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.