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!

Mahalo...

Mahalo is the Hawaiian word for thank you. And I am incredibly thankful today to be sitting in my ocean front room, watching the palm trees sway in the breeze and the waves roll onto the shore while the sun rises on yet another glorious picture-postcard perfect day.

How and why I got here is the topic of a future post, but part of the "why" lies in the fact that yesterday should have been my thirty-second wedding anniversary and today makes exactly seven years and three hours since I lost my sweetheart, lover, and best friend. Both days are emotional minefields and I never, ever, try to go to work or do anything else that requires me to behave sensibly or maintain any sense of normalcy.

SO. Yesterday I parked my fat fanny on a North Shore, Oahu beach with Jimmy Buffett's latest book in one hand and a virgin pina colada in the other. Today I will return to the Polynesian Cultural Center in Laie and finish up what I didn't have time for last night--perhaps take a hula lesson or get a Fijian tattoo. Anything's possible.

And tomorrow I'll be able to face the world again which, now that I think of it, shouldn't be too hard when it looks like the picture at the top of this page...

Road Trip 102: Packing Do's and Don'ts...

Well, thanks entirely to the heroics of Travel Agent Man, I am actually planning to take a holiday very soon. That's all I'm going to say since I'm just superstitious enough to think that if I talk about it out loud, it might not happen. Remember the major appliances and thumbdrives...

Anyway, in the process of planning this trip I've naturally started thinking about packing for it. As a mother of 4 and grandmother of 5, I have become an expert at packing. Making sure I have the requisite clothing, toiletries, drugs, reading material, and credit cards has almost become second nature. I feel like my dear friend Barbara Toberg who, when our children were small and our husbands in the Navy, used to say "Give me a diaper and a MasterCard and I can go anywhere." And we did.

Now I'm not to the point yet where I need the diaper, but the point here is that I'm pretty good at making sure I pack lightly, but thoroughly. Making sure the luggage actually makes it to my destination with me is another matter.

One memorable family road trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, began on a morning when I woke up with a migraine. Hardly able to put a coherent thought together, I loaded up on my drug of choice (in those days, massive quantities of aspirin), tossed a few things in a suitcase, whispered to Randy that my suitcase was ready to be loaded in the car, and then headed out to the front seat with a cold washcloth over my eyes, hoping I wouldn't end up driving the porcelain bus before the drive up the mountains even started. Three hours later, migraine gone, we happily arrived in Gatlinburg where I realized that NObody had bothered to put my suitcase in the car. We spent our first evening in Gatlinburg in the local WalMart, buying cheap underwear and a new toothbrush for me. The rest of the trip didn't get much better.

The picture above sort of illustrates another part of packing at which I've become expert. When you travel in small cars with large children, as we did for most of our married life, it becomes necessary to approach packing the car as you would a giant jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces go together. Now, lest you think I was the pro at loading up the car, let me set the record straight. Randy was the pro. He really was. I became the pro at keeping my mouth shut for two reasons:

1. I really was no good at all at shoving 497 pieces of luggage, diaper bags, sporting equipment, stuffed animals, and other assorted paraphenalia into a 3 foot square trunk. Randy, on the other hand, approached the task with the same skill required to build the pyramids at Giza. He really was a pro.

2. Many of our family trips were to visit my mother and aunt in Charlotte, North Carolina (where the picture above was taken). My mother and my aunt were experts in their own right. They loved to send us home with their cast-offs du jour. It became something of a game..."Susie, I've got this umptiefratz that would be just the thing for your bedroom/kitchen/craft project/living room/child. It might be a tad old, but all you have to do is paint it/wash it/remodel it/wait 5 years til they grow into it/buy something else to go with it/ and it would be perfect!" After about 30 minutes of polite refusals, followed by equally polite but ever more insistent encouragement, Randy would finally smile through clenched teeth and say, "Sure, we'd love it!" Then he'd have to find a place for it in the car, at least until we cleared the city limits when he'd pull into the nearest gas station and toss it in the dumpster.

SO--it was just NOT strategically advisable for me to try to coach him on packing the car. Since it was my fault that we were loaded to the gills, and I was crap at trying to load it anyway, I just learned to stay in the house and keep my mouth shut and try not to look worried at the Grapes- of-Wrath-style bungee cord job on the roof of the car. Truth be told, he WAS very good at it. Give the man a set of bungee cords and he could load the contents of a small house on the top of our car. He ALWAYS did an excellent job and we ALWAYS got everything home in perfect condition.

Except for one spectacular failure.

Bryan had just graduated from high school in the summer of 1999 and had decided he wanted to move out west. Always happy to have any excuse to head back home, we decided to combine moving Bryan to Arizona with a family vacation. Annike wasn't at home that summer, so it was just Bryan, Benjamin, Megan, me and Randy. And our luggage. And everything Bryan owned. TV, VCR, stereo system roughly the size of a pony, assorted car parts, books, CDs, clothes, you name it--Bryan wanted to take it. And, of course, the TV, VCR, and stereo system roughly the size of a pony just COULDN'T go on the roof, so it all went in the back deck of our older model Ford Taurus station wagon, and all our luggage went on the roof. Bungee cords everywhere. It was a brilliant packing job. The only drawback was that somebody figured Megan would have more fun in the back deck behind the stereo equipment so she ended up squashed against the back window like one of those Garfield suction cup toys.

Anyway, all packed and ready to go, we lumbered out of the driveway in the sweltering June heat, rolled up the windows, turned on the air conditioning and felt a blast of....HOT air. Nothing but hot air. No a/c. In June. In Georgia. For a 2,000 mile trip to Phoenix. Did I mention this was in June?

Well, there was nothing for it but to get started and hope that the a/c fairy would visit us at some point and start sprinkling some cold air our way. After negotiating the 10 miles of side streets to the freeway, we were just merging into six lanes of traffic on Interstate 75, hot air blasting, Megan's pink face barely visible in the rear view mirror behind the stereo equipment, both large teenaged boys plugged into their portable CD players, when we hear Megan say, "Uh oh."

That's all. Just a quiet little "Uh oh." Before I'm even aware of what's happened, Randy cuts loose with a stream of highly colorful language, and we're merging back to the right, on the emergency shoulder of the freeway, and I'm looking back to see Randy's suitcase bouncing along the middle lane of traffic, spewing toilet articles and underwear across five lanes of traffic. Most of the 18 wheels on a few tractor-trailers are running over Randy's shaving kit and the rest of our suitcases are dangling precariously from the roof of the car.

Well, there are things in his suitcase that just should not be scattered across five lanes of Interstate 75 so without even thinking, I sprint from my seat, take my flip flops off for better traction, and I'm poised at the side of the road like some kind of aging track star. They say there's a special God for idiots and He was looking after us that day because just at that moment, the traffic cleared and there wasn't a car in sight for miles. Bryan and I scampered across the freeway, snatching up undies, shirts, pants, anything that hadn't been completed trashed, and we were back in the car before the next round of cars was visible, away on the horizon.

We spent the first night of that vacation in the hotel laundromat, washing the tire marks out of Randy's clothes while he went to WalMart for another toothbrush. The next day, Megan was happily esconced in the back seat between the boys, and the luggage was in the back deck.

20+ years of perfect packing ruined by one measly failure. I think the bungee cords are still resting quietly someplace on I-75.

I got FIVE grandbabies and a diploma for Christmas. What did you get?

Okay, so I'm stealing shamelessly from Bryan and Jacey's blog, but their title is just too good to resist! Without further ado, here's a slideshow of just a few of the best moments....

Are they not the cutest things you have EVER seen! Oh, and I'm apologizing in advance for this week's music choices. I realize they're a tad irreverent, but after all--Christmas is over, and you really haven't lived until you've heard Porky Pig and Bob Rivers butcher Blue Christmas and Winter Wonderland! Enjoy!

It's OVER!!!

Kate Haruch, daughter of our dear friends Cinda and Jamie, is now a charming young lady who would probably be mortified at the story from which this blog title emerged. When Kate was very small, sitting through church meetings was sheer torture--as it is for most small children and, truth be told, for a good many adults. Kate and her parents often sat one or two rows behind us in church and none of us who were there will ever forget one particularly tedious Sacrament meeting that we endured together. At the conclusion of the closing prayer, while the chapel was still silent, Kate stood up, threw both fists in the air in a victory salute and loudly proclaimed, "It's OVER!!!"

Never have those words meant more to me than now, as I sit at my computer for a long overdue post, and gaze at that lovely piece of parchment paper that loudly proclaims IT'S OVER!! I can't even express how relieved I am--as my Dad used to say,"It's like beating your head against a brick wall....sure feels good when you stop."

Since graduation day on the 13th, it's been a whirlwind of activity with my (almost) entire family around me. Patrick was, sadly, unable to make it here and spent a miserable weekend in London trying to cajole American Airlines into coughing up an appropriate flight for him while he battled a raging fever. We missed him terribly, but he is happily on the mend and I hope to get him and Annike here again sometime next year. In the meantime, I have spent glorious hours visiting with my wonderful children and lavishing hugs and kisses galore on all five grandbabies. Sunday the 14th was particularly perfect--I spent most of the day lounging on my couch, with Cole sound asleep on my chest and Hailey, Nathan, Connor and Hannah playing happily beside me. It really, truly, does NOT get better than that.

SO--more pictures of my adorable family will be coming shortly. Right now I'm so tired I couldn't put a coherent sentence together with both hands and a flashlight so I'm off to bed. Merry Christmas to all and to all a Good Night!