Our world ... is a fantasy

I started to "write" and "journal" when I was just a toddler.  I would stand by the coffee table, clutching a pen, and go on for a half hour at a time drawing zigzag-y lines into my journal as I would loudly narrate my story.  The stories were a colorful and crazy amalgam of my own life, enhanced with bits and pieces of Disney princess stories all meshed up against the backdrop of the Koolau Mountains.  In these stories, I had a grandma who lived in the mountains, and a boyfriend, named Kolohe, who was a ghost. 

There was nothing unusual about my three-year old self blending the boundaries of reality and make-believe; what was remarkable is that I could pick up the journal a month later, and recite the story word-for-word.   My relatives always seemed surprised that I would remember the storyline so well, while I never understood their puzzlement.  I did not remember the story.  I was reading the journal.  In my mind, I was merely following my garbled, meandering line through the pages, and time and again, those lines revealed the same story.

As I got older, poems and crude movie scripts started to crop up. Then, in 9th grade, I had to make a short video about some aspect of the Elizabethan English language.  For my topic, I chose neologism.  I ended up comparing The Bard's innovative use of language to that of my contemporary youth.  I used an alter ego, named Khristeena Martin, Gen Z version of the Valley Girl: a sweet, well-meaning ditzy girl who knows little about academia, appears to only care about the superficial facade of our appearance.  However, after peeling away the layers of this sweet Kula onion, the reader is left with a vulnerable, socially connected, street smart local girl who represents a new audience in language.  A semester later, Khristeena reappeared in another school assignment, and after that, she would just not fade away.  

I ended up connecting these assignments and writing a novel, a pastiche piece--albeit, it would be closer to the truth if I said that the novel wrote itself.   I could not stop working on it, the material was around me in abundance, asking to be memorialized.  As part of winning first place at the Hawaii Fiction Writer's Competition, the organizer, Michael Little, offered to publish my novel,  "THE FOLKS YOU MEET IN PALI LONGS AND OTHER STORIES"  through Bamboo Ridge Press.

The novel's title was inspired by a poster of a playbill I saw at Kumu Kahua Theatre when I played the titular Kaiulani a few years ago.  The title of the poster's play was "Folks You Meet in Longs and other stories."  I thought it was the funniest title, at least for us, kamaaina Hawaii residents.  At first read, the title seems nondescript, but everybody who grew up in Hawaii knows Longs.  Everybody knows who shops at Longs and what people buy at Longs.  It is a local fixture, like City Mill or Zippy's.  You just know what the stories will be like coming out of Longs.  

That play was written by Lee Cataluna, a local columnist/educator/playwright.  It seems like I have been spinning in her orbit for quite some time.  Her son and I took drum lessons for years from the same teacher, and we had recitals together a couple times a year.  Then, Lee went on to teach at my high school, Iolani School, a few years before my time there, making me cross paths with her without close contact.  We both worked at Kumu Kahua Theatre, just not quite at the same time.  After I saw that poster, I could not get the title out of my head.  I would chuckle every time I saw the poster, imagining the stories coming out of those Longs stores.

Since I grew up in the Pali area of Punchbowl (between Kalihi and Makiki), Longs Pali was our drugstore of choice.  I, too, have become very familiar with the store, its customers and its stories.  It was the greatest pleasure to take Khristeena's character that I created over the years and weave a tapestry of humorous and touching encounters as an homage to my Hawaii.  The stories are "almost fictional, almost autobiographical."   The parts that did not happen to me, could have easily happened to me because these stories are an amalgam of familiar encounters we all share living in Hawaii.