ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

After moving back home, I did not expect old memories to float up uncontrollably, spurred by sights and smells. They ferment like natto, sticky and shocking at first.

One of these floated to mind as I drove from the east side into town, barreling down H-1 under the Koko Head Avenue overpass.

As I stared at the horizon of high-rises blocking my mountain view, words from the mid-1990s suddenly haunted me — words from my high school president Dr. Jim Scott.

His words spoke to how growing up, he never would have imagined the row of high-rises now densely packed across Honolulu — and that we should be prepared for more to be built.

After I moved back home, I have been jolted by the physical changes of this land. Some parts of town are far more rundown than I remembered.

Growing up, I never noticed the thrift shops, or the potholes, or the rusting and dilapidated buildings, or the scores of homeless encampments. Did it become like this, or had I never noticed?

Some jolts come from the unimaginable, like seeing Kakaako filled with hipsters. Some arise upon seeing the unrecognizable, like Ala Moana Center’s metastatic maze. I can hardly remember what it was like before.

Still other jolts come from that which had long disappeared, like the Fun Factory in Market City where my basketball coach would take us after a game, or the Jolly Rancher, now the Kahala Zippy’s parking lot, where I played my first Street Fighter arcade.

A Feeling Of Loss

As the new Keeaumoku Street condo project goes up, and beloved restaurants are relocated or closed, many may experience a natural feeling of loss. Memories stick around well after the building has been destroyed or changed.

At times, modernization does seem heartless, as if to discard your nostalgic memory as just that — a memory. Was your memory real or imagined? Does the memory of a place even matter?

To clear the emotional stickiness of nostalgia, the rule of modernization — also known as impermanence — gives me clarity and comfort. Only when something old goes can something new be placed. Creation requires at least a little destruction.

At times, modernization does seem heartless.

Through this wheel of time, destruction follows creation which follows destruction, and in cycles we go. From time immemorial, generations of birth and death before us have passed — with more generations yet to come. We are but a momentary passing.

Today we say farewell. Tomorrow we may say hello. This is how aloha is both goodbye and hello. This is the magic of how they are exactly the same.