The Aloha State

My parents met at a serviceman’s dance in 1942. I’m grateful for having been born to a couple whose generation continues to suffuse me like gentle lamplight through drawn rayon curtains. Theirs was a world of scotch-and-soda, weekend bridge with the neighbors, dancing at the Officer’s Club, service to country, and music. We had one of those bulky mid-century living room stereos that doubled as a piece of furniture – a token little turntable and muffled speakers built into an ornate wooden cabinet the size and heft of a supine phone booth. My mom loved Mantovani records and in my memory our home was permeated with that music. Today I love all those ‘50s-era pop orchestras that feature more violins than there are hairs on a human head. 

I’ve hauled an overstuffed emotional Samsonite from my parents’ world into my own. I can’t hear Mantovani’s “Charmaine” at dusk without entering a minor fugue state, and I’m made misty by pianist Roger Williams’ recording of The High and the Mighty theme. Percy Faith’s arrangement of “Shenandoah” (Across the Wide Missouri) sends me into a nearly paralyzing reverie. By such things are we tethered to family, and to a yesterday that otherwise can feel like a dream.

My mom departed this variously gorgeous and splintered world in 2014. A crazily bemedaled Senior Olympics swimmer in her ‘70s, she’d been in gradually failing health for a very little while when, at 91, she had a sudden stroke. I took the call in my car and drove like a madman to Cottage Hospital, where she was sitting up in bed with a placid expression. She wouldn’t look at me but was fixated on something over my left shoulder, staring in brow-furrowing earnest as if she saw something there that puzzled her. 

As long as I can remember, she had always sung and whistled around the house, and that was how she left me, singing the line “I can’t give you anything but love, baby;” over and over and over. This is a true story. It was as if the stroke had done us both the structural kindness of allowing a loving little aperture through which she could send this short but voluminous final message. It was really, really something. 

My mom is hard to explain (as is yours, surely), so here’s a story that sums her up. 

Mom and the MPs

My mom’s name is Aloha. She was born in Hawaii but is not Hawaiian. She entered the world at Schofield Barracks, the Army post that 17 years later would be strafed by nervous Japanese pilots following the ill-advised orders that would ultimately unplug their empire. Her father, my grandfather, was an Army Colonel who had long venerated Hawaii – in literature and in fact – and had secured his dream posting. In the full flush of his island fever, he and my probably-less-enthusiastic grandmother nearly named my mother after the last sovereign queen of Hawaii – Lili`uokalani – which is pronounced pretty much the way it’s spelled. It was a close call.

Preteen Aloha was an industrious mischief-maker, routinely climbing out of her bedroom window in the wee small hours (as Sinatra would’ve described them) and roaming the various Army bases she called home. No army-issue bedroom window could hold her. Her return would usually be in the company of a base MP (Military Police) most of whom knew her by name within a few months of her family having arrived for the new assignment. In one familiar story she creeps out of her parents’ Army quarters late one night and slinks by moonlight to the base movie theater where the scandalous Carole Lombard film No Man of Her Own is playing. Twenty minutes into the movie the MP’s familiar flashlight beam plays down the darkened aisle beside her. She looks up to see a resigned-looking gentleman in a white helmet. ”C’mon, Aloha,” he reportedly sighs. “Let’s get you home.”

Aloha and Stephanie Moving Company^® vs Muammar Gaddafi

By 1969 we lived on Wheelus AFB, just outside Tripoli, Libya; my father, my mother, my little brother, my big sister, and me. We’d been there a scant year and-a-half when Colonel Gaddafi rudely moved his belongings into the Royal Palace during one of kindly King Idris’ clueless junkets abroad. 

Shortly thereafter the Americans of Wheelus were ordered to leave the country. In the heated confusion that followed, many people were never seen again. Many of these were my family’s friends in Tripoli, including Omran – the tall Stetson-wearing, America-loving Libyan with a heart of gold, cowboy boots, and a pitiable swagger that tried unsuccessfully for John Wayne. Omrans’ dream was to live in the States or even see the U.S. in a flyover – but he disappeared in the purge that followed the coup. 

Soon enough Gaddafi’s thugs began to round up Jews with a familiar gusto. Mr. Dan de Carlo, the principal of the base High School, would have none of it, and was apprehended in a botched attempt to spirit a Jewish Libyan friend out of the country in a piano crate bound for Malta; a plot foiled on the tarmac of the Maltese airport. 

I don’t know that in the years following, I ever learned as much from an educator about the precious innate value of doing what you know is right. It’s worth mentioning that Principal de Carlo’s failed rescue handily played into Aloha’s predisposition for adventure. 

Extremely displeased with de Carlo’s foiled scheme, the Gaddafi regime complained to the American command structure, and in the placating atmosphere of those fraught months, our Base Commander agreed to Gaddafi’s terms of reprisal; house arrest of de Carlo’s wife, Genevieve – an unbowed French academic and our next-door neighbor. The de Carlos were to be relieved of all their personal belongings, and Genevieve deported to join her exiled husband in Japan. 

In the event, Aloha and her mischief-making pal, another grown troublemaker named Stephanie Lyle, contrived to incrementally smuggle Genevieve’s entire household out of Libya, piece by piece, in defiance of Gaddafi’s sour intent. The success of the Aloha and Stephanie Moving Company^®reportedly involved shameless flirting with the young, bashful, and easily distracted Libyan guards. When Genevieve was finally allowed to join her exiled husband in Okinawa, it was found that nearly everything they owned had been sent on ahead by Aloha and Steph. This stunt typifies Aloha’s middle age. 

Aloha Means Hello

Aloha was very fortunate to have entered the world in a complex, colorful epoch that favored the high-spirited. It was a time of intense feeling and color and hearts abrading their calcium cages. Judy Garland and Mussolini were a couple of the players, for instance. It’s true that much of the intense color was ordnance blossoming brilliantly in the saddened skies over torn-up Pacific islands and smoldering European capitals. But these terrible conflagrations seize and enlarge the bruised human heart. It was, as a great Victorian artist with a poorly executed comb-over once remarked of another era, both the best and worst of times.

At 90, Aloha was still possessed of her dark hair, her teeth and her attitude. She couldn’t pass the full-length mirror in her apartment without stopping to strike a Dorothy Lamour ‘ready for my close up’ pose; one hand on her hip, the other perched uncertainly atop her 90-year-old head. My humor is hers; antiquated and often indecipherable. 

There were moments I thought my mom was going to literally laugh herself to death. I expressed this concern once. We’d really got each other going – she was crying with laughter. Finally, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t catch her breath. She raised her hand to her chest, trying to draw air. I panicked.

”Hey! Hey! HEY!! MOM!! MOM!! MOM!!”

“What,” she coughed, waving me away.

“I thought you were going to leave us there for a minute!” I put my arm across her diminished little shoulder. She wiped her eyes and sighed through a rattling chuckle.

“Wouldn’t have been so bad,” she said.