Cell Phone! Yes I have it on me. Called Doris. She's not available. Joel. Nobody home. Kelly! Yes, but she can't help me, or contact Joel, who went surfing. I leave him a message - call me back NOW. He could be anywhere. Doris is my best bet. OK could be a long wait. Must wait. Dejected, I decide to go into the bakery, which exudees a worn and sparse, un-air conditioned old town fen shui, and where I have never purchased anything in the over 20 years I have lived in Aiea. I sit down at the counter fronting the short order grill manned by a Korean and a Filipino lady. There are no menus in sight Pretty soon I strike up a conversation with my stoolmates, who warn against the chopped steak. Once, a haole man complained, declaring he "could not eat it!" Everything else, however, is good. Even the breakfast steak which they reason must be the better of the steaks served; the lesser specimens they figure, are sliced up for the chopped steak. I say "I've lived in Aiea over 20 years and have never eaten here." They look at me, wondering about what that means. I say I live on Kaonohi Street. Oh, OK. They know, as do I, that what is now Kaonohi Street is not really Aiea, or even a neighborhood, but a former cane field. I order breakfast. We talk about Aiea, how it has changed over the years. My companions compare notes on where they live, which streets have changed, how they have been forced to move because of develoment and property condemnations. I volunteer I'm from the Big Island and that old Aiea reminds me of where I'm from. Where? Kohala, I say, but my parents live in Hilo now, except, well, my dad just died. Oh sorry. Where in Hilo? I explain where. One guy kindof knows where that is and nods. Working through our breakfasts at different rates, and the younger of my companions has got to go. 85 year old Masa and I continue our conversation while we gradually tuck away our meals. He was a soldier who went to France and Germany during the war (you know which one), then was a fireman working for the "federal" for the navy for 23 years until his heart attack in 1967. He was a jouneyman carpenter, that is he was paid as a journeyman, but knew only how to nail floors, and a retired pest exterminator, who still has the shed he once stored poison, which is now filled with his junk, his kids junk, and the junk of his grandchildren. We visited old Aiea in days of sugar, he'd been in the tunnels under red hill where fuel tanks 150 feet deep and 100 feet across were hollowed out of the rock, I hear his account of the flood of '37 in the gulch that was probably where the Pearl City junkyard is now, which killed someone he knew and wiped out rice patties and crops in the area, taking with it a way of life. He mentioned that this was where he had searched for his daughter - a story I didn't get to hear. I didn't hear my cell phone either, thus missing all of Doris' 5 attempts to answer my SOS. After getting out of her class and powering up her phone she got my message. ! She called me. No answer. Again. No answer. She drove back to Aiea after her yoga lesson, called again, not there. Tried some more, walked around the shopping center. My car is there but I'm not, and I don't pick up the phone. She drove home thinking, "maybe he walked home", but I'm not there.
Meanwhile I think, Doris! I look at my phone which reports I received five unanswered calls. A little stressed I call her. She's like, "where are you?" I can explain. She comes back with the van key. So ends my story of locking my keys in the car and hanging out in the bakery next to Times Aiea, awaiting rescue.
No comments:
Post a Comment