Preschool (aka The Four-Year-Old Group): Mrs. Crooker. Pineapple cubes with mint leaves and toothpicks (sharp).
Kindergarten: Miss Snow. Alma Kimura and I vow we will get married. Nick Hormann plays the accordion for us.
First Grade: Mrs. Johnson. Mating our Weimaraner with hers. My dad builds playground equipment for the school. Eating at College Inn. Counting to 100.
2nd Grade: Miss Reed: Who ate all the paste? Dick and Jane, and all those harder books. Eating all the paste in the storage room. Who ate all the paste? Breaking the glass lining of my thermos – twice. How do they fit all those paper towel rolls in that tiny storage room? Who ate all the paste?
3rd Grade: Miss Reed again. She has me read (reed) aloud to her, says I’m not reading at grade level, and tutors me after school until she brings me up to speed. Thank you, Miss Read. I earned a PhD in English Literature, Miss Reed. Many, many thanks to you.
4th Grade: Miss Terry/Mrs. Parker: She leaves for winter break single, and comes back in the new year married. The gigantic world map on the wall where we guess the names of places and learn geography.
5th Grade: Mr. Smith. The only teacher whose birthday I remember because it’s on St. Patrick’s Day. Every time I see him, and even now that he’s passed on, I wish him a happy birthday on March 17. Writing a story about The Story of Doctor Dolittle.
6th Grade: Mr. Marino. An A+ report on breeding endangered Nene up at Pōhakuloa. Camp Erdman. Kevin grabs a live wire and experiences the joys of electrocution. Rocking the Children’s Opera Chorus with Chappy and Carl. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Learning the Bon Dance and how to play all the instruments. Performing it out at the Sears Kahala parking lot with real Bon dancers.
7th Grade: Sister Edna for science and diagramming sprouting peas. Planting lots of beans. First guinea pigs for the FAST science project. Playing tag and ripping my shirt on a nail. Twice. Two days apart. The same nail. My mom is pissed. The game of tearing “Fruit Loops” off the backs of other people’s shirts. Watching people tear the backs of other people’s shirts because some of the loops don’t come off easily. Japanese with Kiyokawa Sensei.
8th Grade: Valerie Haskins for English. She would be my server at a bar in Greenwich Village seven years later – I shock her by recognizing her. The last opera season for me, Carl, and Chappy because our voices change, mine cracking right on stage at the HIC concert hall in the middle of Carmen.
9th Grade: Lelani Lewis/Welch for English. Writing stories to music. Memorizing passages from Shakespeare: Out, out brief candle . . . Soichi Sakamoto teaches our PE swimming class, and I end up on his swim team. My best event is backstroke. Jean Toyama for French. Getting caught shoplifting with a classmate. My mom is pissed. And, coincidentally, so is his. He and I bond forever over this adventure. He will get me a summer job at Dole Cannery. My first job ever. I constantly saw the record my SS contributions beginning then. The place is loaded with Jr. Bow summer hires.
10th Grade: Richard Wing for English. Making a movie at his house in Kaneohe about Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Reading Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain, My Captain” aloud. Kevin, Gerald, and I writing lyrics to the melody of Gilligan’s Island. He likes our lyrics, but downgrades us because we didn’t write our own music. Mr. Conrad: segregation and Apartheid, acculturation and assimilation. Mr. Kalibe: Tracking our stocks: Mattel is a winner. Supply and demand. When I work in a record store in Madison, Wisconsin nine years later, I find out he’s teaching Social Studies at Memorial High across the street. 40 of us drinking after games in the high school parking lot. Security is cool about it. Amazing.
11th Grade: Drinking after games in the school parking lot some more. Jim Harstad’s first year teaching English. The best thing that ever happened to the Jr. Bow English Department. We read more than I ever read in my life. A Farewell to Arms. Shige Yamada. Breaking into the art room on a Saturday morning to work on a pot. Mr. Yamada catches me in there and we work on our projects for the rest of the day. I will go across the street top UH as an art major, but I end up majoring in English. I dedicate my PhD dissertation to Jim and Shige.
12th Grade: Drinking after games in the parking lot again. 18 becomes the legal drinking age in January. Even more drinking in the parking lot a many other places. Jim Harstad again. We read even more than we read in 11th grade. Sometimes a Great Notion – “never give A inch.” Shige Yamada again. The students are firing the kilns now, too, sometimes around the clock, because we’re producing so many pieces. Graduation. Our class is the first to wear aloha attire instead of caps and gowns, and we inaugurate the lei exchange, each of us calling the name of the following classmate and giving him/her a maile lei. Ours is the first yearbook with COLOR photos. Wow! Senior camp at Timberline: A Lost Weekend. Wow! How all those 13 years flew.
Lanning Lee 