Hooked

My grandmother, Tutu, has always been proud of the fact that she can make her baby toe do the hula. She sits in the car, waiting for my piano lesson to come to an end, wiggling her toe in endless circles. Her fingers drum on the dashboard as she blows nonsense into an old harmonica, trying to recapture the Hawaiian music her toes dance to best. I come out of my lesson, see her parked across the street, and beeline towards her ancient Honda. A mosquito is making lazy rounds above her head. Tutu sometimes tells me stories about her life in Kauai. She would dance the night away on warm Hawaiian beaches with those American men. This is where Kupuna Kane comes into the story and Tutu gets vague. Changes the subject to how she wanted to become a hula dancer instead. She never dances the hula now; the only dancing she does is with her baby toe, in the front of the car as she waits for me to finish tapping out Hot Cross Buns on the piano. Tutu says the thing she misses most about Hawaii is the hula girls in their pretty palekoki and that she wishes they were the first things she'd seen when the plane landed, rather than bare, hot tarmac. Climbing into the passenger seat, I hum along to the harmonica's foreign sound as Tutu finally swats at the mosquito, misses.