Time warp...

If you'll forgive me just one more brief Hawaii-related post--

We had a fairly short list of "must do's" for the trip--Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center were the top two on the list--but you know I just couldn't go to Hawaii without taking care of one family history related task.

In a previous blog, I wrote a little about my darling grandmother, Dardy, and shared a wonderful picture of her dancing the hula (complete with grass skirt and lei) on a deserted Hawaiian beach sometime around 1930. I neglected to mention that I also have a shot of my mother at about age 3 in much the same outfit, although clad just a tad more scantily (no top). We just could NOT resist trying to replicate those photos for the next two generations! (Oh, and thankfully, neither Dardy nor Mother wore coconut bras although those were readily available in all the shops!)

SO, without further ado, here are FOUR generations of Shutt women doing our best to hula amid the palm trees of Oahu...Mary Robbins Shutt, Margaret Osburn Shutt, Linda Susan Hardy VerHoef and Megan Trijntje VerHoef. (A special thanks to Annike for the clever photoshopping to convert our 2009 shots into sepia tones! Oh, and I should tell you the one of me is not for the faint of heart--you might wanna skip down to Megan in a hurry...;-)

By the way, we did not bring the grass skirt home and I'm SO sorry I didn't...Tuesday is Mardi Gras at the archives and I would have LOVED to wear it in the parade (and you thought librarians were boring--wait'll you see the pictures of THAT...)

Hallowed ground...

I have spent a good many years studying World War II history. Not exactly sure why it holds such a fascination for me--perhaps it has something to do with the way it makes me feel close to my Dad, who I lost in 1990.

At any rate, I've been extremely lucky to have actually visited a few places that have had special significance for me as I studied the war in the European Theatre. My 2006 trip to High Wycombe, England, included an unforgettable, behind the scenes, quite personal tour of the former 8th Army Air Forces Headquarters where my Dad spent the war. More recently, here at home, I've driven down the same streets that German prisoners of war walked through during the summer of 1945 on their way from their camp to the packing shed where they canned peaches in a tiny town just a few miles from my house--that experience ultimately led to my master's degree since my study of the camp was the topic of my thesis.

Many years ago I watched a television program about the USS Arizona. It included video of the drops of oil that are still rising to the surface from the wreckage, just a few feet below the water. Some say the drops are tears--that the ship still weeps for the loss of her crew. I was awestruck. Some years later, while visiting the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., Randy and I stood transfixed as we listened to videotaped interviews with the men who survived that day--first responders who talked about pulling men from the flaming water, sometimes leaving the victim's skin behind. One corpsman remembered that there were so many burn victims that day, the hospital dispensaries ran out of alcohol for sterilizing equipment and wounds. Some intrepid sailor solved the shortage by separating the local Officer's Clubs from their entire stock of booze; they used the stuff in place of medicinal alcohol.

Anyway, Pearl Harbor sort of became my quest. It's been at the top of my bucket list for decades now and I just wanted to see it more and more the older I got. It was everything I had heard about and more. One particular surprise was the fact that the introductory film that visitors are shown while they wait for the Navy launch to take them across to Ford's Island includes actual footage of the first Japanese torpedo hitting the ship at just before 8am, December 7, 1941. I never knew such footage existed. Most of us are familiar with the now famous photograph of the ship's tower, listing horribly to starboard as it burns out of control.

But seeing the ship as it looked moments earlier, before the attack, when 1,177 men were still looking forward to their Sunday activities, and then seeing that torpedo hit--

Here's a few photos we were able to take during our brief stay on that hallowed ground...

Three's the charm...

SO. I guess I had a lot of reasons for wanting to go to Hawaii (after all, who wouldn't want to go) and I'll be sharing a few of those reasons in future posts. But the fact that our trip was spectacularly successful is really something of a miracle. You see, it's the third time I have tried to make the trip. To say that the previous two tries were unsuccessful is sort of like saying that the Titanic was buoyancy-challenged.

My first attempt occurred somewhere around January of 1980. Mother and Daddy rented a large home in Maui for the purpose of having a family reunion. At the time, Randy and I were starving college students so they graciously paid our way to the islands and even provided us with a little bit of pocket money. We were not able to take Annike, however, and as a new mom who had never been separated from her little darling for more than a few hours, I was totally panicked at the prospect of flying a few thousand miles (each way) over water and spending a whole week away from my baby. Had any of us known what was in store, we could have saved ourselves the trouble and spent the week at home, sitting under a warm shower, shoving money down the drain.

We arrived in Honolulu on a Saturday afternoon, took a white-knuckle special over to Maui, and settled in for a week on the beach. Sunday was cloudy, but warm--and coming from the snow and near freezing temperatures of Utah, we didn't complain. Monday it hit us. According to newspaper accounts, it was the "worst disaster to hit Maui since World War II." Some tropical cyclone spun out of the eastern Pacific and slammed into the islands with a vengeance. Apart from spending day after day stuck in the house, the only two clear memories I have of the trip are trying to find an open store to buy groceries and watching a car parked near the shoreline get washed out to sea, and later watching the floodwaters rise up to our calves INSIDE the rental car while we made a mad dash to the airport for yet another white-knuckle special back to Honolulu. It was like something out of a cartoon--we opened the doors of the car at the airport and a little Niagara Falls spilled out of each opening. I don't remember how much Daddy paid the rental car company for the damage, but it was significant. Here's a picture of our first day:

And here's a picture of what the rest of the vacation looked like:

Total. Freaking. Disaster.

Many years later, Mother and I got to talking about trying to go again. Her sister, Mary Pleasants, had been born in Hawaii and Mother had lived there briefly before Pearl Harbor and the two of them had been back many times and just loved it. Mary was able to book us rooms at the Hale Koa (the luxury hotel reserved for military members and retirees) right on Waikiki beach so we decided to make it an estrogen fest and go together along with my girls, Annike and Megan. We were scheduled to leave from Charlotte on December 24, 2003, but the girls and I were going to drive up to Charlotte the night before and spend the night with Mother and Mary in order to catch our flight the next morning. While we were packing, we got a call from my cousin, Lynn, that mother had been admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pain and that we'd best come now. A frantic three and a half hour drive later, I arrived at the emergency room to be told that she had slipped away just about twenty minutes earlier. I've always wondered why I was able to travel from Athens, Greece, to Los Angeles in time to see my father before he passed away, but was unable to drive 260 miles from Atlanta to Charlotte in time to see my mother.

SO. Not only did we never make that trip, the simple thought of going always tended to bring back the painful memory of losing mother. God, she was SO much fun! Always ready to travel, always ready to get up and go. Here's a favorite picture of her, on one of her many trips with Grand Circle Travel (this one might have been the trip to China--not sure):

We completely dropped the idea of going until just a couple of months ago when my "bucket list" started calling again (more about that later). I gingerly began thinking about it, quietly began talking about it, made the reservations while holding my breath and keeping all fingers, toes and eyes crossed, but only Annike was brave enough to go public. Benjamin thought it was supposed to be a surprise for Megan because she never said a word about it until he finally asked her the day before she was to leave. She told him she couldn't bear to hardly think about it much less talk about it lest the Hawaiian Vacation Gods were listening and decided to slam dunk us yet again.

BUT. Three is aparently the charm. Every single day there, I thought of Mother and Daddy and Mike and Randy and how they all should have been there to enjoy it this time.

But we did our damndest to enjoy it for them. Aloha!