I know that as a mother my kids growing up in Kauai seemed like the right thing to do.
I think we moved there from Cali because my kids were digging scary movies too much during the daytime, when I was a kid, we played outside. The kids in Venice were nasty and tried to beat my boyz up, so we moved to Kauai.
I felt very welcomed there, I had a dress store called Inside Out, and I did ok for about six years. My kids and thier friend ate alot of Pizza at Hanalei pizza, and we had a dalmatian named "Spot" that stole hamburgers from the bubba s burgers tourists, and liked to chase Mrs Ching s cats alot, he could not help it.
I guess when you live accross the street from the CHING YOUNG SHOPPING CENTER it is part of the life there to run into the occassional vagabond
My kids were always on a team, the hanalei surfing federation, or the soccer team or the rollar blade hockey team.I was always driving them to these places where they did these things.
Often, we would see "the walker" a woman that walked form north shore and back to south shore again, over and over. It was kind of wierd to be driving along in the dark, around a curve and to see a woman walking.
She did not talk to many people but I finally convinced her to come to our home and take a shower, maybe have a little dinner, wash her clothes.
She had showered, eaten, and I asked her "why she walked" all the time, and she said, "I cannot sleep"
So I asked her if I could see the bottom of her feet.
I saw a horrible set of blisters on those feet and the june cleaver mother , said "oh let me put some hydrogen peroxide on those blisters"
so I did , as the walking woman trusted me now.
She began screaming and my sons were looking on in terror, and also that knowing look that june cleaver will not be refused.
In a moment of "not knowing what to do"
I offered her a cookie while she was screaming.
My oldest son Jess later on said"I cannot believe you offered her a cookie when she was screaming"
He also explained in a rather compassionate way what was wrong with the walking woman, he said she has unreasonable fears, that she is afraid of wierd things like food, or living in one place.
There was another one I brought home, he was a young man that was wearing eyeliner, and he looked pretty lost.
Both my sons ran in my room and said in my face"how long will this one be staying here mom?"
I said one night seeing that having these people over was clearly bothering my boyz.
I guess it would not be fair to tell this story without giving more details about Hanalei in the 80 s. It was a sweet place, yet it had a little drug problem, and I lived next door to the craziest of all of them , the police commissoner s sons.My third husband was alot like having another kid, and he loved the chaos of my family, the people I drew in, and the bikinin shop and dress shop I had him working in two days a week. He was another con man, and I was very ambitious and refused to see the truth.He and the ching and chong were always up to no good.
There was a time when the bouncer from the tahiti nui a bar, next door to my house started bringing wet drunks to our house to dry them out.This is how we met blueberry Perry, who I made sleep under the stairs with the dogs.He actully got clean as a result of me not letting him in the house.
Today the jokes were flying and one of them was about double messages, and how do you speak alcoholic, just say two things in opposition to each other, and an alkie can figure out what ya mean, by going center with it.We always knew when it was two in the morning because we could hear the glass bottles breaking in the dumpster, or the chin and chong would be fighting back on the dirt road behind our house, and the cars to the drug dealers would be blaring music and we could hear the puddles. Every once in a while we would hear someone having sex. if we were lucky we would have a relatively peaceful night.
Everything was pretty groovy until the hurricane Iniki came and wiped us all out.Then we took the insurance money and went to thailand, and screened in the porch for an extra room.we thought we were pretty slick, which is why we were humbled.Gordon was the kind of guy that you could put in the corner and he would be happy all by himself. Problem was, no one else really existed. I know he loved my kids, he was a good step father except for his little drug problem, which it took me forever to figure out. He was pretty sneaky.At an rate my life is pretty cool now, and my kid is clean and sober, and my other son is a fgraduate form SFU in bussiness and Jess is a filmaker. I am about to graduate myself from Portland state so moving to the mainland was a good thing. There are so many stories I want to tell about Kauai.. like the pimp and hoe party, and the pamela tong and edward phase, but that will have to be next time.
i gotta do some stuff for school
