Summer Memories: A collection of very short shorts

CROOKED

By Nicole Kato

I worked and went to school each summer until I graduated from Hawaii Pacific University, but I would still find time to do those summer-type activities, like going to the beach or stealing large cardboard boxes from Costco and sliding down the hill in Kakaako.

For some reason, though, horrible, terrifying memories are the ones that stick out prominently in my mind. The summer after I graduated from high school, a little voice inside of my head told me it was time for change.

And that change came in the form of a haircut – specifically, bangs. Being a little Japanese child, I grew up with thick, straight-across-my-forehead bangs. My mom (like all other Japanese moms) must have thought it was the cutest thing ever because I consistently had this haircut for YEARS! But this time I wanted sweeping bangs (Emma Stone was my absolute favorite at the time because of Superbad).

I was still really socially awkward coming out of high school, and the thought of driving somewhere and talking to someone about how I wanted my hair to look terrified me. So it seemed rational that I cut my own bangs.

In no way was this a good idea.

I can still remember how terrible it looked. I started by cutting one side and gradually making my way over to the other side. Because I didn’t know what I was doing, it turned out extremely crooked. The solution was, of course, to continue cutting until it came out nice and even.

It never happened.

By the time it was over, my bangs were about 1-inch long – and were still crooked. My summer consisted of perpetual headbands and hats. It was mortifying.

To make myself feel better, I decided change could come in the form of nicely bleached hair. Again, it didn’t turn out the way I had hoped, and chunks of my hair fell out due to over-bleaching that summer.

LIBERATION

By Jaimie Kim

It was the summer of 2006 and I had just graduated from high school.

I felt liberated, older and wiser. Really, I was none of those things. Well, liberated, maybe.

The summer was winding down with everyone’s impending departure dates nearing. Everyone, except a few in the group, was heading off to different states for college.

So it was around this time that I was seeing my friends almost every night. Most of the time, we’d sit around in someone’s house, watch movies and stuff our faces with food.

But here’s the thing about Mililani: It gets boring real fast.

I wish I could remember how this one night in particular began, but I can’t. All I remember is that somehow, I was zipping around Mililani in my dad’s car with a group of girls, trying to outdrive and outsmart another car that was full of boys.

There were a lot of tense, albeit excited, moments of sliding my car into a street and hoping the boys wouldn’t find us. Or speeding through a yellow light to see if they would obey the law and wait until the next green.

So, so stupid, I know.

At one point, when we thought we’d finally lost the boys, we took a break in the parking lot of Town Center. But a few minutes later, their car came barreling down the lane.

I guess at some point they had gotten tired or thirsty or both, and stopped at Jamba Juice. So in this really retroactively embarrassing standoff in a very public parking lot, I found a large cup of Strawberries Wild hurled at my car.

I was pissed. My dad was going to kill me.

The excitement died down pretty quickly, and a few people attempted to inefficiently wipe my car with napkins we found in the glove compartment.

By the time I headed home, it was very early in the morning and I didn’t want to make so much noise that my parents would come into the garage and wonder what I was doing. So I grabbed a towel, poured the small amount of water I had left in a bottle and wiped at it a bit more.

It looked fine to me. Intending to not say a word, I went to sleep that night, exhausted. I slept in the next morning, but as soon as I walked down the stairs, my dad asked, “Why is there sugar residue on my car?”

I left a cup of my Jamba Juice on the roof, I told him, feeling sweaty, and drove off without removing it.

“Lolo,” he called me, before telling me to wash his car again.

And that is how, on one summer afternoon before college, I found myself washing my dad’s car three times.

A WAVE

By James Nakamura

There’s nothing like having the ocean rinse the pixels from my eyes, paddling my surfboard out on water so calm and glassy that it seems like I’m floating on mere vapor. All the while, turtles, monk seals, stingrays, sharks, giant squid, an evil, sentient rock, and even the megoladon itself, are flitting in and out of the murk of my own imagination.

There’s a good memory – the summer of surfing that made me feel I could have existed on a diet of light and air alone. It changed all of my subsequent summers. And, it was out on the water, years later, over the weekend, reflecting on this, that I recalled something else.

Growing up, we never traveled. I’m not saying I was deprived – I don’t think children feel that when they are so young they don’t stand next to their parents so much as under them – nevertheless, every summer, one friend or another would disappear for a few weeks and return with a new set of stories and toys. I had accepted, without lament, that this wasn’t in the cards for me. Then one summer, my parents told me and my brother that we were flying to Japan to reunite with an aunt I had never met.

Psychologists have coined it “the flow,” a total immersion into a moment, and a complete annihilation of the self and ego. You experience it on a wave. There is no you. No identity. Just a wave. This can happen with music, art, writing or anything you love doing. Time dissolves.

It didn’t dissolve on that plane flight. It solidified, and the cabin was dense with it. This was torture for a child, seemingly speeding backward at a negative 500 mph. It was the anti-flow. There were no iPads, laptops or movies on demand – only a destination fastened in some imaginary distance, and a pair of restless, spindly legs dangling off a seat 40,000 feet in the air.

We landed, made our way through the airport and collected our bags. I kept pointing at random Japanese women walking toward us, asking, “Is that her?”

My father, brother, and grandmother were falling a few steps behind us as my mother’s uneven steps continued to hasten. Eventually, she dropped her bag and left it behind for my father to pick up. Emerging from automated sliding glass doors was another woman who had the likeness of my mother, only older and more weathered.

They cathartically fell into each others arms, relieved, exhausted, filled with joy. And in this moment of symmetry, and synchronicity, life blew apart all of the walls of my existence, and showed me where I was and where I came from.

For all my frenetic summer memories – beaches, nightlife, road trips – here is a quiet and simple image. Life is constantly drawing in the margins, and these margins will expand beyond the pages. That moment, I was just a scribble in the periphery of two women, separated for precisely half their lives, recognizing each other instantly, ecstatically crying into each other’s shoulders.

I thought about that while floating on my board during a long lull between sets. A wave rolled out of the blue-green horizon, and I never even saw it coming.

CITY LIGHTS

By Christina O’Connor

The final light from the sun was just sinking away as the group of us arrived at Lanikai Beach, parking our bikes and settling into a tight circle on the sand.

Being on the east side, Kailua is more of a sunrise town – and while you can’t actually see the sun dip into the horizon, the sky still gets strewn with pinks and purples when it does. This night, like most summer nights, was still, with a certain heaviness to the air, and as it got darker, a smattering of stars slowly began to twinkle on.

It was the beginning of summer, after our freshman year in high school, and my group of girl friends and I were settling comfortably into our typical summer routine, just like we’d had the last two years. Long, hot days at the beach. Nights at our neighborhood coffee shop or at someone’s house. But when we’d overstay our welcome at either of those, we’d head back down to our favorite spot on the beach.

It was an idyllic summer. But somehow, all we could think about was the future.

We fantasized about finally getting our driver’s licenses – we saw that as some sort of unimaginable freedom – and talked endlessly about what it would be like to be seniors, and then, to go off to college.

The sky was almost black when we started to see something in the distance – a bright, orange light on the horizon.

“What is that?” someone asked.

“Probably lights from one of the other islands,” someone else answered.

It seemed strange that we had never seen it before, but we all accepted that answer and went back to talking.

But that light in the distance kept growing and changing, until we realized that no, it wasn’t city lights, it was the moon – bright and big and orange and rising slowly.

Without saying a word to each other, we all simultaneously had the same reaction – we started running down the beach. Silently, we ran along the shoreline – trying, I think, to get closer to the moon.

When we got to the end of the beach, we stood there in silence, halfway in the water, watching the moon rise and create a luminous narrow path all along the ocean, stretching toward us.

I didn’t know it then, of course, but this early summer moment was something of a precipice. By August, things were different. Or rather, things started happening. Schoolwork. Moves to the Mainland. First boyfriends. Family troubles. Depression. Meeting other friends. You know, life. We all saw each other less and less, and eventually, most of us moved away for school or work like we’d always talked about, and we saw each other only on summer breaks, and then, as adults, maybe we’d run into each other in the grocery store.

I thought that in writing this, I would be able to unearth some truth about this moment – which has always stuck with me, but I’ve never really been sure why. But, even now, I don’t know what made us start running, or why, or what it means – if it means anything at all.

All I know is that as the moon climbed higher into the sky, it began to lose its golden hue. And by the time we silently turned and walked back to pick up our bikes and ride home, it was posted up at its typical location high in the sky and had taken on its usual size and its usual white glow. It became, to put it shortly, more normal looking.

But we stayed there, standing in the water, for the whole time it was big and bright and orange.

It didn’t last long.

SECRETS OF JAPAN

By Paige Takeya

My No. 1 vacation choice is Japan. I’m by no means an expert (four trips does not an expert make), but I can tell when someone is bringing me cheap omiyage from the 100-yen store (the packaging always gives it away), and I have learned the most interesting things about this country are not found in those “23 must-see places in Japan” listicles.

For example:

1. On the way to Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, there are five shops selling the same soft-serve ice cream for the same price. The flavors are vanilla and green tea. Truth: No one in Japan sells chocolate soft-serve ice cream.

2. One side of the escalator is for standing; the other is for people in a hurry to run through. Which side does which switches for no reason depending on if you are in Tokyo or Osaka.

3. No one in Japan wears sleeveless tops. People wear tank tops covered with T-shirts covered with collared shirts covered with jackets.

In summer. Yet, no one ever sweats.

So, last summer, in between acquiring a collection of plastic cockatiels shaped like bananas at the gashapon machines, I paid a visit to Mandarake in Ikebukuro.

This store specializes exclusively in pre-owned comics for women. Most of it is astonishingly pornographic. (For that reason, my friends refuse to go into the store with me.)

In typical Japanese fashion, the store is brightly lit and meticulously organized. Everything is labeled, and each title is sheathed in protective plastic. The clerk does not ask for ID when you make a purchase.

As someone who was once told that I “look like the kind of person who knows what hentai is” I have accepted that I look normal here, regardless of what I may be buying. I wonder if anyone would bat an eye if I brought in a “SEXY DAKIMAKURA” or something like that? Most likely it would cause everyone to cringe.

But that day, I saw a skinny, pretty girl teetering into the store and up the stairs on 3-inch heels, her dyed brown curls bouncing on her shoulders, wearing a blouse and skirt I could only dream of pulling off. She looked like one of the trendy girls you’d see shopping at Shibuya 109, and there she was, possibly buying porn in public.

As she reached the top, she tripped and fell flat on her face on the wet concrete. No one helped her up or even acknowledged they had seen her fall. As she staggered back up, I felt I had witnessed something very rare.

This is the secret of vacationing in Japan: The most interesting things aren’t the places, but the people.