Letter from Seattle

7 November 2004

Nick....

Happy Birthday, son.

It was good to hear your voice. Things are going well here, as I said.

I try to remember how it was when I was about your age, and when I do, I don’t worry so much. Parents always want their kids to be happy and do well. Some parents just have strange ways of thinking about what it takes to be be happy, and they forget how it is to be young. I haven’t forgotten that. Your mom and grandmother worry about you more than I do regarding certain things. They are afraid for you, but I have faith in you. They just don’t want you to be hurt--well, neither do I, but pain comes and goes, and we just keep on keeping on. I know times are going to be hard for you now and then, but you are smart and strong, and if you keep your head you’ll do fine.

You can make some bad decisions that may cost you years of grief to straighten out. If I knew how to help you avoid that I would tell you the magic words, so you wouldn’t have to do any unnecessary struggling to regain ground you might not have lost if you’d made better decisions. But life is for living. That’s your job. All I can tell you that’s wise is this: don’t think like a criminal. That’s a dead end. No matter what, don’t steal and try not to lie very much. As you get experience (and I know you are getting that now) you will see what I mean.

I had great adventures when I was your age. In my case, many of them came to me while I was in the Army. Most of my Army days had not much to do with combat or Vietnam. I spent over 7 years and a soldier, and 17 months of that in Vietnam. I was decorated several times, but I was never a hero, just some dumbshit trying to do his job, so some other dumbshit wouldn’t have to come out there and do it for me.

But I was only a couple years older than you are now when I got out of the Army, and moved to Hawaii to go to school. Talk about a wow experience!

I wish I could compress the stories and squirt them to you in this note, so you could get a taste--just a touch of the flavor--of what it was like to be in my early twenties, and living in Paradise.

I guess this note is just a sort of one-sided conversation, so don’t worry that I’m getting senile. You know I like to write, I just don’t write letters very much, but I will, if you want to read them.

I’d like to tell you some of my stories. I have a lot of them. Not with moral endings, or with any themes for good living, but just stuff that happened to me. I have written a few of them down already, and they are in my computer down in Oregonoia. Might be, now that I have some spare time, I can type up a few more and send them to you from time to time while I’m up here in Seattle.

Maybe sometime I’ll tell you about how I lived on the flank of a volcano and grew million-dollar crops of Narcoweed for the Filipino Teixeira. His sons and I built a real grass hut in the middle of a field of wild orchids, near a small stream that washed down the hill on a gleaming bed of black pahoehoe, which is a kind of lava that’s so smooth that it looks like glass. His daughter, named Lanai, same as the island, came up from Keeau two or three times a month, to bring me food and sing with me while I played my guitar.

I was one of about ten farmers working for the the family--they didn’t like to have us going into town a lot, so they made up food for us, stuff like minced spiced meat and rice, and packed it into these neat bamboo tubes, about four inches across and maybe two feet long...a joint of bamboo, and sealed the ends the old way, by tying it with a ti leaf cover, using bamboo threads. The food would keep for days, and it was always delicious. They treated me and the other guys like family.

Sometimes two of the sons, Bong and John, would come up, and we would hunt the small Hawaiian pigs by running them down with their two little dogs. The boars were not as big as the California boars, and maybe got about three hundred pounds or so. The dogs were nuts, and real good hunters. They would run the pig to ground, and when it was winded, they would be running around it to keep it from regaining it’s strength before we could get there. When we got ready, John or Bong would whistle, and the little dogs would charge. One would catch the boar on the snout, and the other would catch him by the nuts. He’d be totally grossed out for about five seconds with pain and shock, and while he was confused, one of us would slip in and slit his throat with a long butcher knife. We were wild kids. This would confuse him, but it didn’t look like it hurt. When we did it right, he would bleed out in a few seconds, standing there while the dogs held him. Then we would field dress him and take him back to my hut.

We cooked the pig in a pit at my hut. Bury it wrapped in ti leaves, stuffed with seasoned breadfruit or jackfruit...soak this stuff in shoyu and butter and garlic, put in some other stuff in the pig’s ribs. Wrap it up good and cook it all day in the pit. Dig it up that night and pull the meat of with your fingers, it was so tender.

We’d sing music and talk story all night at those times--John, Bong, Lanai, maybe even the old man and some of the other brothers would be there. Life in Paradise.

I also had a great time while living in town...Honolulu and environs...but those are a whole other set of stories....

Ah well.

Enclosed is something you can take to the bank. Take care son.

I hope you have a good birthday

Love...