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.