Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 32, Number 6, 1 June 2015 — On becoming grandparents [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

On becoming grandparents

Kathy and I never thought we'd see the day when our lives would be blessed with a mo'opuna (grandbaby). But we did on June 4th of last year. In early morning our grandson Samuel Kamaile Lindsey was born at North Hawai'i Community Hospital. Samuel turns 1 this month. His dad is a HFD firefighter.

His mom a nurse. And yes, we are typical grandparents with photos galore. We were planning his future without eonsulting his folks while he was still in Kara's womb. How presumptuous of us, but we were and still are? He's already a genius

and ean do no wrong. We know he'll be playing T-ball at this time next year, football at age 5 and basketball at age 8. We also know he'll be reading Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown) by the end of the month, Catcher in The Rye (J.D. Salinger) in First Grad e,Man 's Searcli for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) in Sixth Grade and War and Peaee (Leo Tolstoy) in Tenth Grade. When I look back across the years I realize how lucky I was. I eame from a simpler, slower time. WWI was supposed to be a war to end all wars. WWII ended three years before I was born. We did not have a hospital. So I was born in Hilo at Pumaile Home. My brother in Honolulu . Parker Ranch was Waimea. In my youth the sun rose and set on Parker Ranch. When I went to Waimea School enrollment was one hundred and eighty kids. There were no signal lights back then. If a hundred cars passed through Waimea on any given day, we were experiencing gridlock. The Waimea Samuel enters is complicated. His world is torn by conflicts in the Middle East, Russia and Africa. And here in America: Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, and Mauna Kea. Parker Ranch is no longer our town's "Big

Gorilla." Thousands of cars pass through Waimea daily. Three of our intersections have control signals. Another will be activated soon. Waimea School today has almost a thousand kids. We have a private hospital operated by the Queen's Health Systems. And his world is fraught with technology: PCs, Laptops, iPads, iPhones, iPods, texting,

tweeting. Who knows what's coming next. I looked with great pride on Samuel's birth document when it was being prepared by the midwife helping elean him up after he was bom. What caught my eye was it said plainly and clearly he was bom in Waimea. Waimea,

my family's one hānau. He is of this 'āina. And one of the things Kathy and I did was retrieve his piko (placenta). We brought it home, dug a hole in our yard, placed the placenta in it and two well-rooted 'ōhi'a trees (one red and one gold) over it, filled the puka (hole) with soil and closed out the oeeasion with a pule (prayer). I just hope Samuel's world (as well as all the children of his generation) will be a peaceful world, filled with aloha, rational thought and the "Rule of Man." Kahu Billy Mitchell in a Mother's Day sermon admonished the moms in the audience with this mana'o, "A child needs to know God." I know Samuel will. His mom, tūtū and Pennsylvania grandparents will be sure he does. For "Grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old." — May H. Waldrip "What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance. They give uneonditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life. And most importantly, cookies." — Rudy Giuliani "Never have children, only grandchildren." — Gore Vidal ■

<LEO 'ELELE V www.oha.org/kwo | kwo@OHA.org TRUSTEE MESSSAGES ' NATiVE HAWAiiAN » NEWS l FEATURES I EVENT S

Rūbert K. Lindsey, Jr.

Chair, TrustEE, Hawai'i

Samuel Kamaile Lindsey. - Courtesy photo