It’s Thanksgiving in a pandemic. Yet there are no awaysickness songs, just at the time we need them the most.

There are plenty of Hawaii homesickness songs but none about longing for a special place that’s not your home in Hawaii but that you remember and yearn for as much as a homesick person who grew up in Hawaii longs to return.

One night 82 years ago this month, possibly on Thanksgiving, the Hawaiian composer and musician Andy Cummings had just finished a gig in East Lansing, Michigan, as part of The Paradise Island Review.

It was cold and foggy outside, more winter than fall. “As we were walking back to our hotel from the theater,” Cummings remembered, “I thought of Waikiki with its rolling surf, warm sunshine, palm trees, and …”

And this: as soon as he got to his room, he sat down and wrote “Waikiki,” one of the most beautiful and enduring of Hawaii place name songs.

Like “Waikiki,” Hawaii’s place name songs are homesickness songs — missing home, feeling lonely and out of place from being in unfamiliar places away from family, school friends, and old hangouts. The melancholy and disorientation of being uprooted.

“I see memories out of the past, memories that always will last, of a place beside the sea … My thoughts are always returning.”

Homesickness is an easy, powerfully resonating story to tell in Hawaii. Everyone here has an example.

Yet it is just one part of Hawaii’s life and connections.

Awaysickness is not about missing home in the concrete, single-place way that Cummings did.

It is about living in Hawaii and liking it but missing a place somewhere else where you have spent enough time to establish a sense of familiarity, a sense of place.

Homesickness songs and stories have always defined this place, but more and more so do stories about many attachments and strong home-like yearnings for places that are far from Hawaii.

These are not your home in the literal sense, but emotionally the longing is something much more durable and compelling than a nice visit to the Bay Area or a hotel you stay at a couple of times a year in Las Vegas.

It’s hard to give such places a name. They are not home, but they also are not not-home. The places you feel awaysickness about are imagined homes (imagined-away-from-home home) that you think about almost every day.

So, on Thanksgiving when I pandemic-Zoom with my family, I’ll be looking at Portland, Toronto and Milwaukee, my hometown. I usually visit Milwaukee once a year, but I haven’t lived there for close to 60 years. I have never lived in those other cities.

Yet I know them. They mean a lot to me, a deep part of me. Seeing those best-you-can-come up-with Zoom settings will remind me how long it’s been since I’ve experienced them.

It gets more complicated. A couple of weeks ago my son and his family moved to Portland after living in New York City for close to 25 years. Pretty amazing. Both my children now live in the same city for the first time since the late ’80s. I’m delighted.

I know, though, that Zooming them in their new home is also going to remind me of all the memories of all the good times we had in their Brooklyn neighborhood and the walks through lower Manhattan from our old friend’s condo where we stayed year after year.

Many attachments, lots of comfort zones, nostalgia, missing those places though not wanting to live there.

Memories of the past, memories that will always last. Plenty of inspiration for songs but with different lyrics, a different twist.

Writing about her own bouts of homesickness, the Canadian journalist and historian Melissa J. Gismondi reminds us not to trivialize homesickness because of the pain that it causes, like depression, apathy, detachment, grieving, even physical illness.

Of course, this does not always happen. Still, homesickness can be pretty serious stuff. The popularity of all those “missing home” songs shows that nobody trivializes homesickness in Hawaii.

“Try as we might to transform ourselves into cosmopolitan citizens of the world,” Gismondi says, “it turns out that where we come from — what we identify as home, whether it’s a place or specific people in our lives — still matters.”

This emotional turmoil can be as true for awaysickness as it is for homesickness.

And we do trivialize awaysickness in Hawaii.

Homesickness songs and stories have always defined this place, but more and more so do stories about many attachments and strong home-like yearnings for places that are far from Hawaii.

That’s because in a homey sort of way more and more people in Hawaii have become cosmopolitan citizens of the world, and home becomes less about a specific place and more about specific people in our lives.

People leave here. Some return. Many more may want to. Many don’t for all kinds of reasons. Many people who live here have developed strong attachments for other places, often because their children have left.

So, making Hawaii more sustainable after the pandemic means two very different things. One focuses on the people right here, getting them to stay and getting others to return. Home as this place, the way Cummings imagined it. The Island Mythology.

The other sort of sustainability recognizes this broader cosmopolitan Hawaii that crosses boundaries. This recognition is essential because more and more people are part of this.

And because they are reality checks on the myths that Hawaii is still simply the place as Andy Cummings described it.

On a cold Hawaii Thanksgiving night that feels more winter than fall, write a song about awaysickness.