Da Kine Stories

1950s Royal Hawaiian Hotel: Pink Palace of the Pacific

The wind would whistle and pile up mini snowdrifts on my inside window sills as I snuggled in my bed under a 3 ½ stripe Hudson Bay wool blanket* listening to “The Arthur Godfrey Breakfast Club", brought to you, live, from the beautiful Pink Palace of the Pacific, The Royal Hawaiian Hotel!” The Nor’easter would rattle the ancient storm windows of our 200 year old home in Yarmouth, Maine while I wafted away on ukulele music into the balmy Hawaiian sunshine. Back in the ‘50s, before we had a TV, I promised my twelve year old heart that someday I would get there.

In the 60s I was married and hoping to conceive our second child when one cold February day my astronomer husband received an invitation to bring his brand new PhD expertise to the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. “If we go, we’ll have to postpone having our next child,” he said. It was a no brainer for me. I had half an inkling that I might be pregnant already, but who cares when Hawai’i calls. We signed on.

There were many cloudy night delays in finishing the observation data for the PhD, so it was the middle of November by the time we landed in Honolulu. From my first breath of the sweet, warm Hawaiian air I was viscerally in love. Baptized with the misty blown rain they call Hawaiian blessing, I felt a powerful sense of my soul coming joyously to rest.

Ka`a`awa Beach on Windward O`ahu

To get there, I had convinced the airlines that I was seven months pregnant, only fudging by a month or so. My daughter was born three weeks after we got there. My husband and I had very different experiences of Hawai`i - he commuting daily along a narrow, winding windward O`ahu “Highway” into the traffic of Honolulu while I played with our children on the beaches; he making his way through the politics of academia and I making friends with local rural Hawaiians. I thrived in the climate, he had constant sinusitis. A year and 10 months later, his job was so frustrating that when he received a call to accept a teaching position back home on the east coast, we decided to take it.

In spiritual ways, I have never left Hawai’i because my soul still lingers there, bringing me strong visual memories as I fold laundry or do the dishes. I did run away to my heart’s home in 1989 and had16 wonderful years working and retiring there, but left again in 2006 "to be near family." I yearn to return.

Da Kine Stories are about my Hawai`i adventures and my many beloveds in Hawai’i. Some are written especially for Hawaiian children. Those may be a bit puzzling, even difficult reading, for those who are unfamiliar with island ways and speech. With no apologies, I indulge my Hawaiian heart with the pleasure of writing Hawaiian style about Hawai`i and Hawaiians. Working there for the Queen Lili`uokalani Children’s Center, I had an eleven year tutorial in Hawaiian culture. May some of what I experienced and learned appeal to you, perhaps even entice curious folks on the United States continent to learn more about the Polynesian culture and the true aloha of the gentle indigenous people of these breathtakingly beautiful and most isolated of the Pacific Islands.

“Da kine” is the Hawaiian equivalent of the American “you know,” as in,  “Please pass me da kine...da kine...da hotsauce?”

*I was told that way back when the 3 ½ broad, black dyed strips on one edge of a Hudson Bay Blanket meant that it had cost the buyer 3 ½ beaver pelts. 



Da Kine Stories by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For permission to use contact randmxcentric@gmail.com