Come Onna My House

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          Come Onna My House
My house is bigger than your house. My house stands 38 stories high, in a  graceful gentle S-shape. There is a large lanai for each of the 407 units, total population of which can accommodate some 900 residents. The building is one of the very few which has one side open to the elements. Sunshine, rain or whatever. Enclosed  hallways always remind me of a "Motel Six."

Below my home is a shallow pond, referred to as a lake. Once, the lake was stocked with a number of Koi, the Asian carp which has so many colors. But, they were accidentally killed when attempts to control algae were made. We had a pair of swans too, but they have passed away. But, we do have a quantity of wild ducks. They arrive, lay eggs, rear their ducklings, and drive some people living on the lower floors simply crazy. Quack, quack, quack. We are not bothered as we live on the 30th floor.

There is a small tea house in the center of the lake for those who wish to use it. Trees and flowers are nicely sited around the lake. There is also a high concrete wall and a iron fence to enclose the property. To see how beautiful our home is, look it us on the internet.

My wife Tonto, thought that getting me to move into a condo would be difficult. But not so, as I don't miss shoveling snow, ice -frozen paper boxes, heating and cooling bills, and all the rest. I don't have to drag garbage cans out to the street, and the morning paper is found just outside our door.

Inside our home, once you pass the guard shack, and through the key door there is the manager's office. The lobby is furnished with chairs, and a door leading to the garden lake.

Walking down a few steps you find the library, maintenance shop, mail boxes. and locker rooms. Up on the right is a waterfall with some koi in a pond. Also, a couple of palm trees.

Every apartment has a large closet locker for suitcases, golf clubs etc. There are also assigned parking spaces.

As you continue ahead there are elevators on both sides of the hall. The elevators on the left run only up to the 20th floor,those on the right run up to the penthouses.

The 407 apartments range in size from a one bedroom, a two bedroom,a three bedroom, and of course three floors of penthouses. For each bedroom there is a bath. Some residents choose to install air-conditioning, while others use ceiling fans, and an always open door to the lanai.

Some special features besides our library are the swimming pool, tennis court, recreation area for parties, squash court, puttingu green and driving net, fitness center, saunas for both sexes, and an exercise area for dogs. We are one of the "pet friendly" condos. And so, we have a large number of dogs or all sizes, a few cats, and I know of one rabbit.

Famous people have made the Waipuna their home. Julia Child once lived here. Also the late Senator Dan Inouye lived in one of the penthouse suites. Currently there are t.v. personalities,owners of local restaurants, etc. We are now seeing Japanese families, and other ethnic groups with children.

We have a small group of men, and one woman who work very hard to maintain our home. Most of them are Filipino.

We can rest easy at night because the building has guards who control the gate, entry door, and patrol the halls at night.

With all that I have said, surely you must ask about problems in condo living. The main problem is the lack of storage space. There is always too much stuff. You will find under beds, beach chairs and canned goods. When all of our food comes to us on large pallets, and some things are hard to get, you buy more than you can use. This leads to a storage problem. And, many of us are collectors of stuff.

Problems? Sure, with some 900 people living here, you would expect it. One of the big problems concerns the trash room on each floor. There is a trash chute for bagged garbage, a large barrel for cans and bottles, and a box for newspapers. And, on  the door is a large sign telling people to take large cardboard boxes etc. down to the dumpsters on the main floor. Do all people do this? No, they are too lazy to comply,and simply leave them in the trashroom when no one is looking. Inside the trashroom itself are directions given in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, where to put each item of trash. Is it done? Are you kidding? People sometimes are just plain lazy.

A couple of other problems relate to our lanais. People who smoke throw their butts over the side, only to sometimes land on the lanai below. Carpets have been burned as well as stuffed chairs. And, there is the problem of people making a fuss on their lanai after 10 p.m., which is the time to quiet down so people can sleep.

Two other major problems are people who drive in the parking garage too fast, and without their lights on. There are signs everywhere. And the second is about tailgating. This is when a resident allows someone to follow them into the building. You must have a key, or phone from outside and the host resident lets the guest in. This is a secure building.

Other than these few mentioned problems,life in this building is very good.I will never again pick up a snow shovel.  
           Aloha
           Grant

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

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       A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I just read a most interesting book "When Books Went to War" by Molly Nuptial Manning. It tells how paperback books were printed small-size for U.S. servicemen during the war. I have written about this earlier on my blog. What really interested me most was why "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,"by Betty Smith, was the most popular sought after book.  I had seen the hard cover edition many times, but never read it. I just finished the book in a new paper limited edition. And, I think I now know why it was so popular.

The book details life as it was lived in the tenements of Brooklyn just before World War I. The characters you get to know are very poor Irish immigrants. They were often hungry.  When the servicemen read this, many of them were living the the depths of the Great Depression . They too had known hunger.

The characters in the book realized that the way up and out of the tenements was to get an education. The service men during WWII were as a whole, poorly educated. Many never graduated from the eighth grade, much less high school or college.  There was such a strong desire to become better educated by the characters in the book. Those G.I.s could identify. They had been prevented from advancing their education for the very same reasons, poverty and opportunity.

After the war many G.I.s eagerly embraced the first G.I. Bill of Rights, which made it possible for them to go to school at government expense. I know this as a fact,  because my father was one of those men, and he earned a college degree. Also, two G.Is who rented two rooms in our house, were also attending college.

The buildings of the college in our small town had burned sometime during the war. But no matter, as classes were conducted in military barracks. I always thought how ironic it was for these men who had lived in barracks, to now attending classes in similar barracks. My mother was proud to have been one of the teachers.

I think the theme of the book could be "Hope through education." It worked for the heroine in the book, it worked for the G.I.s then, and for those of Korea and Vietnam. It also worked for my MA degree. And it continues to do so with current veterans.

      Aloha
      Grant

Thoughts About World War I

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      Thoughts About World War I
I have been reading a lot about WWI lately, and have learned much more than I had known previously. For instance, did you know that during WWI,Britain was drafting men from ages 18 to 40, and then the required number rose from age 15 to 50! And by 1918, half of the British infantry was under age 19! A British soldier in the trenches of France would often only last six weeks before being killed or wounded.A  million young men died, and  Britain was left with a million widows  without men to marry. I remember when I was in the Navy stationed in Panama, a ship full of women from England arrived to transit the canal. They were all going  to Australia or New Zealand to find husbands. This was after WWII. Both wars had stolen their chances to wed and have children.  

I heard today on the radio that it was the anniversary birthday of Mickey Spillane, the crime novel writer. How well I remember him. His first crime novel came out in 1947, and caused a sensation. The title of the  paperback novel was "I the Jury," and had a cover showing a young woman in act of disrobing. My father had a copy of the book and I read it too. I will always remember the final scene when Mike Hammer shoots the girl in the stomach. She ask him" Why?," and he replies "It was easy." Some critics said his books were garbage, but Micky Spillane said that they were "good garbage." He also said that his books were the "chewing gum" of American literature.

But getting back to the subject of the"Great War," Two great books to come out of that war I think, are "Goodby to All That," by Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." I had my students read Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," but I doubt that they could grasp what it was all about. I think that the final scene where Catherine dies, and he walks out into the rain, is one of his best. Students of the war should read the poetry of the war, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson,  John McCrae, Robert Service and others. There is a lot to be learned from reading them.

There is a public radio request show here in Honolulu on Sunday morning. Some guy always requests the Kipling poem "Mandalay," as sung by Kenneth McKeller. Fine poem by Kipling, I memorized it in high school. But though the song is good, it omits the part in the poem where a Briitsh soldier talks about how he is treated back in England,and  though he walks with fifty housemaids, beefy faced and grubby, he has a girl back East in a sweeter greener land. A severely edited song, and it is driving me crazy, Cannot the record be broken or lost?

     Aloha
     Grant

Primo Popcorn

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          Primo Popcorn
An article in today's paper caught my eye, and I would like to share it with you. Primo is a long-time Hawaiian beer, but this has nothing to do with beer. A man here named Rylen Sato has created a frozen popcorn treat called Primo Popcorn. The popcorn is flash-frozen at minus 321.07 degrees Fahrenheit.The frozen popcorn treat is called 77K-on. It melts in your mouth and the vapor that comes out of your mouth and nose makes you look like a dragon. It will make its public debut this weekend. The popcorn comes in different flavors and costs $3.00 for a cup, and $5.00 for chocolate and flavors. I think this guy will soon become a millionaire. Probably the idea will soon reach the mainland.

Reading this article I was suddenly reminded of a summer job I once had, and it had to do with cold treats.

The local dairy in our town had a three-wheel bicycle with a large ice chest in front, and a seat in the rear. The chest would be supplied with popsicles,ice-cream bars, fudge bars and flat slabs of dry ice to keep everything from melting . I knew when the local factory had lunch, and it  was always good for several sales. I hung around the town swimming pool for many sales. At the end of a hot summer day, I would have sold about $11.00 worth of cold treats. My share was probably less than two dollars. I liked Orange coated ice cream bars. They must have cost ten cents, as pop sickles were five cents and could be broken in half and shared with a friend. A cool summer job. My paper route only paid me $5.00 a week. This job must have come to an end with the arrival of Dairy Queen.

      Aloha
      Grant

Cuba Libre

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             Cuba Libre
It's in all the U.S. History books. The so-called "Cold War," between the U.S. and Russia. The very scary time when we almost had a nuclear war. In short, the Russians had placed missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy forced the Russians to remove them, and then imposed an embargo on Cuba. That embargo placed so long ago is about to be lifted by President Obama. Everyone seems to agree that it is about time.

Cuba has had a role in the life of my family on my mother's side. I used to go up into my grandparent's attic on the third floor and find baskets and other stuff relating to Cuba. I learned that my grandfather Roy Beal, had once managed the largest fruit plantation on the island of Cuba. This was before World War I. It seems that a few investors who called themselves the "Cuban Development Co." asked my grandfather to go down to Cuba and manage the plantation for four months. He stayed four years, and only returning with his wife and children to America when the Lusitania was torpedoed. My uncle Tom was born there, which caused him much trouble later. My mother was fluent in Spanish when she came back to the U.S. at age seven.

There are old photos of the plantation house, grandpa and grandma in a horse drawn buggy, and some others too. Grandpa had a lot of stories to tell me. One story was about the time when he had to blindfold the eyes of the horse and lead him into the river to swim across, with my grandmother in the buggy. It was night time too. And then the story of how the Cubans burned their cane fields using a turtle. I wrote about this somewhere earlier on my blog. Another story was about some college boys who had been sent down to Cuba by the owners of the company. There had been the death of a Cuban man, and the boys climbed into the empty coffin as a prank. They died sometime later back in the U.S.  Curse? who knows?

Grandpa had large hands and as they filled boxes of oranges to be shipped to New York, he would hold three in each hand when counting and filling boxes.

I have another connection with Cuba. When I was a small boy, I was befriended by a Spanish-American war veteran called Jake Lightfoot, who had fought in Cuba. I wrote about this too, earlier on my blog.

Another brush I had with Cuba was when I was in the Navy. I remember how we cheered Fidel Castro in his victory over the dictator  Batista. Then Castro declared himself to be a Communist. This led to the Russian missile crisis and the embargo. I have come full circle. I would like to visit there again someday.

     Aloha
     Grant
 

Write On

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              Write On
I learned recently that cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in the elementary  grades of school. How very sad. Good penmanship was required. Examples showing students the proper way to form letters was always placed above the blackboard. Students would first use pencils, and later steel pointed pens dipped in ink wells.The story was always told that some boys would dip the braids of girls in ink wells, seated in  front of them in the long rows. I doubt this. Imagine a girl returning home with an ink braid. Justice would have been quickly served upon the boy who had done it.

Thinking about writing with pens brings to mind a fact that most right-handed people would not know. You all may have seen a left-handed person writing with his hand bent like a claw. He is not a cripple. He is simply avoiding getting ink on the bottom of his hand. If you write with your right hand, the ink flows behind your pen when you write. A person writing with his left hand simply plows into what he is writing. Hence the bent wrist and the awkward position. My father began writing with his left hand until he was beaten with rulers until he was made to change to using his right hand, just like everybody else. He said that it would not happen to me, and it didn't. And come to think of it,I never had a single teacher in any of the many grade schools I attended, who was left-handed.

Not much progress had been made with writing materials beyond the steel tipped pens. But it was an improvement over the knife-sharpened goose quill pens that were in use before. And it made many geese much happier.  

Then came the fountain pen, a pen with a bladder inside holding ink. The pen would be dipped into a bottle of ink, and a lever on the side of the pen would crow the ink from the bottle up into the pen. Ink came in many different colors. My grandpa Joe wrote his letters with green ink. I never knew anybody else who did so. All was well until people began riding on airplanes with fountain pens. The air pressure inside the plane's cabin caused the bladder of fountain pens to deposit ink in your purse or in your shirt pocket. These pens were followed with pens that used a plastic ink-filled cartridges.    The final, and so far the best       development is a pen which uses a roller ball to deposit ink on paper. The use of fountain pens faded away as people embraced ball-point pens. Though expensive, fountain pens  are still to be found. Here in Hawaii some craftsmen make ball-point pens out of our Koa wood, and they are beautiful.

I feel I have to mention here that during the race to  space with the Russians, the U.S. spent a great deal of money to come up with a pen that would write in space. The Russians used a pencil.

      Aloha
      Grant
 

The Old House on Portage Lake Road

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 The Old House on Portage Lake Road

The events I relate here cannot be confirmed by any camera, as they only exist in my memory.

Portage Lake Road slowly uncoils and  lazily makes its way to end at Portage Point Inn. The narrow two-lane road passes three very large summer homes facing the lake. The first one is red painted and a man is trying to mow down the tall grass. The neighboring house is painted white, while the third house is painted gray.These are the homes of "summer people," my grandmother said. Making a clear distinction between them and the loyal local residents.

The road continues twisting and turning until on the left are clusters of cabins and a sign reading "Little Eden," a Brethern Church camp. Next to the road is a water fountain surrounded by large stones set in cement. The fountain is an  artesian well and as such, never ceases to flow. Cars often stop so their passengers can take a drink.

Directly across the road is the old house.
The driveway is simply two sandy tracks  between tall grass. And when the ignition of the car is turned off, I hear the deep throated sound of gushing water. It is coming from a rusty right-angled pipe with its green algae tongue moving in the water. On a broken branch hangs a glass. Water has been coming from this pipe for years and is probably from the same aquifer as the fountain across the road. And the scene is framed by an over hanging branch from the nearby crab apple tree.

I see grandpa and grandma coming down the hill to greet us. Grandma is  wearing a print dress covered with an apron. She is small,with a hump back, and  her dark hair is in a net, and is wearing wire-rimed glasses. Grandpa Joe is her third husband. Grandpa Joe is from Canada,and a millwright by trade. He used to cook on a lumber schooner, hauling lumber to Chicago.  He is a short, stout man wearing bib overalls and a battered gray felt hat. He too wears wire-rimmed glasses. He has a glass eye, having lost a eye in an accident. His face is covered with white whiskers.
Looking up the hill in the distance is a small building called an apple house. And behind the main house is a long low red building where the outhouse is located. The main house is sided with imitation  yellow brick siding. Climbing the hill to the house I come to the single door and find a section cut from an inner tube nailed to the door,   which covers a pad of paper and a string with a pencil attached.

Inside is a room with a cement floor and bare 2x4's outlying a bathroom when finished. Passing into the kitchen I see a round table under the kitchen windows surrounded by tall flat-backed dining room chairs which grandma had painted bright blue. Another unusual feature was a large mangle against one wall. This is a rotary ironing machine used to iron bed sheets and other cloth. Grandma was a good cook and once cooked at the Portage Point Inn. One thing she did which I always liked was that she would  spread  white frosting on the top crust of pies she had baked.

The large living room contained an oil stove, and in one corner a strange-looking  chair as the focal point of the room. Dark, lathed-turned arms and legs. Uncomfortable to sit in. And directly above a couch, a large 1920's era picture of Cleopatra on a barge.

Off the living room and behind the oil stove is the bed room. Twin beds with two mattresses on grandma's bed with a feather bed on top.  

Leaving the house I see on my right thick patches of sumach and poison ivy. A path between the tall grass leads to the garage and grandpa's wood shop. Next to the path on the right are old neglected apple trees. Three  of the antique varieties are "Grimes Golden,""Wolf River," and "Northern Spy."

Before sliding the door open to the shop, I want first to go over to the apple house.The building has a concrete basement and a room above that is filled with furniture,stacks of fine china dishes, and oil paintings in frames. All these things were received by Grandpa in lieu of cash payment when he was building a cottage for some wealthy clients from Chicago, and the stock market crashed.  Grandpa had built several cottages along the shore of Lake Michigan.

Inside grandpa's shop there were saws and other equipment, and a large number of wood planes. On his lathe grandpa turned bowls and lamps.

Outside again, an abandoned green house attached to the garage wall. And across the driveway a small log shed which once was the home for Patsy, a milk cow. Not far from the log shed is a small log dam spanning a stream. It was here that I caught my first native trout. The flesh of this trout is pink, not white as is seen in planted trout.

Next,I turn and enter a small stand of Poplar and White Birch trees. There is absolutely no sound to be heard. Total silence. The rich small of the poplar trees. I am reminded of the poem "Cool Tombs," by Carl Sandburg. One line of verse reads:" Pocohantas, lovely as a poplar..." Looking across a small field of red raspberries and black berries I see a large log cabin sitting on a rise of ground.
Crossing the field of berries I reach to log cabin, with its empty eyes staring across the tops of the trees to the lake beyond. The large logs are smooth and gray from years of weather. There is no cement between the logs either. I enter the single door and see the start of a stone fireplace, with only three courses cemented in place. The owners of the log house are absent, but their signatures are written in the sand floor. A raccoon and a fox surely, but never a bear.

Sometimes when sleep  fails me I retreat to the small house with its imitation siding, and the many out buildings. The large abandoned log house in particular. Recalling this time in my life, always brings me peace.

        Aloha
        Grant