And now ... you are here.
Sam's phone vibrated and chirped at exactly the same time as Iliahi's whistle cut across the distance of two vendor's stalls. The chirp -- Song Sparrows -- was his tutu's ring. She'd recorded the Song Sparrows in the woods where she lived. Sam turned it into "Tutu's Ring" on his phone. She was sending him a text, with pictures. The two thousand mile separation between this boy and his grandmother was a heart-skipping distance. Never seen, but never not felt.
"I think this connection," Sam's dad used to joke, "started when he'd try to eat the old iphone ... when Mom was on the screen." Mamo Black knew better, "That, began way before the iphone, honey." Mamo Black's right hand was pulsing over her heart. Mothers know things about love and this mother was particularly atuned. Having never seen and never allowed to ask questions about her mother, Sam's mother developed her unseen senses ... love and intuition were boundless, but they required space. Mamo Black learned early to make space for love. Intuition happened. Mamo knew things without needing reasons. The computer engineer part of Sam's dad cross-referenced all information. For all the details involved in coding language for computers, the man had Uranus sextile his Virgo mind. Revolutionary elements tweaked his take-care-of business thinking at mysterious times.
Samuel's birthday was a few months away. Before the end of this year he'd be twelve. That meant, next year he started to step outside the circle. Twelve was an even number, connected it was a circle. Thirteen meant it was like the moon shell, a spiral growing beyond a closed loop. All of these thoughts raced easily through his young mind. He and his Tutu had talked about this since ... when did they start to talk? Sam smirked and saw Iliahi closing in with his own circle. The Sing Clan was here.
"Wow, glad we saved some bread," the twins said in unison. "If Aunty Pualani doesn't get her sour dough that would not be a pretty picture."
There were eight of them this afternoon, including Iliahi. Sam spoke first, "So you must have done good cleaning yard." Sam looked at his phone to check the time. It was just after four.
"Pretty good," Iliahi shrugged, looked to see where Aunty P. was then quickly showed Sam his newest blisters. "We putting in new fence with the o'o. Had to dig up the rotten wood first but."
"Where the small fries?" Sam loved the toddlers. Iliahi motioned sleep, then said, "Down for the count." There was plenty of yard to clean, and everything done to Pualani Sing's yard was done by hand and with hand tools. She did not own, nor allow gas-powered or motor-driven tools on her place. Weeders Ho'i, the name of her business. The play on words was everything. The weeders returned, again and again. That's the ho'i part. The even dozen who lived in the old beach house were the weeders, and when they weren't weeding other people's yard they weeded and worked their own.
The small business started at about the same time Mamo Black's grandfather showed up at Pualani Sing's beach house in his white Datsun truck. Best guess, 1982. The bed was filled with metal rakes, two pitch forks, three kinds of shovels, a lidded metal tool box, two buckets with shears and scissors for both lefties and right-handers and two heavy o'o the digging sticks.
Mamo Black's grandfather had been a renegade and a beach boy. Too easy to call him good-for-nothing, because he was good at many things: he was a city boy, loved the ocean, women and could imitate any bird after hearing it once. Back then, Mamo's grandfather was called "Black." His arrow straight thick hair and eyes deep as night sealed the nickname. No one actually knew, or perhaps couldn't connect him to his real name, Kaulana Black. Son of a famous and most loved minister of the Kaumakapili Church in the Kapalama neighborhood. He finished high school, barely, but had by that time developed a new kind of love. It was Clarence Pang, his high school shop teacher who saw Kaulana Black for the man he would become: a man who loved tools.
Kaulana Black loved and left more women than he cared to admit. He loved women, but rarely stayed with one.
"If you make babies," his Ma told him before she died in his arms when he was fifteen, " take care them. Whateva," his mother's breath came in small waves, "you gotta do. Take care your babies" The cancer was supposed to be cured. All those people at his father's church prayed day and night for her, and the treatments should have worked. How holy was this God his father kept talking about? Kaulana Black never forgave his father, and the Hawaiians of his congregation. He's never stepped into a hospital nor a doctor's office. The beach became home, his church, his healing place.
By the time "Black" turned twenty-five he was known by all as "Pops". For obvious reasons the many children who looked undeniably like him called him "Pop" not Dad, or Daddy, just "Pop." To keep his promise to his Ma when he wasn't in the ocean or keeping company with a woman, he was within six to ten feet of Clarence Pang. The Pang's garage became his job shack: the tools hanging on peg-board or on the old workbench kept his hands busy and slowly a neighborhood became Kaulana Black's yard family. One yard at a time, usually one full day at a time, he cleaned/raked, weeded, trimmed hedges and mango trees, and hand-mowed. No poisons. Clarence Pang used white vinegar and a squirt of dish soap in a gallon jug of water, or plain salt if, and when, weeding wasn't enough.
"Who said, that one is weed, anyway?" Clarence Pang came from a family of Chinese herbalists ... growing medicine and making soup, tea, poultice. The shop teacher kept a full-plate curricula going day in and day out. He and his wife Alma had no children. "Chicken pox when I was small. The kids at school began our family." Alma Lee was a music teacher. Her love was singing. When she first heard Kaulana whistle, she fell in love, as did any woman, girl or mahu who heard his trill like a bird loving the first sighting of a new day.
"E Kaulana," Clarence Pang knocked on the garage door. The sun was not even blinking his way over the Ko'olaus. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder this time. Clarence's usual voice was somewhere just this side of a whisper.
Still sleepy from a late night out, Kaulana slid the old garage door -- a barn door -- a remnant piece of dairy farming history. "Morning Uncle. What's up?"
"Let's go for a ride." Clarence had a thermos and two tin mugs.
"Coffee with lots of milk and sugar." He knew how the boy had always loved instant coffee with his evaporated milk. Clarence Pang grew up with Kaulana's Ma, knew her as a sister and knew her morning habits though he never expected her love in return. "Us Pakes and Hawaiians, always had this ... magnet thing going ya?" Clarence voice would drop off at this point. His near whisper thinning to clouds.
"Where we going?"
"Neva mind. Bring towel and that sweat shirt." He pointed to the brown hoodie dangling near the shovels.
This was the morning of Kaulana Black's twenty-first birthday. The ride they would take was in a white Datsun truck that would need some body work, but had a good engine. The ride was to Makapu'u Beach on the windward side of O'ahu.
"This going be your truck Kaulana," Clarence patted the dash pulled up to a place just above the Naupaka growing on the sandy dune looking over the horizon and Manana, Rabbit Island.
"Something else Kaulana." Clarence never called him anything else. "Your Ma loved that name," he'd remind the boy anytime someone called him Black, or later Pops. "She loved your father, and she loved you. Same same. Same name. Same kine love." Those were a lot of words for a man who mostly whispered. The something else was a plain thick legal envelope with writing he recognized immediately. His mother had written, "For Kaulana when he turns 21." Inside was a set of keys and two folded documents. One was a copy of Kaulana Black's mother's Last Will and Testament. The other was a Deed of Title.
The two men sat on the hood of the white Datsun still warm from the drive along Bamboo Ridge and the beautiful coastline that never stopped creating magic in Clarence Pang's heart. They drank hot, milky sweet coffee as Kaulana Black learned he was now part-owner of a small business. His Ma and Clarence Pang had a dream together, and it included a way to always take care of the children. Before the sun was overhead on Kaulana Black's twenty-first birthday he watched Ka La, the Sun, rise, drank three mugs of sweet milky instant coffee, had his first car and keys to a small storefront in Kaneohe.
Pop's Hardware. The place was on a corner lot with an alley running back of it, divided in two by a back wall: upfront a small and tidy counter area and four walls of tools; only hand-tools, nothing powered by an engine or motor. The back wall was one of those Clarence Pang innovations.
"We going double wall this one," Clarence explained during the six weeks it took to transform the liquor store. "because we going use the back for repair the tools, and, cook when we get busy and cannot go home eat Alma's ono food." There was a soft and windy lilt to that comment. Gentle and sustaining love. So, the back room of Pop's Hardware was part repair center, part kitchen.
"Funny," Kaulana mused. "You and Ma owned a liquor story."
"Ya, we figured who better to sell beer and liquor than two tea-tottlers. The inventory was always safe with us." Clarence winked. Kaulana let out a whistle. He could see his Ma's face crumble with the sound. His heart broke a little more.
As Kaulana learned what tools could do the work he wanted to do: quiet, unencumbering (that was Alma's word) Kaulana preferred simple, and repairable he sometimes wondered how the business would live if people never bought any new ones. It was Clarence who taught him to notice how a tool fit the hand, and how the fit was connected: fasteners, bolts, washers, screws. Clarence also taught Kaulana to weld. Alma taught him to cook.
"You gotta be smart about fire. Always smarter than you, Kaulana. Fire. Get to know how the heat and metal marry." Again, these were a lot of words for a quiet man. But he never repeated himself, so Kaulana learned to listen carefully the first time.
Right from the start Kaulana and Clarence stocked tools that kids, or grown-ups with small hands could use easily. Kaulana had an older brother. "The scissors was my bruddah's idea. When he came back from Vietnam, cutting grass with scissors was his therapy. More cheap den one shrink, and if his hands busy no can drink."
The list of hand tools grew and changed a little over the years, but mostly, they were the same tools, cleaned, kept sharp and repaired and if they couldn't be repaired Pops had a source in America, a small company in Wisconsin that made tools right. Turns out the guy who made the tools was a war buddy of his brother's. "Matty" Mathew Paulson was a blacksmith before Vietnam, became a mechanic during the war; and knew metal like a lover.
These were stories the boys heard again and again at those family parties when more than soda and ice tea flowed. Aunty P. was a tea drinker but she didn't expect everyone to be. But what she did expect was no one getting 'stupid.' Any form of that just wasn't gonna happen.
Pualani Sing's thick wavy hair radiated like spun silver escaping from the wide-brimmed lauhala hat anchored with a long bronze hat pin topped with a small old ivory ball the size of a marble. Her eyebrows had thinned with time but the effect of her countenance was still no less dramatic because she was never without sunglasses as dark as you could buy them and the frames changed almost as often as she changed her tee-shirt. With mask in place (a copper printed cotton) her six-foot frame was super-sized and super-powerful.
"Aunty!" Sam's sister and brother shed any hesitation at the sight of the giant Hawaiian goddess. She was mush in their hands and the goddess loved the condition. If it was possible the wide luscious smile could get any bigger, the sight of the twin bake sales kids stretched her lip-glossed mouth from ear to ear and that's with a mask on.
"What's good? And where's your daddy?" Pualani Sing inhaled deeply when Sam sliced into the last round of ulu and rosemary sourdough.
"You going love this one Aunty. The black sesame seeds in the butter are ono."
"Can we get couple more loaves for this weekend?" she asked even before taking her first bite. "They would be great for sandwich. The weeders are celebrating. Kupuna-keiki hookup time." Mamo was listening to the banter and nodded across the table. There was that super-duper energy that surrounded the experience of Weeders Ho'i, and that energy grew with time. Or, was it just the woman who charged everything and everyone she touched with the mana?
Mamo asked, "How many now, Aunty?"
"You mean how many all together in the weeding gang?"
"Yeah, Maybe you could try the bagels for the kids. Same recipe, but we're making small kine goodies. The kids would like it."
"Sold! Our crew is now my even dozen plus eight to twelve aunties and uncles depending on their this and thats. You know, the stuff life throws at us when we blink," Pua paused for a long moment, trying not to complicate her answer with unknowns. "So let's say couple dozen bagels and two rounds. But the second question. Where's the baker man? I got a proposition for him." She circled her free hand (the other was holding one of those small sleeping fry toddler boys) around the brim of her hat, "Idea brewing in here and it's ripe."
Sam watched as Aunty Pualani took her first bite of liliko'i buttered rosemary and ulu sour dough. Then, he remembered to look at his Tutu's text and pictures "Clouds gathering. What are they saying, Samuel?"
