Lanai City

3,300 people live in Lanai City these days and frequent the island’s favorite breakfast joint — the Blue Ginger Cafe — in flip-flops and t-shirts throughout the morning gabbing nonstop. Their ancestors worked pineapple here as imported laborers from Japan, the Philippines, China, Portugal, Korea, and Puerto Rico so if you are looking to conduct a sociological study of amiable polyglot relations, the Blue Ginger Cafe would be the perfect field research lab for you.

Back in the (very old) day the Hawaiian ali’i divided the island into a dozen districts (ahupuaa) each of which extended from mountain to sea and each of which contained the essentials of life — water, cropland, wood, and sea critters. This balanced approach worked just fine until Hawaii’s magnificent isolation ceased in the eighteenth century thanks to Captain Cook, and the world came calling with its diseases and domestic animals. After sheep and goats mowed Lanai clean, the native population shrank below 200. So of course haole businessmen bought the place and converted it to the world’s largest pineapple farm. For 70 years the Dole Corporation provided grueling employment to Lanai City’s denizens, and when pineapple fell from profitability, Rupert Murdoch stepped in and built two luxury resorts on Lanai and overnight pineapple cutters became room attendants. Today Larry Ellison owns Lanai and the grandchildren of imported pineapple peons live secure in paradise.

 

The Future

When I stepped into the little toidy room at our Lanai resort, the toilet seat snapped to attention and lit up.

What?

Unawares I had stepped into the future of toilet . . . and . . . well . . . Jeez.

Alas the toilet of the future is sexist. The lid snaps up but not the seat, and I know from long experience that executing number one with the seat down results in pain and shame.

In my day there was one control device . . . the flush lever. This future toilet instead has a control panel bolted to the wall. Next to the buttons these words appear: Full Flush, Light Flush, Oscillating, Pulsating, (Pulsating!?!?!?), Dryer. On the side of the control panel, these words: Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Pressure, Position, Stop.

I dared touch nothing but Light Flush or Stop, and prayed as I sat that nothing on God’s green earth would prompt my elbow to brush Oscillating or Pulsating. Just for the bleeping heck of it Jane and I placed one foot, each of us, on opposite sides of the toidy seat to approximate the weight of a seated human being, and punched Oscillate.

Ye gads. A robotic arm extended from the nether regions. It oscillated. It sprayed water all over us. We retreated. I warned Jane that at my age sometimes bladder pressure wakes me in the wee hours and that she should not fret if shrieks interrupted her slumber. Just me experiencing the future.