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.