Other Views
Other Views
PEPEEKEO, Hawaii -- Years ago when I was about 12, my best friend spent the night and we stayed up late. We made a lot of noise and my mom kept telling us to hold it down. Growing up with
smiling dadAfter midnight and to our great surprise, my dad burst through the bedroom door. He wore his tuxedo tails (purchased long before at a thrift shop and occasionally worn to great effect) over shorts and white T-shirt. He strummed his ukulele and sang "You Ain't Nothing but a Hound Dog." We sang Elvis songs with him for what seemed like hours.
Another time, when CB radios were popular, he and I talked to my friend on the CB in the car. My dad's CB "handle" was "Armpit." My friend asked where we were, and we told her we were driving further away. Instead, my dad pulled up outside her house and we went in. We snuck up the stairs and continued the conversation from behind her. She was flabbergasted. We all laughed together.
We were always laughing in my family. My mom told me that my dad's biggest fear while she was pregnant was that the baby wouldn't have a sense of humor.
No chance. Not in this family.
Once my grandmother told me about when my father was a little boy. "On Christmas Eve when he was asleep we'd put all the presents under the tree, and then we'd go outside and clang pots and pans and get the dogs all worked up. They'd wake Brad up and we'd tell him they were barking at Santa Claus."
My dad always seemed full of fun and imagination. In 1939, when he was 7, his grandmother travelled from Hawaii to New York. His mother wrote to her:
"Have followed you around Bradley's globe to San Francisco. He wants to know why you don't go straight across to New York instead of the long way through the Panama. And look out when you get to the Panama Canal, he says, because Orphan Annie is there and they are having terrible trouble with spies and everything."
When he was a little older, a substitute teacher took his class to the volcano. My dad knew the ground continued a long way beyond the barrier before dropping into the crater, but the teacher didn't. He yelled, "I'm going to end it all," and jumped over the railing, crouching behind the wall and horrifying the teacher.
One of his school buddies told me that my father spent a lot of time on the other side of the principal's desk. "I was there once for doing something wrong and I saw that Bradley had carved his name into 'our' side of the principal's desk!" he said.
One Sunday morning when I was a teen-ager my dad got up very early to drive someone to the airport. When he returned home, he quietly dragged the stereo speakers down the hall and pointed one in my bedroom and one at my mom, and then blasted church music loud enough to knock our socks off. "If I'm up, everybody's up," he laughed.
We got up and went for breakfast at one of his favorite places, a Belgian waffle house. My dad and I always shared a huge waffle with a whole banana split built on top of it.
I was in my second year of college when my father was diagnosed with cancer. Between doctor's appointments that summer, when I was home from college and he was no longer working, we went out to movies and expensive lunches. We splurged like that several times a week. Benihana of Tokyo became one of our extravagant lunch spots. My mom, who was going to work every day, was frustrated with us for spending so much money. But we were having fun and we kept doing it.
And then several months after that, my dad died. He was 50.
The older I get, the more I realize how young that is. I feel very lucky, though, to have had my father around for my first 20 years.
When I meet people who knew my father as a kid, they always say something like, "That Bradley. He was so kolohe."
He was still kolohe when he was a dad.
Leslie Lang is a writer and airline employee
who lives in Pepeekeo.