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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
August 16, 2009
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2009 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Girl on Tire Swing, 2003
© 2003 by Bud Grossmann
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THRIFT STORE PURCHASE
Friday, 11:00PM
Today my beloved ex-mother-in-law turned eighty. Yesterday at St. Vincent’s, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Debbie, I purchased a Look Magazine dated April 29, 1969. Two stacks of Looks were on the thrift store shelf, and this particular cover, on the top of one stack, caught my eye because it featured an article about Hawaii. “Paradise in Peril?” asked the headline. The top of the other stack featured “The Kennedy Children”; I snatched the Hawaii issue and looked at no others.
Newsstand price was 50 cents, and St. Vincent’s price forty years later was 50 cents, so, as a collectible, it is holding its value well. Perhaps, in twenty or forty years, when I tire of reading this Look, someone will offer me half-a-buck, and I’ll say, Sounds fair.
I bought the magazine, its colors dulled but its corners sharp, without even opening it. Today, though, I laid it on my dining table and carefully turned the brittle pages, and guess what, Deb! I found a photo of Nuuanu Valley, a view from Alewa Heights or from an aircraft, presented as an example of Honolulu’s urban sprawl. I looked for the banyans and monkeypods of Queen Emma’s Summer Palace and, beyond them, the housing development where Darlene’s parents bought, in 1968, the then-new house in which Mom still resides. I mailed a card to Mama Lum on Tuesday, and this afternoon I phoned her home but reached her voice mail. She called back this evening (Wisconsin Time), and we had a pleasant, easy-going conversation. Mom told me of a new pursuit, line dancing. I’d have thought she said lion dancing, but Jeffrey had already told me what she’s been up to when he called me on my birthday, in June. Mom dances three or four times a week and is hardly home, so I should keep in touch and call her cell phone, she said, and leave a message if she doesn’t answer. I forgot to ask how Rose Anne is doing now, from Popo’s point of view.
I thought about the date, April 29, 1969, and realized that Michael Diamond turned twenty years old that day. He was in Hawaii then; maybe I’ll ask if he’d like this Look. Twenty, Deb, as you yourself may have good reason to recall, was Hawaii’s legal age for drinking at that time. Late one night in May of 1969, on the edge of the pavement on a North Shore curve of Kam Highway, Mike, ever straight and sober but riding a bicycle lacking lights or reflectors, got clipped sharply by a passing car. In a backpack he had a Miranda Sensorex my father had bought him in Japan; it was smashed beyond repair. Mike broke a leg and nearly bled to death. He was still a military dependent then, but his family had been transferred off the island. He spent several months in Tripler. In July, Gary Gierlinger and I vacationed on Oahu, and we took Mike out on a day pass a time or two.
Are you willing to hear more? At the time of the bike wreck, Mike was facing charges in Kansas for draft resistance. He’d gone to KU a year. He had applied for c.o. status, but it had been denied. Mike’s shattered femur rendered him physically unfit for military service, but the government proceeded with the prosecution all the same. I don’t recall exactly how this all played out; I don’t remember if he went to jail.
I do remember well that we—Gary, Mike, and Dave—drove to Kailua one day in a borrowed car to see someone from our high school class, Mike’s and mine, I mean, at Halsey High. Or maybe not. I guess we went to see an SDS guy with whom Mike was acquainted, but the guy happened to be married to Akiko Lovell, who’d gone to school with me and Mike. The SDS guy wasn’t home, but we stayed and chatted with the wife. Akiko, in third grade, in Yokohama, had been my girlfriend, or so I have ever since with certainty imagined. I remember Akiko singing “You Are My Sunshine” while I pushed her gently on a schoolyard swing. At the end of that school year, my family moved to Tokyo, and I lost touch with Akiko until eight years later, in 1966 in Honolulu, on the first day of classes in our senior year at Admiral Halsey. I recognized her name at roll call in American History class. Akiko, alas, did not remember me, not even when I mentioned the love song and the swing.
On that summer day in Kailua when Mike and I were twenty, and Gary a mere nineteen, Akiko wore a faded yellow bikini, and she lay in a hammock in the shade of a pair of coco palms. She was nine months pregnant, or very nearly nine. Japanese-and-haole, she was pretty and petite except for bountiful belly and breasts. I had a camera, my twin-lens Ricoh, and color film, but—I wish I could say why—I took no pictures of the lovely mother-to-be.
You are aware, Debbie, that I could babble more. But it’s nearly one a.m., and the woman in my bed is murmuring as I type here at my desk. Goodnight, Ms. Albertini. Please call when you arrive in Sacramento.
Love,
David
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