Island Morning

14x18 Oil

I had three fathers and never really knew any of them. Not having a dad (a role model, a confidant, a friend, a sounding board, an advocate) around left a great hole in my life that I’ve been trying to fill all of my life. I do that through the books I have written and by trying to be the best father I can figure out how to be. Fatherhood was never modeled for me. Sometimes I am successful. Sometimes I feel I have failed. But I never give up trying.

As a twelve-year-old living in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii I was as free as a kid could get. I roamed around our small, idyllic fishing village like a feral cat, and had no one breathing down my neck telling me what and what not to do. My mom had just married her third husband, a true waterman who was ten years her junior. He was a deep-sea charter-boat fisherman with absolutely no knowledge of what fatherhood was all about. But who cared? He looked like a movie star and I wanted to be just like him.

The problem was, he didn’t have much time for me. I wanted to work with him on the boat, learning how to fish. But he hired a real deckhand named Charlie, leaving me on shore to figure things out for myself. It wasn’t his fault. He just didn’t know what to do with me.

My kind and caring mother had her own things to deal with, and had long ago given up on trying to keep tabs on me. Her unspoken directive was: “Go outside and find something to do,” which I gladly did. I was on my own. But this was nothing new. It had been like that since the day I was born.

So I roamed. Wandered. Explored. Picked up clues about life here and there.

I remember one particular day. It was sizzling hot. The village was quiet, people sitting in the shade, cars crawling by every few minutes. All the fishing boats were out on the ocean. The sky was cloudless and the sea was as soft and calm as a turquoise swimming pool.

I was sitting alone on the concrete seawall that edged the bay, fishing with a bamboo pole and a small hook, catching luckless fish that I quickly tossed back. I should have been bored. But I wasn’t. The ocean was soothing to me. The lapping sound of waves, the perfect air. In my head where my entire existence lived, I was in some kind of dreamy paradise.

Down toward the pier I noticed a man on the seawall walking my way with a small boy sitting on his shoulders. The man was big — Hawaiian-Filipino, maybe Samoan. He wore shorts with his T-shirt hanging out of his back pocket. A white plastic sack hung from the fingers of his left hand. His right hand held the boy’s knee, and the boy, who looked about three or four, was bouncing around up there like he was on a horse, having a great time.

The man walked slowly, man-style, the way local guys do, men of the islands like my step-father, men born to ocean, boats, sand, salt and heat. He stopped a few yards away from where I sat, his long black hair pulled into a knot behind his head. Up close, he was huge. A band of tattoos circled one of his biceps, and he looked like he might eat me if I made a wrong move.

He squatted down. The boy slid off his shoulders, and the two of them settled down and sat facing the sea with their feet dangling over the edge of the seawall, not ten feet from me.

The man noticed me gawking, and dipped his head. “How’s it,” he said. I raised my hand half way, then quickly turned away.

After a few moments, I peeked back at them.

The man had opened the sack and was settling a boxed lunch on his knees and opening another one for the boy. Without speaking, the two of them sat eating with their fingers, each silently looking out over the harbor.

The boy leaned forward and looked past his father at me. For a moment we held our gaze, then I turned away.

When they’d finished their lunches, the man got up, and the boy, and they stuffed their lunch boxes back into the plastic bag. The man took the boy’s hand, and the two of them walked over to where I sat.

“Where’s your fish bucket?” the man asked. His voice was soft, friendly.

I squinted up at him. “Fish bucket?”

“To keep your fish in.”

“Um … these are junk fish. I just throw them back.”

The man nodded and grinned. “I know what you mean,” he said. He paused, as if thinking. Then he said, “But I gotta tell you, boy … I understand you may not like eat this kine fish, and that’s okay, but I gotta say, there’s no such thing as junk fish.”

I looked at him, thinking, huh?

He pointed his chin toward the water. “A fish is a work of art.”

What?

He laughed at the confusion that must have shown on my face.

The boy looked over the edge into the water, pointing down at a

handful of black crabs scurrying along the rocks below.

“A’ama.” The man said. “Eat um raw. Tastes good.”

For a long shared moment, the three of us watched waves wash over the shiny-wet crabs below.

Then the man said, “Those fish you catching are called Hinalea.“

I looked back up at him and he winked. “Remember what I told you. Those aren’t junk fish. They’re perfect. Just like you, just like my kid.”

He nodded once, as if tacking a period onto the end of what he’d just said.

Then the two of them walked away, the boy reaching up, hanging onto his father’s fingers.

Just as they were about to jump down off the wall, the boy looked back at me. He waved, and I waved back. My hand was still in the air when I lost sight of him.

In that moment some feeling ran through me, a feeling I would never forget, something that, at twelve, I didn’t begin to understand. But I do now. Because I’d just met the luckiest kid in the world.