[Eds. note: This is the 13th of 14 runner-up posts from the recent Kauai on My Mind Creative Competition.]
by Kimie Sadoyama
If you could see my parents’ store in the middle of
Kapa’a town, on the island of Kaua’i, you would have
chosen a cleaner more modern supermarket to do your
shopping. Its rows were so narrow that two Filipinos
walking opposiste each other would sometimes knock
over a bottle of mayonnaise on the cement floor, much
to my mother’s disgust. Someone once said of the
store, ”You can buy anything from fishhooks to
muumuus.” All I could remember about it was there were
wall-to-wall things in the back of the counter. You
could see everything hanging on hooks which had no
rhyme nor reason, from hammers to lighters, to cards
and flashlights. My mom always had a roll of wrapping
paper on the bottom and some spindles of ribbon on the
counter in case anyone needed them to be gift wrapped.
It was not a grocery store but they carried potatoes,
onions, garlic, eggs, and milk fresh. Their customers
were mostly Filipinos who worked at the sugar
plantations and grew their own vegetables in their
gardens.
My mother was the kind of woman who could look into a
person’s eyes and tell instantly whether he or she was
good or bad or just a victim of circumstances. She
knew just about everybody who walked into her store.
People would come in, and she would grab a ledger and
write down their charges.
She would describe people to me by what they bought.
She’d say to me, ”You notice these old Filipinos, they
don’t buy toothpaste or toothbrush? They don’t brush
teeth! That man doesn't buy toilet paper because he
lives in his car and parks in the sugarcane field to
sleep and uses the pavillions to go to the bathroom."
I’d laugh as they looked at me smiling and chewing
their tobacco with brown stained teeth. Why, she’d
know them so well that before leaving she would say to
them, ”What about apple cider vinegar, did you forget
it this time?” They would say, ”Oh yeah, missis, I
porgot da vin e ga.”
At night after dinner she would read the paper
thoroughly. Her favorite section was the obituaries. I
always thought that it was a bit morbid, but she would
say, ”It’s always good to know who died. You might
know someone.”
My parents’ store was one of the first Ma and Pa
stores to close down in recent years, giving way to
progress and the grocery-chain supermarkets of the
modern times. But the nickname Ma and Pa was not just
a nickname. Here on Kauai’i it was a reality.
Not only did these poor Filipinos come to my
parents’ store for groceries, but they depended on my
father for legal help, tax preparation and, of course,
borrowing money. My mother had seen enough of Kapa’a
town to know why people wanted to borrow money. You
see, my dad was always busy with his books upstairs,
so when someone wanted to borrow money, they would
have to go through my mother first. If it were up to
my dad, he would lend money to most of the steady
customers for he knew that he would be paid back with
interest. But my mom would needle them for hours until
my dad would come down from his office. Their
cusstomers were like their children, and their
well-being, whether it be getting duped at the
gambling tables or having one too many drinks. Besides
selling goods from their store, this was also included
as part of their jobs. This was a real Ma and Pa
store.
There was a bar right next to the store run by a
widow. I would hear stories of how she had, in the old
days, ladies of the night working for her. She opened
at noon and always came into the store before opening
up to buy some last minute ingredient for her
appititizers, which she always served for free with
your drinks. In the evenings you could hear the juke
box playing through the wall and you’d know that the
bar was hopping.
One day an old steady customer of my mom’s was
bugging her for twenty dollars. He had spent his last
dollar on a drink at the bar and was ready to hop over
to the next one a block away. My mother kept telling
him not to drink too much, but no. He stuck around
till closing time and she felt sorry for him and
grabbed twenty dollars out of her bra and wrote it
down in his ledger. The next day she fould out that he
had been hit by a car drossing the street outside of
the bar. He was not hurt too badly. The next time she
saw him he had a bandage on his head. My mom felt so
guilty that she yelled at him: ”You see, if I hadn’t
lent you that twenty dollars, you wouldn’t have gotten
hit. I told you to go straight home! You see.” That
was my mom. She was the mom of everybody.
The store was closing down for good, my mom was
recommending her customers to another store that would
take their charges, but some families preferred to
shop with cash in the larger supermarkets. My
grandfather started this business two generations ago,
and here it was now, my parents were going to retire
and close this store that served as a gathering place
and a second home for many of their customers for
almost three generations.
This old Japanese man was so old with nothing to do
so he would walk into town every day and sing Japanese
songs to the kids. They would just laugh at him and
try to get away, but he’d grab them, sit them down,
and sing songs to them from Japanese movie magazines
sent to the store for him. I would catch him stealing
candy from the rack and I would turn to my mom, who
would just put her finger to her mouth and say sssh.
Sometimes when she could tell that he wasn’t feeling
good, she would pour a little Seagram 7 in his 7up. He
would sing his songs all afternoon in the hot son,
then when it was time for me to drive him home, he
would race all over the store picking up his
groceries, yelling at me ”chi chi chi chi.” Which
means boobs in Japanese. To him it meant milk. Putting
all of his goods in an onion sack, already laden with
a gallon of sake, we would be off. My mom always
complained that he would dilly dally all day long and
at the last minute would be in such a rush. Every time
I drove him home, he smelt of urine. My mom says he’s
so old that he misses when he pees. He would always
give me a couple of dollars and avocados and papayas.
A few months earlier he would come down to the store
at the beginning of every month in a frenzy wanting to
buy a lock. He’d say, ”Those no good Hawaiian kids
stole my money from my drawer.” At the beginning of
every month my parents would cash his social security
check and he would pay his bill and buy some groceries
and go home to build his fire for his bath, an
old-fashioned Japanese bath called a ”furo” which was
outside of his house. He would put his whole month’s
cash in a drawer next to his bed and go outside to
start his bath, and by the time he got inside, his
money would be gone. Every month it was the same
thing. I need a new lock, he would say. This went on
for months. My mother told me that he just felt sorry
for those Hawaiian kids and that he had money in the
bank. He soon died of old age in his broken down
shack, a furo out back, with avocado and papaya trees.
Just like Yasui old man, my parents’ store died of
old age. Why, the shelves were so termite eaten that
if it weren’t for the paint I couldn’t see how they
held all those things on it. The next year my dad
leased it out to a feed business, and hurricane Ewa
knocked the whole thing down. Someone said that the
termites in the wood were holding hands and if one of
them let go, the whole thing would come down. Well
that was probably not too far from the truth, for
after the hurricane the only thing standing was the
rock wall in front of Betty's Inn, the bar next door.
I drove by, and someone had a sign up that said ”Yard
Sale. Everything Must Go!” right in front of the
rubble and a friend was taking his picture.
I am proud to have been born and raised here on Kauai
and have seen many changes but I do believe that if we
can understand how we lived here in the past we can
learn from it and would not be so disrespectful of the
old ways and brush them aside just to sweep in the
new. Thank you very much for providing me the
opportunity to have my words be heard.
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