Mahalo
On Tuesday morning, just hours before this issue went to press, staff writer Adrienne LaFrance burst into the office with a photograph she’d taken on the way to work. “Not sure we still need photos for this issue,” she told me, “but I love this one.” Adrienne is one of our newest employees and is also part of a large contingent of the current staff that is quite new to Hawai’i. It can be hard for malihini to earn the community’s trust, in and outside of the newspaper world, but I’m already learning that one of the great advantages of a newsroom full of newcomers is that it allows us to look at Honolulu through fresh eyes.
I was thinking about this Tuesday morning as I considered the arresting simplicity of Adrienne’s photograph, lamenting that it hadn’t arrived in time to make the paper and wondering about the people in the frame.
Who is that kid? Who’s that little girl in the background? And the woman on the right, her face only half-revealed…who is she? Where are they going? What will they do when they get there?
We don’t and can’t know, of course. But it’s still worth wondering about. That’s partly for the sake of the wonder itself and also because the answers to those questions lie in a realm beyond the reach of any newspaper–in the future. Where these people will go and what they will do and how they will live will be determined in part by the decisions we make about the future of this extraordinary island. We would all do well to remember that, maybe a little more faithfully than we do.
Mahalo to all who participated in this year’s Best of Honolulu edition. We had a lot of fun with this issue, as we do every week. And as they do every week, some of our insights will prove not so penetrating as we’d suspected, and some of our jokes will fall flat. It’s our hope that all of it, for better and worse, will be received in the spirit in which it is offered: That of deep affection for Honolulu and its people, and boundless curiosity about its past, present and future. –Ragnar Carlson
