March 11, 2008

The neighborhood I live in is quiet and old fashioned. Many of my neighbors have owned their homes for thirty years or more. It’s getting rare on Maui to find such stability. Our street is a bit narrow and has no sidewalks, so when someone parks out on the street we have to drive around them.

My place came with a one-car garage over a dirt floor. It had been scabbed on like a lean-to with a sloping roof to the side of my house. I never tried to put a car in there. Instead, over the years it has become a part of the house, going from storage room, to office, to spare bedroom. (It has a floor now). So I don’t have a real garage. Instead, I park beneath the giant Monkeypod tree in the back. But in order to not clog the street in front of my house with parked cars, I created two driveways, one on either side. It confuses strangers, and that’s fine with me.

Lately I’ve been coming home and finding phone books.

Because I have two driveways, the phone book deliveryman must think that a lot of people live here. I bet he thinks he is doing me a great service. Maybe he likes me or he thinks I need to be in better touch with the world at large because I find phone books like batches of Easter eggs, nestled at each doorway. Plastic bags virtually stuffed with multiple phone books for which I have no need or interest. Heck, I’m not even done reading the ones I got last year!

Three different companies have printed and delivered books to me this year. Hawaiian Telcom found it necessary to print two. One is the regular phone book of 830 pages and the other is a smaller version with a
repeat of all the yellow page ads; they call this the Maui Companion. This company alone delivered a total of six books to my home last week. This year’s book covers offer black and white images of vintage Maui along with banner ads for lawyers and timeshares.

Earlier this year I also received the Paradise Yellow Pages. These books virtually replicate each other. This year’s cover sports a comely maiden lounging on lauhala, gracefully swooning with leis; below her serene gaze an ad for “Maui’s Most Experienced, Aggressive Trial Lawyer” sits in bold letters; no wonder she’s so untroubled.

The third unneeded book is the Maui Directory. To its credit, it is smaller and its front cover and spine harbor no ads, just another time worn image of happy-faced dolphins. It must have been painted before the Navy started its sonar experiments.

I hardly need one phone book any more because my cell phone is so smart that it remembers numbers for me. So why do we get multiple copies of books we hardly use in the first place? Because merchants pay to put their ads in them. I now have eleven phone books in my house. I will keep one and drag the others off to be recycled. It’s the least I can do and many local schools will take them. Hawaiian Telcom will ship all of the phone books turned in to Nippon Paper Industries in Washington State to be processed back into paper. This will cost more money than it will generate. Presumably so we can do this all again next year. To my way of thinking, this seems a sad way to use our precious resources, once again for the short-term profit of a chosen few. 

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Ginger Johnson