Wau haawi hoihoi

Feb 7, 2011

I once posted a photograph of a flyer I saw taped to a lamp post advertising paints, canvases, easels, and so on. The top of the flyer read: "Giving up on my art career sale."

Several years ago, I sold a few guitars on eBay as part of my own "Giving up on my music career" sale, and although I didn't sell them all, the ones I kept were put into suspended animation via the time-honored technique of stuffing them under the bed. Despite Deborah's occasional encouragement for me to dig them out and play, I just wasn't inspired. Things like hand surgery and the occasional broken arm didn't help anything, either. But recently, in an inexplicable burst of—well, not inspiration, exactly—let's call it renewed interest, I blew the dust from one of my old pals, and began strumming its corroded strings.

I even plugged into a basic home recording setup to experiment with making some lo-fi demos. It's not surprising that I became frustrated with both my out-of-practice chops and my know-nothing engineering skills.

"Sounds good, honey," Deborah said while I tried recording a part.

It's been said a million times, but it's true: Lo-fi digital recording lacks the quirky charm of lo-fi analogue recording, and as I listened back to my effort, I began cursing in frustration. "Fuck, I can't get it to sound good."

"People go to school for that kind of thing, you know," said Deborah. "I mean, they study for years."

"Yeah, yeah…"

I decided that part of the problem was that I was trying to record a guitar whose strings were older than our cats, and so, after a nice Sunday brunch, we took a walk to the Guitar Center so I could pick up a new set.

I followed the sound of lazy buzz-saw noodling and found a glassy-eyed, tattooed sales clerk behind a wall of amps playing a blood red guitar through a dozen effect pedals. He apologized for being in slow motion, blamed it on Sunday, and got me what I needed.

While I paid for the strings, Deborah wandered around the store and found something she just had to have:

A ukulele.

"Can we get one?"

"How much is it?"

"Fifty dollars."

"Hmm, okay. I always wanted a ukulele."

"Me too!" she said, clapping her hands in excitement.

The sales clerk had gone back to his secret hideaway, so we tracked him down again.

"You need something else?" he said.

"Yeah, a ukulele."

Although the ukulele display was admittedly rather large, asking for one seemed to throw him for a loop. He kept wandering around in circles, not sure what to do or where to go. He apologized again for his Sunday morning fuzziness. "Be patient," he said.

"No problem," I said. "We've waited a lifetime for a ukulele, what's another few minutes?"

He disappeared into a back room, and upon returning with the instrument in-hand, said he couldn't find one in a box.

"No problem. We'll take that one if we can."

"Uh, sure, um, yeah, one sec," he said before disappearing again.

After all was said and done, we walked out of the store with a ukulele in our hands. I carried it most of the way home strumming it now and then -- although it was out of tune and I wasn't quite sure how to tune it. We passed plenty of people along the way but nobody seeming to notice or care about our new purchase, which isn't all that surprising of course but the reason I mention it is because, the second I handed it to Deborah so I could take a picture of some random garbage on the street, we were suddenly surrounded by sunbeams and double rainbows.

"Is that a ukulele?" asked a woman who was walking her dog.

"Yes."

"How cute!"

Thus inspired, Deborah barely let me touch it after that. We figured out how to tune it, downloaded some ukulele sheet music, and for the rest of the day, Deborah sat on the couch singing "Tiny Bubbles" in phonetic Hawaiian.

Summertime, here we come.

Hua li'i

I ka waina

Au hau'oli

I ka wa au inu

Hua 'li'i

Wau haawi hoihoi

A i'ini nui i ka wa au

Nana ia oe

Au kuuipo

I nu ho'omahalo ka'ua

I ko ka'ua aloha mau loa