Hawai'i Nei

A few nights ago I was invited to attend a missionary fireside. For the non-Mormon crowd, a fireside has nothing to do with fires. Or sides. In fact, this particular fireside was in an air-conditioned, brick church building that doesn't permit open flame. I think firesides evolved from FDR's "fireside chats" back in the '30s and '40s, a series of radio broadcasts hosted by the President on Sunday evenings. The Mormons took the concept and ran with it, even though FDR was a Democrat. (That part is a little Mormon humor. A very little.) Now Mormons have little meetings where they get together and listen to someone talk about something. On this occasion, it was a missionary fireside--the speaker was asked to talk about his conversion to Mormonism, and it was for people that were new converts or investigating the church themselves.

The fireside itself wasn't anything remarkable, just a guy telling his story, but his story really brought some memories back to the forefront of my mind. Tom (that was his name (I think it still is his name)) started out by saying that his first introduction to the Church came in Hawaii when he was working in the General Counsel's office at UH. His conversion process took some seven years, beginning in the early '70s, and it involved a handful of people that were dear to me. (NOTE: I didn't know Tom prior to this meeting. I was at the fireside in connection with a new calling I received in church, and the congregation hosting the fireside is not my own.)

My Hawaii story doesn't start in the early '70s. It started in the fall of 1984, when I first attended Albion Middle School. It was seventh grade, and I was moving up in the world. I had accomplished just about everything an elementary student could accomplish at Silver Mesa Elementary (GO EAGLES!). And by that I mean I had offended just about every teacher I had, including the one time that I got in trouble because my teacher thought I was flipping her off when I was, in reality, pretending to pick my nose so as to make a kid named Billy laugh in the middle of math class. I was a misunderstood youth.

Anyway, back to seventh grade. The transition from elementary school thug to middle school nobody was a difficult one for me. Despite my incredible good looks, charming personality, and dry sense of humor, my reality was much closer to Diary of a Wimpy Kid than Alex Rider. OK, so nobody's as cool as Alex Rider, but really, middle school was the worst two years of my life. And seventh grade was the worst. THE. WORST.

Within a few months, I decided that I just needed to not go to school anymore. I made myself sick and basically skipped school for almost two weeks. My anti-social behavior had the unintended, yet predictable consequence of pushing my friends away. My mom eventually caught on to my fake illness and sent me back to school. You know, thirty years later and being a parent myself, I can't imagine how confusing my behavior must have been to my mom and dad. Man, I can't believe I was even allowed to have kids after that. Good thing they didn't administer that test in seventh grade, or I'd still be wishing I could figure out where kids came from.

Although I returned to school, I was not particularly motivated to do two weeks' worth of make-up work. I did a little here and there, including an invention project for one of my classes--a skateboard that had a foot-belt attached to it. Yeah, that didn't help my image.

My mother decided to let me in on a secret, though, in an effort to get me motivated. She and my dad had gotten tickets to Hawaii and they were going to take me and my brother with them. (Now that is a noble cause--give me the sixty-five, I'm on the job.) I was very excited, but very worried, too. Oh, not about school. Forget that stuff. I was very concerned about shorts. What I really needed to know was whether everyone wore OP (Ocean Pacific) corduroy shorts, because that was the stuff right there. Can you say stylish?

Notwithstanding my fashion concerns, we managed to get to Hawaii. I loved it. I loved everything about it. We hit the beach on Oahu, rode a helicopter above Kauai, and watched stingrays swimming in the lagoon below our balcony in Kona. We spent the last day in Waikiki doing more touristy things, and then headed to the airport for a red-eye home. And then the surprise. Our tickets were on PanAm, and PanAm had declared bankruptcy while we were off island and not paying attention to the news. My dad scrambled to get us tickets on another airline and home we went.

I had picked a really nice aloha shirt for myself that I wore to school with my white OP shorts. I was Magnum PI, minus the mustache and Ferrari. And the chest hair. I didn't have chest hair. Yet. I still can't figure out why seventh grade was so difficult for me.

Anyway, about a year later, my folks announced that we were moving the whole family to Hawaii. Moving. To Hawaii. Oddly, I was not happy about that move. I had worked through most of the awkwardness and had made-up with my friends and things were FINALLY looking up, and now my folks wanted to RIP ME AWAY from everything good in my life and move me somewhere 2,995 miles away to an ISLAND in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! Did I mention I was a confused little 14 year old?

In July 1986 we packed up everything we owned and it all got loaded on a big truck that was going to drive it to Hawaii for us. OK, so that's not true. It was loaded on a truck, but it was going to LA (I assume) to get loaded on a ship and slow-boated to Hawaii, where we could pick it up after we got there. We went the Northern California route so that we could visit my grandparents before flying out.

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and unbeknownst to any of us, my dad's business partners declared bankruptcy. That put us in a real bind. My parents were not wealthy, and the company was supposed to be paying for our move. They didn't. Suddenly we were in Hawaii with no place to live, no job, no furniture, and only the clothes in our luggage. My parents scrambled and rented a house for us in Hawaii Kai, down at the Southeast end of Oahu. It was not big, but it worked. The lack of furniture worked, too. My brothers would sneak onto the nearby golf course and collect lost golf balls (you wouldn't believe how many people lost golf balls on the short grass right by the hole), and we concocted all sorts of games to play in the sunken family room. Some members of the ward donated a few items of furniture, and we managed to put together something like a presentable wardrobe by hitting the Aloha Stadium swap meet.

All of this, and four more years, came rushing back to my memory while Tom talked about his conversion in Hawaii. (NOTE: I could go on for a long time about Hawaii, but I've spent too much time talking about seventh grade. You know, I don't map these things out--I just kind of type what comes to my mind and see where it takes me. I will revisit Hawaii, as a topic and (hopefully) a vacation destination, but for now let me say that Hawaii changed my life. Some of my dearest friends are from the four years that I spent there. When people ask me where I'm from, I say I grew up in Hawaii, because I did.)

Tom said that his wife had worked with the Stake President (a leader of + ten congregations in a geographic area) and his two sons. I immediately suspected he was talking about James Hallstrom and his sons Donald and James, so I approached Tom after the meeting and asked. Yep, it was the Hallstroms. I asked Tom when he had left, and then mentioned that I had moved to Hawaii in '86, and that Donald Hallstrom had been my Stake President. His father, James, who had been Tom's Stake President, was the Stake Patriarch who gave me a Patriarchal Blessing some 17 years after Tom first started investigating the Church.

We got to talking, and he asked whether I knew Steve Molale. Well, of course I know Steve. His son Kevin was a good friend of mine, and we'd graduated together from Kaiser High School 25 years ago. Tom got excited and expressed his love for Steve, who was the Bishop of the Hawaii Kai 2nd Ward when Tom and his wife were baptized. He explained how Steve had come to give him a blessing and how his (Tom's) decision to be baptized was a direct result of Steve's leadership and counsel. He was taken aback when I shared the news that Steve had passed away earlier this year. Notwithstanding the sad news, the conversation was a fun trip down memory lane.

When my family visited Hawaii last December we took opportunity to attend church out in Hawaii Kai. Steve was teaching the Gospel Principles class, a Sunday School class designed for those investigating the church or returning to activity after an extended absence. It was vintage Steve Molale. He had great stories, probably embellished but certainly entertaining. We chatted about my family and his family, about his wife Pat, who had passed away herself only a short while before. It was a joy to see Steve again, and I was surprised only a few weeks later when a dear friend emailed to let me know that Steve had suffered a stroke, and then a few days later had passed away.

Some people say it's a small world. Others say it's an even smaller Mormon world. I suppose that's true--it doesn't take long to find people who have crossed paths when you're talking to other LDSers. I'm sure glad that I went on a Friday night to listen to Tom Wood talk about his conversion. It gave me a chance to reflect on three great men that had an eternal impact on my life, and on Tom's life, too.

It also gave me a chance to pull out the old OP shorts, put on the vintage aloha shirt, fluff up the chest hair a bit, and take the Ferrari out for a spin. Mahalo Tom.