"Hewo, dere, Mika," Miles said to his little sister, talking though an empty miniature box of cereal.
"Hewo, dere, Miyoz," Mika said back to her big brother. With the help of Boyar, I am flashing back to the memory of the kids sitting on the condo balcony in Wailea.
Today, the kids sit at a counter in a different condo in Wailea, chomping down some cereal that they have poured themselves, reenacting the "Hewo, dere" scene to indulge their parents.
"How old were you guys when you did that?" I ask.
"Really young," says Miles.
"I dunno. Too young for me to remember!" answers Mika.
My guess is it was seven years ago. Mika would have been two, Miles, four years old. And Dad would have been about seventy years old. We were staying at his condo on one of the golf courses in Wailea, where he had slept on the sofa so that we could commandeer the rest of the condo with our Pack n Play and various other little kid contraptions.
Boyar had videotaped the scene of the kids eating their cereal -- with a healthy dose of zooming out to film the golf course -- his adorable kids' voices still in the background as he cropped them out of the frame to capture the beauty of another creature that was close to his heart. Father and son would go off together later that day, rendezvousing with one of the gorgeous golf courses on Maui. Makena? Wailea Blue? Gold? Maybe it was the public course, Waiehu, where they sell Spam musubi at the turn instead of hot dogs. Hey, the better the bargain, the better the golf. As a condo owner, Dad enjoyed the local resident kama'aina rate, which he was very happy about.
It is bittersweet to reflect on this now, having just laid Dr. John Lee, M.D. to rest a few days ago. He was my second "dad", and I remember feeling privileged that he let me call him that. He was my mainstream, out-there, super-confident, always happenin' dad; similar and different from my own dad in so many ways. Having a father-in-law is like getting to have a dad who has no memory of what a pain you were when you were little, no headaches or annoyances to reflect back on, no decades of expectations one could never fulfill, a no-baggage dad. Or, at least, that's how it seemed for me.
It's hard not to tear up as we vacation here, with many good memories of Dad, thinking about how he looked out on this same sunset, played a round of golf on this same course. I dropped off Boyar at Makena this afternoon -- twilight rate begins at 2 pm -- and had an image of Dad and Boyar in Wailea, looking hot and tired, sitting outside a pro-shop as I drove over to pick them up. Relief on their faces as they saw me drive up, getting up and walking over to the car, walking that same walk, looking like each other, a father-and-son twosome.
Boyar is golfing as a single today. But I'm thinking Dad might be right there with him.
