The house Dad had built on the lot he'd bought in Pupukea was a "pre-fab". These were pretty controversial in Hawaii, where there are no RV's, billboards, or "mobil" homes. Essentially, they were built somewhere in the industrial area near Sand Island, then trucked to where they'd be set up. This one was in two long halves, which would normally be fastened together at the site. Imagine taking a long, unsliced, loaf of bread and slicing it down the middle lengthwise. That's about the proportions of the two halves. Dad, being the inventive guy he was, was able to get a change in plans: The two halves would be some distance apart, with a big living room in the middle and a big deck at the front and a smaller deck at the back. There was a half-open garage, and a driveway. This was all on Akanoho Place, a small road that went up and down like a rollercoaster.
We went out and visited while it was being finished, and we kids got to know all about different types of nails and wood. I thought the house looked great in the natural wood colors it had before it was painted, but sadly, it got painted a color Crayola used to call "sea green" with darker green trim.
While we waited for the house to be finished, we stayed several temporary places. First, we rented a house on the next ridge over, which was rather nice. I felt very sad about leaving Portlock Road and spent a lot of time just sitting, looking out the window and watching the crop dusting planes treat the sugar cane fields over in Wailua. We were not supposed to have cats there and agreed not to have cats but ... we had cats. One of them kept peeing everywhere and thus, we didn't last long there. We then stayed someplace in La'ie, next to a family of kids who weird in two ways: they liked salted licorice and they had a pet monkey. Then we left and stayed in one of the "cottages" at Pat's In Punalu'u. That was great, for as we all know it was only a mile or two from Ka'a'awa, and the same wonderful fresh sea air and walking along the beach brought back great memories. Somewhere in this time frame we also stayed in the Schofield Sands, temporary rentals usually used by soldiers and their families. It was pretty great. One morning a bunch of TANKS went clanking by at 6:30 in the morning. Mom was infuriated, but Alan and I thought it was great and hoped they'd visit again soon. For some reason we'd acquired a couple of baby ducks, who paddled around on the painted-cement floor and got their bathing pool very dirty. The Schofield Sands had a soda machine that had Diamond Head Orange, the only kind of soda I liked. What really impressed me was, if I was having trouble with the machine which I generally was, some kind soldier would help me out, cheerfully. And they'd say Hi and things like that. It was amazing. I was used to local-haole relations where no one said Hi to a white kid. I was used to being barely tolerated by the local storekeepers, school officials, really anyone with any sort of authority, or without. So these friendly Mainland soldiers, generally from the South, were a revelation.
We finally moved into our cheerful green house, and we had to wear rubber boots outside because of the red mud, which Mom was *not* a fan of. This was kind of annoying because we were used to going barefoot almost everywhere. For Christmas, or maybe using some money Aunt Mary had given us, Cinda and I got cowboy boots. We'd run around in those, pretending to be cowboys. They did make a nice galloping sound. We had great fun exploring the valley, and after just a day or so after moving in there all of us got so involved in exploring that when we got back Mom was livid because she didn't know where we'd gone and was worried. It was so nice and green in the valley!
Initially, like with any new house, things were great. Everything was clean and new, we had the furniture all set out in the dining room, living room, bedrooms. Dad built a storage shed because we had a lot of books and bedding and things to store, and it was green too. The trash can area was next to that, like anything Dad made, well-built with gravel on the bottom. Dad also built a mailbox that looked like a miniature of the house, which was pretty neat. Unfortunately, the mailman refused to use it. Now, thinking back, what Dad should have done was take a regulation mailbox and then build the house-model around it, but he didn't. So it got used for packages or the newspaper. It has a spring-loaded door and the "thwap!" of that closing told us something had come.
We kids got to recognize the sound of the neighbors' car motors and could tell Mom who it was going by. Down at the end-end of the road was a guy who was Hawaiian and supposedly a coach at one of the high schools, and rumored to be very mean. We took care not to cross paths with him. There were the Finleys just up from there, the Bensons (among whom was the famed surfer Becky Benson), Jeff Hakman (another famed surfer who used to shape boards) the d'Alessio's who had a dalmatian who used to always bark at us, the McRae's (Heather McRae and her mother) and some others we knew but I can't remember the names of now. Up around the corner were the Wallroths (I don't know if I've spelled that right) who had a very neat large flat piece of land with grass almost as short and stiff as the d'Alessio's dalmatian's.
I wish I remembered the street number of the place. I was last there in 2003, and someone put a second story over the living room, making it a bit less distinctive. And it'd been painted brown, no more "Esmond" green. The only way to pinpoint it would be to go back there and physically stand in front and write the number down, and the chance that I'll see Hawaii again is pretty close to zero. I'd say it's the place just downhill from Jeff Hakman's and on the same side, but there are probably 1-2 houses between Jeff Hakman's and our old place now. I managed to get Google Street View working, and Akanoho Place is so different it's unrecognizable. When we moved there, the landscape was dominated by "haolekoa", a legume that grows to the size of a small tree, has fuzzball flowers, and makes a funny smell when it relaxes its leaves in the evening, local "ironwood" trees, actually casaurina, and the grass that would dry out in the summer, with native pink orchids scattered through it. Now it's all overgrown with actual pine(!) trees like you find on the Mainland, and all sorts of other stuff. Most of the houses are hidden behind hedges and masses of greenery. With two famous surfers on the street even when I was a kid, no doubt the area is home to a lot of "surfing elite" mainland types who can afford to surf and own a car - it's not that bad a drive to get to all the good north shore spots. But it's been "mainlandized". This makes me very sad. I used to sit, very quietly, and listen to the bittersweet, longing cries of native birds, and I wonder if no one hears the distinctive swishing sound of the wind through casaurina trees, or picks guavas in the valleys any more? I guess I am writing about a place that doesn't exist, in a sense, any more.
We got to know quite a few people around the neighborhood, but looking back I note they were all fellow haoles. The Japanese people in the area tolerated us at best, and the locals/Hawaiians were to be feared. There was a Japanese guy who had a Kobota tractor who roto-tilled the back yard of our place, and Dr. Yurioka who stitched up April's face after she'd fallen off a go-kart Alan had made, and he was nice, but we were lucky to get a polite wave in exchange to our wave and "Hi!" later.
Dad was around quite a bit, building things and trying to relax. But Mom was a nag as usual, and the drive back and forth to Honolulu was a long one. He was in the habit of sleeping in his office at times, or, I believe, with a "stew" which is what he called a stewardess. Also being a white computer programmer in Hawaii is, as I've mentioned, not the best career choice, and I believe he was having job trouble again. I remember that for a short time he got a job as a salesman for Hitachi, and showed us one of the first handheld calculators - 4 functions and only $400, and if you tried to divide by zero it went nuts.
So, at first, times were great, we had clothes and food and books and Dad even got the TV working kind of OK (TV back then was three channels at best) and Barbara would go with Dad into town each morning, to Punahou and work, respectively. We even had a horse! An old horse, named Candy, and we took some riding lessons from the Wheelers up the street. We'd go out and ride on the trails, and we learned out of a book called "Happy Horsemanship". Except for the times Cinda and I would tell each other, in private, how much we missed Hawaii Kai, life was looking pretty good.One notable adventure was when we went to the valley on the other side of the road from us and discovered a huge pond from the rain, full of the most wonderful almost-black mud. We took paddle boards and things down there, and had the most glorious mud fight. We came back, far later than we'd told Mom we would, and boy was she angry. We looked like we'd been dipped in dark brown paint. She had us go right into the showers, clothes and all, and clean up. You could almost gauge how much fun something was by how mad it made her. Wouldn't a normal mom just get a little bit mad, and then tell us that, if we're going to play in the mud, to wear old clothes or swimming clothes, and to simply be careful?
I think what happened with Mom was, when she met Dad she'd been going to college classes and was quite smart, and really "going places" and when she married Dad she thought she was going to have this great life, with plenty of art and adventure, and instead she ended up raising 5 kids and expected to be no more than a housewife, in an economy that kept grinding down. She probably felt she'd have been better off to stay in California and I think she would have.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Shara and Shebti
Barbara, being 5 years older than me, was someone I really looked up to. Not only going to a grown-up school like Punahou and playing the flute, and learning German (she taught us to sing Oh Tannenbaum in German on Christmas and was mostly successful) she loved cats and anything to do with cats.
The ancient Egyptians also had a lot to do with cats, thus she loved reading about them, and we had a few really nice "coffee table" books about them. So I read up on the Egyptians too. I doubt I learned as much about them as she did, but the ancient buildings and the sculpture and art, and the tales of adventure with archaeologists discovering the ancient tombs were all pretty interesting.
Barbara also had a huge shelf with every kind of cat statue, sculpture, pendant, teeny glass knick-knack imaginable. It was absolutely amazing. I wasn't supposed to, but occasionally I'd go into her room and admire them. I remember picking up a couple of the teeny ones just to look at them closer, but other than that the rule was "no touch"; I knew that.
She also had two "show" cats, white Persians, named Shara (male) and Shebti (female). They'd been "fixed" so they were not breeding cats, but they were very beautiful, and Barbara was always, with Dad's help, taking them to cat shows in the H.I.C., Honolulu International Center, now called the Blaisdell Arena unless they've changed the name again. I remember going along to pick her and the cats up, and I may have gotten to walk through a bit of one once, but mainly I remember all the tons of ribbons Barbara's cats won. And trophies too.
This was becoming the end of the Golden Age though. Dad's job at HC&D was not working out well, Mom was nagging him too much for him to be happy at home, and he bought a Datsun 240Z sports car so he could go out and drive around and get away from it all. Dad loved that car and so did we kids - it was really small but Dad and 4 of us could fit in there, 2 kids in back and 2 kids (one in the other's lap) in the passenger seat. Dad was always a car guy, not in fixing them so much but in driving them. Although his glasses were quite thick, he never had an accident. He was always very physically adept, a good swimmer, and woodworking and carpentry are fairly physical activities too.
Although the 240Z could not have been very expensive, I think it signaled the beginning of the end of the good times. I think the household budget was fairly delicately balanced, and that car may have been enough to tip it downward. Another huge factor would have been, with Mom nagging Dad so much, he was eating out at restaurants instead of eating at home and that makes a huge difference.
I remember Dad held a huge party, for what reason I don't know. Maybe it was to try to ingratiate himself with his bosses, or to "network" with some people to try to get a better job. Maybe he just decided he ought to throw a big party. So our lanai, which was quite large, was set up as the buffet area, and we stocked up on all kind of crackers and party foods, and we had a dragon dance. Everyone expected me to be scared of the dragon, but I stood right in front and smiled at the guy I saw peeking out of the mouth of the head. It was great. This was about the time Barbara was getting to know Tom Farrell, the guy she'd later marry. Alan was mad at Tom for a long time because he had taken the last piece of steak or something. He held that grudge for years.
I remember one time we went to a Boy Scout pancake breakfast, and were standing in line, in the hot sun, at the Hawaii Kai shopping center and I fainted. I kind of tottered over to a store front and fell against their window, chipping a front tooth. The thing is, I think we were short of breakfast foods at home so the idea was to just take the kids there. Another time Mom wasn't feeling well or something so Dad set me up to go to school, and cooked me a flat scrambled egg thing and I ate it up fast. He said I was a real "hungry tiger" and I hoped that meant he'd make me another, but he didn't.
Eventually it was decided that we'd sell the house. We had to keep it very neat, and "open house" people would come through. We kids had to be on our best behavior, or better yet, go out and play and not be around when the open house people were around.
During this time I got an ominous feeling, like everything I did or was, was fake. Cinda and I had these toy "motors" on our bikes, they were really just things you put batteries in and made a motor sound. I realized these were really fake, they're not a real motor, they need batteries, they don't make the bike go forward, and who are we fooling anyway? Anyone can tell we're on bicycles not motorcycles. And that feeling extended to everything, somehow. I think the root of it was my knowing that our settled, becoming rooted, life on Portlock Road was going to end.
If we'd been able to stay, maybe a couple more of us could have gone to Punahou (the only really good school in the state) or at least Kaiser High is decent. We'd have grown up with the same people, and that's a very powerful thing. When I tell people how much I moved around growing up, the first thing they say is "Army brat, eh?". I explain that no, my dad programmed computers ... and then kind of drift off because there's so much that happened, it was not like having a computer-programming Dad in Orange Country or Santa Clara County in California. Any computer programming job in Hawaii is tenuous at best, and if you're white they don't want you taking a local's job, so if you're white the best thing you can do is work in the tourism industry because you can relate to white tourists (be less intimidating) and Japanese tourists find it exotic to be waited on by a white person.
I've seen this in small towns in general - everyone's known each other from elementary school on, through high school, and what high school you went to is a question that *will* be asked.
It took a while to sell the house, and then some people, the Joneses, did buy it and there was an agreement for us to be out by a certain time, and with all the books and furniture and stuff we had, plus the house Dad was having built in Pupukea was taking longer than anticipated. So in the end, we had to leave before we had a house to move into. Obviously Dad must have gotten something out of the house on Portlock Road, because the land and pre-fab house in Pupukea were bought with something, but I believe we took quite a financial hit.
I don't remember saying good-bye to Portlock Road although I suppose I must have, but I think at the time I thought we would go back and visit, spend time on Little Beach, swim with the fishes at Hanauma Bay, have Dad point out the blowhole further up the coast, etc. But the truth of the matter is I did not see Portlock Road again for many years, and at times I missed it a lot.
The ancient Egyptians also had a lot to do with cats, thus she loved reading about them, and we had a few really nice "coffee table" books about them. So I read up on the Egyptians too. I doubt I learned as much about them as she did, but the ancient buildings and the sculpture and art, and the tales of adventure with archaeologists discovering the ancient tombs were all pretty interesting.
Barbara also had a huge shelf with every kind of cat statue, sculpture, pendant, teeny glass knick-knack imaginable. It was absolutely amazing. I wasn't supposed to, but occasionally I'd go into her room and admire them. I remember picking up a couple of the teeny ones just to look at them closer, but other than that the rule was "no touch"; I knew that.
She also had two "show" cats, white Persians, named Shara (male) and Shebti (female). They'd been "fixed" so they were not breeding cats, but they were very beautiful, and Barbara was always, with Dad's help, taking them to cat shows in the H.I.C., Honolulu International Center, now called the Blaisdell Arena unless they've changed the name again. I remember going along to pick her and the cats up, and I may have gotten to walk through a bit of one once, but mainly I remember all the tons of ribbons Barbara's cats won. And trophies too.
This was becoming the end of the Golden Age though. Dad's job at HC&D was not working out well, Mom was nagging him too much for him to be happy at home, and he bought a Datsun 240Z sports car so he could go out and drive around and get away from it all. Dad loved that car and so did we kids - it was really small but Dad and 4 of us could fit in there, 2 kids in back and 2 kids (one in the other's lap) in the passenger seat. Dad was always a car guy, not in fixing them so much but in driving them. Although his glasses were quite thick, he never had an accident. He was always very physically adept, a good swimmer, and woodworking and carpentry are fairly physical activities too.
Although the 240Z could not have been very expensive, I think it signaled the beginning of the end of the good times. I think the household budget was fairly delicately balanced, and that car may have been enough to tip it downward. Another huge factor would have been, with Mom nagging Dad so much, he was eating out at restaurants instead of eating at home and that makes a huge difference.
I remember Dad held a huge party, for what reason I don't know. Maybe it was to try to ingratiate himself with his bosses, or to "network" with some people to try to get a better job. Maybe he just decided he ought to throw a big party. So our lanai, which was quite large, was set up as the buffet area, and we stocked up on all kind of crackers and party foods, and we had a dragon dance. Everyone expected me to be scared of the dragon, but I stood right in front and smiled at the guy I saw peeking out of the mouth of the head. It was great. This was about the time Barbara was getting to know Tom Farrell, the guy she'd later marry. Alan was mad at Tom for a long time because he had taken the last piece of steak or something. He held that grudge for years.
I remember one time we went to a Boy Scout pancake breakfast, and were standing in line, in the hot sun, at the Hawaii Kai shopping center and I fainted. I kind of tottered over to a store front and fell against their window, chipping a front tooth. The thing is, I think we were short of breakfast foods at home so the idea was to just take the kids there. Another time Mom wasn't feeling well or something so Dad set me up to go to school, and cooked me a flat scrambled egg thing and I ate it up fast. He said I was a real "hungry tiger" and I hoped that meant he'd make me another, but he didn't.
Eventually it was decided that we'd sell the house. We had to keep it very neat, and "open house" people would come through. We kids had to be on our best behavior, or better yet, go out and play and not be around when the open house people were around.
During this time I got an ominous feeling, like everything I did or was, was fake. Cinda and I had these toy "motors" on our bikes, they were really just things you put batteries in and made a motor sound. I realized these were really fake, they're not a real motor, they need batteries, they don't make the bike go forward, and who are we fooling anyway? Anyone can tell we're on bicycles not motorcycles. And that feeling extended to everything, somehow. I think the root of it was my knowing that our settled, becoming rooted, life on Portlock Road was going to end.
If we'd been able to stay, maybe a couple more of us could have gone to Punahou (the only really good school in the state) or at least Kaiser High is decent. We'd have grown up with the same people, and that's a very powerful thing. When I tell people how much I moved around growing up, the first thing they say is "Army brat, eh?". I explain that no, my dad programmed computers ... and then kind of drift off because there's so much that happened, it was not like having a computer-programming Dad in Orange Country or Santa Clara County in California. Any computer programming job in Hawaii is tenuous at best, and if you're white they don't want you taking a local's job, so if you're white the best thing you can do is work in the tourism industry because you can relate to white tourists (be less intimidating) and Japanese tourists find it exotic to be waited on by a white person.
I've seen this in small towns in general - everyone's known each other from elementary school on, through high school, and what high school you went to is a question that *will* be asked.
It took a while to sell the house, and then some people, the Joneses, did buy it and there was an agreement for us to be out by a certain time, and with all the books and furniture and stuff we had, plus the house Dad was having built in Pupukea was taking longer than anticipated. So in the end, we had to leave before we had a house to move into. Obviously Dad must have gotten something out of the house on Portlock Road, because the land and pre-fab house in Pupukea were bought with something, but I believe we took quite a financial hit.
I don't remember saying good-bye to Portlock Road although I suppose I must have, but I think at the time I thought we would go back and visit, spend time on Little Beach, swim with the fishes at Hanauma Bay, have Dad point out the blowhole further up the coast, etc. But the truth of the matter is I did not see Portlock Road again for many years, and at times I missed it a lot.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
People Around Portlock
We knew a lot of interesting people around Portlock Road. There were the Kaisers, in the Kaiser Estate up at the end of the road; we didn't know them but one guy there had a pale yellow Corvette which I used to love to see. It reminded me of lemon meringue pie.
There were the Fairweathers, and Doug Fairweather used to babysit us sometimes. One of us would want to get his attention and it'd be "Doug..Doug....Doug...Doug..." One time, I was outside and saw them and said to the person I was with, "Oh, those are our Fairweather friends". One of the Fairweather kids, not Doug, used to always talk to me in a nasal, whining, voice, to make fun. So one day I was with some other kids and he does that, and one of the kids I was with asked me, "Why's he doing that?" and I said, "Oh, he always talks that way". It's the only way I'd heard him talk!
The Bickels had parrots, big ones, macaws. They also had a big basset hound named Wailer. You could hear his deep, wailing bark down the street.
The Lows had a swimming pool we kids spent a ton of time in. They loved to have kids running around and enjoying their pool. Mr. Low was actually named Loren Low, which I though was an odd name at the time.
The Durants lived right next door to us, on the other side from the Ko's and they gave us a cat, a very handsome short-haired tabby we named "deeko" for Durant-Irvine Co. We barely saw them, but their lime tree used to drop limes on our side of the fence so we kids always had a lime to suck on.
There were two Mikes. Mike Herz and Mike Noise. Mike Noise and his mom lived in a rundown place with toys and bent golf clubs and such littering the yard. He had a dog just like Dennis The Menace's except this was a real dog not a cartoon one so he was smelly and attracted flies. Mike Noise's mom looked tired and harried, and Mike could get away with just about anything, like writing somewhat dirty words all over his Peanuts bed sheets. The one interesting thing involving Mike Noise is, one day there were all kinds of guests at his place, adults, drinking beer and talking about whatnot, and they'd been firing off lots of firecrackers the night before (so it must have been just after the 4th or new year's day) and of course there were lots of firecrackers lying around that hadn't gone off. Any yard that has coconut trees will have lots of baby coconuts that have fallen, and had the insides hollowed out by rats. These then dry and get very hard. So, I discovered I could take however many firecrackers would fit into one of these hollow baby coconuts, one to three, twist the fuses together, light, and throw it up in the air at just the right time. It would explode and the pieces would rain down which was hilarious.
Mike Hertz was a different story. His house was big and neat and clean, and had a swimming pool that was always kept covered. They had Hertz rent-a-car notepads by the phone. Mike was neat and clean and had a lot of toys. One day Cinda and I were with Mike in his room playing, and Mike and Cinda took off, and I sat there thinking, "How am I going to put away all these toys?". Then I remember they're Mike's toys and it's not my problem. So I go running out to catch up with Mike and Cinda, out through the open sliding glass door ... BLANGG!!! The door hadn't been open, just very clean. I found myself on my back, shaking my head. I then got up, and very carefully opened the door, went out and then closed it. The next time I was there, the door was covered in bird decals. That place was A-OK though. There was a treehouse, reachable by climbing the tree (not easy) or climbing a length of garden hose hung up in the tree. And most amazingly, unlike our tree house, it was pretty high up. And the safety-conscious Hertz's somehow didn't mind that it was just a couple of pieces of old plywood the size of small card tables up there. I remember pencil drawings of war scenes from WWII that one of the Hertz's had drawn, presumably whichever one had fought in WWII. They were quite realistic, and I was impressed with how not only a seashell but an outdoor scene could be drawn so well with a pencil.
Miss Wilder was about the age of my Great-Aunt Mary when we knew her, maybe older. She had a Steinway grand piano in her living room, a VW bug with an automatic transmission, and seemingly, connections everywhere. She took an interest in me and took me to places like the newspaper office, where I got a "slug" with my name on it. She had some younger relative, Chet, who I think was dodging the draft actually, stay with her and do beekeeping. So I got to learn a little bit about beekeeping. Miss Wilder was very, very, nice, but one thing bugged me. She wanted to teach Cinda to play piano, but Cinda didn't have the ability to concentrate on it and that plan never went anywhere. Meanwhile, I'd have loved to learn to play the piano, but Miss Wilder didn't want to teach *me* the piano.
There were other minor players ... the Willcoxes, with his-and-hers matching pale green Land Rovers, who'd honk their GA-GOOOG-GAH! horns at us when we were in the alleyway on our bikes, and some "bad" kid named Kyle, whom Alan became friends with and really wasn't bad at all.
So these are people I remember, and if it doesn't sound like it's a very "local" way to live, it's not, really. It's as Henry J. Kaiser created; the standard suburban lifestyle with nice weather and coconut trees. In Hawaii Kai it's possible to be really "local", fish and gather limu off the point, eat nothing but local foods which they sell at every Foodland, go around by bike, etc. But the default lifestyle is the car-centric mainland lifestyle, going to the Waialae drive-in, driving to Ala Moana, even if at Ala Moana you're going to get a plate of Hawaiian food, then maybe go to Iida's for some new chopsticks and a visit to the Crack Seed Center for some li hing mui.
"Local" is a very hard thing to define. There are people who have lived in Hawaii for generations, and who knows how long Miss Wilder's family has been there, but except for her quirky decision to drive a VW bug, she lived just like she was on the mainland. Yet no doubt she'd been in Hawaii when WWII was going on and she was merely middle-aged. Certainly she was "local" in sheer years spent there.
But "local" seems to mean, for most people I think, either you're Hawaiian, kanaka maoli or original people, kama'aina, son(or daughter) of the land, etc. You are of the aborginal people of Hawaii. Or, your family is of one of the many waves of immigrants who were brought in to work on the plantations, and thus your family started out really low on the totem pole, and perhaps worked their way up, and have been both immersed in the culture of Hawaii and endured hardships.
But then you get people who are white, whose ancestors were sailors or something, were certainly not coming from any position of power, and have been in Hawaii a long time. Or people who may have fallen in love with the place when they were passing through for WWII and came back and settled down. And they had kids and now their kids have kids...
It's a problematic thing because ... back home, I always get questioned. Here in California, I might have my problems, but I don't get questioned. I'm a tanned white or a very pale Hispanic in appearance so I can pretty much go anywhere and be OK. A couple of times I've had people surprised, sometimes a bit indignant, that I don't speak Spanish, but then I just tell them in what Spanish I *do* know that I only understand a little and defuses things. This usually happens when I get a lot of sun. But compared to Hawaii, living in California is much less hard, with regards to racial matters.
There were the Fairweathers, and Doug Fairweather used to babysit us sometimes. One of us would want to get his attention and it'd be "Doug..Doug....Doug...Doug..." One time, I was outside and saw them and said to the person I was with, "Oh, those are our Fairweather friends". One of the Fairweather kids, not Doug, used to always talk to me in a nasal, whining, voice, to make fun. So one day I was with some other kids and he does that, and one of the kids I was with asked me, "Why's he doing that?" and I said, "Oh, he always talks that way". It's the only way I'd heard him talk!
The Bickels had parrots, big ones, macaws. They also had a big basset hound named Wailer. You could hear his deep, wailing bark down the street.
The Lows had a swimming pool we kids spent a ton of time in. They loved to have kids running around and enjoying their pool. Mr. Low was actually named Loren Low, which I though was an odd name at the time.
The Durants lived right next door to us, on the other side from the Ko's and they gave us a cat, a very handsome short-haired tabby we named "deeko" for Durant-Irvine Co. We barely saw them, but their lime tree used to drop limes on our side of the fence so we kids always had a lime to suck on.
There were two Mikes. Mike Herz and Mike Noise. Mike Noise and his mom lived in a rundown place with toys and bent golf clubs and such littering the yard. He had a dog just like Dennis The Menace's except this was a real dog not a cartoon one so he was smelly and attracted flies. Mike Noise's mom looked tired and harried, and Mike could get away with just about anything, like writing somewhat dirty words all over his Peanuts bed sheets. The one interesting thing involving Mike Noise is, one day there were all kinds of guests at his place, adults, drinking beer and talking about whatnot, and they'd been firing off lots of firecrackers the night before (so it must have been just after the 4th or new year's day) and of course there were lots of firecrackers lying around that hadn't gone off. Any yard that has coconut trees will have lots of baby coconuts that have fallen, and had the insides hollowed out by rats. These then dry and get very hard. So, I discovered I could take however many firecrackers would fit into one of these hollow baby coconuts, one to three, twist the fuses together, light, and throw it up in the air at just the right time. It would explode and the pieces would rain down which was hilarious.
Mike Hertz was a different story. His house was big and neat and clean, and had a swimming pool that was always kept covered. They had Hertz rent-a-car notepads by the phone. Mike was neat and clean and had a lot of toys. One day Cinda and I were with Mike in his room playing, and Mike and Cinda took off, and I sat there thinking, "How am I going to put away all these toys?". Then I remember they're Mike's toys and it's not my problem. So I go running out to catch up with Mike and Cinda, out through the open sliding glass door ... BLANGG!!! The door hadn't been open, just very clean. I found myself on my back, shaking my head. I then got up, and very carefully opened the door, went out and then closed it. The next time I was there, the door was covered in bird decals. That place was A-OK though. There was a treehouse, reachable by climbing the tree (not easy) or climbing a length of garden hose hung up in the tree. And most amazingly, unlike our tree house, it was pretty high up. And the safety-conscious Hertz's somehow didn't mind that it was just a couple of pieces of old plywood the size of small card tables up there. I remember pencil drawings of war scenes from WWII that one of the Hertz's had drawn, presumably whichever one had fought in WWII. They were quite realistic, and I was impressed with how not only a seashell but an outdoor scene could be drawn so well with a pencil.
Miss Wilder was about the age of my Great-Aunt Mary when we knew her, maybe older. She had a Steinway grand piano in her living room, a VW bug with an automatic transmission, and seemingly, connections everywhere. She took an interest in me and took me to places like the newspaper office, where I got a "slug" with my name on it. She had some younger relative, Chet, who I think was dodging the draft actually, stay with her and do beekeeping. So I got to learn a little bit about beekeeping. Miss Wilder was very, very, nice, but one thing bugged me. She wanted to teach Cinda to play piano, but Cinda didn't have the ability to concentrate on it and that plan never went anywhere. Meanwhile, I'd have loved to learn to play the piano, but Miss Wilder didn't want to teach *me* the piano.
There were other minor players ... the Willcoxes, with his-and-hers matching pale green Land Rovers, who'd honk their GA-GOOOG-GAH! horns at us when we were in the alleyway on our bikes, and some "bad" kid named Kyle, whom Alan became friends with and really wasn't bad at all.
So these are people I remember, and if it doesn't sound like it's a very "local" way to live, it's not, really. It's as Henry J. Kaiser created; the standard suburban lifestyle with nice weather and coconut trees. In Hawaii Kai it's possible to be really "local", fish and gather limu off the point, eat nothing but local foods which they sell at every Foodland, go around by bike, etc. But the default lifestyle is the car-centric mainland lifestyle, going to the Waialae drive-in, driving to Ala Moana, even if at Ala Moana you're going to get a plate of Hawaiian food, then maybe go to Iida's for some new chopsticks and a visit to the Crack Seed Center for some li hing mui.
"Local" is a very hard thing to define. There are people who have lived in Hawaii for generations, and who knows how long Miss Wilder's family has been there, but except for her quirky decision to drive a VW bug, she lived just like she was on the mainland. Yet no doubt she'd been in Hawaii when WWII was going on and she was merely middle-aged. Certainly she was "local" in sheer years spent there.
But "local" seems to mean, for most people I think, either you're Hawaiian, kanaka maoli or original people, kama'aina, son(or daughter) of the land, etc. You are of the aborginal people of Hawaii. Or, your family is of one of the many waves of immigrants who were brought in to work on the plantations, and thus your family started out really low on the totem pole, and perhaps worked their way up, and have been both immersed in the culture of Hawaii and endured hardships.
But then you get people who are white, whose ancestors were sailors or something, were certainly not coming from any position of power, and have been in Hawaii a long time. Or people who may have fallen in love with the place when they were passing through for WWII and came back and settled down. And they had kids and now their kids have kids...
It's a problematic thing because ... back home, I always get questioned. Here in California, I might have my problems, but I don't get questioned. I'm a tanned white or a very pale Hispanic in appearance so I can pretty much go anywhere and be OK. A couple of times I've had people surprised, sometimes a bit indignant, that I don't speak Spanish, but then I just tell them in what Spanish I *do* know that I only understand a little and defuses things. This usually happens when I get a lot of sun. But compared to Hawaii, living in California is much less hard, with regards to racial matters.
Some things Dad built
As mentioned the Portlock Pier was demolished, and a lot of those old shaggy silvery boards were piled up on the beach. Dad took four good ones, and somewhere got a big piece of plate glass from a demolished hotel, and made one of the coolest tables I've ever seen. He notched the two pier planks so they interlocked into a base, then the glass was just set on top. It was great - I could look into the edge of the glass, which was about a half inch thick, and look into what appeared to be a big bluish-greenish "room". The pier wood was fresh as new under its outer, seaworn, skin. We had that table for many years.
Dad was always building things. He took two old doors from the house, and set them up in the jacaranda tree in one of the side yards, at two levels and right angles to each other. He put a short stairway to it, and now we had this really cool tree house. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!
He took one of those rattan chair things you sit in, no legs so I guess it was meant to be suspended, from the roof of one's porch or something, and attached a pulley very high up in the branches of a banyan tree in the yard, and now we had a chair we could pull ourselves up in. It was great. He also hung a section of "ship's ladder" from the other side of the tree, for those who wished to climb. Alan could go all the way up right off, of course. Me, I had to work my way up. I felt pretty proud when I could go all the way to the top rung, just like Alan.
The pull-yourself-up thing could be dangerous though; my sister April pulled herself up one time, was lowering herself, lost control of the rope, and fell down - THUD! I seem to remember a coconut falling on her head once too. We were talking about something, facing each other, under that banyan tree. I need to mention that the banyan had started from a seed in a little hole in a coconut tree, and eventually this huge banyan tree had grown up, "riding piggyback" on the coconut tree, with the coconut tree, very tall, poking out of the top of the banyan tree's canopy. So April and I are talking there, and we heard the crashing of a falling coconut bouncing off of various banyan branches, and then it fell - bang! - right on her head! It was just like in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon - fell dull-end on, was paused there perfectly balanced, then fell off to the side. And April cried and ran off.
Dad built a fish pond, with a waterfall. It was dark green and coffin-shaped, but with all the nice plants around it it looked pretty neat. It ended up full of guppies, and I used to catch them to look at the pretty patterns on the males. One summer my teacher at school decided I'd take care of the aquarium of tilapia we had in the classroom. I took these home, and to save myself some effort, dumped them into the pond. Now, a lot of tilapia, if kept in a small tank, will not grow much. Dump those same tilapia into a pond, with plentiful guppies, moss, algae, the occasional bug, and they'll grow just fine. It eventually got to just a few very large ones.
Dad built a sort of loft for himself, with a straight-up ladder that went up the wall. There was a carpeted area up there, and bookshelves full of books. I remember looking at one about dentistry that was creepy, just the kind of thing a kid likes to read to get the shivers. He built the loft because Mom was scared of heights, and would not bother him there. Theoretically. In actuality, he'd get nagged wherever he was when he was home.
He built a sort of roof-support thing in the middle of the living room, imagine a beam across the upper part of the room going both ways, with a post from the center of that to the ceiling. I'm not sure why he built this, but it looked neat. He did railings separating the living room and the family room. He built a very nice "trash yard" which was an enclosure with a gravel bottom to store the metal trash cans we used and everyone used back then. I'm pretty sure he also built the front gate (which we hardly ever used) too.
Dad really should have been a carpenter rather than a computer programmer, because I think he would have been a lot happier, and probably would have made more too. He had tons of tools and he knew how to use them all. He mentioned several times being a "journeyman carpenter" by which I think he meant that he had skills equivalent to a journeyman, not that he'd gone through a journeyman program officially. Here I've mentioned just the things he built at the Portlock house, and I'm sure I've missed a lot of things.
Dad was always building things. He took two old doors from the house, and set them up in the jacaranda tree in one of the side yards, at two levels and right angles to each other. He put a short stairway to it, and now we had this really cool tree house. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!
He took one of those rattan chair things you sit in, no legs so I guess it was meant to be suspended, from the roof of one's porch or something, and attached a pulley very high up in the branches of a banyan tree in the yard, and now we had a chair we could pull ourselves up in. It was great. He also hung a section of "ship's ladder" from the other side of the tree, for those who wished to climb. Alan could go all the way up right off, of course. Me, I had to work my way up. I felt pretty proud when I could go all the way to the top rung, just like Alan.
The pull-yourself-up thing could be dangerous though; my sister April pulled herself up one time, was lowering herself, lost control of the rope, and fell down - THUD! I seem to remember a coconut falling on her head once too. We were talking about something, facing each other, under that banyan tree. I need to mention that the banyan had started from a seed in a little hole in a coconut tree, and eventually this huge banyan tree had grown up, "riding piggyback" on the coconut tree, with the coconut tree, very tall, poking out of the top of the banyan tree's canopy. So April and I are talking there, and we heard the crashing of a falling coconut bouncing off of various banyan branches, and then it fell - bang! - right on her head! It was just like in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon - fell dull-end on, was paused there perfectly balanced, then fell off to the side. And April cried and ran off.
Dad built a fish pond, with a waterfall. It was dark green and coffin-shaped, but with all the nice plants around it it looked pretty neat. It ended up full of guppies, and I used to catch them to look at the pretty patterns on the males. One summer my teacher at school decided I'd take care of the aquarium of tilapia we had in the classroom. I took these home, and to save myself some effort, dumped them into the pond. Now, a lot of tilapia, if kept in a small tank, will not grow much. Dump those same tilapia into a pond, with plentiful guppies, moss, algae, the occasional bug, and they'll grow just fine. It eventually got to just a few very large ones.
Dad built a sort of loft for himself, with a straight-up ladder that went up the wall. There was a carpeted area up there, and bookshelves full of books. I remember looking at one about dentistry that was creepy, just the kind of thing a kid likes to read to get the shivers. He built the loft because Mom was scared of heights, and would not bother him there. Theoretically. In actuality, he'd get nagged wherever he was when he was home.
He built a sort of roof-support thing in the middle of the living room, imagine a beam across the upper part of the room going both ways, with a post from the center of that to the ceiling. I'm not sure why he built this, but it looked neat. He did railings separating the living room and the family room. He built a very nice "trash yard" which was an enclosure with a gravel bottom to store the metal trash cans we used and everyone used back then. I'm pretty sure he also built the front gate (which we hardly ever used) too.
Dad really should have been a carpenter rather than a computer programmer, because I think he would have been a lot happier, and probably would have made more too. He had tons of tools and he knew how to use them all. He mentioned several times being a "journeyman carpenter" by which I think he meant that he had skills equivalent to a journeyman, not that he'd gone through a journeyman program officially. Here I've mentioned just the things he built at the Portlock house, and I'm sure I've missed a lot of things.
The Pier
No one who was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s in Hawaii Kai, especially if they lived on Portlock Road, could forget the pier. Of course even then, some parents were very protective of their kids and probably would not let them play on something so dangerous.
As an example, Kam Fong lived across the street. He played Chinn Ho on Hawaii Five-0. Their son, the name of whom I forget sadly, had a lot of Hot Wheels cars and we'd play with those but he was not allowed to climb the trees in their back yard, or do much of anything "rough". I got pretty good at making stuff out of wood, and had made a big wooden pirate sword. I went across the street to the Fong's place and asked the kid's mom if he could come out and play - she took one look at this huge wooden sword I had by my side, tucked in my belt, and No, little whatshisname could not come out and play. What did she think I was going to do? Hit him with it? It was built specifically for knocking the top off of the occasional milkweed, and pointing dramatically while saying "Aargh!".
So I hardly remember seeing other kids out on the pier. The pier had been built "for WWII" or so some grown-up told me, and went out past the reefs to where the water got deep. Surfers used to use it to get out to the waves, people fished off of it, and kids like me used to just walk along, and if it was windy, look at the whitecaps and wonder if one might just decide to break into a real wave. The wood the pier was made of was all silvery and shaggy on the outside, and it seemed like it would be out there forever.
One time we took Dad's "good fiberglass" fishing pole out there. "Don't lose it!", Dad said. The predictable happened. Since the end of the pier was where the water got deep, no one was going to dive for it, not even Dad. Then we were "in trouble" again. This I don't get. You know a kid's got a 50/50 chance of losing the fishing pole, why not give 'em their own, cheapo, pole?
The reef around the pier was a wonder. At low tide I could walk out on it, and find crabs and bristle worms, live cone shells, everything the northern edge of the Indo-Pacific offerss. I turned over rocks; far too many rocks. What's worse is, I didn't know to put them back after I was done looking under them. As an adult I'd not disrespect reef life that way. This is yet another reason I'm glad there's more education on Hawaiian culture for kids these days, because it teaches respect and care for the land and the sea.
Over time, the pier got a bit careworn. Boards started missing. The walkway was three boards across. But you might have a part with two boards only, or only one. Parents in the neighborhood got worried about it being unsafe. So it was torn down. I didn't go down to the beach while that was happening. Mom forbade it or maybe I just didn't feel like it or. When I went down there again, when the debris was cleared away, the reef had been killed by the silt. I was so sad I cried. We were learning about "ecology" on TV and here it was: damage to the ecology. It took years to recover mostly, but even now the areas right by the shore are still dead, from silt and runoff from all the new houses being put in, and all the chemicals it takes to make the lawns look nice, just like the mainland.
That noble, silvery pier wood table stayed with us through several moves.
As an example, Kam Fong lived across the street. He played Chinn Ho on Hawaii Five-0. Their son, the name of whom I forget sadly, had a lot of Hot Wheels cars and we'd play with those but he was not allowed to climb the trees in their back yard, or do much of anything "rough". I got pretty good at making stuff out of wood, and had made a big wooden pirate sword. I went across the street to the Fong's place and asked the kid's mom if he could come out and play - she took one look at this huge wooden sword I had by my side, tucked in my belt, and No, little whatshisname could not come out and play. What did she think I was going to do? Hit him with it? It was built specifically for knocking the top off of the occasional milkweed, and pointing dramatically while saying "Aargh!".
So I hardly remember seeing other kids out on the pier. The pier had been built "for WWII" or so some grown-up told me, and went out past the reefs to where the water got deep. Surfers used to use it to get out to the waves, people fished off of it, and kids like me used to just walk along, and if it was windy, look at the whitecaps and wonder if one might just decide to break into a real wave. The wood the pier was made of was all silvery and shaggy on the outside, and it seemed like it would be out there forever.
One time we took Dad's "good fiberglass" fishing pole out there. "Don't lose it!", Dad said. The predictable happened. Since the end of the pier was where the water got deep, no one was going to dive for it, not even Dad. Then we were "in trouble" again. This I don't get. You know a kid's got a 50/50 chance of losing the fishing pole, why not give 'em their own, cheapo, pole?
The reef around the pier was a wonder. At low tide I could walk out on it, and find crabs and bristle worms, live cone shells, everything the northern edge of the Indo-Pacific offerss. I turned over rocks; far too many rocks. What's worse is, I didn't know to put them back after I was done looking under them. As an adult I'd not disrespect reef life that way. This is yet another reason I'm glad there's more education on Hawaiian culture for kids these days, because it teaches respect and care for the land and the sea.
Over time, the pier got a bit careworn. Boards started missing. The walkway was three boards across. But you might have a part with two boards only, or only one. Parents in the neighborhood got worried about it being unsafe. So it was torn down. I didn't go down to the beach while that was happening. Mom forbade it or maybe I just didn't feel like it or. When I went down there again, when the debris was cleared away, the reef had been killed by the silt. I was so sad I cried. We were learning about "ecology" on TV and here it was: damage to the ecology. It took years to recover mostly, but even now the areas right by the shore are still dead, from silt and runoff from all the new houses being put in, and all the chemicals it takes to make the lawns look nice, just like the mainland.
That noble, silvery pier wood table stayed with us through several moves.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Kitchen Hawaiian
There is so much to write about our life on Portlock Road... We had landed there as Niel Armstrong landed on the moon and put his footprint on it - it was on the front page of the paper that sat in our entryway for quite a while. We had our green shag carpet and our huge Chrysler Town & Country station wagon, in which Dad took us all kinds of places when he wasn't using it to go to work, at HC&D, Hawaii Concrete & Dredging, a place we were *not* to call Hot Coffee & Donuts if Dad's boss was around. Their cement trucks were to be seen all over town. The house had 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and each of us had a bike. Older brother Alan went to Boy Scouts and then Webelos, and he and Dad went to the makahiki each year.
Makahiki you say? What does Scouting have to do with the traditional Hawaiian custom of taking part of the year off to do traditional sports? This is a fine example of the Hawaii version of a phenomenon I've read about called "Kitchen Swahili". If you are the white colonist, and want to get along a bit better with your staff, he helps a lot to learn a few native words and drop 'em in here and there, to show you're really not all that bad a person, really. So in Africa the white ranch or farm owner would pick up a few words of the local lingo and drop 'em in. And in Hawaii, haoles who were new arrivals would do the same, or at least we did. It got ridiculous. If one of us was sitting in a chair and wanted to get up to get a glass of water, we'd say "This chair is KAPU" and that meant is was "reserved" for when we came back. We had a chaise lounge sort of thing, covered in a heavy "Hawaiian" print cloth, but it wasn't called a chaise, it was a pune'e. One was never finished, but was Pau. Now, I like that Hawaiian words are sprinkled into conversation in Hawaii, but it seemed stilted at the time, looking back. It's not like we were learning actual, grammatical, Hawaiian nor was there much interest in that at the time. Older sister Barbara had a couple of books on Hawaiian though and actually taught herself enough to at least speak simple sentences, which looking back, is admirable (like so much she did). The native Hawaiian movement picked up more steam later and I'm glad to see it; the stereotype of Hawaiians being dumb and lazy was strong in 1969, and Dad had a couple of "Coconut Willie" records that he thought were hilarious but were the worst insulting "humor" against Hawaiians I can conceive of.
Just for the record, and I learned much of this after leaving Hawaii, Hawaii had 100% literacy with several Hawaiian-language newspapers before the US moved in. Hawaiians were prized as sailors for being hardworking, smart, and brave. Being a hard worker was a big part of being Hawaiian, traditionally, and many of the traditional legends and tales revolve around hard work. If I'd never heard the tales of Hercules, and just read them now and didn't know the ethnicity of Hercules, I'd probably believe they were about a Hawaiian guy.
The big Chrysler station wagon took us all kinds of places, and once around Ka'ena point. The map Dad had was a bit out of date, and it showed a road going around there. So off we went. And Dad actually got it around there, I remember it being a bit sandy but firm enough, with a bit of a slope. Mom and us kids walked ahead, while Dad got the car around. I was later to go around there on motorcycles a few times; I don't think it's passable now.
We used to go to Paradise Park, which was a sort of parrot theme park, and to restaurants with Aunt Mary. We went to "luaus" held for tourists, buffets, the La Ronde (rotating spaceship-shaped restaurant on top of the Ala Moana building) and we went to the Ala Moan Center, a lot.
It was a big deal when Alan and I were old enough to walk up to the Koko Kai shopping center by ourselves. When we'd first moved there, it was a Foodland market that was old school. Dirty floors, so my bare feet would end up black on the bottom, and all the price tags were hand-painted. I loved those. How did that guy make the "1" so fat and still look like a "1"? Look at the little 0's and the line underneath thin then fat then thin. I used to love looking at those things. I'd have loved to watch the guy paint them. Well, the whole thing got renovated and Foodland cleaned their floor up and went to plastic price signs, and everything got new and modern. Alan and I used to go to the fishing supplies store and look at the hooks and lures and stuff. He'd buy a big hook, and then a bigger hook ... Next door to that was a barber shop, and we watched a guy get a flat-top once. The barber noticed us and made a big deal out of checking his client's flat-top with a ruler. And the guy getting the cut smiled at us while being careful not to move and throw the barber's measurements off.
Alan and I used to find marbles in the drainage ditch near the shopping center, and that started our interest in marbles. We could buy them, but buy keeping our eyes open would could find even more interesting ones. They could be found in the drainage ditch, and in the ocean. I'd be swimming along, in the water off of Little Beach, and I'd see a marble. The best one was "the blood marble", a cat-eye of a greenish brownish pond water color, with a red cat-eye streak through the middle. If you held it between finger and thumb, you could tell someone, "Look, my blood is going from my finger to my thumb through this marble" and it was pretty convincing. It was Alan's, and he showed me this trick. I wanted it, and one day, playing marbles on the indoor/outdoor carpet in the kitchen, he told me I could have it if I could hit it - it was really far off. Like a pro golfer aiming for the deciding putt, concentrated on the shot and ... hit it! I had that marble for a long time.
Other things were to be found in the ocean, like bits of interesting old china, spark plugs and carbon rods out of batteries, beautiful tiny clams painted in black and pastels as if by a master Chinese artist making a minimal statement, often with a little hole made by an "oyster drill", a tiny snail that drills holes in clams to eat them. And golf balls. For some reason, to us, golf balls were a naturally occurring thing in our part of the Pacific Ocean. We'd take them home and cut them open, and I had a collection of the different colors of centers which were little hollow rubber balls. It was fun watching the rubber bands wrapped around those self-unwind. What was actually happening was, a local radio personality who went by the name J. Akuhead Pupule lived right there by Little Beach and he liked to drive balls out into the ocean. He'd pay kids anywhere from 5c to 25c for the balls. We had a pretty good thing going until some bigger kids found out and took that little business over.
One glorious Saturday morning, Barbara wanted to show us something. We walked up to the end of the street, by the Kaiser Estate, and walked through a tiny trail between the Kaiser place and some other wall, and were out on another street's dead end. Then down a hard-mud hillside trail between the beach plants and to the most magical place I've ever been. Essentially it's lava flats that are only a bit over sea level and are full of the most amazing tide pools, jewel-like, with hermit crabs, periwinkles, nerites, bubble shells, blennies, manini, all kinds of fish and shells and limu and all in the most amazing colors. The hermit crabs there have brown legs with black stripes along the tops of them, bright blue eyes, and a pair of little antennae that look like little torches that they constantly flick around like rah-rah-sis-boom-bah. Oh, and the legs have white tips, and the large claw white on the end. I can't think of a show horse as fancy and proud looking as one of those little hermit crabs. We went from tide pool to tide pool, looking around, and there were greens and purples and even orange colors (runoff from a garden) and it was all to go to The Cave. There's a small sea cave at the end of Kokohead Point there, and that's what Barbara wanted to show us. It was one of the greatest days of my life. I found both Drupa morum and Drupa racinus shells there, and I believe a pencil urchin spine or two. When we got back home, Mom chewed the hell out of us, so it was a contradiction, both the best day ever and one of those "horrible embarrassments" Mom would do her best to make us feel bad about, just because we stayed out longer then she expected.
I've thought long and hard about what Mom's problem might have been, and I think it's that she wanted everything to be perfect, and when things weren't perfect, it devastated her.
One day I was looking for "fossil shells" in the sandy soil among the beach plants behind the sea wall by Little Beach. I found opihi, limpet shells, the size of silver dollar pancakes, all stacked up like last night's dishes. This told me a few things: First, they had to be from the early days of the Hawaiians in Hawaii, because opihi are a highly prized food and it's hard to find one larger than a pea, these days. These were huge. Second, obviously by the way they were stacked, they *had* been gathered and eaten by Hawaiians. Lastly, it made me realize that Hawaiians had likely lived right there near by the beach, before the seawall, before all the concrete and asphalt and private property rights and Henry J. Kaiser promoting Hawaii Kai where you can live just like on the Mainland, but with palm trees.
We *were* living that life. Aside from a few kids at school, the only other Pacific Islanders we came into regular contact with was a large family of Samoans who'd come around and trim the coconut trees, no mean feat considering how tall they were, and pick flowers from the two large, very productive plumeria trees on either side of our front door. It was great, the women would pick flowers, the guys would climb the coconut trees and cut all the extra leaves and junk down, and any coconuts, and clean that up, and they'd hang out and talk and relax. My littlest sister, Cinda, had more guts than me because one guy would have her spread her hand out on the grass, and he'd throw a knife, each time landing between alternating fingers. Bing! bing! bing! he never missed. It was always nice when the mumblety-peg Samoans came around.
Or when anyone came around, because it would distract Mom from bitching at us. Lectures, we actually called it, and she was always finding fault. Or, she'd misplace her sewing scissors and she'd say one of us used them, and she'd have us walking all over the house, around and around, looking for her sewing scissors. Or she'd have us out in the yard weeding, using a table knife. "Get the root!" she'd say. There was the "A" on the toilet seat incident. The toilet seat in one of the bathrooms had avocado green paint on it, naturally, and naturally any little scratch or flaw in it was nice to pick on when sitting thereon. Gradually, there developed an "A". Now, with three children whose names started with "A", Alex, Alan, and April, this called for an inquisition. Now, Barbara had all these books about the Egyptians because the Egyptians liked cats and she liked cats, and since I thought pretty much everything she did was cool, I liked the Egyptians too and she'd been teaching me about Egyptian gods. I believe it was one called "bastet" I was supposed to call to if I was in trouble. So while Mom's got us lined up and is giving us the stare down, I said in a low, melodic, voice, "Oh holy bastet". I hadn't meant to be heard, but Mom heard me. That was taken to be a confession, it got the others off the hook, and I think all that happened to me was I had to go to my room for a bit.
Makahiki you say? What does Scouting have to do with the traditional Hawaiian custom of taking part of the year off to do traditional sports? This is a fine example of the Hawaii version of a phenomenon I've read about called "Kitchen Swahili". If you are the white colonist, and want to get along a bit better with your staff, he helps a lot to learn a few native words and drop 'em in here and there, to show you're really not all that bad a person, really. So in Africa the white ranch or farm owner would pick up a few words of the local lingo and drop 'em in. And in Hawaii, haoles who were new arrivals would do the same, or at least we did. It got ridiculous. If one of us was sitting in a chair and wanted to get up to get a glass of water, we'd say "This chair is KAPU" and that meant is was "reserved" for when we came back. We had a chaise lounge sort of thing, covered in a heavy "Hawaiian" print cloth, but it wasn't called a chaise, it was a pune'e. One was never finished, but was Pau. Now, I like that Hawaiian words are sprinkled into conversation in Hawaii, but it seemed stilted at the time, looking back. It's not like we were learning actual, grammatical, Hawaiian nor was there much interest in that at the time. Older sister Barbara had a couple of books on Hawaiian though and actually taught herself enough to at least speak simple sentences, which looking back, is admirable (like so much she did). The native Hawaiian movement picked up more steam later and I'm glad to see it; the stereotype of Hawaiians being dumb and lazy was strong in 1969, and Dad had a couple of "Coconut Willie" records that he thought were hilarious but were the worst insulting "humor" against Hawaiians I can conceive of.
Just for the record, and I learned much of this after leaving Hawaii, Hawaii had 100% literacy with several Hawaiian-language newspapers before the US moved in. Hawaiians were prized as sailors for being hardworking, smart, and brave. Being a hard worker was a big part of being Hawaiian, traditionally, and many of the traditional legends and tales revolve around hard work. If I'd never heard the tales of Hercules, and just read them now and didn't know the ethnicity of Hercules, I'd probably believe they were about a Hawaiian guy.
The big Chrysler station wagon took us all kinds of places, and once around Ka'ena point. The map Dad had was a bit out of date, and it showed a road going around there. So off we went. And Dad actually got it around there, I remember it being a bit sandy but firm enough, with a bit of a slope. Mom and us kids walked ahead, while Dad got the car around. I was later to go around there on motorcycles a few times; I don't think it's passable now.
We used to go to Paradise Park, which was a sort of parrot theme park, and to restaurants with Aunt Mary. We went to "luaus" held for tourists, buffets, the La Ronde (rotating spaceship-shaped restaurant on top of the Ala Moana building) and we went to the Ala Moan Center, a lot.
It was a big deal when Alan and I were old enough to walk up to the Koko Kai shopping center by ourselves. When we'd first moved there, it was a Foodland market that was old school. Dirty floors, so my bare feet would end up black on the bottom, and all the price tags were hand-painted. I loved those. How did that guy make the "1" so fat and still look like a "1"? Look at the little 0's and the line underneath thin then fat then thin. I used to love looking at those things. I'd have loved to watch the guy paint them. Well, the whole thing got renovated and Foodland cleaned their floor up and went to plastic price signs, and everything got new and modern. Alan and I used to go to the fishing supplies store and look at the hooks and lures and stuff. He'd buy a big hook, and then a bigger hook ... Next door to that was a barber shop, and we watched a guy get a flat-top once. The barber noticed us and made a big deal out of checking his client's flat-top with a ruler. And the guy getting the cut smiled at us while being careful not to move and throw the barber's measurements off.
Alan and I used to find marbles in the drainage ditch near the shopping center, and that started our interest in marbles. We could buy them, but buy keeping our eyes open would could find even more interesting ones. They could be found in the drainage ditch, and in the ocean. I'd be swimming along, in the water off of Little Beach, and I'd see a marble. The best one was "the blood marble", a cat-eye of a greenish brownish pond water color, with a red cat-eye streak through the middle. If you held it between finger and thumb, you could tell someone, "Look, my blood is going from my finger to my thumb through this marble" and it was pretty convincing. It was Alan's, and he showed me this trick. I wanted it, and one day, playing marbles on the indoor/outdoor carpet in the kitchen, he told me I could have it if I could hit it - it was really far off. Like a pro golfer aiming for the deciding putt, concentrated on the shot and ... hit it! I had that marble for a long time.
Other things were to be found in the ocean, like bits of interesting old china, spark plugs and carbon rods out of batteries, beautiful tiny clams painted in black and pastels as if by a master Chinese artist making a minimal statement, often with a little hole made by an "oyster drill", a tiny snail that drills holes in clams to eat them. And golf balls. For some reason, to us, golf balls were a naturally occurring thing in our part of the Pacific Ocean. We'd take them home and cut them open, and I had a collection of the different colors of centers which were little hollow rubber balls. It was fun watching the rubber bands wrapped around those self-unwind. What was actually happening was, a local radio personality who went by the name J. Akuhead Pupule lived right there by Little Beach and he liked to drive balls out into the ocean. He'd pay kids anywhere from 5c to 25c for the balls. We had a pretty good thing going until some bigger kids found out and took that little business over.
One glorious Saturday morning, Barbara wanted to show us something. We walked up to the end of the street, by the Kaiser Estate, and walked through a tiny trail between the Kaiser place and some other wall, and were out on another street's dead end. Then down a hard-mud hillside trail between the beach plants and to the most magical place I've ever been. Essentially it's lava flats that are only a bit over sea level and are full of the most amazing tide pools, jewel-like, with hermit crabs, periwinkles, nerites, bubble shells, blennies, manini, all kinds of fish and shells and limu and all in the most amazing colors. The hermit crabs there have brown legs with black stripes along the tops of them, bright blue eyes, and a pair of little antennae that look like little torches that they constantly flick around like rah-rah-sis-boom-bah. Oh, and the legs have white tips, and the large claw white on the end. I can't think of a show horse as fancy and proud looking as one of those little hermit crabs. We went from tide pool to tide pool, looking around, and there were greens and purples and even orange colors (runoff from a garden) and it was all to go to The Cave. There's a small sea cave at the end of Kokohead Point there, and that's what Barbara wanted to show us. It was one of the greatest days of my life. I found both Drupa morum and Drupa racinus shells there, and I believe a pencil urchin spine or two. When we got back home, Mom chewed the hell out of us, so it was a contradiction, both the best day ever and one of those "horrible embarrassments" Mom would do her best to make us feel bad about, just because we stayed out longer then she expected.
I've thought long and hard about what Mom's problem might have been, and I think it's that she wanted everything to be perfect, and when things weren't perfect, it devastated her.
One day I was looking for "fossil shells" in the sandy soil among the beach plants behind the sea wall by Little Beach. I found opihi, limpet shells, the size of silver dollar pancakes, all stacked up like last night's dishes. This told me a few things: First, they had to be from the early days of the Hawaiians in Hawaii, because opihi are a highly prized food and it's hard to find one larger than a pea, these days. These were huge. Second, obviously by the way they were stacked, they *had* been gathered and eaten by Hawaiians. Lastly, it made me realize that Hawaiians had likely lived right there near by the beach, before the seawall, before all the concrete and asphalt and private property rights and Henry J. Kaiser promoting Hawaii Kai where you can live just like on the Mainland, but with palm trees.
We *were* living that life. Aside from a few kids at school, the only other Pacific Islanders we came into regular contact with was a large family of Samoans who'd come around and trim the coconut trees, no mean feat considering how tall they were, and pick flowers from the two large, very productive plumeria trees on either side of our front door. It was great, the women would pick flowers, the guys would climb the coconut trees and cut all the extra leaves and junk down, and any coconuts, and clean that up, and they'd hang out and talk and relax. My littlest sister, Cinda, had more guts than me because one guy would have her spread her hand out on the grass, and he'd throw a knife, each time landing between alternating fingers. Bing! bing! bing! he never missed. It was always nice when the mumblety-peg Samoans came around.
Or when anyone came around, because it would distract Mom from bitching at us. Lectures, we actually called it, and she was always finding fault. Or, she'd misplace her sewing scissors and she'd say one of us used them, and she'd have us walking all over the house, around and around, looking for her sewing scissors. Or she'd have us out in the yard weeding, using a table knife. "Get the root!" she'd say. There was the "A" on the toilet seat incident. The toilet seat in one of the bathrooms had avocado green paint on it, naturally, and naturally any little scratch or flaw in it was nice to pick on when sitting thereon. Gradually, there developed an "A". Now, with three children whose names started with "A", Alex, Alan, and April, this called for an inquisition. Now, Barbara had all these books about the Egyptians because the Egyptians liked cats and she liked cats, and since I thought pretty much everything she did was cool, I liked the Egyptians too and she'd been teaching me about Egyptian gods. I believe it was one called "bastet" I was supposed to call to if I was in trouble. So while Mom's got us lined up and is giving us the stare down, I said in a low, melodic, voice, "Oh holy bastet". I hadn't meant to be heard, but Mom heard me. That was taken to be a confession, it got the others off the hook, and I think all that happened to me was I had to go to my room for a bit.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
348 Portlock Road
After a week or so in lovely Ka'a'wa, we moved into our house. To the best of my recollection, Dad had: rebuilt the roof, replaced all the door knobs, carpeted (dark/light avocado green shag!), installed avocado-green appliances, replaced the kitchen counters, built book shelves along the full length of the hallway we used as the entrance, built a gate for the formal entrance, and probably a lot of other things we took for granted. The house had a panax hedge along the front and one side, a wall in back, the Durants on the other side, and a row of tall coconut trees in the large back yard. The lawns were full of kukus, local "stickers" that seemed to love to be found by little kids' bare feet. For a while we even had a series of pieces of plywood in a "trail" to the sandbox to avoid those kukus, but we eventually got rid of them.
Mom had a thing about antiques, and shortly before leaving the mainland we'd acquired an old wrought-iron bed, and as we got settled in Mom somehow acquired some official Kaiser pink paint, probably from the Kaiser estate up at the end of the street. She's probably just walked off with it. So the bed was painted this pink, and it's what I slept on for a while.
Mom's strength was painting, and refinishing, and she painted and refinished and "antiqued" all sorts of furniture, and painted parts of the house like the carport (my next youngest sister, April, leaned against the wet paint and made her t-shirt all stripey, that really set Mom off) and the formal front entrance which I got to help with - I liked painting and I liked helping so it's one of the few good memories I have with Mom.
We kids got settled in and started exploring the neighborhood. "There are no sidewalks!", said Mom, who was offended by this fact. In actuality, there were none on our part of Portlock Road, but all the streets branching off had them, and the lack of sidewalks never gave us kids a second thought. "Go together, stay together, play together" Mom was always lecturing us, and thus we explored the nearby streets, learned to walk to school, and found out about the local beaches.
Nearest was a magical place, Little Beach. We called it that because it was very little. It was larger at low tide, when a nice layer of coral sand - and seashells and all sorts of wonders - built it up. At high tide, all this light stuff was stripped away, leaving the base layer of green olivine sand. This is otherwise known as peridot, and thus I can say we played and dug and threw sand on a beach of pure gems. Olivine sand gets very hot in the sun, though, and if it's dry, expect to hop if you are barefoot to the wet part.
But to me the real gems were seashells. I think my fascination with them probably started with one of those plastic-sealed packages of them, a variety harvested from all over the South Pacific and sold to tourists in Hawaii to this day, that was given to me when we were still in Ka'a'awa. I soon had a little book, Seashells Of The World, and at the beach I'd find cowries, cone shells, bubble shells, top shells, turritellas, lucines, tellins, cherrystone clams, slipper and cup-and-saucer shells, and one wonderful day, a large Partridge Tun.
I don't think Vladamir Nabokov had a bigger fascination with moths than I did with seashells, back then.
Little Beach was a wonderful place to dig and play and yell and scream and to get away from Mom. One time, Alan dug in the sand and found an Indian head penny. We had a drawer with a lot of cowries in it, and when I'd open it, they'd roll around with the most satisfying sound. The water was clear in those days, and there were a few kinds of limu, seaweed, growing here and there. My favorite looked like green long hair, swirling around in the water, it was beautiful.
Mrs Heart was an older lady, who in her proper old-lady one piece bathing suit and swimming cap, would come out to swim. Or rather walk, slowly out into the water, until she was neck deep and then slowly, walk back to shore. We kids were happy to have a new swimming friend and would swarm around her. "Hello Mrs. Heart!" "Hey, are you gonna swim?" "How deep can you dive?" And so on. This would result in a call to Mom, who'd lecture us on being "those bad Carter kids". Mom was sure "those Carter kids" were the scandal of the neighborhood. I doubt we were, it's just that she kept us on such a short leash at home that the beach became our place to let out pent-up energy.
Those Styrofoam "surfboards" - still sold in Hawaii - were a kids' staple back then, and I used to paddle and paddle mine until my arms were limp than paddle some more. Hawaii Five-O was a big deal back then and I'd paddle as fast as I could, with my head down on the board so it seemed like the water was going by fast, thinking the Hawaii Five-O theme in my head. There are waves off Kokohead Point, but far too far out for a little kid.
We had lots of books, among them one about Robin Hood, out of which Dad would read me a chapter at bedtime. This got me interested in bows and arrows, and I set about building these. Any old stick with some string worked OK for a bow, and an arrow was a bit more difficult, but I eventually managed OK with mynah bird feathers and on one of them, a big needle at the business end. I'd shoot from one end of the back yard, which was pretty large, up at 45 degrees and it'd make it to the other end. Dad noticed this one day and for the next holiday or my birthday, I'm not sure, I got a real bow and arrow set. It's the same 20-lb set that is still sold today. Dad set up a box and put a target on it, and got out HIS bow and arrows, that he kept in the gardening tools closet, and we did archery together. It was great. He showed me how to shoot properly, not using the "pinch" hold that worked OK with the lightweight bows I'd made, and to not let the shot off too soon, but to pause a bit, not do a "snap shot". One afternoon I walked out to the yard to practice and was horrified to find one of our cats, Kai, asleep among the arrows in the target box. I was sure he'd been in there when I'd last been shooting and had only luckily been missed. Actually, he'd just crawled in there when I was not around, curled up among the arrows, and had a nice cardboard box cat nap. Whew!
But this brings me to the neighborhood kids. The Ko family lived up the street, and it's safe to say the Ko kids were worse behaved than the Carter kids. I was walking back from Little Beach with Mom and one of those Ko kids came up with a bow he'd made and a panax stick for an arrow, and tried, at about point blank, to shoot my eye out. My good eye! I flinched just in time and he got me on the cheek, making a small scrape. Then he ran off, I guess. Mom had a word with Mrs. Ko, who probably said something like "Eh, what kids gonna do?" and between that and my telling the kid that if he tried that again I'll bring my real bow over and shoot him with it, that put a stop to it.
Another time my youngest sister, Cinda, was with me, going to Little Beach with maybe a side-trip to some poor neighbor's who had wonderful tropical plants, a veritable jungle, and a well-cared for one. There's one plant that looks like pale green teeth, hanging down in long bunches. We'd each take a couple of the "teeth" off, stick 'em in our mouths and be vampires. "Bla, bla," we'd say. So we were near that place and some bullies came by, Hawaiian kids. There were three or four of them, and it was just me and little sis. So I picked up a stick or a big seed pod or something and charged at them yelling, and they took off! I didn't even care about myself, the usual target of bullies, but I wasn't going to let anything happen to my little sis.
Bullies and good kids were across the whole spectrum, local and haole, Asian, Caucasian, Hawaiian. But the Hawaiian kids who lived up in the back of the Kuapa valley had a certain reputation for being rough. One time we were swimming off of Little Beach and some of 'em came down and started throwing rocks at us, large ones. Fortunately they were pretty easy to dodge, but these rocks were not meant to pester, they were meant to injure, or kill. Now I know that the Kuapa area was a prime Hawaiian living area, and it got taken over and re-made in the mainlander's way by Henry J. Kaiser and there was no more care for the Hawaiians there originally than for the mosquitoes the DDT truck sprayed for, making a smell like rotten eggs.
Starting out at Koko Head Elementary School, I sat next to one of these Hawaiian kids, Ronald. "Yawwwwwww....." he'd say, making a funny face and making me laugh. He was hilarious. "Want some Fritos?" he's ask. Of course! Then he'd take his foot out of his slipper and stick it in my face. Free toes, get it? The teacher was teaching us about the equals sign, saying "equivalent". But every time she said "equivalent" Ronald would say, right next to me, "E-kill-avent, it kills you...." while sprawling in his seat. So the teacher calls me up to the front, and asks me why this and that side of the equation are the same, and I said it's because they're e-kill-avent. She told me to say equivalent, and I told myself to remember, it sort of sounds like quiver, like in archery. She also explained to me the minus sign, and I thought minus bird like mynah bird, I can remember that.
Koko Head Elementary School, last time I was over there, still sits, sleepy and light pink in the sun. It was a classic piece of late 1950s or early 1960s architecture. The classrooms were light and airy with large windows the lucky kid in each class got to open with a hook on a long pole before first class and another lucky kid got to close at last class. The classrooms were in rows branching off of a long covered walkway, like leaves branching off of a stem. There was a large auditorium that was also the lunch hall at the left side of the base of the stem, and on the other side, a 2-story building with offices below and the library above. There's a circular driveway for mothers to pick up and drop off their children but in those days only very few did this. Mainly that driveway was useful for the big armored car to come by to pick up our lunch and juice money. Every day in class the juice nickels were collected in a Band-Aid box with a slit cut in the top. Then a student took that to the office. I got to do this once. I skipped down the "stem" singing, while shaking that box as hard as I could, making a big racket. I didn't get to do that again.
The lunches were pretty good. You paid a quarter for lunch and a nickel for juice, which alternated between orange which was good and guava which I could not stand. The lunch - and this held through high school - was a meat course like lasagna, spaghetti and meat balls, meat loaf, etc., a roll or some sort of bread etc., a vegetable like salad or watercress salad, a piece of cake or a stewed prune or half a canned peach, and milk. It was very balanced. I was later to learn that on the mainland, lunches were typical fast/junk food and you had to pay much more than a quarter. And if you don't have money, you don't eat. I look back with fondness on those old Hawaii school lunches, because they're a physical illustration of how, on the mainland, society is atomized and competitive, while in Hawaii there's more of a feeling that we're all in this together.
The most popular teacher at Koko Head, at least I like to think, was Mrs. Nobriga. She knew kids like to sing and yell, and used that to teach us the multiplication tables. "2!! 4!! 6!! 8!! ..." etc. It was so much fun! However, other classrooms complained so we had to quiet it down. We used to do fire drills; you'd think the school was in imminent danger of bursting into flames for all the fire drills we did. We had, once a year, Junior Fire Marshal material, printed all in red. How to stay low, and feel if a door is warm, and all that.
One day Ross's house burned down. Ross was a kid my older brother Alan knew. We saw a big plume of smoke, black, rising into the air; Ross only lived about a block down from us on Portlock Road. I wonder, did he know to stay low? Did he check if the door of his bedroom was hot or not, before exiting? Did being a Junior Fire Marshal help him get himself and his family out? We never saw Ross or his family again. The house stayed empty and eventually the swimming pool got green and was full of frogs.
Another kid I knew was Cedric. It's more like he hung around me, I think because I could draw. It started with my seashells; I wanted to draw them like the illustrations in Seashells Of The World. My first efforts were awful, so I kept working at it. Both parents being frustrated artists, there were no end of nice "Draughting" pencils around the house, plus Dad's endless supply of Flair pens. I kept at it and kept at it, and began to get places in drawing shells. So I worked on other things, like jet planes, which I'd trade to Cedric for one of his drawings of dragsters, which he in turn was good at - super good. One day I was drawing a nehu-nehu, which is a small fish that lives in the shallows, and I'd discovered a school of in the drainage canal at the far end of Mai-Tai's beach. (Mai-Tai's beach was called this because of a dog there named Mai-Tai who jumped up on my youngest sister, scratching her stomach a bit.) So I'm drawing this nehu-nehu from memory, and Cedric comes up and suggests I add some teeth, make the mouth bigger, add some gill slits, etc. Nehu-shark. Then that Hawaiian kid named Cedric went off to draw another dragster.
The variety of people around our area was amazing. Because I was so interested in seashells, Dad took me to Hawaiian Malacological Society meetings and joined me up. We got to meet people with rare shells in cases, and one member had a Greek amphora, a real one, by the front door of his house. The newsletter was interesting too. Hawaii has the most interesting mix of people I've seen anywhere. From the native Hawaiians, to the descendants of all the successive waves of immigrants, to missionaries and whalers and sailors without a ship, WWII vets, to the people, like Dad, who realized it's a much neater place than the Mainland, to the scientists there to study at UH... So of course they'd have a Greek amphora by the door. Goes right with some other house that had a pair of try-pots from a whaleship in their yard. It's taken me far too long to realize how humdrum most of the US is.
Mom had a thing about antiques, and shortly before leaving the mainland we'd acquired an old wrought-iron bed, and as we got settled in Mom somehow acquired some official Kaiser pink paint, probably from the Kaiser estate up at the end of the street. She's probably just walked off with it. So the bed was painted this pink, and it's what I slept on for a while.
Mom's strength was painting, and refinishing, and she painted and refinished and "antiqued" all sorts of furniture, and painted parts of the house like the carport (my next youngest sister, April, leaned against the wet paint and made her t-shirt all stripey, that really set Mom off) and the formal front entrance which I got to help with - I liked painting and I liked helping so it's one of the few good memories I have with Mom.
We kids got settled in and started exploring the neighborhood. "There are no sidewalks!", said Mom, who was offended by this fact. In actuality, there were none on our part of Portlock Road, but all the streets branching off had them, and the lack of sidewalks never gave us kids a second thought. "Go together, stay together, play together" Mom was always lecturing us, and thus we explored the nearby streets, learned to walk to school, and found out about the local beaches.
Nearest was a magical place, Little Beach. We called it that because it was very little. It was larger at low tide, when a nice layer of coral sand - and seashells and all sorts of wonders - built it up. At high tide, all this light stuff was stripped away, leaving the base layer of green olivine sand. This is otherwise known as peridot, and thus I can say we played and dug and threw sand on a beach of pure gems. Olivine sand gets very hot in the sun, though, and if it's dry, expect to hop if you are barefoot to the wet part.
But to me the real gems were seashells. I think my fascination with them probably started with one of those plastic-sealed packages of them, a variety harvested from all over the South Pacific and sold to tourists in Hawaii to this day, that was given to me when we were still in Ka'a'awa. I soon had a little book, Seashells Of The World, and at the beach I'd find cowries, cone shells, bubble shells, top shells, turritellas, lucines, tellins, cherrystone clams, slipper and cup-and-saucer shells, and one wonderful day, a large Partridge Tun.
I don't think Vladamir Nabokov had a bigger fascination with moths than I did with seashells, back then.
Little Beach was a wonderful place to dig and play and yell and scream and to get away from Mom. One time, Alan dug in the sand and found an Indian head penny. We had a drawer with a lot of cowries in it, and when I'd open it, they'd roll around with the most satisfying sound. The water was clear in those days, and there were a few kinds of limu, seaweed, growing here and there. My favorite looked like green long hair, swirling around in the water, it was beautiful.
Mrs Heart was an older lady, who in her proper old-lady one piece bathing suit and swimming cap, would come out to swim. Or rather walk, slowly out into the water, until she was neck deep and then slowly, walk back to shore. We kids were happy to have a new swimming friend and would swarm around her. "Hello Mrs. Heart!" "Hey, are you gonna swim?" "How deep can you dive?" And so on. This would result in a call to Mom, who'd lecture us on being "those bad Carter kids". Mom was sure "those Carter kids" were the scandal of the neighborhood. I doubt we were, it's just that she kept us on such a short leash at home that the beach became our place to let out pent-up energy.
Those Styrofoam "surfboards" - still sold in Hawaii - were a kids' staple back then, and I used to paddle and paddle mine until my arms were limp than paddle some more. Hawaii Five-O was a big deal back then and I'd paddle as fast as I could, with my head down on the board so it seemed like the water was going by fast, thinking the Hawaii Five-O theme in my head. There are waves off Kokohead Point, but far too far out for a little kid.
We had lots of books, among them one about Robin Hood, out of which Dad would read me a chapter at bedtime. This got me interested in bows and arrows, and I set about building these. Any old stick with some string worked OK for a bow, and an arrow was a bit more difficult, but I eventually managed OK with mynah bird feathers and on one of them, a big needle at the business end. I'd shoot from one end of the back yard, which was pretty large, up at 45 degrees and it'd make it to the other end. Dad noticed this one day and for the next holiday or my birthday, I'm not sure, I got a real bow and arrow set. It's the same 20-lb set that is still sold today. Dad set up a box and put a target on it, and got out HIS bow and arrows, that he kept in the gardening tools closet, and we did archery together. It was great. He showed me how to shoot properly, not using the "pinch" hold that worked OK with the lightweight bows I'd made, and to not let the shot off too soon, but to pause a bit, not do a "snap shot". One afternoon I walked out to the yard to practice and was horrified to find one of our cats, Kai, asleep among the arrows in the target box. I was sure he'd been in there when I'd last been shooting and had only luckily been missed. Actually, he'd just crawled in there when I was not around, curled up among the arrows, and had a nice cardboard box cat nap. Whew!
But this brings me to the neighborhood kids. The Ko family lived up the street, and it's safe to say the Ko kids were worse behaved than the Carter kids. I was walking back from Little Beach with Mom and one of those Ko kids came up with a bow he'd made and a panax stick for an arrow, and tried, at about point blank, to shoot my eye out. My good eye! I flinched just in time and he got me on the cheek, making a small scrape. Then he ran off, I guess. Mom had a word with Mrs. Ko, who probably said something like "Eh, what kids gonna do?" and between that and my telling the kid that if he tried that again I'll bring my real bow over and shoot him with it, that put a stop to it.
Another time my youngest sister, Cinda, was with me, going to Little Beach with maybe a side-trip to some poor neighbor's who had wonderful tropical plants, a veritable jungle, and a well-cared for one. There's one plant that looks like pale green teeth, hanging down in long bunches. We'd each take a couple of the "teeth" off, stick 'em in our mouths and be vampires. "Bla, bla," we'd say. So we were near that place and some bullies came by, Hawaiian kids. There were three or four of them, and it was just me and little sis. So I picked up a stick or a big seed pod or something and charged at them yelling, and they took off! I didn't even care about myself, the usual target of bullies, but I wasn't going to let anything happen to my little sis.
Bullies and good kids were across the whole spectrum, local and haole, Asian, Caucasian, Hawaiian. But the Hawaiian kids who lived up in the back of the Kuapa valley had a certain reputation for being rough. One time we were swimming off of Little Beach and some of 'em came down and started throwing rocks at us, large ones. Fortunately they were pretty easy to dodge, but these rocks were not meant to pester, they were meant to injure, or kill. Now I know that the Kuapa area was a prime Hawaiian living area, and it got taken over and re-made in the mainlander's way by Henry J. Kaiser and there was no more care for the Hawaiians there originally than for the mosquitoes the DDT truck sprayed for, making a smell like rotten eggs.
Starting out at Koko Head Elementary School, I sat next to one of these Hawaiian kids, Ronald. "Yawwwwwww....." he'd say, making a funny face and making me laugh. He was hilarious. "Want some Fritos?" he's ask. Of course! Then he'd take his foot out of his slipper and stick it in my face. Free toes, get it? The teacher was teaching us about the equals sign, saying "equivalent". But every time she said "equivalent" Ronald would say, right next to me, "E-kill-avent, it kills you...." while sprawling in his seat. So the teacher calls me up to the front, and asks me why this and that side of the equation are the same, and I said it's because they're e-kill-avent. She told me to say equivalent, and I told myself to remember, it sort of sounds like quiver, like in archery. She also explained to me the minus sign, and I thought minus bird like mynah bird, I can remember that.
Koko Head Elementary School, last time I was over there, still sits, sleepy and light pink in the sun. It was a classic piece of late 1950s or early 1960s architecture. The classrooms were light and airy with large windows the lucky kid in each class got to open with a hook on a long pole before first class and another lucky kid got to close at last class. The classrooms were in rows branching off of a long covered walkway, like leaves branching off of a stem. There was a large auditorium that was also the lunch hall at the left side of the base of the stem, and on the other side, a 2-story building with offices below and the library above. There's a circular driveway for mothers to pick up and drop off their children but in those days only very few did this. Mainly that driveway was useful for the big armored car to come by to pick up our lunch and juice money. Every day in class the juice nickels were collected in a Band-Aid box with a slit cut in the top. Then a student took that to the office. I got to do this once. I skipped down the "stem" singing, while shaking that box as hard as I could, making a big racket. I didn't get to do that again.
The lunches were pretty good. You paid a quarter for lunch and a nickel for juice, which alternated between orange which was good and guava which I could not stand. The lunch - and this held through high school - was a meat course like lasagna, spaghetti and meat balls, meat loaf, etc., a roll or some sort of bread etc., a vegetable like salad or watercress salad, a piece of cake or a stewed prune or half a canned peach, and milk. It was very balanced. I was later to learn that on the mainland, lunches were typical fast/junk food and you had to pay much more than a quarter. And if you don't have money, you don't eat. I look back with fondness on those old Hawaii school lunches, because they're a physical illustration of how, on the mainland, society is atomized and competitive, while in Hawaii there's more of a feeling that we're all in this together.
The most popular teacher at Koko Head, at least I like to think, was Mrs. Nobriga. She knew kids like to sing and yell, and used that to teach us the multiplication tables. "2!! 4!! 6!! 8!! ..." etc. It was so much fun! However, other classrooms complained so we had to quiet it down. We used to do fire drills; you'd think the school was in imminent danger of bursting into flames for all the fire drills we did. We had, once a year, Junior Fire Marshal material, printed all in red. How to stay low, and feel if a door is warm, and all that.
One day Ross's house burned down. Ross was a kid my older brother Alan knew. We saw a big plume of smoke, black, rising into the air; Ross only lived about a block down from us on Portlock Road. I wonder, did he know to stay low? Did he check if the door of his bedroom was hot or not, before exiting? Did being a Junior Fire Marshal help him get himself and his family out? We never saw Ross or his family again. The house stayed empty and eventually the swimming pool got green and was full of frogs.
Another kid I knew was Cedric. It's more like he hung around me, I think because I could draw. It started with my seashells; I wanted to draw them like the illustrations in Seashells Of The World. My first efforts were awful, so I kept working at it. Both parents being frustrated artists, there were no end of nice "Draughting" pencils around the house, plus Dad's endless supply of Flair pens. I kept at it and kept at it, and began to get places in drawing shells. So I worked on other things, like jet planes, which I'd trade to Cedric for one of his drawings of dragsters, which he in turn was good at - super good. One day I was drawing a nehu-nehu, which is a small fish that lives in the shallows, and I'd discovered a school of in the drainage canal at the far end of Mai-Tai's beach. (Mai-Tai's beach was called this because of a dog there named Mai-Tai who jumped up on my youngest sister, scratching her stomach a bit.) So I'm drawing this nehu-nehu from memory, and Cedric comes up and suggests I add some teeth, make the mouth bigger, add some gill slits, etc. Nehu-shark. Then that Hawaiian kid named Cedric went off to draw another dragster.
The variety of people around our area was amazing. Because I was so interested in seashells, Dad took me to Hawaiian Malacological Society meetings and joined me up. We got to meet people with rare shells in cases, and one member had a Greek amphora, a real one, by the front door of his house. The newsletter was interesting too. Hawaii has the most interesting mix of people I've seen anywhere. From the native Hawaiians, to the descendants of all the successive waves of immigrants, to missionaries and whalers and sailors without a ship, WWII vets, to the people, like Dad, who realized it's a much neater place than the Mainland, to the scientists there to study at UH... So of course they'd have a Greek amphora by the door. Goes right with some other house that had a pair of try-pots from a whaleship in their yard. It's taken me far too long to realize how humdrum most of the US is.
Ka'a'awa
I guess the Portlock house wasn't ready to move into yet so we moved to a place called Ka'a'awa. We kids worked on this: kah-ah-ah-va. It was only much later that I learned to pronounce it with the flow of local pronunciation. We stayed in an A-frame place right on the beach. It was so neat! Southern California air was OK I guess, but in Ka'a'awa, the air came straight in after thousands of miles of purification over the sea. Misty rain feel, seemingly, every 20 minutes or so and Dad called it "liquid sunshine". I contemplated the physics of this.
Alan woke me up early the first morning or so, to look at a "huge" crab, but when we went to the sea wall and peeked over, we could not find it again. But the wonder of the crab and that morning stays with me. The beach was wonderful, the air was fresh, and the times were joyous, at least for a little kid. The A-frame ceiling was tall, and one of us kids had a balloon which somehow got loose and perched up at the very top. This bothered my mom, but then everything bothered her.
Dad took us out on the beach, where he tried to throw rocks into an old washing machine that was out in the shallow water. He also skipped stones, the most wonderful thing! I think he got 12 skips once. The sky was beautiful, the water was beautiful, needless to say the weather was beautiful - I didn't mind "liquid sunshine" a bit.
We'd drive into the closest town, to a Safeway that had a weird roof shaped like a big bowl inverted over the store, with pulled-down corners. I got to love the local style of bread pudding, which is almost as hard and dense as a brick. Hawaii has a culture with many influences, one of which being that of the missionaries, dour types from New England, where no doubt bread pudding really was a way to compactly store the calories inherent in old bread. To me it's still the only "real" kind, and it's the first island food I have a memory of, while, sadly, it's the last thing Dad ate before he left us all.
On our way to/from town, we'd pass a construction crane that had been abandoned and was all covered with vines. Dad loved that crane and always remarked on it. I think he liked the idea of a crane being allowed to just sit and support lush green vines, in the midst of roadside jungle, instead of the clean hustle and bustle of the Mainland.
Alan woke me up early the first morning or so, to look at a "huge" crab, but when we went to the sea wall and peeked over, we could not find it again. But the wonder of the crab and that morning stays with me. The beach was wonderful, the air was fresh, and the times were joyous, at least for a little kid. The A-frame ceiling was tall, and one of us kids had a balloon which somehow got loose and perched up at the very top. This bothered my mom, but then everything bothered her.
Dad took us out on the beach, where he tried to throw rocks into an old washing machine that was out in the shallow water. He also skipped stones, the most wonderful thing! I think he got 12 skips once. The sky was beautiful, the water was beautiful, needless to say the weather was beautiful - I didn't mind "liquid sunshine" a bit.
We'd drive into the closest town, to a Safeway that had a weird roof shaped like a big bowl inverted over the store, with pulled-down corners. I got to love the local style of bread pudding, which is almost as hard and dense as a brick. Hawaii has a culture with many influences, one of which being that of the missionaries, dour types from New England, where no doubt bread pudding really was a way to compactly store the calories inherent in old bread. To me it's still the only "real" kind, and it's the first island food I have a memory of, while, sadly, it's the last thing Dad ate before he left us all.
On our way to/from town, we'd pass a construction crane that had been abandoned and was all covered with vines. Dad loved that crane and always remarked on it. I think he liked the idea of a crane being allowed to just sit and support lush green vines, in the midst of roadside jungle, instead of the clean hustle and bustle of the Mainland.
Saturday, February 13, 2016
It starts in Costa Mesa
Costa Mesa is a small town in Southern California, just inland from Newport Beach. I was born in Pasadena, and have been told we lived on Balboa Island before moving to Costa Mesa but I don't remember those places.
When I was born, or shortly thereafter, my eyes got screwed up - turned in. I'm told I didn't crawl, just sat and listened. And why not? I could listen and keep track of where everyone was in the house, except the cats. I had eye operations, paid for by some relative of the family. I only remember a bit of the last one: being in a hospital bed and Dad giving me a glass of Kool-Ade and telling me, "The doctor will be in later with the 'sleepy juice', meanwhile, here's a glass of Kool-Ade". What great psychology. Next I remember waking up from the operation and being on some kind of a cart I thought was a market cart, and crying and yelling in anger and frustration at being on a market cart because "only babies ride on market carts".
So now, with something like normal vision, I set about learning to "drive" my body, running around and crashing into things, with perpetually skinned knees. Mom bought special large Band-Aids for them. Eventually I got things under control, and would walk around the block and explore. Eventually I was riding a tricycle and Alan showed me how to put playing cards on the spokes to make a "motor" sound.
We lived in a nice "ranch" house on White Oak Street in Costa Mesa. The local school, Mesa Verde, the local market, Market Basket, and such things were all walking distance, even for little kids. But to give an idea of what an unusual and great person my father was, the house had art, nothing trite, on the walls, objet d'art all over the living room, he was always playing good classical, "world", or decent popular, like Herb Alpert, on the stereo, and always teaching us words and how to spell them, singing little-kid songs with us, and taking us to the (cold) beach. There was a cave there, and my older brother was convinced he'd find bats there if he just looked hard enough. I was right behind him, but we found no bats.
In the back yard, Dad had built a simple plywood "play castle" with two stories. We could climb up there and see over the back fence. One time I remember (I'm sure there were many other times) we got kites and I guess it was probably my older sister's, Barbara's, that got up pretty high. So Dad tied on another ball of string and let's see how far up we can go! "The curve of the string looks like a wine glass", Dad said.
We went to the beach a lot, and to a place called Knotts Berry Farm, where we got a silly bench made from a log that looked like a goat, the log flattened on the sitting part and the neck and head being the part of the log that curved up, and carved to look like a goat. It was cool. We also went sailing, I remember, in some big sailboat that heeled over a lot. I was below, in a discussion with one of my Dad's friends: "That life jacket you have on, that's kapok", he said. "Cape-eyed?", I said. "No, kapok", he said. So kapok it was.
We had pets. We had, to the greatest of my recollection, a collie named Sunday and a black standard poodle named Monday (a friendly furry black wall for me to lean against and bury my face in) a garter snake named Crictor, a huge toad pollywog in an aquarium, two tortoises named Slow And Stolid and Fast And Flimsy, several cats including a black one named Dagmar who used to jump on the bed, for a short period it seems a monkey (who ate meal worms on the share plan, one for me and one for you; hey we were kids) and a goat. The goat lived on the bottom floor of the orange castle.
My older sister did grown-up things like go to the roller rink, and I looked up to her and to my older brother, Alan, who among other things taught me to count to 100 and gave me a toy dump truck. My younger two sisters, April and Carole later named Cinda, were there but they were still babies.
One time, Mom re-arranged the furniture in the living room and little me didn't like it and moved it all back! Well, OK maybe it was just the chairs, but still, I was a determined little kid. Barbara (oldest) knew how to draw a star on paper. She showed me and when my effort looked like anything but a star I remember sitting there for much longer than you'd expect a 5 year old to, drawing star after star in a near rage, until I could get at least a kinda-sorta good star, before I was satisfied with my effort.
Dad taught me words like "Dad" and "Bed". And sang little-kid songs with me, and had time for all of us. He'd gone to the college where the computer language BASIC had been invented, and where they'd also done a lot of research into child education. He did something with computers for Coast Federal, a local bank. Maybe having gone to Dartmouth and being exposed to child-education theories made him pay so much attention to us, but I think it's just because he was a great guy. One hilarious afternoon, Dad and I worked on funny words. 2nd funniest: "Stow". Funniest in the universe: "Fleebeedoo".
We had tons of books. Little kid books, educational books, literature, you name it. No trashy novels or anything like that. My dad's taste in books was superb. We had all the Time/Life Nature Library books that were out at the time. I remember Alan and I looking at a picture of scallop with its many eyes in one, and in another, deciding which prehistoric sea creatures we'd be if we could.
I did a bit of kindergarten. Both of my parents were frustrated artists and I was drawing and painting before I can remember. Some sort of big deal was made over one of my paintings because it was this cool geometric shape, a square standing up on one corner, with colored stripes. I called it the "peepeeweepee". It was entered into some kind of little kid art show. This was the late 1960s and abstract art was big at the time - a little kid doing it was interesting I guess.
I'm sure the kindergarten was great, but only two other memories stand out. I was "head-shy" because of the eye operations and I guess some kids found out, and they got some corrugated ventilation hoses like are used on clothes dryers and beat me with them, creating quite a fuss. I wasn't hurt, but at the time I guess I was terrified. And, in the school playground was a ditch, and as any kid can tell you, ditches are great. But this one was in a stand of pussy willows, the most wondrous things. So I discovered that one day and decided my time was best spent in the ditch with the pussy willows, petting their grey flowers. It took people a while to find me.
It may be Dad's sailing friends who got him interested in Hawaii. Dad had wanted to get a degree in naval architecture at Dartmouth but had had to settle for a degree in English, but that did not kill his interest in boats. But much more likely it was my (great) Aunt Mary, who'd been some kind of Commander Of All Pacific Librarians through WWII and a bit after, and had retired in Hawaii, and thought it was very nice. She and Dad were close.
Dad found a house, at 348 Portlock Road, and it was a fixer-upper. So he went over for 4 months and did all kinds of fixing-upping, and then came back, and then we were going to move. I remember how bare the Costa Mesa house looked as the Smythe truck took everything away. I wondered where Dagmar was going to go, but I guess homes were found for all of our pets, even the big pollywog.
I remember a bit of the flight over, on Pan-Am. My older brother had shown me pictures in one of the Time-Life books, about the different layers above us, the stratosphere, troposphere, ionosphere. So when a stewardess came by, I asked here which "sphere" we were in now, and she said, "No need to fear". I also looked carefully at the clouds, in case I might see an angel or two. We all got little tin pin-on pilot wings and Pan-Am bags.I'm sure we were pretty well-behaved on the plane as we'd been taught to be well-behaved in restaurants and at the dinner table at home.
When I was born, or shortly thereafter, my eyes got screwed up - turned in. I'm told I didn't crawl, just sat and listened. And why not? I could listen and keep track of where everyone was in the house, except the cats. I had eye operations, paid for by some relative of the family. I only remember a bit of the last one: being in a hospital bed and Dad giving me a glass of Kool-Ade and telling me, "The doctor will be in later with the 'sleepy juice', meanwhile, here's a glass of Kool-Ade". What great psychology. Next I remember waking up from the operation and being on some kind of a cart I thought was a market cart, and crying and yelling in anger and frustration at being on a market cart because "only babies ride on market carts".
So now, with something like normal vision, I set about learning to "drive" my body, running around and crashing into things, with perpetually skinned knees. Mom bought special large Band-Aids for them. Eventually I got things under control, and would walk around the block and explore. Eventually I was riding a tricycle and Alan showed me how to put playing cards on the spokes to make a "motor" sound.
We lived in a nice "ranch" house on White Oak Street in Costa Mesa. The local school, Mesa Verde, the local market, Market Basket, and such things were all walking distance, even for little kids. But to give an idea of what an unusual and great person my father was, the house had art, nothing trite, on the walls, objet d'art all over the living room, he was always playing good classical, "world", or decent popular, like Herb Alpert, on the stereo, and always teaching us words and how to spell them, singing little-kid songs with us, and taking us to the (cold) beach. There was a cave there, and my older brother was convinced he'd find bats there if he just looked hard enough. I was right behind him, but we found no bats.
In the back yard, Dad had built a simple plywood "play castle" with two stories. We could climb up there and see over the back fence. One time I remember (I'm sure there were many other times) we got kites and I guess it was probably my older sister's, Barbara's, that got up pretty high. So Dad tied on another ball of string and let's see how far up we can go! "The curve of the string looks like a wine glass", Dad said.
We went to the beach a lot, and to a place called Knotts Berry Farm, where we got a silly bench made from a log that looked like a goat, the log flattened on the sitting part and the neck and head being the part of the log that curved up, and carved to look like a goat. It was cool. We also went sailing, I remember, in some big sailboat that heeled over a lot. I was below, in a discussion with one of my Dad's friends: "That life jacket you have on, that's kapok", he said. "Cape-eyed?", I said. "No, kapok", he said. So kapok it was.
We had pets. We had, to the greatest of my recollection, a collie named Sunday and a black standard poodle named Monday (a friendly furry black wall for me to lean against and bury my face in) a garter snake named Crictor, a huge toad pollywog in an aquarium, two tortoises named Slow And Stolid and Fast And Flimsy, several cats including a black one named Dagmar who used to jump on the bed, for a short period it seems a monkey (who ate meal worms on the share plan, one for me and one for you; hey we were kids) and a goat. The goat lived on the bottom floor of the orange castle.
My older sister did grown-up things like go to the roller rink, and I looked up to her and to my older brother, Alan, who among other things taught me to count to 100 and gave me a toy dump truck. My younger two sisters, April and Carole later named Cinda, were there but they were still babies.
One time, Mom re-arranged the furniture in the living room and little me didn't like it and moved it all back! Well, OK maybe it was just the chairs, but still, I was a determined little kid. Barbara (oldest) knew how to draw a star on paper. She showed me and when my effort looked like anything but a star I remember sitting there for much longer than you'd expect a 5 year old to, drawing star after star in a near rage, until I could get at least a kinda-sorta good star, before I was satisfied with my effort.
Dad taught me words like "Dad" and "Bed". And sang little-kid songs with me, and had time for all of us. He'd gone to the college where the computer language BASIC had been invented, and where they'd also done a lot of research into child education. He did something with computers for Coast Federal, a local bank. Maybe having gone to Dartmouth and being exposed to child-education theories made him pay so much attention to us, but I think it's just because he was a great guy. One hilarious afternoon, Dad and I worked on funny words. 2nd funniest: "Stow". Funniest in the universe: "Fleebeedoo".
We had tons of books. Little kid books, educational books, literature, you name it. No trashy novels or anything like that. My dad's taste in books was superb. We had all the Time/Life Nature Library books that were out at the time. I remember Alan and I looking at a picture of scallop with its many eyes in one, and in another, deciding which prehistoric sea creatures we'd be if we could.
I did a bit of kindergarten. Both of my parents were frustrated artists and I was drawing and painting before I can remember. Some sort of big deal was made over one of my paintings because it was this cool geometric shape, a square standing up on one corner, with colored stripes. I called it the "peepeeweepee". It was entered into some kind of little kid art show. This was the late 1960s and abstract art was big at the time - a little kid doing it was interesting I guess.
I'm sure the kindergarten was great, but only two other memories stand out. I was "head-shy" because of the eye operations and I guess some kids found out, and they got some corrugated ventilation hoses like are used on clothes dryers and beat me with them, creating quite a fuss. I wasn't hurt, but at the time I guess I was terrified. And, in the school playground was a ditch, and as any kid can tell you, ditches are great. But this one was in a stand of pussy willows, the most wondrous things. So I discovered that one day and decided my time was best spent in the ditch with the pussy willows, petting their grey flowers. It took people a while to find me.
It may be Dad's sailing friends who got him interested in Hawaii. Dad had wanted to get a degree in naval architecture at Dartmouth but had had to settle for a degree in English, but that did not kill his interest in boats. But much more likely it was my (great) Aunt Mary, who'd been some kind of Commander Of All Pacific Librarians through WWII and a bit after, and had retired in Hawaii, and thought it was very nice. She and Dad were close.
Dad found a house, at 348 Portlock Road, and it was a fixer-upper. So he went over for 4 months and did all kinds of fixing-upping, and then came back, and then we were going to move. I remember how bare the Costa Mesa house looked as the Smythe truck took everything away. I wondered where Dagmar was going to go, but I guess homes were found for all of our pets, even the big pollywog.
I remember a bit of the flight over, on Pan-Am. My older brother had shown me pictures in one of the Time-Life books, about the different layers above us, the stratosphere, troposphere, ionosphere. So when a stewardess came by, I asked here which "sphere" we were in now, and she said, "No need to fear". I also looked carefully at the clouds, in case I might see an angel or two. We all got little tin pin-on pilot wings and Pan-Am bags.I'm sure we were pretty well-behaved on the plane as we'd been taught to be well-behaved in restaurants and at the dinner table at home.
Growing up on an island of jewels
When you grow up on an island of jewels, how long does it take you to figure out that not everywhere is bejeweled also? Not only the literal jewels, and I'll get to that, but the jewels of people and culture, or rather, cultures.
Right now the only thing I'm on the windward side of is the city of San Jose, in California, on the mainland. The last time I visited Hawaii was 13 years ago as of this writing. Given what I'm told about the economy back home, I might be wise to never return.
But even given the high likelihood that I'll never see it again, I should write about the place because it's not all honus and hulas and loud shirts and mai-tais. Or mokes vs. military or anything simple. It's the most complicated place I've been and this is speaking as someone born and living California; a fairly complicated place in its own right.
Nor is it simple how I ended up growing up on Oahu. Some came because their parents were military, and some woke up there because their ancestors were whalers or missionaries, but I and my family ended up there because of my father, a extraordinary man. I've only realized what an unusual man he was after many years of seeing how dull and ordinary most people are, even people who match his high educational level on paper. I'm not saying there aren't interesting people on the mainland, but that I've never anyone who'd be a patch on my dad. I only wish he were still here to read this.
So it is partly out of wonder and partly out of duty that I write this. But first I have to get to the beginning...
Right now the only thing I'm on the windward side of is the city of San Jose, in California, on the mainland. The last time I visited Hawaii was 13 years ago as of this writing. Given what I'm told about the economy back home, I might be wise to never return.
But even given the high likelihood that I'll never see it again, I should write about the place because it's not all honus and hulas and loud shirts and mai-tais. Or mokes vs. military or anything simple. It's the most complicated place I've been and this is speaking as someone born and living California; a fairly complicated place in its own right.
Nor is it simple how I ended up growing up on Oahu. Some came because their parents were military, and some woke up there because their ancestors were whalers or missionaries, but I and my family ended up there because of my father, a extraordinary man. I've only realized what an unusual man he was after many years of seeing how dull and ordinary most people are, even people who match his high educational level on paper. I'm not saying there aren't interesting people on the mainland, but that I've never anyone who'd be a patch on my dad. I only wish he were still here to read this.
So it is partly out of wonder and partly out of duty that I write this. But first I have to get to the beginning...
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