Monday, December 09, 2002 :::
 

Tale of two Brothers:

One time on the windward shore, I met two brothers. When the boys were teen-agers they liked to smoke pot. They lived in perhaps the nicest bedroom community in Hawaii, Lanikai. The family rented a home it was the early eighties. The father worked selling audio visual equipment to the military bases around Oahu. The mother was a homemaker. One day the boys were hooting on a pipe in the living room of the family house. After packing a few bowls the boys decided to go surfing. However in their buzzed state they simply dropped the pipe still smoldering in the garbage and went beach. Pretty soon the house was on fire. They saw the commotion from the nearby surf spot. Their curiosity turned to horror when they arrived to the smoldering rubble that was once their home. The firefighters pinpointed the starting location of the blaze and the brothers fessed up.

The family lost everything.

With rents skyrocketing through the eighties as the Japanese economy bubbled what they once rented for a few hundred dollars a month now cost two thousand a month. The family was devastated.



They moved to a less expensive part of Kailua, their church helped them with first and last months rent. Now they rented spare bedrooms to help make the monthly nut. I stayed with this family for a time. Life is not always easy in paradise. They all worked hard and had little free time to play.


After the devastation the older brother dove deeper into substance abuse, an easy thing to do in Hawaii. He worked for a landscape company and was high every day as he weed wacked away.

The younger brother got straight went to AA and was taking things one day at a time. He was finishing school and headed towards a job as a helicopter mechanic in the armed forces. He always was truthful about what happened but he never blames his brother, he always said "I dropped the pipe" His brother never spoke of the incident and they rarely talked when I saw them together. Neither brother surfs anymore. I heard the older boy beats up tourists for a living. While younger brother is a family man wrenching Apache's and Huey's for the marines. He now lives in Lanikai.



Tale of two brothers.

::: posted by Mega at 8:48 AM

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Mega means big or large stir because I like to mix it up