Passing-Thought

2004 Hawaii Trip (Friday & Saturday, May 21-22)

Friday evening we said our "farewell" to Harlan & Dana since they had only agreed to let us stay with them for the first week. Before we left, I cleaned the bathroom, washed the bedsheets, and left a note: "Thanks for putting us up (and thanks for putting up with us)".

First, we went to the Crossroads Coffee House at Scoffield Barraks Army base. It is a Christian ministry which used to focus on single soldiers, but now it also ministers wives and children of soldiers are in Iraq. I had a latte while Bill had a fruit drink. After Bill showed some little kids up on how many mini-basketball goals he could make in 1 minute, he beat me at a game of pool. We helped the staff clean up afterwards and headed over to Pastor Pete's.

Bill had planned to ask Pastor Pete if we could stay with him, but Pete was sorry to inform us that he had already promised to host a Campus Crusade missionary. But he did remind us of some things we could help him with at the church building construction site, so we planned to help out Saturday morning. We said that it was okay if he could not provide us shelter. We could just sleep out in the car in the driveway. After Bill menaced Pete's personal administrator Cecil, we decided it would be safer to stay somewhere else.

We found lodging at the Navy base at Pearl Harbor in the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). The apartment was nice, especially for $25/night.

Saturday morning, we went to Pastor Pete's house and he sent us to City Mill (home/garden/hardware) store in a pickup truck to find some trash bags, before meeting him at the church construction site. At City Mill, I called and asked Pastor Pete if he could bring some sun-block from his house, and he suggest that I also look for a hat. So I asked a man there where the hats were. The garden hats reminded me of what chinese rice farmers wear. Unfortunately they didn't have a small size. The man asked if there was anything else he could help with, so I asked him if they had a Hanzo sword. At first he didn't understand what I was asking, but then he said, "No, I think you need to ask Uma Thurman for that."

We met Pastor Pete at the construction site and he showed us what needed to be done. The first thing we did was pick up several pieces of scrap metal, pieces of wood, and boxes to take to the dump. Then Bill wacked weeds while I weeded the flowers. Scott & Athen passed by on their motorcycle and waved. (Apparently Scott had been doing this kind of stuff while Bill was gone. So he was glad to have a break.) Then we loaded up the back of the pickup with some cinder blocks for Pastor Pete's back-yard. Apparently Pete's next door neighbor had complained that his air-conditioner unit was too loud, so Pete went out of his way to create a sound-box for it with the blocks, so they could run the air-conditioner at night.

Bill and I mowed Pastor Pete's yard and he provided us dinner--chicken salad. Pete had felt bad that our meal on Wednesday at Long John Silver's had made me sick, so he wanted to give me something with more green and less grease. Not bad. We helped Pete's wife Martha with the kitchen. It was not long before we started talking about relationships and then she asked me whether or not I was interested in someone and about the kind of girl I was looking for. (Bill tells me she is matchmaker minded.) We talked about that for some time, until I asked her about her thoughts on the courtship vs. dating issue. She seemed a little defensive when I tried to argue the courtship line (though I did not know it well enough to defend it).

To be quite honest, Friday & Saturday nights seem jumbled in my mind, but to the best I can recall, on Saturday Bill drove around several places and neighborhoods he had known. After walking on a couple of military beaches, we visited the family of his friend Clark. Clark showed us his civil-war industrial-strengthed iron coffee grinder and let us taste his home grown cherry tomotoes. His accent reminded me of my uncle Jerry, so I asked him if he was from Broklyn. He told me he was from that region in New York, an Italian with catholic roots. We spent a while watching famous clips of rodeo bull riders. Each of those cowboys must have their own personal chiropractor. And I wondered what the average lifespan is for the rodeo clowns that throw themselves in front of the bulls to distract them from the dismantled bullriders.