Garden of Sugar and Pineapples
By Pineapple Sam
Edited by Michele Casteel
Copyright © 2011 Pineapple Sam
All Rights Reserved
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Dedication
To the listeners and readers of my stories, without them, these pages would hold no more than jumbled letters with no meaning. So, if you are not a reader or a listener, this book is not for you…give it away.
Introduction
I, Pineapple Sam, have always enjoyed telling stories based on my life experiences to friends or to anyone else who would listen. More often than not, these stories involve something that happened to me personally. This allows me to express the true sentiment and feeling behind the story and therefore allows you to experience each moment in a way that cannot be found in a fictional book. I have found that stories are more compelling if they come straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say. (I don’t know who says that, but you get my drift.)
My reason for writing this story (and so many others) is that the aging process has started to kick in. My body and mind are showing the natural signs of aging with all the trimmings; namely memory loss, which does have the added benefit of feeling as though one, is always meeting new people. My problem however, is that my aging is apparently a sign that I can’t live forever to continue telling my tales. I have long enjoyed telling my stories, but I realize that without writing them down, these stories will disappear when I am no longer on this beautiful, wonderful earth to share them. This leads me to one conclusion: The funny, educational and entertaining life I have lived for over half of a century must be shared.
As you probably know already, I am not a professional writer. In fact, I was a High School dropout. Don’t drop the book! I didn’t ask you to pay too much for it anyway. I am guessing that if you picked up this story, you did so because you wanted to know who I am, Pineapple Sam. I’m hoping this brief introduction has kept your attention long enough to turn the page to the beginning of my story so that you might find the answer to that question.
Let’s do that now…
Garden of Sugar and Pineapples
The First Adventure
At the bus stop, Januaria took several deep breaths of the cool, clean mountain air. People nearby smiled at her when they noticed her huge belly. A plantation worker offered her his seat on the bench where they waited. She thanked him as she slowly sat down with a sigh. She crossed her arms over her bulging belly and smiled as the baby moved vigorously inside. Her small wicker bag hung from her right arm. She closed her eyes and wiped the tears that tried to escape from their corners.
The days started early in Hawaii. Her husband Segundo left at 4:30 in the morning to catch the plantation trucks at the crossing. Her children left for school at 7:00. Januaria kept busy each day as she waited for the arrival of the baby. She did her light chores in the morning and waited for the right moment to leave for the hospital. It was 11:30 in the morning when she made the decision to walk to the bus stop with her identification and a few necessities in the wicker bag.
A squeal of airbrakes startled her and she looked up to see that the bus had arrived. People started disembarking as soon as the bus door opened.
“Let me help you, Nana,” a young, petite Filipino lady reached for Januaria’s hand and helped her to stand up from the bench with a smile.
“Oh, thank you my ading, you are so kind.” Januaria’s voice was weak but grateful to her fellow passenger.
“You are ready to have baby Nana. You look really big, no?”
“Yes, ading, I am going to the hospital now. It is time.”
“Nobody going with you to the hospital, Nana?”
“No, nobody, but it is okay because I left a note for my children and Tata. They will come to the hospital after work and school.”
“Oh, good then.”
The last person to enter the bus was a farmer. He waited for Januaria to climb the steps and helped her to an open chair behind the driver.
“Nana, give me your hand. Let me help you,” the same farmer gently grabbed her hand and guided her to the seat.
“Oh, thank you Barrock.”
This baby would be her eighth. She was a loving mother, experienced—she thought—at giving birth. She continued her breathing exercise as she maintained her seated position, trying not to let the bouncing of the bus jar the baby. Each labor pain brought tightness to her belly and a grimace to her face until it finally ebbed away. The bus ride took an agonizing forty minutes before it finally pulled up before the hospital.
The pregnant woman gathered her strength to exit the bus, and to admit herself to deliver what she hoped, at the age of forty-two, was to be her last child. Once she checked in with admissions, the hospital nurse aides sat her in a wheelchair and wheeled her to her room. It had been an hour since the contractions made her leave the house.
“Good morning Januaria. How are you today?” Dr. Kulman strolled into the room and greeted his patient with a smile.
“Good morning Doctor,” she answered, “I think this baby is big boy, Doctor, yes?”
“Yes, I think so, but don’t worry. We can do this like the last time with your son Hank, okay?”
“Yes, I hope so Doctor. But this time I am a little scared.”
Tears welled in her eyes.
“It will be okay,” the Doctor patted her hand to reassure her.
“Nasakit. It hurts worse than the last time, Doctor…please give me medicine,” her voice was almost a whisper as another contraction overtook her, “nasakit, nasakit.”
Dr. Kulman stepped up to one of the nurses and gave her instructions. The nurse nodded her head acknowledging his orders and they both left the room. A few minutes later, the nurse returned with a syringe.
“This is the pain medication the doctor ordered for you.”
Januaria was much relieved, but the pain was so strong she could only nod and offer a weak smile. The labor pains and delivery were taking longer than usual and Dr. Kulman began to worry. It had been twelve hours since labor started and his patient was not dilated enough for the baby’s head to exit.
“Your wife is trying very hard to deliver your child, but we may have no choice but to perform the C-Section, Segundo.” It was Dr. Kulman’s third plea to the father of the yet unborn baby. He could not perform the procedure without the consent of the next of kin.
“No need. We wait,” Segundo said, sitting next to his wife’s bed. He held her hand in one of his work-worn ones and waved Dr. Kulman off with the other.
Dr. Kulman went ahead and had the operating room prepped. The children were in the waiting room, expecting good news at any moment. Extended family accompanied them. Belinda, cousin to Januaria, had been in and out of the delivery room and finally saw the need to intervene. She asked to speak to Dr. Kulman.
“Doctor, I wish to talk to my cousin, Segundo and try to get him to understand the situation. I understand you are trying your best under the circumstances.”
“Please do talk to him. Convince him that a C-Section at this point is necessary. Januaria and the infant’s lives are in danger.”
The operating room was alerted to stand by. In that room were one registered and one licensed nurse, an anesthesiologist and an intern. In the delivery room, beside his wife, Segundo heard what Belinda had to say. He was skeptical about what he did not understand. He did not understand why it would be necessary to cut the baby out of his wife and to have her suffer in recovery when the last seven children had been delivered without incident. He did not understand why this time—this child—should be any different.
“Manong,” Belinda said, “Please give Dr. Kulman permission to take out baby by C-Section so that manang don’t have to suffer anymore.”
After some hesitation, Segundo said, “We will ask your manang.” He stood and looked at his wife.
“Nasakit, nasakit, it hurts,” Januaria whispered, her eyes half-closed.
Segundo stared at his wife as her tears rolled off the right side of her face, bent away from him. She did not want him upset over her. She said nothing more, but in her pain she only wanted the ordeal to end. The contractions became stronger and closer and clenched her entire body in their grip.
“Please, manong. Dr. Kulman said she will die and baby going to be in trouble too,” Belinda begged, her own tears flowing, “If she dies and baby lives, how is that going to look? Please give them both chance to live together. Please, manong!”
The nurses looked at them with sympathy and pretended to be doing something so as not to intrude on the scene. They were discreetly prepping Januaria for surgery. The permission forms for the procedure were laid on the table next to the bed. Segundo looked at his wife’s weakened state and slowly walked over to the table and began signing the documents.
I can tell you why that child was different from the rest. It was because he always found his way into trouble. Never one to shy away from living, his life was an adventure from the start. In the enchanting county of Kauai in a town called Lihue in the early dawn hours of April 25 in 1950, I was born into this world.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Tabalno. You did well and you have another baby boy. We will bring him to you as soon as you feel better, okay?” The nurse patted Januaria’s hand.
My mother was exhausted. Three hours after the baby was delivered by C-Section, she was still under the lingering effects of sedation, but she was allowed to hold her infant son for the first time. I was, in fact, the last child to be born into our family. They called me Ismael.
Gardens of Earthly Delight
Together with my brother I was one of two Hawaiian-born among the family. My parents left the Philippines and immigrated to Hawaii in 1946. The odyssey marked for them the end of the Second World War. Leaving was not an easy decision for my parents to make. My oldest brother and sister stayed behind in the custody of my grandparents. It would be twenty years before they were able to join us in Hawaii. But that’s another story.
At that time, the United States government was seeking laborers for the highly lucrative and rapidly expanding sugar cane and pineapple industry in Hawaii. Contrarily, the war had left devastation throughout the Philippines, and millions of its residents were out of work. Hawaii was the place where my parents and thousands of other migrant workers chose to pursue their golden opportunity.
One of my brothers and three sisters accompanied my parents on their journey to Hawaii: that faraway place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the years that followed, they did not speak much about that trip except to say that the ships that carried them on the crossing were so full of people it was a wonder as to where they all came from. For almost thirty days, they and their shipmates tried to stay strong on rationed food and waited patiently to step on the shores of a new land.
After my nearly tragic but ultimately triumphant birth, I was baptized Roman-Catholic. Both of my parents valued hard work and spent every hour of every day doing what was necessary to keep our family together. We were what most people considered a poor family, but we were taught to view hardship as a challenge that could be overcome rather than a real set-back. My father was a laborer on the sugar plantations and my mother was caregiver to her family. She kept herself busy all day long preparing delicious meals on a modest budget and doing household chores. As a child, I was strapped to a cotton harness that she wore on her back as she hummed through her daily chores of laundering and housekeeping. In addition to washing our own family’s clothing—and to supplement my father’s income—she took on the job of laundering for some of the unmarried laborers in our community. I cannot remember ever seeing my parents take time to rest.
In the town of Koloa, we lived in an area called the Spanish Camp. It was a plantation camp designed exclusively for employees and families of those who worked for the sugar plantation or pineapple canneries, who had once primarily been of Spanish descent, hence the name. The house we lived in was a testament to utility. It had three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a front porch. The whole thing was no more than 800 square feet of living space in which eight of us managed to live together. The home was built three feet off of the ground to prevent flood waters from coming into the house during the rainy season. Through the cracks in the floorboards I could see into the deep, dark hollow under the house. All of the homes in the Spanish Camp looked the same with walls made of thin pine wood capped with a corrugated tin roof.
There was no running hot water. The bathhouse was situated ten feet away from the main house. For the first ten years of my life we heated our own water for bathing on a daily basis. This chore fell to the men in the family and there were many nights that I and my brothers passed shivering between the house and the bathhouse while the entire family cycled through their bathing routines.
True to form, the Tabalno’s were not about to settle for the condition of our home. My father, who was a self-taught carpenter of rather amazing skill, rounded up his friends and jump-started the additions to our humble abode. I think it was an opportunity for him to show off his construction skills to the guys. In no time they had built a detached garage on the right side of the house and another in the rear. They also built a wrap-around porch that did not quite wrap around. We needed the garage because my dad took great pride in his car and in the act of driving it around our camp and the neighboring towns. If my mother knew how to read, write and speak English, I believe nothing could have stopped her from getting a driver’s license too. Her commitment to her family and her tenacity has shaped me throughout my life.
“Mama!” I said, running through the screen door at the back of the house, “I going do some work on the Bates’ back yard on Saturday.”
Like our parents, the notion of idleness was not in my or my sibling’s vocabulary. From a young age we took on odd jobs to help the family make ends meet. Our economic status only served to make us work harder and look deeper for opportunities to succeed. I was excited whenever I was given the opportunity to work.
Unlike our plantation house, the Bates’ residence was among the better built houses located outside of our camp. The houses there were nearly four times bigger than our own and had larger yards. All of the larger houses were reserved for plantation supervisors. Periodically, the ladies living there would ask kids like me to help trim and clear the fast growing grass and shrubbery.
“I going make some rice balls and boiled egg fo lunch,” my mother said.
“Okay, Ma. I going ten in the morning for four hours. She said she going pay me one dollar to cut some bushes and clean da up the yard.”
I knew that a couple of small rice balls and a hard boiled egg would be more than enough to sustain me considering I would be munching on delicious Lychees and juicy Hayden mangoes too.
“Make surwa you tell yo fadda which cutting tools you going use. You know haw he is wen his tools missing.”
“I know, Ma.”
My dad made many of his own tools out of wood and scrap metal and he knew where each one was at all times. I searched through the tool shed and set aside my choice of gardening tools: a regular hoe, a sharpened sickle and the all-purpose machete. At thirteen years old I was already a seasoned yard boy; this from having started at the ripe old age of five helping dad and my siblings maintain our own small yard.
We had a small, but enchanting garden behind our house. It was more than the average vegetable garden. It abounded with luscious fruit trees and a variety of vegetables. Our home was surrounded by this small garden paradise of papayas, avocados, bananas, mangoes and many other delectable fruits of the earth. To add to the magic of the place, we built a modest pond, eight feet by ten feet around and little more than two feet deep, in which we raised and stocked catfish. In addition to this pond we had the nearby reservoirs and the ocean for our fishing grounds and these were the source of many a fresh meal. Life was bountiful regardless of our economic means. I would go to work at the big houses outside of the camp, and I was grateful for the work, but seeing the money that others had never made me appreciate the beauty of our own home any less.
Magic and Mischief
I slept with the window open at night and from my bed I could hear neighborhood dogs barking in the distance and sometimes the screeching cries of a cat fight. In the spring and summer there were sounds of life outside; voices carried on the air late into the night and crickets chirped from their home in the plants outside my window. In the fall or winter, the night sky would cloud over and sometimes the silver moon would peep through the cover and cast a white light over everything. On moonlit nights, I would kneel by my window and look outside at the garden that butted up to that side of the house. The moon landed one night exactly in the little pond where the catfish swam and it looked like the moon was taking a dip in the water with the fish. I imagined what it would be like if fish swam in the sky with the moon instead of in the water.
At night my father would sometimes leave in his car and this was how I knew he loved driving. I would hear him tinkering around out by the garage and then the door would open up and I’d hear the engine of the car start up and the wheels crunch across the gravel as he backed out. I watched at the window until the car pulled into view, its lights blinking through the twisted branches of our yard’s lush vegetation. Eventually the taillights would disappear and the sounds of the 1945 Chevy engine would be replaced again by the sounds of the night.
I tried to wait for him to come back, fantasizing that he would come to my window when he returned and invite me to climb out and go for a ride. I yawned and must have fallen asleep where I sat because some time later I felt my mother’s arms moving me to my mattress.
In spite of those winter nights, it seems like childhood was an endless round of summer. My mother always needed something from our garden for her cooking so my youngest sister and brother and I were set to the task of getting what she needed. We learned at a young age which spices were which and when to pick the mangos. My sister had a cotton bag that we used when it was time to pick the mangoes. It was scary and completely thrilling to be up in those high branches, twisting and hanging like monkeys. Up among the dark leaves I tried to get the best view over the neighboring yards and I felt that I was born to be a giant rather than a small-even-for-his-age little kid. I took pride in climbing higher than my brother and sister and finding the most vibrant mangoes up at the top where the sun coaxed them to perfect ripeness.
When I chose a good one, I would either hand it down to my sister to put in her bag, or I would peel back the skin and suck the delicious fruit in through my teeth. If I found a particularly good branch, I would sit there in the cover of the leaves until there was nothing but a pit left of the fruit. I sometimes fantasized that I might be able to conceal myself in the tree and hide until the search parties had been called out, but I would hear my brothers and sisters playing nearby, or hear other children in the camp shouting and I’d have to go see what was going on.
I ran into my mom where she stood in our kitchen washing jars for canning. I wrapped my arms around her as if I’d actually been gone on a long journey instead of just up in a tree for a half-hour.
“You stay all sticky and messy!” she laughed, “You like help, Mael? We going make jam and mango seed snack.”
The mangoes we had picked were laid out on the kitchen table and counter; some of the finest, juiciest specimens I had ever seen.
“Oh, Mama, I no can look at another mango!” I said holding my belly. I often got my fill from our garden. It was the very best kind of hunger satisfaction.
After we did our chores in the garden, my brother’s and sister’s and I went fishing. We dug earthworms behind the pig pens where the dirt was ripe and moist and then we gathered our poles and tackle from the shed and my older siblings got their bikes out. Those of us that were smaller rode on the handlebars down to the shores of the reservoir. We threw the lines in, propping the poles up and hung bells at the end of the fishing poles while we lie in the tall horse grass and fell asleep under the warm sun waiting for the Tilapia to bite. Willy followed along behind us to and from the reservoir and always found a good napping-spot in the shade. Every time a bell jingled on one of the poles, he barked to wake us and then he’d hop around us while we reeled in our catch.
Life was a mix of hard manual labor and complete and total leisure, but even the hard work was enjoyable. I loved being outside helping in the garden with the tilling and digging and the planting and weeding. One morning my father called me out specifically to help him in the garden. I always felt a little taller when dad singled me out and I worked extra hard on those occasions to impress him. He showed me what he needed done and gave me the small tools I would need to dig out the plots for the new plantings. I felt especially grown up because he left me to do the task entirely on my own. Well, not entirely. Willy was with me. He stood by for a while; watching and panting with his tongue hanging out while I cleared the weeds away and then began tilling the soil. After this went on for a long time, Willy must have gotten bored because he went and took a nap under a tree, but still he watched me as he fell asleep and then when he woke up again.
I stopped and sat beside him to have a snack of ripe fruit and vegetables, and eyed the large amount of work that still lay before me. We continued this way for the rest of the afternoon, Willy watching and me working. It was late afternoon when I finished and I was so proud of the job I’d done I ran inside, still full of energy. This time I helped my mom in the kitchen so that I could see out the window when my dad came to see the work I had done. I figured he would be surprised that I had finished so quickly and done such a good job, and that he would be full of praise and tell everyone at dinner how I was the best helper he’d ever had.