I just had a super crazy ride home that i thought i'd tell you guys about. I got off work at 2pm today and walked across the street to a local lunch-van for lau-lau, rice and a salad. I ate facing the mountain down by the water of a small lagoon under the shade of a coconut tree. It was amazing.
After lunch I headed back across the street to catch the next bus up to kahuku, my home town. When I got onto the bus i noticed one of our elderly regular customers named Besse sitting at the front so i stopped tosay hi. Besse is 97, oriental, and is starting to suffer with dementia and alzhiemers and the other usual things that 97 year olds deal with. She's just in the last week started using a walker instead of her usual cane. She lives in Kaaawa (pronounced Ka, ah, ah, va) with her grandson who is mean, thats all she ever say about him.
After i say hi the bus driver asks me "Hey brudda, you know her?" i say yeah and she tells me that neither Besse nor the bus driver know where Besse's usual stop for her house is. Besse keeps on saying its by a pine tree in kaaawa and her address is 51-156. Next the bus driver asks if i can keep an eye out and watch for her stop so we dont overshoot it because the bus cant turn around. I say sure, ofcourse.
About 20 min down the road we're getting close to where it should be and as we pass kaaawa elementary Besse tells us that her house is BEFORE, the elementary. I pull the stop signal and decide that i'll just help her to her home and then i can just catch the next bus in an hour or so, no big deal. We get off the bus and the bus driver lady turns a hard left and drives forward to block both lanes so we can safely cross the street to catch a bus going the other way, or hitchhike.
As we get settled at the bus stop Besse points across the street to an Avocado tree growing in somebodys front yard and say "Tyler, could you grab me the kind, a couple of those leaves, i need to go chichi". I was kinda shocked to hear that but i ran across and grabbed her some leaves, and then asked her if she didnt just want to walk across the road and use the beach bathroom instead of just going on the side of the road. she dropped her pants to her ankles and that was her answer, leaned against the bus bench and did her buisness. I'm pretty sure my virgin eyes shouldnt need to see anything like that again...
We spent the next 20 minutes having the same 3 sentence conversation and trying to hitchhike.
"Where are we going, are we going to ala moana?"
"No besse I'm helping you get home, we're waiting for the bus"
"oh, what's your name"
"Tyler"
"oh, Thank you so much for helping me"
Serriously though, 20 minutes of that conversation about 100 times. Very sweet old lady though. Anyways the bus did come and we rode it about 30 secconds to her bus stop which was still way to far away from her home. when we got off we started walking. I tried to help her the best i could cause she kept complaining about being tired and cold and lonely. It was tugging at my heart strings super bad.
When we were about half way there a guy about 25, asian and deffinately not a fluent english speaker stopped across the road to take a picture of the storm that was rolling in so i yelled to him, "oi brah, think you could help us?". I explained the situation and he drove Besse and I the last part until her house.
When we got to the house she pointed out I wasnt really sure that it was the right house. It was overgrown by jungle, kinda run down and was deffinately not walker assessable. I knocked at the front door because of course, Besse had lost her key that morning at ala moana mall. Nobody answered so, as besse was making chichi again I checked all the doors and luckily, the back door was open enough that I got in.
Besse was a Pack-rat. Her house was like a scene from the movie "Seven", just piles of junk from floor to celing all over the place. I ran back to her and helped her get inside and sat down in a chair. I thought my adventure was done.
Besse sat for about 30 secconds and then said "Lets go, i dont want to be here when my grandson comes home cause he will be mean to me. Lets go to town." I tried to talk her out of this bad idea but she was determined so i helped her back out the door and back to the bus stop we had just gotten off of 15 minutes ago. Again she needed to go chichi so i jumped over the wall and grabbed some Bird of paridise leaves for her and just as im about o jump back over I meet the owner of the Yard im stealing leaves out of. I was lucky that he was just a cool surfer dude. I told him the story and he said "that is epic brah, you are deffinately going to heaven". The dude was very drunk so i let him go back inside while i waited another 20 minutes or so for the next bus.
When it finaly came i helped her onto the bus and told the bus driver the whole story, he told me he'd drop her off in an hour at kaneohe and would tell her that she needed to catch the next bus home. The bus in hawaii is kinda like a super-cheap old folks home/homless shelter and the bus drivers take care of them.
All said and done im home 3 hours later than usual, super tired, my hands smell like urine and im cold and ya know what? Its all worth it because of one of the things she said when we were trying to hitch a ride. "No hawaiian is going to pick up a howle like you and a oriental like me hitchhiking, thank you for helping me and even though you're not local, I considder you Local".
