Do not delete this, please. Before I die, I want to sit across you.

Now that you have two shows, I feel my chances are better than five years ago when I publically expressed: “My dream is to sit across Charlie Rose someday. Publish another children’s story and another caregiving book.” I did all that with a bonus book called Kapoho: Memoir of a Modern Pompeii. You’re the only one who can make the remaining dream come true.

Now, why should I deserve a place on your show?

I’m not famous or a household word except in our home. But..but…someday when one of those famous names cancel out on you, I’ll be there to fill in any spot. You can depend on this.

Sometimes, a nobody needs to have dreams fulfilled, and you can do this, Charlie Rose.

I recently published my 10th book called Kapoho: Memoir of  a Modern Pompeii. My family left Hiroshima  before the bombing and went to Hawaii, seeking  an ordinary life. Soon there was Pearl Harbor and  the enemy came wearing my face. We buried all things Japanese and 14 years later, Kilauea Volcano finished the job by destroying my place of birth. Not good enough?

How about my books  on caregiving for caregivers and children?

I give lectures and poetry writing workshops to caregivers of Alzherimer’s  and other dementia related diseases, children and health personnel,  throughout the U.S.  Until there is a cure, caregivers need help that can’t be found in medical offices,  and poetry writing has found a place in their lives to bring meaning and compassion to caregiving.  I have become the conscience of caregivers and the ones being cared  for, and a voice for our children. I presently facilitate a third poetry writing support group for caregivers in Sacramento, Ca.I was a caregiver for my mother who had Alzheimer’s and my own poetry writing took me beyond the daily tasks of caregiving to a higher level of what it means to be human.

Still not good enough?

How about being so desperate to fill in an empty slot, you will invite me to your table and I will read poetry to you. I have a few poetry books published.

Miracles do happen, why not today? Forgive my arrogance, Charlie Rose, but I’m a seeker of dreams.

Thank you and readers, if anyone out there knows magic, can you send Charlie Rose to this post?

starlight, starbright

first star I see tonight,

I wish I may, I wish  I might

have my dream come true tonight.

I met Ted in the 60′s at the English Institute at the University of Hawaii. I was a student in his linguistics class . “You!” he pointed at me in class. “Speaking of value systems, it’s quite obvious where your values are. Why, even the design of your dress is like the wrapping paper of Liberty House.” ( The Macy’s of today.) I never wore that spaghetti strapped dress to class again. Ted, of course, didn’t know then, who he was dealing with that day.

I raised my hand before he could start his class a few weeks later. “So,” I asked, “Was there a sale at the Sears basement this past weekend?”  He was wearing a new aloha shirt. We sparred for the next six weeks.

One day Ted stood nervously as he announced that his guru master teacher James Sledd, the renown linguist would be visiting our class the following day. He warned us, ” I suggest you refrain from exposing your ignorance by questioning this man. Just listen to him.”

When Mr. Sledd commented on dialects and how dialect speakers do not want to change and therefore, we must not even think of tampering people’s dialects, I raised  my hand and said, “”Mr. Sledd, I disagree with you.” Ted was behind him, motioning me to shut up. “I grew up speaking Pidgin,” I continued, “and at age 6 when I discovered Pidgin was not the standard English found in books or  how others spoke, I was determined to lose my dialect.”

He came toward me and said, “Young lady, you interest me.” I gave the smuggest look  I could muster to  Ted.

On the last day of  class, after the finals, he asked to see me outside. He bent over and told me to look at the label on his new aloha shirt. I saw a Liberty House label.

Twenty five years later, I saw Ted again, in the audience during a conference on writing. My lecture was on Children as Authors project on which I was basing my entire curriculum in my classes.

Ted came to me and said, “The Dept of Educ. ought to put you in a van and take you to every school in the state.”

“You don’t remember me, do you? Summer of 63?”

He pointed his finger at me once again and said, “Liberty House.” That week, he sent me a check for a hundred dollars with a note: Use this for the kids and writing, not at Liberty House.”

And we became pen pals. He never had a computer after he gave his first away to a young student whose story of needing a computer appeared in the local newspaper. Ted unplugged his and took it to him. He once bought a bicycle for a student who was taking a bus to his job while attending college.

In one of his letters, he asked if I knew he was gay.
“OF course,” I wrote back. “When you didn’t ask me out that summer in 63, I knew you were gay because I knew you weren’t married and any man who doesn’t ask me out must be gay.”

Ted lived with dignity. He was concerned that being gay would rob him of his dignity until the day he decided that he needed to write a letter to the editor on the gay issue. And he did and drew a breath of relief when nothing changed in his relationships with his neighbors.

We both had season tickets to the opera in Hawaii when I lived there; he knew more about opera than I did.

Ted was also courageous in how he lived alone and became a cancer survivor. I would have died from the descriptions he sent about what chemo therapy did to him.

We playfully sparred and bantered  a lot, laughed a lot, and we both knew beneath it all was a true friendship. I learned to be generous in helping others  because this is what Ted did. More than anything else, I could do no wrong in his eyes.   He told everyone he met that I was a genius and I should become the next Poet Laureate. In later years, he would recognize me or my name through the word Poet. And I shamelessly greeted him with “This is the genius calling.”

I saw him a few months ago at his nursing facility. Early set dementia was beginning to fog part of our conversations. I kissed him before I left and asked, “When was the last time a beautiful woman kissed you?”

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes and slowly said,” I’m still waiting.” I punched him  playfully and left.

About five hours after my phone call to Ted today, his niece Celeste called to say Ted left us.

I will miss him, Ted Plaister.

1-11-12

May the spirit of the holiday season become a permanent residence and may it not be out-staged by politicians sparring in sand and toy boxes. This poem was generated after reading a post on the following blog site:

Avomnia.wordpress.com

I highly recommend checking out that site to truly understand  why I’m  giving pause to rant on our politicians when the poinsettia is still in full bloom. The post  saddened me in its message that  perhaps  the  eloquence, dignity and style of our founding fathers  have not been inherited by  many of their heirs.

On Politicians

Our politicians have been watered down,

Hosed by those called Constituents.

( We are the creators of Politicians)

Brain is less, soul is less, love of country is less.

The eloquence of Jefferson, Paine, Adams,

Now reduced to LOL & ROFLMAO.

Even the mud they sling

Is watered down, leaving

Muddly puddles betwixt their legs.

Alas, had  they known their heirs

Would be so diluted into crapulous mass,

Thomas, Thomas, and John

Would surely have been cloned.

Found our old house lot in Kapoho

It was more than books sold, more than number of people who stood in line at my book signings.  It was, what Kapoho has always been…her people.

Ninety one year old Suzuki,  a conductor on the passenger train we called Motor Car came to both signings. He was a young rascal to us Kakugawa kids who rode the train for free since my father was working for the railroad company. Wilson would ask us, “Where’s your ticket?” As a child, I always  wanted a ticket to be punched like the other kids. Suzuki is now Wilson, he took his mother’s name after Pearl Harbor. He came with a sheet of paper, with most of the names of the families who were living in Kapoho before the eruption. An incredible man and he even wore a jacket!  He told more stories of Kapoho to other people from Kapoho who were in presence.

Suzuki, a.k.a. Wilson, my sister and me.

Jimmy, in his 80′s said, “I read about Frances Kakugawa but you are still Hideko to me.” We were neighbors in Kapoho and bought adjoining lots in Pahoa after the eruption to remain neighbors. I visited him at his home.

The Kapoho Lighthouse: lava stopped a few feet around the lighthouse to keep the light burning.

His sister, Julie, in her 80′s , invited my sister, niece Tammy and me to lunch at her now Pahoa home.  She took us on a tour of Kapoho where we found our old house lot. We had an old Vee apple tree in our backyard and it was still there, growing above the other trees, a welcome home sign. The area is now overgrown with coconut, ohi’a, ferns and other growth. Only the acres near the ocean are black lava.

George, in his 90′s , a  former policeman came with a book in hand to be signed. I’m not sure he was the policeman in my story “The Kindergarten drop-out.”

Misae, classmate from Kapoho, attends all my book signings. Misae and I were neighbors, we played cowboys, baseball and danced Bon dances throughout our Kapoho years. When we quarreled, we still went to school together, each of us walking on opposite sides of the road.

Many of the original residents are now gone but their children or grandchildren or in-laws or relatives came along with strangers interested in a place now under lava rock. And friends from long ago years.

There are still original buildings still standing. We met the New Kapoho residing in these homes. The new Kapoho, I call them, mainland Haoles now living in Kapoho. They came to learn what the old Kapoho was like, they said,  and left with book in hand with a vow to preserve the spirit and humanity that was once Kapoho.

   Kapoho, under lava rock…………

                 The Kapoho Tree created by niece Tammy.

David, the Events Manager, greeted  me with an orchid lei and my favorite café mocha drink.

All five of my books were dramatically displayed  on two tables. Dawn of Watermark Publishing was there to assist me.

Within minutes, magic took over. It was a book signing unlike any of my other nine books.

Kapoho: Memoir of a Modern Pompeii is a collection of stories of my childhood in Kapoho which was eventually destroyed by Kilauea Volcano. My history begins on December 7.

The book cover features a photo of an active lava fountain behind the heart of Kapoho:  Nakamura Store, their pool hall, theater and the family’s residence. This Nakamura Store made the Life and Look Magazines and national TV during the eruption.

The Nakamura family came to my signing. I haven’t seen some of the members since the eruption in the late 50’s. In the top photo, that’s my brother, Paul, to my left, and Shozo Nakamura and his wife, Harumi, to my right. Shozo and Harumi’s daughter, Sharon, wears the bright blue shirt. It was Shozo’s parents that owned Nakamura Store. In the bottom photo are Shozo’s nephew, Ronald, and his wife. Ronald’s parents’ house was under construction when the lava came to consume Kapoho and his grandparents’ store — you can see it in the photo, that building behind the others, standing on its own.

The Nakamuras stood looking at their home on the cover of my book. There are times when silence and tears express emotions better than words and this was one of those moments.

When I told Shozo that I included in the book a conversation between his now deceased mother and myself that took place on the night he was drafted into the army, he responded with tears.

Copies of Kapoho were purchased for every member of their families by the Nakamura family and others who were there. My sister’s high school classmate was there, someone I had not seen since the eruption. It was a reunion of a tiny part of Kapoho with my book cover as a backdrop.

Someone suggested I organize a Kapoho reunion.

It was Kapoho once again, now under lava, breaking through its black crust to bring us all together.

Next weekend, I’ll be on the Big Island of Hawaii and one of the bookshops notified me that books are flying off the shelf even before any news release.

No one has yet read the book. They may tar and feather me out of the Big Island after they read Kapoho, but I’ll be back in Sacramento by then.

If the presence of the entire Nakamura clan is a sign of what this book means, then What Have I Done? may be a question answered with more nostalgic hugs and tears than a pail of hot tar.

I read excerpts from “The Enemy Wore My Face” and “Once There Was a Kapoho.” My publisher, Watermark Publishing, brought punch and pupus for everyone to enjoy after the reading.

The gentleman in the picture to the right was born in Kapoho, too! His son saw my book at the store on Tuesday, bought it and brought his dad back to meet me. He’s in his nineties and we both recognized each other’s family name; when I was a girl we used to swim on his family’s property at Pohoiki Beach.

Yesterday, Wayne Harada also wrote a review on his blog for the Star*Advertiser:Excerpts:

[Frances] was always primarily a poet at heart but a storyteller in general, and she lived through tough times, enduring some of the fallout scars of being of Japanese ancestry, in a post World War II era when local Japanese often were maligned because of the bombs that fell at Pearl Harbor.  Over the years, she has evolved as a savvy ambassador of caregiving, conducting workshops for those burdened with the task of caring for a loved one, and writing about her use of poetry to ease the pangs of the grips of Alzheimer’s.

You can read the rest of Wayne’s blog here.

I have one more signing on Oahu this weekend: Saturday, December 10, at Barnes & Noble at Kahala Mall, from 11am – noon. I also have several more events in Hilo next weekend. Read my previous blog post for all the dates, times and locations. I’m even conducting a writing workshop for people who want to write their own memoirs!

And here are more photos from last night’s reading and book signing:

BOOK SIGNING SCHEDULE IN HAWAI’I
BOOK LAUNCH CELEBRATION
Wednesday, December 7 |6pm – 7:30pm
Native Books at Ward Warehouse
1050 Ala Moana Blvd.
Reading & Light Refreshments
(808) 596-8885
Saturday, December 10 | 11am – 12pm ( signing)
Barnes & Noble, Kahala Mall
4211 Waialae Ave.
(808) 737-3323
Saturday, December 17 | 11am – 1pm (reading&signing)
Book Gallery, Hilo
259 Keawe St.
(808) 935-4943
Saturday, December 17 | 3pm – 5pm ( lecture and book signing)
“A Writer’s Pen” Workshop—The Writing Process and Memoir Writing
East Hawaii Cultural Center, Hilo 141 Kalakaua St.
Sunday, December 18 | 1pm – 2pm ( signing)
Basically Books, Hilo
160 Kamehameha Ave.
(808) 961-0144

I needed words, more than photo images to capture certain moments on this trip and I share a few with you.

World Trade Center Memorial: friend Charles Pellegrino used his family pass for his first visit to the Memorial and I was honored to be with him. I had my own special moment.

I saw a young man trying to lay a roll of paper on a name so he could trace it with a crayon. The wind was strong after a snowstorm the previous day. I asked to hold the front end of the paper for him so he could rubbed his crayon over a name. I watched  a name slowly  appear…Julie….and I didn’t know what to do. It was more than a simple name, I knew that.  She was a person appearing before our eyes, a person who was a daughter, wife, girl friend, sister, or mother  and I wanted to let the young man know that I knew this. Julie’s name was followed by her middle initial, her last name and ended with “and her unborn child.” I asked, ” Will you tell me something about her?”  He choked and couldn’t speak and finally said, “I can’t.”  I said “I’m sorry” and put my hand on his and left. I looked at thousands of names and knew each was more than a name.

Charlie followed the name of his friend and a family member with his hand, running his fingers over each letter and said, “It helps to feel their name.”

New York City is also subways.

The Subway

Will I ever become one of them?

She sits and knits without raising her head,

Can she sense by the length of her knitting

When her next stop will be?

Does five inches of knitting equal her stop?

He sleeps soundly like a horse,

His head upright, his hands on his lap.

Clenching a shopping bag.

Is there an alarm inside his bag?

She stares straight ahead

Like a robot in space.

Do I hear a silent ummmmm

Meditating her next stop?

How can they be so relaxed?

He sits, his back straight and stiff.

Ah, is this his first ride, too?

Naah, he’s guarding his Armani shopping bag.

Among the likes of us.

A man jumps on board, and asks

“Does this take you to J street?”

What an adventurer, I envy him.

Occupy Wall St harmonized in

Built in standing ovation:

We are the 99 % fill the air.

I sit there. Anxious, a child whose grip lost

Her mother’s hand.

A New Yorker friend sits across me

To accompany me to Brooklyn

With three transfers. I watch her like a hawk

but the crowd soon becomes a wall between us.

I can’t lose sight of her, I panic.

I must get to Brooklyn.

Ah, I see her shoes between pairs

And pairs of legs. My safety net,

Those tired worn out shoes.

Relax, observe, learn.

I pretend I’m a native New Yorker

Who’s quite capable of knitting

Or snoring before my stop.

I look for signs on station walls

But they run like subtitles

On foreign films.

I listen to “next stop”

But they sound like voices

At airports, all muffled and dumb.

I keep my eyes on her shoes.

When they move, I move.

When they stand, I stand.

         Shoes are walking,

         Shoes are walking.

         She motions me toward the door.

         I elbow my way like a New Yorker.

         We run, two short distance runners

         To the next train.

Denver, Colorado:

On the plane from NY to Denver, I arrived with a blank sheet. I still didn’t know how to begin my keynote address at the Brookdale Respite Care National conference, but it was waiting for me in the Renaissance Hotel lobby. I was greeted by nine large flower arrangements of red anthuriums? Anthuriums in Denver?  They gave me moments for pause. My mother grew and sold anthuriums before her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. That night she entered my dream and I had  my introduction which caused many teary eyes in the audience the following day.

A young woman working in the Renaissance Hotel gift shop asked to be my pen pal. “I don’t have any friends to hang out with since I moved here from Georgia,” she said, “and I could really hang out with you.”  How wonderful is that, to hang out together as pen pals between Denver and Sacramento, two friends with eons of age between them?

The world is still a wondrous place if we look for beauty, kindness and humanity.

I’m very excited about book #10 coming to you this Fall

Pre-order from : Watermark Publishing : sales@bookshawaii.net

or signed copies from the author herself: fhk@francesk.org

Or meet me in Hawaii and/or  L.A./ Sacramento,  for book launch: Info to follow soon.

Down town, Kapoho, before lava destroyed it all. The billiard pool, the store and theater run by generator.

The country mouse will be in the Big Apple on the 29th.

It’ll be a treat to see my friend Sets who moved from Hawaii to the big city.

You can see her poetry in Mosaic Moon: Caregiving Through Poetry. Sets is a practicing

Buddhist . She tried but often failed to ground me to reality. I wrote this poem about  one of our ventures:

A Literary Afternoon at Borders

My name is announced over the intercom,

Followed by a press release on Mosaic Moon.

Shoppers are invited to join me in reading,

Promising a literary event of magnitude.

“Sets,” I say to my partner in reading,

“We will read and give our all

To an audience of one or a hundred.”

We settle for one.

We sit facing three rows of empty chairs

Except for one in the front row,

Occupied by an employee of Borders,

Hoping to be honey to ants.

Shoppers curiously walk around the edges,

Sneaking looks at Sets and me.

“It can’t be good if no one’s there,”

Can almost be read from their faces.

Soon hard rock music fills the room,

Followed by an aria from an opera,

(Not even my favorite Puccini.)

Drowning out our voices

As we read our literary creations.

Empty chairs, an aria,

Poetry without rhyme.

Omar Khayyam, at least

Had bread and Thou

Beside him. And lots of wine.

Sets, the philosopher, states with conviction,

As I gather unused fountain pens

And clean white blotters,

“I learn something from every experience.”

“Yeah, right Sets,” I mutter,

“Empty chairs don’t applaud.”

    Frances H Kakugawa

    ( written after a book signing, 2004)

Author, Forensic Archeologist, Charles Pellegrino  promises  me the best cupcakes on 6th Ave.  He is one of the best  writing  teachers ; I read his books of different genres and sit at his feet in awe.  He influences my writing like no other. We hope to pay our respects at the WTC Memorial.

I’m determined to join Occupy Wall St. will take two signs “Occupy Sacramento” and “Occupy Hawaii” , eat a hot dog like those screen detectives,  and  play author whenever called upon. Lunch with former students, now all grown family men. Then to Denver, to give a keynote address at the  Brookdale Nat’l Group Respite Conference.

I promise to send you postcards. Stay tuned.

From Denver, to Hawaii to launch my new book: Announcement  to follow soon.