December 7. The nation remembers Pearl Harbor. I remember my dad. It was his birthday. He died in 2010, just about six weeks short of his 97th.
Here’s what I wrote on that first December 7 after he was gone.
He had a lot of birthdays, and he live long enough to wear out our ideas for presents.
For the last 10 years or so, maybe more, we were in a rut.
Our presents were simple.
A box of candy. We usually tried to find a Whitman Sampler, an old favorite.
A bag of Hershey kisses.
He had a sweet tooth.
A UH t-shirt, sometimes a sweatshirt.
And a photo book, maybe from National Geographic.
He enjoyed leafing through photos of distant places.
A bottle of champagne, although that was really to get us through the evening.
He would have a glass, although he wasn’t ever really a drinker.Tonight, no party.
But we will remember.
That still rings true today.
Here’s a photo taken on his 93rd birthday, December 7, 2006. He had almost two more good years before he had a fall, ended up in the hospital, was diagnosed with dementia, and ended up spending nearly two years in a nursing home before his life ended. But in December 2006, he was doing well, and commented that 100 was only a few years away.
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That cake looks delicious! Glorious frosting!
Ian, biologically speaking you’ve got many more decades of blog in you! Your father looked great at 93!
A fine photograph. He looks like he was in his element.
Your father was the kind of bright, capable, adventurous young person who used to come to Hawaii, much like Carey D. Miller. Hawaii was a whole different world, and the economy was booming in that long period of his working life. Hawaii was attracting people like Henry Kaiser, who worked with your father. It must have been exciting.
Hawaii’s economy has not flourished for a generation. Hawaii is no longer so unique. Hawaii is losing population.
Look also at who we are losing. David Ige went to public school and graduated from the state university, even though he got accepted to MIT. We are lucky to have him. His own children, however, went to private school and prestigious colleges on the mainland, where they remain and now thrive in new industries. It must be exciting to be young and in the swim of things, and moving forward in a new frontier. This is something that most of us have not experienced.
There is no solution. Hawaii just played itself out, the way all places get played out. That’s not my point. It seems that very few people in Hawaii have noticed these changes. That is scary.