The beach at the very end of what used to be Lawrence Road on the Kaneohe Marine base was one of Oahu’s less spectacular beaches. Unlike Waikiki, sand had not been imported from Australia to create a tourist-friendly spot to sunbathe. No. The beach was a gleaming black lava flow with large, jagged pieces of the black rock the Goddess Pele had tossed about, sitting atop the long-since-cooled lava flow of her anger that oozed across even earlier flows.

In this manner, the beautiful island was formed. The ancient path of Pele’s wrath was worn smooth by the eternal motion of the Pacific Ocean.  The water was a vivid blue that one can’t imagine until they see it for themselves — up close and personal.  The crashing waves were edged with white foam reaching for the sky. None of it looks real.

That shoreline smelled of plumeria and hibiscus. It smelled of coconuts lying on the ground in the bright tropical sun.   It smelled of salt and mildew and of decomposing small sea creatures trapped in the tidepools when the ocean receded.

I was a feral child crouched over a tidepool formed by smooth lava and the blue water of Kaneohe Bay. 

I was a Brownie until I crossed the bridge, meeting the other newly pinned Juniors who would soon all go camping on another beach.

I was a voracious reader in my spare white bedroom at the back of the ranch house on Lawrence Road.

I was a buffoon when my 4th-grade class re-enacted the Laugh-In Party on Friday afternoons in 1969.

And I was a loved child.

I didn’t go to this beach often, but in the memories I still have in vivid technicolor, I am always there alone  — just a skinny little girl who at the age of 8, 9 and 10 liked to explore.  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to get in the water, but I could scamper across the smooth lava flow and examine the rocks and the not-yet-dead tiny creatures stranded when the tide receded.  I always hoped to find a starfish, but I never did.

I remember the excitement of a beached whale after a big storm and a whole platoon of Marines trying to figure out how to rescue it.  I can’t quite remember, but I think the whale died, and they ended up using a crane to remove the carcass. 

I wonder what they did with it?

I also explored books — any book, every book. Once, when I was out of books to read, I started reading my father’s copy of The Collected Works of Shakespeare. I thought the Taming of the Shrew was outrageously funny when I was 10 years old in 1969.

This is some of what I remember of the late 1960s.  Vietnam was raging, and my dad was in combat for more than two of the three years I lived at 1701 Lawrence Road on the island of Oahu.  He’d done his first tour while we were at Camp Pendleton in California the year before we transferred to Hawaii.  Do the math: he did three combat tours, 39 out of 48 months, between 1966 and 1969.

In the early 90s, I had a dual induction hypnosis tape that flooded my earphones with electronic sounds, frequencies, and beeps to provoke certain brain waves according to the desired effect. I liked the creativity one. Underneath the beeps was music, and underneath the music was a woman telling a fairy tale in one ear while a man told a different story in the other ear. All of these sounds would move and twist from one ear to the other by taking full advantage of the stereo headphones.

The conscious mind, so they said, could only decipher some of the words. It would be intentionally confused so that one could enter the free flow of the creative state.

I could hear the woman better than the man.  One of the phrases she would repeat was Childhood memories are potent. I would actually enter a hypnotic state, but I never could quite grab my thoughts to get them down on paper.. I would never remember much at all of these self-induced sessions. But I would emerge feeling peaceful, although a bit groggy. I would sometimes fall asleep towards the end of the recorded piece.

My father was always pleasant to us, but oh how he hated Hawaii. Years later, he said it was because it reminded him of Vietnam.  He arranged it so that we soon transferred back to the mainland.

I always thought his hatred of such a beautiful paradise was just a matter of the two combat tours he endured during those three years his wife and children were living on Oahu. But I’ve since seen photos of Vietnam’s beaches and countryside.  The resemblance to the Hawaii of my youth is uncanny.  I hope to explore Vietnam someday – to see for myself the place that looms so large in my immediate family’s history.

Some of my childhood memories are far more potent than others. Fourth grade at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station in 1969 is bedazzled in my brain but also scarred on my heart.  The late 60s were tempestuous times, but I was having an idyllic childhood in paradise. I hadn’t realized how pivotal this era was in the development of my personality until I began reflecting on these memories from the milestone marked by the procurement of my very own Medicare card.. I can pin many of my attitudes and beliefs on those experiences.  They formed my nascent worldview, the one that is still mostly intact. 56 years later.

Childhood memories are potent.