“Not for you, I replied. “You can live at home.”
“Oh I would LOVE to live at home! But not with my MU-THER”
“Great! You take care of the house and I’ll go to Hawai`i.”
“Would you really?”
“Would you really?”
“Deal!”
My daughter had been born in Hawai`i in 1967, three weeks after we arrived in Honolulu for my husband’s first post doctorate job. (See Da Kine Stories tab for that story.) He had been hired by the University of Hawai`i Institute for Astronomy to make a special instrument for the new telescope they were building. Twenty two months later that telescope still wasn’t finished. I was totally in love with Hawai`i, but he was understandably unhappy. When he was asked to return for a teaching position he had previously been offered by a local college, we went back to Annapolis, MD.
For 20 years after our 1969 return I was a home maker, then a graduate student, then a divorced single mom with a counseling career raising two children. For those 20 years I periodically asked my angels: “Some day could I go back to Hawai’i? I’d like to live and work on the windward side of O`ahu, right between the mountains and the ocean, and work with Hawaiian children.” The answer, I knew, was: “If you really want to you will - after you and their dad finish co-parenting your kids....”
Now here I was, on Shrove Tuesday 1990, getting off the plane in Honolulu - a fifty year old runaway with no house, no car, no job. The soft misty rain, blown from the windward side across the Ko`olau Mountains, baptized my return to my heart’s home. I knew one dear couple on O`ahu and another on the Big Island, friends for many years, all of whom had encouraged me and supported my yearning. They were wonderfully helpful and sympathetic when I told them I was numb and in shock. “I did it! I did it! OOOhhhh, what in heaven’s name have I done?”
“No worries – you’ll be fine. A move is always a shock. Rest, recover – you’ll be fine.” My friends continued their support as I went into an amazed, ecstatic, exhausted period of recovery. The O`ahu couple helped me find immediate temporary housing, a good bank for my wee start-up fund, and a car. When I visited my Big Island friends they hooked me up with another couple who offered me a long term apartment-sit in Waikiki.
Then, on my fifty-first birthday, I received a phone call from a Hawai`i acquaintance whom I had met at a conference several years back and with whom I had shared my dream of one day moving back to Hawai`i. She had promised it would happen so I had called her when I arrived to tell her I had fulfilled her promise. She was now calling to tell me of job openings at the Queen Lili`uokalani Children’s Center, a private child and family service agency funded by the Queen’s trust foundation to serve orphaned, part-orphaned, and destitute children "with preference given to those of aboriginal blood." I applied and was invited to interview on the island of Molokai and at the Hilo Unit on the Island of Hawai`i.
On my visit to the Friendly Isle, I was first toured around the island by a staff member of the Molokai Unit. Molokai is a rural gem with one main town three blocks long and two smaller settlements with one or two stores. There are no stop lights. It reminded me of where I grew up in Maine, minus the snow and I loved it. I bought my lunch at a local lunch-wagon. “Oh, you da new social workah at Queen Lili’uokalani?” Smiles. “Not yet.”
Eating lunch, I thought about that exchange. I was news. I remembered the eyes and ears of our small town in Maine and the opinions they engendered, how we called people that moved to our rural area “summer people” for the first five years that they were residents. I thought about how my college plans and rather intellectual affections for symphonies, libraries, and art museums - snob stuff - had not won me any magic with the local boys during high school. Except for topography and climate, Molokai was dearly familiar, but I realized I wouldn’t fit.
After lunch, the staff gathered and we had a very comfortable, informative meeting in which they told me about their work. When they asked me why I was applying to work there, I confessed my misgivings as well as my delight with the familiarity of Molokai. One of the social workers, a Japanese man, smiled and said it was good that I understood rural ways. He said it took the Hawaiians years to treat him like a local.
“You belong at the Windward O`ahu Unit,” he offered.
“Oh, I lived on windward O`ahu in the late ‘60s and that would be my idea of perfect, but there aren’t any openings.”
“There’s one this morning," he replied. "One of the social workers has moved up to be the Unit Manager at Windward and her job is open.”
Back on O`ahu a week later, I drove the 45 minutes out from Honolulu to Punalu`u and tears of amazement and joy sprang to my eyes as I entered the driveway of the Windward Unit. It was nestled behind a grove of banana trees, right between the mountains and the ocean.
By May 1, 1990, I was employed at the Windward Unit of the Queen Lili`uokalani Children’s Center, soon after had a corner office that looked out on the mountain and on the ocean, lived in a 20’x20’ cottage in Ka`a`awa, also right between the mountain and the ocean, and was working with Hawaiian children and their families.
My angels are awesome!
Runaway by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For permission to use contact randmxcentric@gmail.com
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