All of these pieces were written during the last twelve years, and some may reflect a nostalgia for the last century. Most take place in Hawai'i, although some are set elsewhere--the Maine Coast and New York in the late Fifties, the Oregon coast in the early Eighties, and L.A. ten or fifteen years ago. There is no central theme to the collection, save, perhaps the preservation of time and place. The earliest stories take place in Hawai'i sugar towns in the Forties and Fifties. One is in an unnamed New York conservatory in the late Fifties, while another involves a young Oregon couple in 1983. Yet another concerns kids surfing in the Seventies, and there is a movie samurai navigating L.A. in the late Nineties. They coexist with an old man and his grandson in Maine during the early Sixties, and a country preacher on the Indiana-Michigan border, who looked like Ned Beatty and whose sermon was James Joyce with a twang. Two poems in the collection both deal with time. And there is a Honolulu yuppie driving himself into oblivion around 2008. I hope that they all interest and enrich the reader in some small way.