Aunty Kanoe & The Martin Guitar
This weekend I’m flying to San Diego for my Aunty Kanoe’s celebration of life. She passed at her home at the ripe old age of eighty-four from cancer less than three weeks after her diagnosis. I had three aunts and my grandma on my father’s side who, at various times, played the role of “Mom” in my life. Now they’re all gone. My uncles and father as well as my grandfather; Aunty Kanoe was the last of them.
My Aunty Julie was the big sister, caregiver to all and a hard worker. Everyone benefited from her familial loyalty and self sacrifice. Her thirty five years of kitchen service at White Memorial Hospital created in her a love for cooking and baking that, again, we all benefited from. When my grandmother contracted Alzheimer’s and dementia Aunty Julie insisted we would care for her at home and that’s where my grandmother passed after ten years of progressively worse mental health - in Aunty Julie’s bedroom. Aunty Julie was about action.
My Aunty Mae was the youngest sister who rocked me to sleep as a baby and was my bedmate until I was four. She clicked her nails in my ear before leaving to work in the macadamia nut fields at dawn and I waited for her return daily on the front steps of our house in Keaukaha. A much older gentleman from church for years wanted to date her. To my grandparents dismay Aunty Mae stubbornly refused all of his advances and instead waited for joy and true love. She was rewarded with a loving marriage and a happy man and family. Aunty Mae was about fun.
And then there was my Aunty Kanoe, the middle sister, the China doll, the dancer. She was about progress.
I wish I were more like my Aunty Kanoe. Although I would consider myself progressive I don’t think I have quite the foresight or lifelong steadfastness she did. I don’t think I have quite the fortitude she did either, or the drive to make tasty food or iron mountains of clothes. I definitely don’t have the patience she had to create albums of photographs documenting the international travels and adventures and interests that she lived and loved and enjoyed all her life. Aunty was an excellent markswoman, wielding rifles and shotguns with ease and confidence. She was a fisher, a hunter, a prospector, a miner, a leader at work and mother in the most dedicated and loving way. She was an entrepreneur with her husband of sixty-one years, Uncle Bruce, and together they bought and sold over one hundred properties during her lifetime. Aunty’s Jazzercise class compadres gave her special recognition as their oldest and longest active member attending classes into her eighties. Aunty Kanoe made sure she lived, regardless of the prejudices of her era, regardless of the injustices women in her time faced especially as minorities and, in her own humbly joyful, sometimes kolohe way, made a difference as a living example of practicing what she preached.
The last time I made a trip specifically to see Aunty Kanoe she gave me a Martin guitar. She’d mentioned she wanted me to have it a few years back and I’d been making plans to go to California and fetch it when Covid happened. It was the guitar I’d heard my grandfather play when I was a girl living in Maywood, California attending Heliotrope Elementary school.
In between his daytime painting gigs, painting being a trade he learned from his father-in-law, and his night job as a janitor at Vornado, grandpa would come home, eat his dinner, help me with my math homework (those fractious fractions) and pull out the Martin to play for a bit.
picking, never strumming. He was methodical about getting it out of its case, careful and respectful as he’d been taught as a youngster. In his time musical instruments, in Hawaiian households anyway, were prized and revered; treated with respect, as one might treat an elder. Never touched or played with by children as if it were a toy. The instruments were pulled out at night, after the cares of the day had been put to rest and children settled. It was the time of day one waited and longed for, when the quiet sounds of night, moonlight and kī hoʻalu soothed the aching world. Stars appeared and troubles were forgotten. We were in California, more than two thousand miles from Kapaʻahu, Kalapana, Puna, but while he played the Martin we returned for a moment to the lava fields and ocean sounds and smells of home. Grandpa returned the Martin to Aunty Kanoe when he, reluctantly, moved back to Hawaii after fourteen years of living and working in California. That was all I knew about the guitar until Aunty Kanoe shared more of its history.
The guitar was actually originally purchased by Aunty’s older brother Joe when his Merchant Marines company made a stop in California. Before his company left the west coast he gave the Martin to my Aunty Julia who’d gone to California for college. When Uncle Louis’ Merchant Marines company made a west coast stop he went to his favorite sisterʻs house and played that guitar and, as the most musically gifted of my grandmother’s six children, made it sing. When my father, Clarence, joined Aunty Julia on the west coast to attend college he took the guitar and used it to play Hawaiian and tiki bar gigs to support and put himself through school. It took near fifteen years for my father to get his degree in music and art but that Martin guitar helped my dad become the first in his family to graduate from college. Once he was done with California life, he gratefully left the guitar with my Aunty Kanoe and hightailed it home to Hawaii.
Several years later, when I was four and Aunty Julie insisted we go to California to find better doctors for my grandmother, my grandfather, ever an opportunist, decided to extend his visit. He liked it there in California and he enrolled me in Kindergarten at Humphreys Elementary school in East Los Angeles. On the mainland grandpa was free to go where he wanted and do what he pleased without small town meddlers in his business and extended family making him a cosigner. The extended visit lasted fourteen years when he got a job, started a painting company and enjoyed the newfound freedom California afforded him. And with that newfound freedom grandpa decided to borrow the guitar from his favorite daughter, Aunty Kanoe, who, by then, had moved to California, married and inherited the guitar from Aunty Julie. Grandpa decided to play the music of his childhood and youth - ki ho’alu, traditional Hawaiian slack key - until, finally he too had to bend to my grandmother’s wishes, give the guitar back to Aunty Kanoe and move back home to Hawaii at the age of 79, less than a year before he passed.
The old Martin sat in my Aunty Kanoe’s house for forty more years; the scars of life as a loved part of our ohana etched into its back with belt buckle marks and into the front below the sound hole with strum patterns. Its neck was slightly twisted and the original tuners beyond saving when Aunty passed it on to me, still in its original cardboard case. I carried it on the plane with me back to Hawaii in 2021 and took it to my friend, a musical partner and luthier, Terry Warner.
Terry’s an interesting fellow. A lanky and jocular artist of sorts himself, Terry’s been tinkering with instruments, his own and those of his friends, for decades. Never formally trained as a luthier, Terry, nonetheless, has a natural rapport with stringed instruments. He’s a guitar whisperer. A retired carpenter and contractor by trade, Terry’s quest for creating works of art with wood can be seen in various structures and facades around the island, but I suspect that the legacy he leaves will be in the instruments he creates and fixes, always leaving them in better shape than when they came to him. I left the Martin in his safekeeping and told him I wanted it in playable condition, not all dolled up and refinished shiny, but capable of carrying a tune and being a working member of my family again. I wanted its story to remain and its character kept intact. “It’s an old girl,” he said, “but I think sheʻs got a good tune or two left.”
According to Terry’s wife, Lisa, Terry and that Martin bonded. He’d take her out of her case and keep her in his workshop while he worked on other, less confounding, instruments. She mellowed in the Hawaiian sun and took in the tradewinds while he fidgeted and tapped and meticulously drew out her story. Things worth doing well take time. They shared their secrets, as a luthier and a guitar do, and when they were finished he called.
I played her this morning out on my big shady lanai overlooking the kai mālie of Kawaihae. A whale waved her thanks for the old kī hoʻalu tune and I smiled thinking of my grandpa, my Aunty Kanoe and the preparations we are making for her services this weekend. I will be picking crown flower this morning for her lei and the fresh laulau will be frozen this afternoon for transport to California tomorrow. Life has a funny way of bringing things around when you least expect it.
Aunty Kanoeʻs last visit home was for a family reunion. She stayed on with us in Kawaihae, did the sakura card smack down and heatedly debated the validity of Keali’i’s “super yaku.” We played family songs, sang himeni and laughed at stories of family members who were gone long ago. We put flowers on the graves and shopped for fresh fish and she made her famous chow mein and beef stew. Aunty Kanoe knew my story, she knew my history and some of the sad choices that I’d needed to make in my lifetime. Aunty Kanoe’s counsel, always offered with love and support, was true and pure. Aunty Kanoe was always in my corner rooting for me, always reminding me of the love and care my grandparents had raised me with, and always cheered me with her sing-song voice on the phone for our birthdays, just a day apart. I will miss her. But I have the Martin, the best gift ever, with which to remember my Aunty Kanoe and my family. Whenever I play her, she will sing to me of times and places and people past and I will pass that on to my children and theirs and create stories to remember as well with that old Martin guitar.
