Hana Okolele

I've written before that I grew up on a Japanese immigrant sugar plantation camp here on Oahu. We had food to eat, a rental home, a plantation provided health clinic and clothes to sew and wear. As a young child, I figured just about everybody lived like we did (except people on TV or really rich people). I didn't know we were poor. 

Our language was pidgin English. I've written before that we often referred to our long ago childhood days as hanabata days. Hana is Japanese for nose. Bata is butter. So hanabata just means nose snot. Local people all know what it means.

A lot of the Hawaiian language is also part of our pidgin English. We all said pauhana for the end of work or after work. We said "Pio the light" for "Turn off the light." 

(We almost never said, "Aloha" or "Mahalo" which has become more popular now.)

Uh oh... I just checked my blog posts and see that I've written a lot about Hawaiian pidgin English on my post Hawaiian Words of My Youth in 2021.

Anyway, the other day... out of nowhere, I remembered saying, "Ohana okolele, you bust your okolele." I grew up on Oahu. Art grew up on the Big Island. He said he remembered it as "Hana kokolele." We used it as children to say, "You're in big trouble." 

I asked several friends if they remembered saying this. One friend said "you bust your okolele" meant you'd probably get a spanking since okole means your butt. Another friend said they'd heard, "Hana kokolele" also. 

You know you can look up anything on the web and get some kind of answer, right?

Would you believe there's even a company called Hanabata Days who sells these t-shirts for kids?

OK.

So I asked my baby brother who remembers everything about our childhood if he'd heard this term and he said, "Nope. Never heard it."

Is he trying to tell me I'm the only one who got in trouble?

Today's Reality

 One of my very fun classmates sent us all some fun reality cartoons.

Granted, I do a blog now instead of writing in my journal. You can make more friends this way.

Actually, I use my VERY old Fitbit which isn't all that costly.

Ummm... Actually... What High Income? And yes, we know our neighbors quite well, thank you.

I'm happy to say we do have a number of best friends. Unfortunately, we are sadly losing too many of them. It's a sad fact of aging, I'm afraid.

And no... I'm trying to gain weight now. I can't snack easily because of my Invisalign so it's hard to accumulate calories.

I do look back on the fun days of growing up on a poor sugar cane plantation camp where we didn't know we were poor, but I'm grateful for the life I've been given since.

Homes That I Remember...

Do you remember the Beatles song In My Life?

"There are places I remember...All my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone and some remain..."

Whenever our kids and grandkids come to Hawaii, we often take them to the Big Island where Art  grew up. They get to see the home where he spent his childhood and then the home they moved into next which was behind the mom and pop restaurant/soda fountain that his parents operated. It's a very special feeling to return to the places that will always bring him fond memories.

Someone asked me recently if the grandkids had seen where I grew up. No, they haven't because it's all gone.

It's rather disconcerting to think I can't even figure out where those places were.. once upon a time.

I spent the first 5 or 6 years of my life in an isolated large sugar plantation home in the middle of a sugar cane field in Kunia, Oahu, Hawaii. That's my grandfather on the porch. My father and mother are on the right of that family grouping. My grandmother (father's side) is the other lady. The two young girls are my older cousins. I don't think I was born yet. 

I know the home was demolished but I don't know when and I don't know where it was actually located. It's totally gone. My nephew said he was in what he thinks was the general area and saw some debris that might indicate where the house once stood.

Because the house was so far from school, my parents moved to another smaller plantation home, with a few neighbors... this time at what was called Camp 56. (I don't even know a town name to identify with that home.) That's me. I must have been about 7 years old.

I've asked my brother with the better memory, but he's not sure either. I think I remember getting chicken pox when we lived there... or was it measles? Hmmm....

From AI: 

"The historical location of Camp 56, one of the many plantation camps associated with the Oahu Sugar Company, is no longer a distinct, named area on modern maps. The original plantation camps have largely been redeveloped into contemporary residential and commercial areas within Waipahu...."

Whatever the case, it's completely, totally, forever gone too. 

Eventually, even that house was too far from school requiring a long bus ride so we moved to an actual town called Waipahu. It was another sugar plantation village.

I think I must have been about in the 2nd or 3rd grade by then. I think. We had LOTS of neighbors then and LOTS of friends to play with. My brother and I could even walk to school. I always told people it was about 5 miles to school, uphill both ways, but discovered later it was more like a mile. 😏

I lived there until I left for college and moved to the dorm and then to an apartment near campus. After Art and I married, we moved to Illinois. My brother sent me these bottom photos showing the aftermath of a fire. I don't know if it was purposely set by the plantation so the area could be used for as an industrial area. I don't know. The bottom left photo with my nephews is where our house once stood. The other photo is the neighborhood that we knew so well at one time.

And now it's all gone and nothing remains. 

It's a feeling of sadness of a time I can still remember.

Papaya or the Baby?

We were having a snack at a mall with good friends when Art mentioned how he'd once made a catch that could have been a drop...a catastrophic drop.

This was something that happened 15 years ago. I'd forgotten about it, but it must have been traumatic for Art. 

We used to have a tall papaya tree with the sweetest papayas we've ever had. Eventually, the birds discovered it and got to the papayas before we could pick it. There were times they'd make a small hole and then actually clean out the entire papaya leaving only the skin and dropping the seeds on the ground.

Anyway, Tiffany and KC were in Hawaii for a visit and loved having the papayas for breakfast. KC wanted to pick the papayas so of course, Grandpa was always willing to grant his favorite granddaughter her every wish. He got the chair and hoisted her up to pick the ripe papayas. She was loving it all.

Well, unfortunately, she lost her grip on one of the papayas and it fell out of her hands. Incredibly, Art held on to KC, kept his balance and was able to reach out to catch the papaya.

We could not believe it! Tiffany was taking photos and managed to catch that rather shocking episode. 

And no, Art never did it again.

Lovebirds?

And this is just another post just to show you this photo that I've had for several months.

Art and I were on our evening walk when I came across this sweet little tête-à-tête. As we walked past, they were so intent on each other that they didn't even budge. 

They sort of moved side to side but always facing each other and never more than a few inches apart. I'm glad a car didn't come by.

I'm not a fan of pigeons, but so long as they stay off our roof I'm OK with them. 

What do you think they're doing? 

SPAM Comments

I've gotten tons of spam comments on my blog through the years and thought that if I just marked them as Spam and kept them in the Spam Comments File, it would teach the computer to never let them get published.

It didn't appear to work. 

One day I was looking through years of Spam that I've gotten and saw that there were a whole bunch of comments that were one or two word comments. I didn't know back then to click the comments that I knew were safe and to publish them.

I discovered later that you can click on Comments which would give you the options to go to the Published or Spam file. 

If something Published is a person you know is Spam you can indicate that and the comment would be moved to your Spam file.

This was from Dylan Brandon in my Spam File. If I knew for certain it was not Spam, I could click on those three dots that would then show me that trash can or that check mark which I could click to move him to the Published file.

So then I'm wondering if I should keep all my Spams to help the computer or Blogspot AI remember who the Spams where.

So I looked it up and this is what AI said:

So OK. I'll mark any Spam I find in my Published file first, and then go to the Spam file later and kill it there too. I'll give it a little time to make sure the AI brain is remembering this in order to make sure I don't see it again.

POSTSCRIPT:

It's been a couple of months now and so far, so good. I haven't gotten any more Spam. I just got that one Spam from Dylan which I kept just so I could show it for this post.

Fingers crossed 🤞 this continues to work.

Bambucha Blueberries

Just to show how bad my memory has gotten I decided to go ahead with this post.

Arrrghhhh!

I was so shocked with the size of the blueberries we got from Sam's Club a while ago that we took photos of them.

I titled it Bambucha (Hawaiian pidgin English for huge) Blueberries. 

So here I was ready to post this and I thought I'd check to see if I'd mentioned the word Bambucha before.

Arrrgghhhh!

https://travelerswife.blogspot.com/2022/10/bambucha-blueberries.html#comment-form

I can't believe it.

Not only did I write a post about it, I even titled it Bambucha Blueberries.

Arrrggghhh!

I told you that my memory is faltering and my daughter has told me several times, "You've already told me that, mom."

In my defense I've now written over 4,250 posts so it's hard to remember what I've written about. That's my excuse and I'm going to stand by it. 😕

Dang Blasted Roosters

OK...

I've written before how I've lost my sense of smell and most of my sense of taste. But I have very good hearing. That's why Art and I are such great partners. He can't hear well but he's got an acute sense of smell and taste. He's also near sighted, whereas I'm farsighted.

All this is just to introduce an irritation of mine.

Crowing roosters. Arrrrghhhh!

We have to wake up by 5:30 every weekday morning to get mom ready for her ride to the day care that she loves going to. She's always been an early riser from her working days so we have to get up to make sure she can safely have her breakfast and doesn't try to prepare it on her own. She has accelerating dementia so it's not safe to have her preparing any kind of food.

Therefore, it's especially annoying for me to be awakened at 3:30 in the morning. Problem is, we 

have lots and lots of feral chickens everywhere. 

However, there are also neighbors who keep chickens and lots of roosters in their yard. We've passed this brood of roosters and chickens on one our walks. 

Thing is I can hear one rooster starting his crowing and then another one will seem to answer from another direction and then even farther away another one. Then there's some silence and I might doze, but arrrgghhh! The first rooster will start again. 

And Art? Sleeping like a baby through this whole thing. 

Well, I thought I'd look up what the ordinance was about roosters and found this on the Humane Society website.

And yet... with all the feral chickens scampering about you could never prove exactly which operatic rooster is the one waking me up. 

Hmmm... I wonder why we have so many feral chickens. You'd think our feral cat problem would prevent the feral chickens from getting out of hand.

Hmmm...

Always Thankful

At this holiday time of Thanksgiving, I have much to be thankful for in my life. I won't start a list. And don't worry. Although I don't mention Art here, I do always count my lucky stars that he would come into my life and make it as happy as he has. When I told mom we were engaged, she was so happy she could hardly contain herself. She still lets him know how grateful she is for him even as her memory has been declining. 

Anyway... 

One of the things I'm so happy that Art and I were able to do for mom was to take mom and her sister, my Auntie Grace to Eiheiji. This is from the Eiheiji website:

Eiheiji, "The Temple of Eternal Peace", is one of the two head temples of Soto Zen. It is located deep in the mountains, near the northwest coast of Japan, not far from Fukui City...

This was in April, 2010. I think my grandfather was there sometime in the 1940s.

Mom and Auntie Grace's father was a zen priest who was trained there.

When I researched the temple, I learned that only relatives of zen priests who had been there would be allowed to spend a night at the temple. 

That's a photo of my grandfather at the Eiheiji Temple. 

Mom and Auntie Grace had a wonderful time with two priests-in-training who took care of us during the stay. There was a ceremony and we were all named. Not sure what they said, but mom and Auntie were thrilled.

I am so happy we were able to do this for them before Auntie Grace passed away. It did take a lot of planning on Art's part.

And here's mom absolutely ecstatic for her 96th birthday a month ago with one of her favorite grandsons. 

And another thing I'm thankful for is my brother.

He's always been my favorite brother. OK, he's my only sibling, but he'd still be my favorite.

Since we started our lives living in a plantation home in the middle of a cane field with no other neighbors for miles around until I was in 1st grade, we had only each other for playmates.

When we were in college Dennis roomed with Art and me for a couple of years. 

He and Art were and are best buddies and even did a "Round-the-Island" bike race together.

When Art and I left for Illinois, Dennis came with us for a road trip from California to Chicago. 

After arriving in Chicago, Dennis flew home to Hawaii. I remember feeling like an arm was torn off.

And now, here we are back in Hawaii again and I know he's always there to help whenever we need it.

Art also has just one sibling; his sister, Kay and they are also very close. Yes, her name is Kay too.

And now... what really makes us happy.

We have two children. Tiffany and Keola.

I'm sure I've written about this before but I just have to repeat it.

When we first brought Keola home, Tiffany was very happy.

But one night I heard her crying and went up to her room.

"I change my mind," she said. "I want a dog instead. You love him more than me."

I told her that Keola didn't belong to just Art and me, but he was also hers to protect and teach.  

And she took it to heart...seriously took it to heart. 

When Tiffany left for college, he wrote a beautiful letter telling her he'd miss her and asking who was now going to help him choose his clothes. "Certainly not mom and dad," he joked. I think he joked.

And now, if I'm frustrated because Keola hadn't written in a while or whatever, Tif would still defend him saying he's got two boys now... etc.

And yes.. friends. I'm thankful for all our friends and relatives. You know who you are. We have lifelong friends and relatives on the mainland and here in Hawaii and blogland. 

Yes, there is so much to be thankful for even though sometimes, the political climate looks bleak, there are always lots to make us happy. 

So I'm going to keep that thought with me as we travel into the holiday season.

Terrible, Horrible, Super Awful Vertigo!

I took mom out to the Handi-Van the other morning and the driver said, “How come you no stay long time? Your husband when bring your mom out for the last few days.”

I just love hearing Hawaiian pidgin. I grew up speaking it but my brother says I lost it when we moved to the mainland.

Anyway, I told the Handi-Van driver that I’ve been dealing with vertigo and it’s supposed to last 3 or more months.

It was a surprise to hear him say,  “YOU TOO? My wife get um too. Lots of times. Have to do the exercise. She need help to get up, yeah.” 

Good grief! Every time I turn around, there are so many people (mostly women) who have had this and unless you’ve been through it, you cannot know how horrible it is.

At my appointment last week, Dr. Payne said the MRI done two years ago showed I did not have a tumor growing in my brain. Dr. Payne had sent me to see the ENT doctor who deals with vertigo at Tripler. At that time, Dr. Chen diagnosed what I had as PPPD (Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness). 

Dr. Payne disagreed with that diagnosis.

And now that I’ve done more research, I think Dr. Payne is right. It said that with PPPD, you don’t have the world spinning (apparently the world goes side to side?) and you don’t get nauseous to the point of vomiting. 

So nope. That’s not me. The world definitely spins and I do get sick to my stomach horribly.

I’ll be waiting to see what the new diagnosis will be. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Payne warned me about scrolling on the computer. 😳

And he’s right. If I scroll through items on the computer, it does make me dizzy.

I already have a bunch of blog posts scheduled for several weeks so I guess I’ll be more careful about being on the computer for a while until this episode passes.

Meanwhile, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everybody!!! ❤