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At the Honolulu school I went to for my senior year, a lot of kids, and I was one of them, came from military families. Occasionally we would meet someone we had known at some other school at some other place in the world. First day of classes in the fall of ’66, in American History, when the roll was called and I heard the name Laverne Love, I recognized the girl who, in third grade in Japan, had sung “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” to me while I pushed her on a playground swing. When I reintroduced myself to Laverne in that Honolulu classroom, she did not, despite the promise in those lyrics, remember me after all, and I never had the pleasure of hearing her sing on a playground swing again. I did get to see her one time, though, briefly, on a swaying hammock. Stick with me a minute and I’ll tell you where.
After high school, I went to college in California, and my family moved to Virginia. In the summer of 1969, as it turned out, I unexpectedly came into a little money and did not need to look for a summer job as I usually planned to do. Instead, I went, with a California friend, back to Hawaii for a couple weeks’ vacation. The friend and I camped out in the Sunday School building of the church my family had attended. For the first few days, my friend and I got around by hitchhiking, or riding on city buses. But then, in church on Sunday, a friend of my parents offered us the use of a Rambler automobile that he happened to not need for the rest of our intended stay.
It so happened that one of my high school pals was in Tripler Hospital at that time, recuperating from injuries received a month earlier, when he, riding on a bicycle alone at just past dusk on a curvy stretch of country road, had been bumped hard by a rapidly moving police car. Bad break, and lucky break, as you might imagine. If you’re going to be hit by a cop, it’s best to be hit by a good cop, a cop who stops, one whose radio works properly even out in the sticks somewhere on Oahu. Soon as my California pal and I received the Rambler, we arranged to take our injured friend out of Tripler on a day pass. He was well enough to go.
Well, while the three of us were out and about that day, following the shoreline, the Hawaii guy suggested that we should drop in at a certain house where someone he knew from UH was staying. And oh, by the way, he said, this friend had married Laverne Love. So of course we did drop in. The UH guy wasn’t there, but Laverne was, exotic and long-haired, slender and sun-darkened, pretty much as she looked in American History class, but now she was barefoot and clothed only in a macrame bikini. She welcomed us from where she lay, relaxing in a hammock strung between two coco palms.
I did say slender, but not all of her, for Laverne appeared to be about nine months pregnant and notably larger in some ways than I’d ever imagined her. We three boys and the soon-to-be-a-mom chatted amiably for a bit, and then we boys resumed our travels.
Down the road a little way I realized I should have asked Laverne if she would like to sing for us, and I realized, too, with deep regret, that I had neglected to ask if I could take a picture.
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