As I reflected on my post about wahi pana (a sense of place) I realized that a big part of our sense of place are the stories. They provide for the younger generation a glimpse into their past and the personalities, histories, victories and defeats that have made our families into unique and special creations. My son asked me to write some reflections on growing up and I decided to share one with you, just as an example of a simple way to convey to the keiki their family’s sense of place and history. You may want to do the same for your ‘ohana.
I grew up at 904 Lunalilo St., in a large one-story house built up on six foot posts and surrounded by a large and wide wooden porch. The house was built at the top of a slight rise of yard so you had a pretty good view of the surrounding neighborhood and glimpses of the city below. Fifteen to twenty feet away on the Diamond Head side of the house, sat a cottage where Uncle Alfred, Aunty Beatrice and my cousins Alpha, Melvin, and Michael lived. In front of the cottage was a mango tree (the launching pad for my adventures as Superman with a wash towel tied around my neck) and a sprawling expanse of lawn that ended at a rock wall several feet above the sidewalk. On the Ewa side of the cottage facing the main house were the washing sinks where all of the clothes were cleaned on scrubbing boards and then soaked with bluing to make the whites whiter. Aunty Bea was doing laundry at these sinks when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began on December 7, 1941.

I remember the house as a ramshackle structure, huge with high ceilings, large drafty rooms, and the wooden porch painted a peeling grey. On the porch you could watch the fat, black bumble bees diligently working to mine the wooden posts that held the roof in place. A luxuriant, deep, and very high stand of shell ginger plants lined the Lunalilo St. side of the house, with two sets of eight or ten stone stairs climbing from the yard up to the porch.

The set of stairs at the middle of the house brought you to what was the formal (and basically seldom used) entrance to the “parlor,” a formal room with old oriental rugs that people used to pass through on their way to another part of the house. The other set of stairs to the right, brought you outside the kitchen and had at its foot a very prolific Hawaiian chili pepper bush. It stands out in my memory because it was to this bush that Uncle Al would go for chilis to rub on our lips to discipline us about the words and/or attitudes my cousins and I indulged in from time to time. It’s amazing that I still love the tang of those little red tormentors!

All of my cousins were older than I. Michael was the youngest of my cousins and was five years older. He was for all intents and purposes, my older brother and my model, and I his shadow. Melvin (“Buddy” as he was called) was several more years my senior and Alpha, the oldest, was ten years my senior and the same age as my sister Barbara (I couldn’t say her name so she became and remains, “Tita”…sister). Since sister Barbara had a very active social life at Punahou, Cousin Alpha was often stuck caring for her bratty younger cousin Jan. Life was and is not fair. To this day, however, I have a special place in my heart for Alpha and Michael. The latter was important as one of my first guides to how life works. He had a newspaper route in and around the Lunalilo St. and Thomas Square area, and used me as slave labor to deliver his papers in exchange for a couple of small waxed juice bottles that were the rage in the latter part of the ‘40’s. Michael introduced me to the wonders of the manipulation of people (in good ways) and could get me to run up the longest driveways with the paper for those little wax bottles and the occasional big treat, a strawberry soda. The strawberry sodas were usually won after a particularly hard day (for me, at least) of delivering newspapers and part of the thrill of getting it was plunging my arm into the water and ice to claim my prize at the small corner store. Strawberry soda was my favorite, but it often found competition with Nesbitt’s orange soda in the bumpy bottle. Strange to think how life’s memories are populated by these details. At the time, however, they were important building blocks of my life.

Adults on the whole had their own lives separate and apart from us kids. We spent our childhood exploring around the block and if we could get away, down at Dole Park a couple of blocks down the street past the old Normal School. The park has a cliff that was a magnet to young children and I’m just amazed that I don’t remember losing friends off its face. In the neighborhood, people were always very vocal about reminding you what you should or should not be doing. At dinner time the neighbors reminded you to go home and eat. Mom and Dad didn’t have to chase you down. The Simaos lived in the house just behind us and when dinner was ready, Mrs. Simao would call in a shrill voice for her two children to return. Like clockwork, “Diana June, Earl William, you come home NOW!” would resonate throughout the neighborhood at dinner time. Looking back on it, things like Mrs. Simao’s trumpeting voice provided structure and stability to our lives.

The times when the lives of children and adults crossed were usually around the large round kitchen table we had in our house. The table was the platform for large bowls of stew, poi, fried fish, and rice that often were the substance of our meals. There were always extra people at the table, some I knew and others strangers to most of us except my mother. She was always finding people with needs and those needs often meant they ended up eating with us and sometimes, living in our house for extended periods. Stew was always a good thing to have in the pot, for you could always add more water and more carrots if the need arose! We would have long conversations about the day’s activities over the meal and then, when the dishes were cleared and cleaned, we would hunch near the radio to hear the latest adventures of The Shadow, The FBI in War and Peace, and the hilarious antics of Jack Benny and his radio colleagues. Radio provided vivid images of the outside and unknown world for us as we were growing up. The Lone Ranger and Tonto became people you could almost reach out and touch as you listened to their adventures in the quiet of the kitchen surrounded by those you loved.

On a more mundane level, the kitchen table was also the place you put the metal bowl of water under the kitchen light to attract the termites when they swarmed periodically. I’m sure that the two houses at 904 Lunalilo St. were kept standing by the gracious mercy of the termites and their determination to keep holding each other’s hands.When they swarmed, however, the metal bowl was quickly filled with wiggling bodies and wings. A final memory of the kitchen was the twice weekly delivery of ice for the icebox, the refrigerator of my youth. I used to stare in amazement as the bare backed men would jump down off their truck, throw a burlap bag over their shoulder, pull out gigantic metal tongs and grab fifty pounds of ice, sling it over their shoulder, and then dash up the steps to deposit it in our icebox. Their strength and energy remain vividly in my memory, and as a very young boy, it showed me hard work in its rawest form. A great lesson for life!

So many simple, yet profound lessons I was privileged to learn at the corner of Lunalilo and Ward Streets six or seven decades ago.

All of us have those amazing insights to life that were given to us in very mundane and common settings! We should work on reflecting on them and seeing how they have molded and guided us. Then we need to shoulder the responsibility of passing these portals to the past to our younger generation as they work on discovering who they really are.

Hopefully the stories and the sense of wahi pana will help them through the process. My ‘ohana has periodic “Cousins’ Camps” where all of the young cousins gather and we older ones have a chance to share the past as they forge relationships for the future. We have all felt this has been a blessing. Perhaps you might explore the same for your ‘ohana.

Blessings to all this Christmas season and New Year!

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In the midst of traumatic changes to the life of the Hawaiian people in the latter part of the 19^th century, King Kamehameha IV asked missionary Lorenzo Lyons (Makua Laiana…Father Lyons) to adapt an English hymn ‘I Left It All With Jesus’ (written in the 1840’s by James McGranahan) for the Hawaiian churches.  ‘Hawai‘i Aloha’ is a call to the Hawaiian people to remember their roots and their relationship with Ke Akua.  It is a call to reaffirm who they are in the midst of change.  Today this song is often sung at the closing of meetings or gatherings and remains an important part of local culture and a reminder of the importance of wahi pana.

(If the you have trouble viewing the Hawai‘i Aloha video below, click directly on the video or click here to view it on another page)