My Hawaiian Sojourn

Celia - 1950 - Waikiki

We moved to Hawaii in 1949 because of Dad's job, he was a fisheries biologist and he was spending quite a bit of time in what I think of as the South Seas working on something having to do with the tuna fishery there. Eventually I went back to school. My early schooling was spotty due to asthma and moving around. I skipped kindergarten, started the first grade in Seattle, moved to Portland, Oregon and in with Grandma Grace and her cat. I continued first grade spottily that winter in between cat dander related asthma attacks.

In March, right before my 7th birthday, we took the midnight Pan American flight out of Portland to Honolulu. I think it was on a DC4. Two things stuck with me after all these years. It was bitterly cold on the plane; too cold to sleep much. The stewardess covered my younger sister and I with army green wool blankets and kept bringing us hot chocolate. The other was the sight of the magnificent sunrise over the Pacific Ocean with not a speck of land in sight. I've never seen a sunrise to match it. We arrived at 8am, went to our motel with a kitchen. There was a severe housing shortage there after the WW2 and the Korean War was heating up. We managed to lived in four places in our two years there, each a little better than the last. That first day, after a nap Mom, my sister, and I went to the beach and were promptly fried into fritters. We girls had to stay inside in our underpants for several days.

I didn't return to school until the fall of 1949 and went into the 2nd grade. I had been sort of home schooled through the rest of the first grade. School was very rough, besides my kintergarten age sister, there was only one other white kid in my grade. The first month or so I was tormented, beaten up, and chased home by assorted little dears. And that dear bloggers is where I learned to fight. My mother who was shy, homesick, and afraid of everything was not much help. When Dad was in from his sea travels for a bit he taught me how to defend myself, since being skinny and asthmatic made it difficult to run away. I will keep his suggestions to myself except to say they worked, and I did not pass them on to my children, who were better watched over than my sister and I. We also had a mean teacher but she was an equal opportunity mean teacher and humilated everyone on a regular basis. However, punishment for poor behavior in class was to be sent outside onto the covered veranda of the school with your nap mat. That made me laugh even then, being forced to daydream in the lovely sunshine and catch the occasional gecko that paused too long within my reach.

The picture is of me in our last home there, a two bedroom cottage. Last time I heard, about five years ago, those cottages were still there but were now surrounded by high rises.

Antique Lampson Pneumatic Tube System

I went to the bank yesterday to deposit a check at the drive through. They have a pneumatic tube system to get the goods to the teller. Once while accompanied by a grandchild I remarked that similar tubes were used in department stores to get change and send notes. She was amazed. Frankly I was amazed the first time I saw one. I must have been 5 or 6. I wonder if anything ever got stuck in them. Isn't it funny with all the things that have disappeared in the last 60 years, such as many of those department stores, that the tube mechanism has survived.

I got to yakking about how stores like Frederick & Nelson (gone with the dodo) had not just those tubes but elevators with elevator operators in them. They asked you what floor you wanted and announced each floor as it came near along with a synopsis of it's goods. F&N was where I saw my first escalator as well. And it was in Frederick's that I lost my 2 1/2 year old son on the escalator. I was pregnant as a house with his brother and as we got on the down escalator he snatched his hand out of mine, ran back up, and jumped onto the up escalator effectively putting to floors between us. A helpful clerk got on the phone and got a second clerk to round up my runaway while the first clerk trekked back up two floors with me to collect my wandering child. She kept asking if I shouldn't be staying home, I did look about to deliver but wasn't and she walked me and junior out to my car. That's customer service for you and F&N was famous for that.

Frederick and Nelson in 1929 - Seattle, Washington. Photo Asahel Curtis.

Frederick and Nelson also had a bakery, a tea room and a millinery department at one time. When I started high school women still wore nylons, heels, gloves, and hats when they went shopping downtown. Frederick's also took back anything they sold, no questions asked. I got my made-to-order chocolate wedding cake from their bakery in 1966. They made an addictive chocolate candy called fudge half dips, dark chocolate wrapped around a walnut fudge center that just peeked out the top of each piece. To die for! I think they were the precursor of to all those truffles abounding everywhere now. They also made the original frangos which are now peddled by Macy's. Later as the store began to have financial problems they put paraffin in the chocolate of the half dips. A great howl began including an article in the paper and the original recipe was restored. Christmas was amazing there. Somewhere I have pictures of solemn, shy little me on Santa's lap at Fredericks.

All this grew out of a trip to the bank. Wonder what else in my memory bank, if I could just get some human RAM I could get at it. Oh, oh, now I'm thinking of Jack LaLanne, someone else none of my grandkids have heard about.

Norman Rockwell

This afternoon I read kenju's post about the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Filled with envy I looked it up on the web and after its close, January 30, 2011 , it will travel to Tacoma, Washington, where American Chronicles opens on February 26, 2011 at Tacoma Art Museum. It's a bit of a drive but there are people there I was hoping to visit and what a treat if we all could go see it.

Oddly enough it meshes with my post about kids from yesterday. A print of the picture above was given to me by mother for reasons best explained by the picture itself. She even looks like me at age 10. Girls didn't often get into fights in the early 50's but I had occasion to defend a younger sister, a neighbor's dog, and myself from a school boy's insistence on dumping grasshoppers down my back and squashing them. Can you hear the righteous indignation here? Woe to those who cross a combatant who thinks she is fighting for an honorable cause. It didn't hurt that I was the tallest, if skinniest kid in our tiny country grade school. I can't help but wonder that I still have some pride in this behavior, the same behavior my young sons engaged in with each other and drove me crazy trying to change. Mom said " I hope you have 10 kids just like you..." Good thing I stopped at two.

Day Off

Yesterday I stayed home and took a day out of the world. I sat on the steps of my deck in the rare winter sunshine. I watched part of the second season of "Clatterford," a BBC comedy that makes me laugh and nod my head in recognition. I read some more, did some stretches, knitted a little, and got into my gym clothes. I couldn't make myself go the gym though. Then I started thinking, remembering.

August 1981, Love the Rosebowl Shirt

I thought about my life as a mother when both my sons were under 10 and all the fun we had, and some not so fun times. My youngest climbed the fountain in the Seattle Center and got blown off by a water spout, and fell onto another pipe which gouged a huge gash in the side of his head and at first it looked like his eye was punched out but no, thank God. And as soon as it happened I was thinking what kind of a mother lets her little kid do that. It didn't help that there were many, many other children on the fountain too that hot Memorial Day. A doctor and a nurse appeared out of the crowd to help and assure his eye was intact. Then came my sister and her partner. They were parked nearby and took us to Children's Orthopedic Hospital ER who by then knew us by name. The x-ray showed a crack but the MD said it didn't look right (what?) and had it redone. The crack was a flaw on the film. So he was patched, stitched, and he healed good as new.

My eldest at 5 or 6 visited Children's ER for the first time after running into the kitchen to show me his new "trick." The trick was making a bb fall out of his ear. Before I could say "no" he dropped it in his ear and it took up residency. I tried sucking it out with one of those bulb things you use on baby noses and gave up for fear of pushing it in farther. They managed to get it out without surgery but it took a long time and was very painful for him. The doctor told him he was going to give it one last dig and it would hurt and asked him if he would "let" him do it. My child said "yes." It came out but God forbid I ever hear a child scream like that again. This was the same child who at age three chewed a candy wrapper into a wad and shoved it up his nose so far he couldn't get it out. Mom and her trusty tweezers fixed that one.

Their Daddy and I used to call them the Flying Rascoulie Brothers. Both of the little twerps were walking by nine months and used their new found knowledge to climb over the side of their cribs and drop themselves onto the floor. So they had regular beds very early. Try explaining to a 9 month that he has to stay in bed. So they got rocked to sleep and quietly tucked in for the night. They come by it honestly, I was the sister who jumped off the roof of the house with an umbrella and at age three got up and left my parents house for a midnight stroll around Seattle. Mom said a "bum" came to the door and asked if she was missing a little girl, he'd been going house to house. My youngest did that too, but unlike my parents I heard him. He was down the walk before I caught him though, laughing and running away from me. We put those little hook and eye things on our doors for awhile. Their favorite entertainer for years was Gallagher and his smashed watermelons. Not sure what that has to do with anything, but they sure liked him. Probably still do.

Snow in the Palouse

Snow in the Palouse

The hills here got another powdered sugar coating this week. Looks like our patch of balmy, 50 degree weather is gone and the weather trolls remembered it's still January. Got my computer up and running again and added external storage for backup, something I should have done ages ago. Now its me that's crashed and burned. The change from dry and cold to damp and windy seems to have kick started an arthritis flare or maybe it just got a mind to do that itself. All I want to do is sleep and that's not the best thing so I'm setting my alarm to get myself up after 8 hours and then taking an hour nap most afternoons. The worst is in my feet and that keeps me from walking much, not good, not good. Just nature's way of reminding me I'm not 40 anymore, or 50, 0r 60, jeez.

Being parked more than usual I've gotten a lot more reading done and some knitting. I just finished "Cane River" by Lalita Tedemy. I really liked it even though much of it was painful to read. The mores of the times are difficult to take in, and makes this family of strong women even more amazing, not just that they survived but managed to prosper. Now I'm starting "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," by David Mitchell. I'm only a few pages in and am totally in love with his art with words. It's set in Shogunate Japan where Jacob employed as a clerk with the Dutch East India Company is confined with other traders to an small artifical island near Nagasaki from which they pursue their business.

Life is peaceful and uneventful for the most part. A great relief after the divorce drama of the fall. My life is remaking itself. Every now and then I get some new small housewares to fit my one person household, a six hole muffin tin, a little bread pan that fits in the toaster oven I had forgotten I had. I got a new, small skillet too; not that I haven't kept all the big stuff, company is coming for spring break. Just to keep some uproar in the background I have started tearing wallpaper off both the bathrooms. I'm sure I'll have them painted by the time company gets here. Ha, ha, ha.

New Beginnings

I tried getting pictures of the grandgirls on Christmas day. Couldn't get all six in or any child to look up from their loot. Still, it was a lovely, peaceful morning followed by a delicious breakfast served up by their mother. A good send up for the coming new year.

I got up early on the December 30th to get ready to go to court to get my divorce decree. The weather had been cold and snowing and I was concerned about parking. Because of my asthma I can't walk far in below freezing temperatures. In spite of the weatherman's promises of more snow that night none had fallen and the streets were clear and the sun was out. I got a parking place in front of the courthouse. I hadn't been in court since my granddaughters were adopted and found like the big cities we now have a metal detector and they collect your cell phones and go through your purses and bags. We have a gang problem here too, there are no paradisaical places any longer. I was the first one on the docket and was sworn in and had to sit in the witness chair and declare my marriage was irretrievably broken; Washington is a no-fault divorce state. It took seven minutes and I was done.

I can't say I was joyful, it wasn't that kind of occasion but I felt immensely unburdened. I don't know what is coming down the road but I am kind of excited to greet it. I never imagined I would end up in divorce court at 68 but there I was. In the afternoon I had a pre-arranged phone visit with a very dear longtime friend and as planned we had a glass of wine and toasted our futures. She was abruptly "retired" by her firm and has been on unemployment since early 2010. She is legal secretary with excellent skills but not one nibble of a job so she is starting her own business providing those services for companies who cannot afford their own staff. I think she will do quite well. We toasted to our futures and whatever that may bring and what we can make of it. Here's to a new year and the hopes and plans we all have.