping from one of the towers holding hands. Everyone checking in: are you all right? The Navy doctor and his pregnant wife next door had a friend in one of the towers. "He hasn't called his wife since."

"The instant politicization of our grief," says one email. Grief, by any other means, is now our politics.

So this is the (darkest) sublime. We have crossed the Alps. This time we saw it happen. "Our lives have changed forever."

Sunday, it rains heavily on the windward side. The mountains are covered by waterfalls, so many the mountains themselves seem to move.

My two-year old son, Sangha, plays happily with his airplane, his fire trucks, his bulldozer. I think, thank god he's too young to be drafted.

All the calls ended, "I love you."