i have a love/hate feeling about end of semester. on the one hand, i have great relief that school is done, for the moment. on the other hand, i miss my students. some classes are better (for me) than others. i try to form a relationship with each student, although it's not always possible. this semester i had them all write journals, as i am required to look at and grade according to writing samples. i usually require short papers. this time i went with the journals for all three classes, which meant i had about 70 to read. very time-consuming. but also enlightening. journals are like diaries. i had specific outcomes in mind when i asked for them. but students forget (i think) and they allow me to look inside their lives at all the things that concern them and inspire them. or sometimes keep them from doing their best.
i think my journaling is kinda personal, but not as personal as what my students share. i'm mindful, for example, that there may be any number of people reading this, most of whom i don't know. since nobody posts any comments, i can't really tell. but some of you do email me personally, and that i appreciate.
this morning one of my students came to visit. she has a lovely baby--cute, good-natured, just very sweet and appealing. every now and then, my grandma and elderly aunts used to say they were lonely for the feel/smell/touch of a baby. i never knew what that mean, being a kid at the time i heard them. i couldn't relate. when i got older i realized they were feeling the same thing i was feeling growing up, except i was lonely for my mother. my sister and i grew up in a house where everyone worked. i think we weren't the only ones. latch key kids hadn't been invented yet, so we weren't that. we were just lonely. my mother and father were both musicians, certified, card-carrying, union member musicians. she played, and still plays, ukulele, guitar, and stand-up base. i don't know what happened to her instruments after she went into lunalilo home (for aged hawaiians). my father drove the bus for HRT (honolulu rapid transit, back in the day), the forerunner of The Bus. he played guitar. they both sang. he was my adopted father, but he sang, so those genes got handed down from another line. but what am i saying? everybody sang. we sang. and we danced hula because my grandfather (daniel machado) had a brother who was married to lena machado (hawaii's songbird) and we ended up taking hula from her for a few years at their old homestead on john ena road. the kalauokalani ohana were cousins (wonder where they all are now?). so anyhow, i grew up in a house where everybody was always singing. my mother worked at the kodak hula show when it first started up. then when it folded, she worked as a casual musician for years and years. when kodak hula show started up again, she went back to work for them until they folded the second time. i have a postcard with all the musicians and dancers that i'll scan and paste into the next post.
after my father left HRT, he went to work for young brothers, part of dillingham corp. at the time. i remember him talking about "ben", like everybody at his level was buddies with ole ben dillingham. he may have been. i never thought to ask. my father was an oiler on a tugboat, the eleu. he went all over the world tugging barges here and there. he was gone for months at a time, sometime. but he always brought home presents. i guess those were the good times, but they weren't always. he stayed with young brothers until he retired. the not-so-good times stand out in my memory more, but i'm not quite ready to write about that now. suffice to say that my sister and i were subjected to a lot of abuse, both physical and sexual (her more than me, unfortunately for her). we dealt with it in different ways. i ran away a lot, especially as a young teenager.
we lived across the street from the waikiki library, in the little lane between the service station and the little market on the corner, my grandma's house. i ran away to the library--every single day. i began to read science fiction books--every book they had in the library. i would stay there for hours on end and read one book after another. eventually i started catching the bus to the main library downtonw because there were no other scifi books to read. as i got older, i realized that there were other people like me, who found a safe place in libraries and in other people's stories. that place saved me. and educated me. i learned how to read and digest and, eventually, write.
my sister was a different story. she was two years older and way more popular. she had choke boyfriends and hung out with the popular crowd. she went to roosevelt high school. then they rezoned the area and i went to kaimuki. at that time kaimuki was almost but not quite like mckinley high school--tokyo high. not many hawaiians at kaimuki. the school was sectioned off into upper, middle, and lower achieving students, with four levels in each section. so: U 1, 2, 3, and 4. M 1, 2, 3, 4, and L 1, 2, 3, 4. and then there was special ed. i was in U4, the lowest of the upper level. i was the only hawaiian. all the rest were orientals (didn't use the word 'asian' at the time), and maybe one haole. my sister didn't do that well academically, not that she cared. she was a partyer and had lots of friends. i was a loner and read a lot. all the time, actually. i couldn't wait to get home and finish a book, or to finish a book and run back to the library. obviously we came from a dysfunctional home! but my grandma was the best. she looked grouchy, but she wasn't. my grandfather was grouchy. my sister and i tried to steer clear of my father. and my mother was always working. i think you get the picture.
anyhow, we did the best we could. holidays were great because all the aunties, uncles and cousins would come over and everybody would cook and play cards (they were all gamblers), eat, drink (and drink, and drink, and drink), and sing. one of my cousins, kehaulani burgess, was a natural at the piano. we had a piano in the house and when she came over, she would sit down and start banging away. what a treat! and people would sing and be happy. in the evenings the adults got down to some serious card playing that lasted all day and all night and into the next day, and it was to our advantage to keep out of the way. so we played hide-and-seek in the yard and down the lane, and we did this all day and all night. if we didn't want to get a whack, we stayed out of the way of grumpy gambling adults. i remember those times fondly because i had fun. over the years, the family separated. the cousins grew up and moved away. i have no idea where most of them are now, but i certainly am lonely for those times.
