Stephanie says

  Sunday school and the smell of felt boards linger in my nose I learn about heaven, of angels singing hosannas in a celestial choir Of peace and joy eternal As a child I think it sounds very dull As a child I figure I'll end up there But not just yet.

  Mom was walking in downtown Myrtle Point and heard some commotion ahead.  She got closer and realized her young nieces were the culprits.  Aunt Carol left them in the car while she did some business (you could do that in those days,) and Gayle, Jeanne, and Betsy had rolled down the windows and were popping up to shout at passersby then ducking down to hide amid loud giggles.   Mom heard, “Look at the fat lady in the pink dress” and this is where she lost control of the story because at this precise point one of us would ask “Were you the fat lady in the pink dress?”  That really got her goat.  Kids.

She invited Neil to Sunday dinner,  a bold move considering she couldn’t be absolutely sure  we’d behave ourselves,  Michael, Bruce, me and Jim.   She’d prepared her usual company meal:   exceedingly dry roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy,  green salad, various veg,  and some scrumptious home baked dessert for later.   We sat at the dining room table and served ourselves family style.     Conversation flowed smoothly,  nobody asked,  “Ah Neil, exactly what are your intentions with our mother?)     We were behaving!   One of us broke out a favored refrain,  “Mom, Neil doesn’t like your roast.”  Neil bit to our delight.  He, stammering, “that no, he really liked the roast.”     The gravy boat was dry  Mom refilled it in the kitchen  and offered  “more gravy?” to Neil.     Walking around the table she stumbled,  lost co...

  Jim and I moved into Honolulu proper to a 10 th  floor apartment with a lanai overlooking city to ocean. I don’t know quite why we moved there as Jim always took care of relocating, (and I loved that about him.) So he chose the place, maybe forgetting his fear of heights.  That lanai was a source of torture for the man. It was large enough to hold a table, several chairs, a hibachi, and plants. Jim always sat in the chair nearest the sliding door.  Always.  He would not join at the table whenever our portly friend Dick Royes was over for dinner. Maybe he worried about the tensile strength of the rebar supports.   Dick’s theory on the fear of height, one of his many interesting and often outrageous ideas, was that it wasn’t so much the height that people were afraid of, but that they wanted to jump off - and feared they would.   One night I was shooting photos from the lanai during a lightning storm over the ocean when Jim not...

One sleepy Kahaluu evening Jim had turned in for an early night while I studied in the living room.  A loud explosion startled me and when I looked up from my book I saw a red-orange glow lighting up the night.  Mil’s house was ablaze.  Engulfed. The intense heat of the fire blew out the window glass. I dialed 911 while yelling for Jim.  He ran into the living room and immediately sized up the situation.  Saying, “Mil,” he was out the door and running down the common driveway.  Augie ran out to meet him and they both ran into the burning house and found Mil incapacitated in the living room, some of her clothes smoldering.  They carried her outside to safety.  Neighbors sprayed water on the houses closest to the fire with scrounged garden hoses until the fire department arrived.  Thankfully the trade winds weren’t blowing. The parameds quickly sent Mil to a burn unit, much of her body was seriously ...

  We frequented a health-food restaurant in Kailua owned and operated by a born-again christian group.   We fondly dubbed it “Bible Bread” because they baked all the very delicious bread and also because we were so witty.   Anyway, the staff seemed to be all cute girls so Michael was in his element.  One particular time, this is an example of sibling solidarity, we’re in there and at the counter was a particular girl Michael liked to chat up. He was flirting big time when she looks over at me, with an ‘and who’s this?" look.  Michael says “Tell her you're my sister.”  So I just looked right at her with a bland gaze and say, “I’m his sister."  Unconvincingly it seems.  She cut the conversation short.  Michael was not amused.  I certainly was.   I really crack myself up.

One of my profs invited students to attend a lecture on China from someone who’d just been there.  This was a big deal as trade had been re-established with China after a 25-year hiatus and Americans were now allowed travel.  Nixon went to China in 1976 on his elder statesman redemption tour and although he couldn’t dodge the taint of Watergate, he did reestablish trade with China.  Two things I remember about the lecturer’s trip:   1.     They’d noticed there were no flies buzzing around the farm animals at any of the farms they’d visited.    Remarking on that they were told that the flies were all eliminated.    By hand.    2.     Exceedingly few elementary age kids wore glasses at the schools they’d visited.    They learned eye exercises were added to school daily exercise routines some years back and it resulted in 20/20 vision for the majority. I was seated next to a woman,...

  Jim visited brother Dan in Palau mid 70s and came back with some wild stories of these gloriously beautiful tropical islands.  The ones that stuck with me are pretty much food related, go figure.  There was an open-air movie theatre in Peleliu filled with wooden benches for seating.  Rats were bold enough to scavenge food whenever, so movie viewers kept their feet up on the forward bench.   Hamburgers were served with a cabbage leaf for greenery, there being no iceberg lettuce on the island.  He met our friend Virginia there, she was maybe 13.  That girl took down fruit bats with a sling shot, a treat for her grandmother. They are a large bat species with a two-foot wingspan. She’d spot a roosting fruit bat hanging upside down from a tree branch, pop a small rock into the slingshot, eyeball the angle and let loose.  She had incredible aim.  She’d  nonchalantly balance in a squat to  husk a coconut wit...

  .. . Mike McGovern also worked in the office.  His partner Shoji had a noodle factory, (‘In a Shanghai Noodle Factory’ playing in my head,) in town and they lived way up in a downtown high rise.  Mike’s family owned a vacation house out Chinamans Hat Island way, north of Kahaluu. It was snugged in among papaya and mango trees, mountain apple and star fruit with a path leading to the shore where coconut palms flourished.  We went to a party there along with Uncle Lynn who happened to be in the islands.  Mike and Shoji put out a wonderful meal in the shade of the trees to likely 15 guests.  After, everybody ambled to the beach toward a dilapidated boat dock that was knee deep submerged in the incoming tide.  Lynn was strolling along the water’s edge when he spotted a coconut laying in the sand.  He picked it up and cracked it open and took a deep drink of coconut water.  Which was rotten.  Of course it ...

  Lower Stark, a few blocks west of Laurelhurst Park I’d run Sasha at that park. I was so callous with that dog’s safety in traffic, it makes me shudder now.  So, the apartment.  It was an old building even then, standing tall above the street. My apartment was one of two on the ground floor, the entry five steps up to a covered porch where I’d sit in the sun and do the Sunday Crossword.  It was a dump but with rent of $90 a month for a one bed, one bath, (complete with a claw footed bathtub,) well?  Nothing that a lot of art pieces and fabric hangings wouldn’t improve.   I lived there with my dog.  Me and the dog all alone at night was scary.  I made the mistake of reading “Helter Skelter” about the Manson murders. They broke into a house one night, killed the old sleeping dog then murdered two people.  That didn’t do much for my peaceful sleep.  I wedged a chair under the doorknob. Every night....

  Grandma was a teacher and she drove the 18 miles from Powers to Myrtle Point every school day.  It’s a pretty drive on a narrow road that hugs the hillside high above the snaking south fork of the Coquille River, past high pastures and a few scattered houses. One day there went Ethel on her morning commute when she noticed “Howard Post” boldly painted on a large rock embedded in the hillside.  She kept going and there was another one.  Then another one. For a stretch of several miles young master Howard took it into his adolescent brain to spray paint his name on many, many exposed boulders in the hillside.   My grandmother’s solution to this embarrassment was to buy her own can of spray paint and on the way home that day, wearing a dress, (she wore only dresses then,) she stopped the car and over-painted every “Howard Post” she could reach.   It took many years for that paint to fade.  

We spent a considerable amount of time in and around the ocean and gradually acquired much water equipment. The first purchase has to be a mask and a snorkel.     Then when you see what you’ve been missing, (which in my case was needlefish which may be small but half the fish is jaw,) you go for the fins so you can swim very fast away from anything over a certain size.  Then came Hawaiian slings, a rubber-band version of a spear gun, and we took to the shallows to see what we could spear.     It takes gripping the rubber-bands and the shaft in one hand, then using the other to increase tension on the rubber-bands by pulling back the sling.     Aim and release.     But you are in the water which distorts size and distance in the human eye.     So good luck.     I managed a sea cucumber which might be the land equivalent of shooting a sloth.    

  We'd been to the Christmas Parade in Kailua, (most remembered for a Great Dane sporting tinfoil antlers in the spirit of reindeer,) and stepped into a downtown bar afterwards.   There  was a piano in a pool of light in the otherwise dim lounge, a woman at the keyboard. She talked to an audience of a few scattered people as she played, emphasizing her words with a dramatic flourish of tinkling notes.  She gave us a “hello” and a smile amid a few chords.  It was right out of a ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’ set with Lily Tomlin doing her ‘Bobbi-Jeanine’ skit at the piano.  It was hilarious.   We got a beer and stayed for the show.

  It was a lovely condo in a well-maintained complex situated in a lush tropical setting, the lanai overlooking a timber bamboo forest.  The bamboo grew six inches a day in season and one could literally watch it grow.   There was a steakhouse at the edge of the property that featured local beef and freshly caught fish as well as traditional Hawaiian dishes, and where we took guests visiting from the mainland.  It was outdoor dining, a gorgeous place to just sink back and enjoy a fine meal and a view of paradise.  So many shades of green, a fishpond, the steep peak of Puu Ma’eli’eli in the distance, the  occasional bzzzzt when a mosquito zapper fried a big bug or a gecko . 

  Available on Amazon in paperback or ebook.   My life coming up in the mid 1950s. This story came roaring into my brain after my story published.    Argghhh Grandma was a teacher and she drove the 18 miles from Powers to Myrtle Point every school day.  It’s a pretty drive on a narrow road that hugs the hillside high above the snaking south fork of the Coquille River, past high pastures and a few scattered houses. One day there went Ethel on her morning commute when she noticed “Howard Post” boldly painted on a large rock embedded in the hillside.  She kept going and there was another one.  Then another one. For a stretch of several miles young master Howard took it into his adolescent brain to spray paint his name on many, many exposed boulders in the hillside.   My grandmother’s solution to this embarrassment was to buy her own can of spray paint and on the way home that day, wearing a dress, (she wore only dresses then,) she...

  We made friends with another transplanted Coos County family, George and Emily Wilder and their two girls.  We attended the same church and often had Sunday dinner afterward.  Christy and Linda, brother-less until their tweens, loved the boisterous company of my brothers, their very boy-ness intriguing.  Michael excelled at organizing obstacle courses and us.  He’d race off in the lead setting the course while the pack followed.  We’d dash around the back field, scale the rock wall to vault onto the tire swing for a fast spin, drop off into cushiony ivy beds, onward to the next challenge.     The two sets of parents took dance lessons together, round and square dance, (Mom sewed square dance dresses for her with matching shirts for Dad.)  They held dance parties at our house, pushing furniture against the walls and sprinkling powder on the floors for a better dance surface. The adults whirled away in abandon do...

I cleaned my mother’s silver belt tonight; I’m giving it to you for Christmas.   I’d always thought it silver, but now think another metal, maybe copper or tin, is overlaid on a silver base.    This belt is so recognizable to me, and I fondly find it pretty. Mom had it forever.   She dressed like a gypsy, walnut stained face and many layers of necklaces, to read fortunes at my third grade school carnival, and wore this belt clasped at her waist over voluminous skirts and slips, hoop earrings, scarved red tresses, and striking green eyes.   She nailed it.   I was amazed by her performance – yeah, like an eight year old.   So proud!   You can thank her genetically for your waistline – apparently it skips a generation…    Helene would delight in you wearing this!