Wai‘anae, O‘ahu, 1978 (October 2016)
I am looking for you. Your home in the country is my beginning and ending, the humble Waianae house at the end of Hakimo road. On sleepless nights now in my forties, I search for the red house twenty-four years after Grandpa died, entering past the giant imported clam shells near the front door.
The screech is what I remember most clearly. The chain link gate rolled on its rusty hinges across the dirt road, Grannie's tiny frame heaving it open to the driveway. I was a little girl, maybe eight, in the back seat of Grandpa's tan 1980 Chevy Malibu. The behemoth came to rest under the car port, a high pitched whine lingering as Grandpa shut the ignition off. Hot dust blew across our faces, the screen door grazing our backs as we entered through the heavy wood door.
The neighborhood at the back of Nanakuli valley was sketchy, although I never knew it until later. A stinky piggery led up to stacked auto wrecks across from my grandparents' WWII Quonset huts fronting the eight-acre property. I had been in them only once. The huts were rentals to people who today we might call low-income. A single floor-to-ceiling corrugated metal sheet rounded over a bare wooden floor. Tree knots like oval eyes appeared as ghosts from the plywood floor full of splinters in the windowless hut.
The tin houses and the out-house in the back were the first dwellings on Great-grandma’s property long before her son-in-law Grandpa built the red house with plumbing. The rutted road to the main house was littered with cane toads flattened like pancakes. And always, a white cloud of coral dust fill blew from behind Grandpa's Datsun truck or Grannie's blue Volkswagen bug, heat rising to the wilted pomegranate tree at the driveway.
All around the property lay the remnants of failed crops; the sagging grape vine trellis, cotton that was never harvested, the earth cracked open. But the tangerines bore small, sweet fruit encased in leather pouches. And always somewhere in the yard was Great-grandpa, the old man, as my grandparents called him, watering the lime tree or laua‘e ferns skirting the concrete path around the house.
My earliest memories were as a young girl, Grandpa's inday, in the muck of the waterlogged taro patch ditch behind the parched farm. I'd wear my floral sundress and rubber boots up to my thighs as Grandpa wrestled the taro roots from the black sludge. Grandpa was small and lean, a strong carmel tanned man with a wisp of hair atop his shiny head often thrown backwards in laughter. His face could cloud over in a moment, eyes flashing in anger if you did something wrong.
Long before water had been diverted from the Navy base next door creating a perennial spring shaded by thorny kiawe trees. He planted taro and sold the starchy roots and broad leaves to locals nearby. In those days, he toiled in the black water and mosquitos while I watched tadpoles wriggle in the mud.
Grandpa hoisted me onto the riding lawnmower letting me steer across the patch of spiky low-cropped grass near the house. The stubble lawn was the Waianae putting green where Grandpa demonstrated his golf stance, legs hip-width apart, knees slightly bent. His golf club grip was a perfect V between thumb and a forefinger stump, the top cut off in a train car accident at the sugar plantation decades before. My small, slender fingers couldn’t master the proper grip by my grandfather’s rough hands.
I rarely noticed his injury. Grandpa played golf as he did his Gibson guitar, with an easy grace. His fingers danced up and down the frets, while his right hand lightly fanned the chords, the pick balancing between his thumb and forefinger stump. On these nights of music, Grandpa’s high laugh and slow Visayan accent blended with the sound of crickets. "Jes' like pine-AH-pul" was his superlative for pure delight, food especially. "Honeygirl, you like da cow juice?" he would ask as I drank a glass of milk. He loved to recall me as an infant. “You slep’ on my ches’,” he proclaimed slapping his hand against his heart. I sought the crush of his hug and a rough kiss on the cheek, his lips pressed thin and tight, more beard stubble than tenderness.
Grandpa often lay on a twin bed in the TV room, the middle part of the house sandwiched between the kitchen and the sliding glass doors. It smelled of menthol Bengay rubbed onto sore muscles. TV golf commentators droned in the background. Grandpa savored his singular pleasure with closed eyes--fresh mango and vanilla ice cream. As he dipped the spoon slowly into a bowl of orange and white, it was the only time I saw that look of full, complete satisfaction. Although the golf on TV sent me into more interesting parts of the house, I still wanted to be near Grandpa, his sleepy eyes becoming slits in the heat of the afternoon.
A beaded curtain separated the TV room from the shell room stuffed with odd objects. Glass shelves in display cabinets overflowed with shell necklaces, chandeliers, ornaments imported from the Philippines. Remnants of Grandpa’s School Street liquor store were stashed above it all--a Kool Lights cigarette sign and a plastic lit Mountain Dew wall display with a clock and waterfall. I drew Wonder Woman, my favorite TV super hero on a wall chalkboard beside Grandpa’s block letters, “Man’s Moral Concept.”
Just outside were the legions of cats that Grannie fed trays of kitchen scraps most afternoons. One morning in the shady ferns Dad asked if I wanted to see some baby cats. He led me quietly to a new born litter of kittens. I could hardly believe how small they were, so completely formed, their mewing cries and pink bellies alien to me.
Grannie’s small kitchen was beside the TV room. It was here that Dad taught me how to wash rice, an essential skill for all Filipinos. As I massaged the rice in cloudy water, I drained the bowl, grains of rice escaping into the sink. I repeated the process again until the water ran clear. “Grannie never drops a single grain,” Dad explained, those words still with me now each time I prepare rice.
Grannie roasted endless turkeys for Filipino parties. On party days, Visayans would descend upon the house, followed by trays of sponge cake, meat, rice and slippery noodles that looked like worms. Who are these people, what are they saying, and why are they eating clear worms? They were like the baby kittens I saw for the first time, beings from another planet.
The outdoor lanai that later became the two-story edition once hosted a party with tables of tin food trays. It was here that I set up my first art sale. I was always painting with the watercolor sets Grannie ordered from a paper catalog. I would mark the item then Grannie mailed in a check while I impatiently waited weeks for my art supplies.
The day of the party, I decided to sell my paintings to guests, ever the entrepreneur like Grandpa. He wore his dark brown toupé, never bothered by how obvious the hair cap was against his bare forehead. The white Filipino shirt, the barang tagalog was Grandpa’s formal wear. It was sheer and richly embroidered, contrasting with his white tank top underneath. Like the Visayans and their weird food, Grandpa’s costume was strange to my young eyes. Only much later would I come to understand it as a symbol of Filipino pride, a blend between the native dress made frompineapple leaves and the embroidered Spanish cloth.
The parties would inevitably end with a lecture by Grandpa on the microphone speaking to the virtues of "Man's Moral Concept.” The teachings were from a Jesus-like figure, Hilario Moncado, a kind of contemporary Filipino saint. A 1940s photo of the tall Moncado flanked by Grannie in a ballgown and Grandpa in a tuxedo hung above a doorway. He was the benevolent overlord of the house. But Grandpa's fervent devotion and overbearing demand that I love the shadowy figure only made me fear this Moncado, and by extension Grandpa whenever he was in his devotionals.
Grandpa’s open Visayan nature was quick to affection and sternness, yet his fun-loving spirit was never far behind. Although he was raised on the sea fishing for his family, I only remembered one time with him at the beach. He rolled with me in the waves, laughing and throwing me in the crashing shore break, my hair and swim suit full of sand. I begged him to play in the sea with me again, but he complained his back was sore, a familiar refrain that any parent will tell an unyielding child.
My senior year in high school I performed a French opera solo with our Punahou School choir at the Neil Blaisdell Center. It was the most prestigious concert hall in Honolulu, just down the road from the Hawaii Theater where Grandpa played base half a century earlier. In just a few months I would head off to college, music school. I could not have known then how my soaring aria filled my Grandpa with joy, the self-taught guitarist, a man who didn’t read music. After the concert, he pulled the gold diamond and aquamarine ring off his finger and gave it to me. A year later he would be dead after heart surgery. His loss was a heartache, a longing I would only come to fully know nearly a quarter century later when my son was born.
The bedrooms were in the back of the house. Grannie's was the largest with a queen size bed. She folded her quilted pink polyester bed spread neatly over two pillows. A small closet held her 1940s ballgowns, purple and black tulle skirts stuffed behind sliding wood doors. The huge round mirror of her vanity shown like the moon, reflecting her black wigs upon styrofoam heads graffitied with uneven eyes I scrawled in black eye pencil.
Grannie always took care in her grooming. Although her full lips, black hair and round eyes had faded long before, her skin was still smooth and supple. She wore her hair cropped short and permed in those days, a curl of gray at her widow’s peak. Her brown makeup kit opened like a small oval guitar case with eyelash curlers, lipsticks and strange, green foundation sticks the size of small chocolate bars. “Meesh-yong,” she would call me tenderly by my Visayan nickname, “pluck only from below,” she advised as I shaped my eyebrows, her own nearly bare and filled in with brown pencil.
Grannie was a quick wisp of a lady. Her arms and legs were thin and bony like mine. She would stride ahead of me at the Ala Moana mall, then a one story concrete strip of a few dozen stores. Some days we would visit her at the Ritz, a variety store in Ala Moana where she worked as a salesperson for a little extra cash. Before that, Dad took me to see Grannie at the Dole pineapple cannery during herbreaks, her high giggle echoing across dark chambers in the cavernous, sweet-smelling factory.
After she retired we sometimes took the bus into town for shopping trips. Grannie would order her green tea while I munched on pastries at Shirokiya. She loved to spoil me—McDonald’s French fries, clothes and later on designer wallets and bags. Grannie’s slender hands, the tip of her right middle finger slightly askew were always cold on our bus rides. She wrapped herself in a shawl, a bemused look on her face as she stared out the window. She was never in a rush. Not on the long bus rides, at the laundromat, or anywhere--so unlike myself who was born impatient.
At night back at the country Grannie would bathe me, water streaming down my little brown body. The wash cloth was thin and soft from decades of use, like the clean smelling pink towels stacked neatly behind the door. She rinsed me carefully with a cup, telling me not to pick at the dirt in my belly button because it might get sore. Back in Grannie’s room, a delicate Japanese doll in a red kimono spun around in an illuminated box next to the bed. A fiery glow danced on the walls while we slept in the cool air falling from the mountain, the bukid.
Grannie was always up before me. I stirred to the distant sound of Reveille from the military base close by, a faint bugle recording waking the soldiers. Glazed donuts, custard and strawberry-filled twists from the Waianae bakery would already be on the table. Other mornings, Grannie would fry pancakes, cautioning me to be patient and not to poke at the air bubbles that formed as the batter sizzled. And if we weren't making ice cubes from powdered orange Tang, then we were sifting flour for the cake batter. “Don’t jump!” she would caution when I was playing around the oven, lest I flatten the rising cake. I spooned chocolate Duncan Heinz frosting from a tin can with a narrow metal spatula onto the sponge cake, the entire operation taking place upon a tiny brown kitchen table.
My favorite dish was Grannie's chicken kalamungai. The chicken thighs were pan fried and simmered in a clear broth of onions and carrots with the savory green leaf over rice. Grannie confessed ignorance in the kitchen during her younger days when she and Grandpa partied late into the night. Yet she mastered this dish after her boys were born. It was my nourishment as I took in endless TV game shows, old black and white movies, or on special occasions, the Miss Universe pageant. I was the contestant sashaying back and forth in Grannie’s gold shawl itching my legs. “Don’t scratch them!” Grannie scolded, as my mosquito bites bled, warning me I would never be Miss Universe if I had scabs all over my legs.
Summer days in the country were lazy and lasted forever, especially afternoons. I would sit on the L-shaped couch across from Grandpa’s golf trophies and leaf through photo albums, searching the past. My Uncle Gene’s National Geographic magazines were neatly stacked in the living room beside his books on chess and Grannie’s sewing kit. A bottle of Crown Royal in a purple velvet pouch sat upon the wooden radio console playing KGU radio’s “Coconut Wireless.”
Grannie would lay on the couch for an afternoon nap, the back of her hand draped on her forehead, resting her eyes as she said. When the shadows grew long, I squinted out the window trying to find that clear glass object embedded low on the mountain. I was convinced this round eye was either a giant hour glass or the downed plane that crashed into the hillside one foggy night.
Some nights Grandpa would fry a whole fish and eat it on the ornate wooden dining table. Rice, fish, vegetables would spin around the lazy Susan at the center. The table-within-a-table imported from the Philippines must have meant a lot to Grandpa. Perhaps it confirmed his status in America since the intricate, carved edge was so unlike the rest of the modest furniture in the house. I would squirm as he ate the fish eyes with greasy fingers, the fried smell lingering on the coils of smoke rising from the lit mosquito punks. Afterward, he would retire to his bedroom next to Grannie's, a warm menthol towel around his neck.
Grandpa’s bedroom was small with a tiny TV, nightstand and twin bed. From the dark hallway I could hear the faint tunes of Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald, big band jazz drifting from Grandpa's transistor radio in the smoky house. I loved the sweet, lyrical melodies. The music was so unlike my parents’ Kenny Rogers and Neil Diamond records. It was a mysterious comfort, a lullaby from a different era. I could never have imagined that this was the soundtrack to my grandfather's wild, 1930s band playing years. Nor that these melodies would become my songbook in a Honolulu jazz club years later.
Great-grandpa’s room was farthest back. His was like Grandpa’s—but spare, just a twin bed, no television or radio. It was dark and I never ventured in. Great-grandpa was ancient and rarely spoke. Occasionally he muttered a few indecipherable words in broken English. He slowly shuffled about with thick, horn-rimmed bifocals. His hair was still its youthful black, with leathered skin stretched across high cheek bones darkened from years of laboring on the plantation. He would prepare soup in the kitchen or stand outside motionless watering the broken earth, smoke curling from his pipe.
We weren’t blood-related and I didn’t know his name. All I knew was that he was my great-grandmother’s second husband and that he would give me five dollars, especially after the illegal chicken fights where we left him some afternoons. As per my parents’ training, I would thank him and give him a hug. He would exhale a high-pitched sigh like after the car engine turned off, patting me on the head with a low chuckle.
On rare occasions, Grannie would pull out a passport photo of Great-grandma from the safe, a cement hole in her bedroom floor. Grannie would gaze upon her mother’s photo marveling at how she travelled the islands as a successful business woman. I envisioned Great-grandma Nicolasa wearing office suits flying in jet planes from Oahu to Maui. In reality, she exported copra, coconut husks, in a boat from Bohol to Cebu before she immigrated from the Philippines in 1932.
Near the end of her life, she and Great-grandpa worked the coffee fields to bring the fruit to market on the Big Island. Mom once told me that Great-grandma died from blacking out in shallow water on the Big Island, a story relayed to her with great sadness by Grannie.
They were my world then--Grannie and Grandpa, the old man, Bully the dog. On any given summer day, I rotated between them, orbiting the house and a round swing under the giant kiawe tree. The parched earth crumbled beneath my toes like peeling paint chips. The silence of the wind across Mikilua valley was broken only by a rooster’s distant crow or a dove’s coo under the eves of the roof. The glass eye on the mountain, the broken Coca-Cola ice box, the old man were all characters in a shifting story of cats in the tool shed and tadpoles of the black water. I could not have known how peace and play were nameless, inseparable then and how it would become the dust of memories once we left.