This fair-haired phenomenon was born in Honolulu while her parents were stationed there in the 60's. The Queen's Hospital's brand new maternity floor sported spanking new beds with state of the art push-button controls and lanais in the room with views of the city and mountains beyond. A landing place for a goddess!!
In the hospital nursery she created a sort of glow-- her pink body and a fuzz of golden red hair setting her off like a sunrise against the backdrop of the darker Asian and Polynesian babies.
She was an armful: "Beeg baby!" sighed the admiring grandmother from the Korean landlord's house pulling the cotton wrap away to see.
Hawaii is such a great place to have a baby. The windows are open, the air is fragrant, the temperature balmy, and in those days, a young mother could push a little stroller around Honolulu without worry about crime or traffic. People were unfailingly warm and friendly to the little haole family, and to their effervescent infant.
The child was a watcher and responder. From the first, she had the gift for engagement-- eye contact, dialog in body language, energetic responses to people's overtures that made them laugh with delight. The child adored the warm ocean waters she was introduced to and stretched her chubby arms out for more, more.
After Hawaii, the Kama'aina was brought back to the seasons of the mainland, and began her journey through the joys and disappointments of Real Life.
Somewhere in her first seven years an imaginary friend came into her life, and somehow this friend got the name Lacidæa. Lacidæa gradually got a last name -- Lipsinger --and very specific characteristics including a mermaid tail which could morph into long legs featuring sparkly red shoes with very high heels! Her hair was long and she was very beautiful with very long eyelashes and long fingernails painted red. She wore a shimmering gown with a dramatic slit that showed off her legs (when she was not being a mermaid.)
Lacidæa Lipsinger deserved her last name. You could hear her singing as she and the Kama'aina swam together summers in Nantucket Sound. They would stand breast deep in the gentle swells touching the sun glitters with sensitive fingers, admiring glistening green seaweed strands, and singing their special mermaid songs. Through the mundane seasons of rules and limits and school they went on secret trips to lands the parents never knew.
This was not a simple child, and she did not have a simple childhood. As morphable as Lacidæa Lipsinger, she was in one person a personification of both fragile grace and fierce paganism. The parents had their hands full.
And when Lacidæa Lipsinger was discovered to have had a fiery demise (she had "put her head in the furnace and burned all up") the parents, already perplexed by their complicated daughter, became alarmed.
Through an adolescence and young adulthood decorated with lots of eye makeup and high heels, the Kama'aina sent parents, boyfriends and teachers alike on a mostly distraught chase punctuated with moments of intense beauty.
Often the moments would coincide in one event. Often the event would have to do with water. Getting in touch with Lacidæa, perhaps.
For instance:
The battling mother and daughter cannot speak to each other, but they drive, seething, for two hours in winter weather to the ocean where there is a gale blowing the sand in horizontal volleys pelting their freezing faces. They stamp on foam puffs torn from dirty breakers and get wet to their waists. They have to hold hands to stay upright in the cross current. They curse the foam, imbuing it with the names of their anger and end up laughing hysterically and then comfortably together at the wild adventure. They come home thankfully, glad for each other
The Kama'aina will arrive and make the world around her work better; the family will again feel subtle shining threads knitting them a little closer-- like a cobweb -- for the sake of love.
"Time for a family get-together-- I'm making chicken -- be there or be square!"Maybe the cobweb will have a certain sheen, a phosphorescence, like mermaid skin. Maybe it will carry the waves of a certain song. Maybe it will sparkle and smell a little like fire.
Maybe goddesses can come through fire and still be singing!
Aloha!
Green Thumb
