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Show Hospital Point was an oasis of sorts, two long and shady streets framed by a broad lawn that ran along the Harbor channel. Date palms bent in graceful arcs over the water and oleander bloomed pink, white, and lilac in the spring and summer. At the age of four and five, I remember standing along the mussel-littered shores of the harbor watching the ships move in and out. The sailors in their work blues stretched in long lines of orange life preservers from bow to stern; the submariners stood tasting the last fresh air before diving into the belly of the sea; those on frigates and destroyers soaked in the last images of land. I waited along the channel with my mother or father, guessing the kind of ship, the name, the use, fascinated by how they hid the other side of the harbor only to allow it to reappear as they passed. They arrived as regularly as dinner bearing artillery the size of small buildings and leaving a trail of oil-slicked waves lapping at my feet. Of our time in Hawaii, I remember little, and most of what I do remember is out of focus and vague. There was Fledgling Hangers, the day care on Hickam Air Force Base my parents sometimes left me at, the morning I learned to ride a bike on a road flanked by monkey pod trees, the bright red stain, lip-shaped, on the wall above my bed, and my father's pipes. By the time we left Hospital Point my dad no longer smoked, but until then he loved a good pipe. In the slow afternoons, while my mother made dinner and straightened the house, before my father arrived home from work, I would sit on the floor of the closet space under the stairs and rearrange his pipe collection. They sat in a wooden rack with holes cut out to hold the stems. For hours, I could line the pipes up on the floor, matching those with black stems together and those with white in a separate 43 |