Lehua's FAQ

From now on, any question I get asked more than 10 times is going into this page. (And thank you sincerely for caring.)

I don't know. I've tried to say a little about that in Straight Answers to Hard Questions.

One day I sat and counted them up, including fosters, adopted, step, and came up with 31 (though the most at one time was only 10). (I only made one of them myself.)

Your house must be very crowded!

No -- every last one of them is out of the nest, I'm sorry to say.

Didn't that drive you crazy?

Only occasionally, mostly I loved it. They all took care of each other better than I did. I miss those days.

No. There are some specific men that I hate. But they're the exception.

Well, if you don't hate men, how come all your friends are women, and how come at the OPB you always sit with the women?

How come I spend so much time with women? Although I like men, I find I don't understand them very well. That's why I love to get those little funnies about men vs. women that go around on e-mail; I find them actually helpful in understanding men. I also appreciated those books of the "He Says/She Says" series. I've found few men who enjoy the things I like to talk about. For instance, my knowledge/attitude about sports is world famous:

But when I DO find men with common interests, I appreciate them very much.

Doug is really, truly, one of the goodest persons that ever evolved. Helpful, funny, smart, kind-hearted, and honorable. No, the other exes aren't bad, except for one. It all comes from a flip remark I made once, calling them "The Good, The Bad, The Rich, and The Unacknowledged." Jim is also a very nice person, also very honorable, helpful, and kind-hearted, and in addition, he blessed me with fine stepchidren. I've been pretty lucky in whom I've associated with. With only one exception.

Well, if Doug (or Jim) is so great, how come you didn't stay married?

I don't know. I've got a work-in-progress of trying to find out. I call it failure to thrive, like trying to grow an orchid on the tundra. I do poorly in captivity. Pandas eat umpty-three different kinds of bamboo, and only the panda knows what kind and when, and I'm sort of a panda in that respect.

Come on, tell the truth, so how many times HAVE you been married?

Nope. Too embarrassing. Suffice it to say that though I suffer in captivity, I'm also an optimist, and that's a rather doom-ful combination. There was a time when I tried to learn how to just have affairs rather than get married, but that didn't work well for me either. For now I'm on hold. I finally figured out that any woman who couldn't be happy with Doug couldn't be happy with anyone, so for some time I've been in pondering mode (and might remain there forever).

Literally? Sort of a beige, with both peach and olive undertones. Racially? I don't know. There was a lot of argument at the time as to who was really my father. Now, everyone who might have known is dead, as is the truth. So I will never know.

In terms of nativity, culture, upbringing, I am Hawai'ian. Except for a short jaunt when I was 2, I never set foot off O'ahu until after I graduated from highschool, and even then it was only to go to Kauai. But like most other light-skinned, non-rich Hawai'ians I was beaten up for my color on a regular basis. So where do I belong? Probably nowhere.

Bob:  When you return to Hawaii, you must feel about like I do when I return west - "how could I ever have left?"

Well, yes and no.  Certainly, my Hawai'i albums are a love song to Hawai'i.  I've created an equivalent love song to Coastside, which I'll publish one day.  Hawai'i is being pulverized, obliterated.  The day came when I couldn't bear to watch.  When my sister and I were teenagers, we & our girlfriends would camp on the beach, sleeping without tents.  If a gang of teenage boys came along, we were delighted, and exchanged phone numbers, there on the beach, at midnight.  When I finally left Hawai'i, we were up to a rape a day.  That's a lot, for a 40-mile patch.  As you can imagine, sane people no longer enjoy the beach at midnight.  This is just one of many terrible changes.

I lived in a very nice neighborhood, similar to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.  Yet, twice in my last two years I couldn't get home due to cordons for hostage/shooting situations.  Several times a week, I would watch rival gangs beat one another literally to death in the streets below my apartment, once even seeing a person run amok with a machete and attack passing cars, ending shot to death in the intersection.  If this was going on in my neighborhood, you can imagine what goes on in the bad neighborhoods.

We liked to go to Ala Moana, the only more-or-less "local" beach on that side of the island.  In my last 5 years there, 3 times we arrived to find crime-scene tape everywhere, for yet another woman raped and murdered in the park.  One day I came to work, glossy high-rise in the nice part of downtown, to find police everywhere.  A woman who worked there had been raped and murdered in our bathroom.  It turned out to have been our security guard who did it.  Mind you, the same security guard I'd run to for help on the numerous occasions when I'd been threatened by roving cars of hoods when catching the bus late at night.  These things didn't happen every day, but often enough that I couldn't take it anymore.

For many years, one could retreat/escape to the "country".  But the country got slaughtered as well.  When the time came that there were Hicks homes in Mokuleia, MacDonald's in Kahuku, breakins and carjackings in Sunset Beach, I knew there was nowhere to go.  Going to an outer island for retreat is not an option, since we have the highest air-mile in the world, and extremely low pay.

I was still married to Doug when I came here to Coastside.  I remember the first time I saw mountain ranges without houses on them -- I was struck dumb.  We passed a beach where someone was riding a horse, and I said to Doug, "My God -- that would have killed 2000 people back home!" (at Ala Moana, you have to search for quite some time to find space on the sand big enough for your beach towel).  Coastside reminds me of the north shore when I was a baby -- no fast food, no nothing, just dunes and scrub and wild flowers.  You can see the ocean from the road.  It soothes my soul.

Yes, I get homesick, wildly painfully homesick.  I miss my friends, miss my culture, my food, my language, miss things being the right colors, miss knowing where I am, miss everything.  But a morning doesn't break here, Coastside, that I don't look around me and know that I made the right decision.

I've written up my both my intentions and my how-to of this website at Raison d'être. Please let me know if there's anything I didn't cover.