'Akua nana' -- God is watching.

Tuesday I had a visit from a member of Boston's Hawaiian community; a Hawaiian elder. Only he doesn't like to be called that--"Kupuna!" he shouted when he heard me referring to him to someone on the phone as an elder, "A *young* kupuna!"

'Kupuna' means 'grandparent.'

So: Kupuna lives in the city and does not own a car. He took Amtrak to Providence and I was to pick him up at a cafe in the Arts District. I got to the place a little after 10:30 in the morning, pulled in next to a hydrant, and phoned his cell.

A few minutes later he emerged from the building next door to the cafe, which could have been the Amazing adult store or an office in the same building. He had a ponderous, luggage-sized backpack with him.

"What's that?" I said.

"For meeting," he said in his friendly Hawaiian Pidgin. I took it to mean not our meeting. Kupuna is into everything; he's some kind of Commissioner in Massachusetts and pulls all kinds of influence.

I wasn't sure what kind of meeting would require materials gleaned from a mystifying, film-noir building in Providence and crammed to weigh down a Samsonite backpack. I thought it best not to pursue the matter.

Kupuna had promised to bring champagne for our meeting, a working session to plan a hula demo to a college ethnomusicology class. He insisted on stopping at a liquor store, where he picked up two matte black bottles of chilled Freixenet.

We settled into my office with the booze and plentiful pupus, finger food I'd prepared because it is impolite not to have lots of food to offer visiting Hawaiians.

In the ensuing five hours we polished off both bottles and somehow planned our show.

Kupuna is a slight, intellectual-looking man, retired from a federal-government job. He looks as Chinese as he does Hawaiian, with long, straight, black hair caught in a queue and streaming down his back. He speaks in a strong, authoritative baritone and he has Presence. A New Age person might say he has a big energy body--he can fill a room with meaning and leave an audience knowing they have arrived at a new and significant understanding.

We were working on this project together because we both believe in cultural outreach. Kupuna would open our demo with an `Oli Aloha, a chant of welcome. This would not be spectacle or entertainment, but a true act of inviting the students into our culture.

Working though our ideas, we played cuts off my iTunes, discussed, and made notes.

It was a sunny midday with a hint of spring. Part way through the first bottle I looked out my window at my yard, with its lazy landscape just waking up from winter slumber. "This is what life should be like," I thought; and made a note to try organizing my life such that I could have more long, European-style creative working sessions.

Several flutefuls later, Kupuna was saying, "Hoo, I get a buzz from dat stuff," and I was struggling to keep my notes legible.

Kupuna pulled out several Hawaiiana books I hadn't seen in about 30 years. Since our initial meeting on the demo, he'd had time to think, and think, and had added a whole new didactic theme to our 80-minute spiel.

I have produced and directed lots of expensive corporate videos, not to mention professional stage shows, and to me, the Stopwatch is King. I was worried, but remained poised in perfect balance between killjoy clock watcher and respectful junior giving an elder his space.

In other words, I sat listening to Kupuna and, save for a couple of halfhearted interjections of 'lo`ihi!' ('long!'), did nothing.

The problem really wasn't cultural. It was a matter of decision-making styles. My own process is like a square wave: When I have something to decide, there is no conscious consideration of the options. It's just, bam! I've decided. As if lightning has struck, incinerating all options but the one that remains standing, smoking slightly, on the scorched terrain. (There are advantages and disadvantages to deciding things this way, but I will leave that discussion for another post.)

Kupuna, on the other hand, uses a decision-making process more like an oil slick slowly spreading. Amorphous, in rainbow colors, it flows in all directions, pulled this way and that by currents of thought, engulfing myriad, bobbing chunks of flotsam and jetsam.

This style of decision-making has its good points, but alacrity is not one of them.

As the day declined, we arrived at a plan. The only thing that remained was for me to sober up so that I could drive Kupuna back to Amtrak.

About two hours after I stopped drinking, I was ready for the journey. Kupuna wanted to stop somewhere for a bite to eat, "To soak up the booze." He expressed surprise and dismay that the quaffing of a solitary bottle of sparkling wine could cause him to be buzzed.

I was all for the food idea, but Kupuna's train was due to pull into Providence in less than an hour. The really cool restaurants near my house could barely muster a waiter in that time. So we drove into the deeps of Providence, Kupuna directing me.

"Have I told you I'd rather stick my finger into an electric socket than drive in Providence?" I said.

The streets are ridiculously narrow and laid out not so much, as in Boston, to follow ancient cow paths, but apparently to follow the paths of cows that had grazed on hallucinogenic herbs.

And, more than that, my internal Producer was kicking in again. I brandished my watch: "If I had a train to catch by then," I said, "I'd be standing on the platform by now."

Kupuna was serene. He had me park on a Monopoly board-sized street (probably Baltic Avenue, given the derelict nature of the buildings that lined it) and we went into a corner dive bar for hamburgers. We ordered and waited, and finally got them wrapped to go.

From there, neither of us had the slightest idea how to navigate to the train station. The train was due in ten minutes. Kupuna directed by gut feel, and I fretted and drove.

"Akua nana," he said. "God is watching. No worry. We'll get there, no problem."

And we did.

Akua nana; pronounce it Ah-KOO-ah NAH-NAH. I knew the words, but not the expression. It reminded me of the serenity with which I observed Hawaiians, way out in the country on the Big Island, dealing with life as it came, back long ago in the 1970s.

I thought, how wonderful to be of a culture that thought, when God was watching, it was to protect us and not find fault with us.