I’ve been scanning and organizing old photos.
This is my favorite photo of my mom. Since her birthday was two days ago, she would have been 96, I thought I’d post it.
In March of 1983, my parents decided to take my little brother and me to Hawaii. I don’t know why. It was over my Spring Break, so Mom had some kind of plan. My little brother was turning 16, so maybe she didn’t want to leave him home alone and she didn’t want to keep an eye on him in Hawaii.
Quite a few people were selling drugs on Waikiki Beach, so having a chaperone for him was prudent. I get a lot of bad ideas, but drugs aren’t one of them.
Mom would get bad ideas too, but she was stubborn and didn’t like to admit it. Brother and I were keeping ourselves entertained on the beach, but Mom thought we should do a family outing to see the island. Her bad idea was that we’d hop on a city bus, and see Oahu that way. It sucked, and after an hour of boredom, brother and I were going to get off and take the next bus back to Waikiki.
This was only a couple of years after the airlines were deregulated, so people who vacationed in Hawaii were loaded and everything was expensive. Dad had worked for American Airlines, so we flew standby and got a huge discount, like 80%, on the hotel. Dad thought we should spend the money for a rental car for the day, but Mom thought that was a silly waste of money. Let’s just take the bus.
We all got off at Tuli’s, and waited for a bus going the other way.
I adore how Mom is turned away from the camera, with her chin up in defiance. “You don’t like my idea, so you can all go pound salt. I’m having a cigarette.”
Mom loved to smoke. Dad had quit a half-dozen years earlier, but Mom kept it up until her heart attack when she was 80. I was surprised that she quit at that time. Her expected logic would have been that with a triple bypass, she should be good to smoke for another 80 years.
If Mom wasn’t pissed off about her dumb idea, she would have been browsing Tuli’s, bought some garish trinket, then chat up a Hawaiian lady, and become best friends.
On the way back to Waikiki, Ken and I had our own bad idea. We wanted to climb Diamond Head, so we left the bus a couple of stops early, cut through a bunch of yards, and just started hiking up. There were a couple of times where we were in danger of falling to our deaths. When we got to a ledge that was 10 feet long, 2 feet wide, with a 30oslope, I decided we shouldn’t risk falling to our deaths. We turned back, hiked to the road, and walked to the hotel.
Now I know that Diamond Head is a state park with a trail leading to the top, but this was in 1983, when everyone was dumb. We didn’t have the internet, and anyone you asked was trying to sell you something. The only way to research was to get a guide book. We hadn’t done that.