8:12) chris abraham 02-SEP-97 14:46

The dive boat we had used since he and I took our course through PADI in 1985. I was almost 15. Tom Yoho was always our captain. They were always different boats, but if Tom was there, it didn't matter. It was a consistancy, one of our few traditions -- to great me whenever I deplaned in Honolulu International Airport. The boat rode low, there were so many people chain-smoking Viceroy Golds and drinking scotch out of tiny paper cups. Little chips of ice rachetted at the hollow plastic bottom of the several ice-coolers on the boat.

The lights of Honolulu and Waikiki sparkeled. On clear nights, it always appears that lava is rolling down the mountains from the Koolau mountains, down Manoa Valley, and along the ridges of Pacific Heights and Hawaii Kai. The light of homes along the ridges mimic this flow. The coursing streetlights and the softer lights of the homes, of lava hardening.

Inside the oak box (there is no gravestone, no marker except in our hearts, in his images) I was surprised to see a gray platic bag. I felt strangely like a consumer as I untwist the wire and tasted the ash as it wafted up from the brisk tradewinds off shore.

We held our Glasses high, some of the amber fluid leaking. Someone wanted to pour some whisky into the box. Some wanted to give the ash a cigarette. I kept the box close and insured that the ashed where deposited into the sea, none of it to be kept. I gave the box to his partner. My mother looked quite affronted by the burial. Not by the burial, but rather by the drunken dandies and hussies making such a spectacle of themselves, offering booze and smoke to the remains, the ashes of a man who had died.

All the while a gentle breeze, the flowers riding the waves having been thrown in after. The leis slowly wilting on the string: carnations, orchids, tube roses. Thrown to the waves and little fish, the eels, turtles, anemonies taking the ash into their bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.