mililani turns the big 4-0

lynn saw this "contest" in the mililani ka nupepa. mililani is turning 40, and they wanted submissions about what mililani "means." i would point directly to my blog, but it's pretty subversive and negative stuff. i think they want happier fare. draw more flies into the web.

nevertheless, i made my attempt. apparently, people like it. they may actually print it, i don't know. it's honest, it's true, and it doesn't compromise my ambiguous perspective concerning the town. and (most importantly) it's under 300 words.

i'd save it for the publication, but since most of you (nonexistent readers) don't even live in the area, you'd likely NEVER see it. so here it is, in all its worthless glory:

Submission for: Mililani’s 40th Birthday
By: Randy Otaka
Working Title: Mid-life Memories of Mililani

I was born and raised in Mililani Town.

I also currently live in Mililani Mauka.

The juxtaposition of these two facts sometimes bewilders me.

Let me explain.

I consider myself a typical product of this “first planned community,” and, like others in my generation, felt a strange mix of good fortune and restlessness living in Mililani. Good fortune because I knew I had it good: I lived in a clean town with great schools and swimming pools to while away summer afternoons. And restlessness, because, despite all of this, I wanted more.

My adolescent friends and I, weary of zigzagging the length of the town, continually sought “out-roads” to the wilderness at Mililani’s peripheries. We followed irrigation canals, rain-drainage canals, and even that largest “canal,” Kipapa Gulch, searching for “life” in our red-soiled world.

On one such venture, my friend Cliff and I discovered a small carseat at the base of a acacia tree, looking out onto Kipapa Gulch. It was a mile or so north of the then border of Mililani Town (the gate at the end of Meheula Parkway), deep in pineapple fields, just behind a couple of squat water tanks.

I recall us sitting at the base of that tree, telling larger-than-life stories and making absurd promises (as adolescents are wont to do). Our words fell off the edge into the gulch, like coins into a wishing well.

Not long after that day, Cliff moved away, and soon after that, so did I.

Now, almost two decades later, I’m back. I live in a house in Mauka, not far from the water tanks and the very tree where I’d spat challenges into my tomorrows.

Maybe those challenges have landed where I am today. Happy, bewildered, thinking:
how far I’ve gone, only to return home.

-end-