You want me to kiss & tell? Well, we didn't come out of the bedroom for 3 days once we got there. What do you expect? We hadn't seen each other for TEN MONTHS and we were newlyweds who had never spent a full night together, anywhere! Duuh! I guess you can presume SHE had been faithful then -- I know I had been! Anyway, one of those 3 days was my December birthday so Raquel practiced the celebratory lighting of my birthday candle and we got fired up!
The Ilikai Hotel on Waikiki was in a nice romantic setting but the romance was INdoors, not outside -- I'm not kidding... Three days & nights out of the 7 total to be on R&R, and I can't even remember what we did for meals during that time! That third floor window overlooked the Ilikai's marina and that was all we saw of Waikiki for the longest time. I think I remember taking Raquel out for supper a couple of times because I have a vague memory of the Ilikai's beach bar area, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Hawaiian Village Hilton's dining rooms at least once .
I'm sure I showed her where I lived in Hawaii as a boy and my dad was stationed next to Pearl Harbor at Hickam Field. I know I took her on a boat tour around Ford Island where the USS Arizona has lain docked at rest underwater since December 7, 1941! When you see TV History Channel's film of Pearl Harbor being attacked, the ship whose central smokestack is emitting a rapid plume of thick, black smoke straight up at the beginning of the explosions... THAT is the Arizona! One of the first Japanese bombs dropped right down her smokestack just a few moments before those film frames were shot.
Most of her crew went down with the battleship and are still aboard her! Over 2000 bodies released their souls that day and left their corpses never to be recoverable from the water inside the Arizona there. When we visited their final resting place, the nation had not yet turned it into the beautiful and appropriate white memorial docking platform that it has today. We could still see some of the rust-red Arizona superstructure reaching up to us -- makes me think of the underwater statue of Jesus in the Florida Keys' John Pennekamp Underwater State Park reaching up to save divers looking down to him. I still imagine the sailors buried in the Arizona looking up like Jesus, but looking to BE saved. Even today, they are still there under the water! So is the Christ.
I didn't realize it until the movie, "Pearl Harbor," came out a few years ago. But after I'd seen it a few times from start to finish, I had one hell of an epiphany! I suddenly realized it was because of Pearl Harbor that I spent 24 years in military uniform! It was all those Hawaiian experiences as a kid at Hickam Field, Wheeler Field, and Pearl Harbor (I attended Pearl Harbor Intermediate public school.) Somehow, I was deeply touched by those first 4 perfectionistically-tough years living with my very strict father at a very impressionable age. Wearing a Boy Scout uniform on Memorial Day, I'd placed plumeria leis around the small Stars-&-Stripes planted on each veteran's grave in Diamond Head's Punchbowl (the National Cemetery of the Pacific). My memories are etched in clear, vivid, technicolor! The Boy Scouts gave me opportunities away from my father just like the military would later. My dad was never involved with me in either; but, I can't imagine I was any better off without him in either. BTW, Loyalty is the second point of the Scout Law.
posted by Richard A @ 9:37 PM
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