Hilo Days: Little Lost Boy

A long, long time ago, probably when I was in kindergarten, I had a pretty traumatic experience that I wrote about in my book of childhood, Hilo Days. Many have shared that story; unfortunately, the free website that hosted it was closed down and I was too cheap to pay the rent on another.

But hey! You get to read that story now.

A Bad Sense of Direction

I once got lost. This happened after Sunday School when I decided to go along with a friend to his parent’s store, just down the street from the Church of the Holy Cross.

The church was located on Kinoole Street next to Lincoln Park. They’ve since moved the church, following a fund-raising effort to build a new one. This took place during my junior high days, but we’ll cover it later on.

Glenn Miyao and I had cut across Lincoln Park to Kilauea Avenue and had begun our adventurous preschool Sunday escapade. All of a sudden – and I really don’t know how it happened, Glenn had disappeared, his family’s store was nowhere in sight. For the life of me, I didn’t know where I was.

Of course, I cried and cried until someone took me into a store and calmed me down. After I told them who my parents were and what my phone number was, they called my parents. Dad miraculously and heroically arrived to swoop me into his arms and take me home.

(By the way, I do remember my old telephone number. These were the days when telephone numbers in Hilo were four or five digits. Ours was 4758. Dad’s office was 51748.)

In retrospect, I wasn’t very far from the church, just about a block or so away, but to a little kid in unfamiliar surroundings, even a mere half block or less is forever. I can only surmise that Dad had gone home after Sunday service, worried sick about me (not to mention Mom).

When we got home, there was Mom, ready to console me and take me into her arms. You just don’t know how much you love your parents until you see them after being lost. I’m sure I gave them ample opportunity in the years that followed to worry about me, but if nothing else, I made sure I never got lost again.