Missing From Oahu

I didn't see what I most wanted when Big Guy, Daisy, Birdie and I traveled to Oahu. I saw a lot of great stuff--the incredible blue ocean; the rugged, razor-sharp pali; lush tropical vegetation; surfers (mostly confused Asian ones); mongeese and strange birds. But gone was my childhood playground. Infused in how I viewed all the tourist stuff were my 40-plus-year-old memories of living in Hawaii and playing with my best friend Florida Sunshine. I moved to the Fort Shafter army base as an eight-year-old, and within a day, met Florida Sunshine. I don't remember if we instantly liked each other, as military brats have to determine who is and isn't ok to hang with, but soon we were inseparable. We spent our free time swimming, baking sugar cookies, exploring the backyard mountain and playing with her sister's Barbie dolls. But my favorite memory, and the one I hoped to share with Birdie and Daisy, was of the jungle gym. At the Fort Shafter of long ago, privates lucky enough to not be shipped to Viet Nam spent long hours painting the playground's jungle gym. They would finish. Then Florida Sunshine and I would peel off the newly dried silver paint with our fingernails, competing to remove the longest continuous strip possible. On my return trip to Fort Shafter, I wanted to discover that the playground survived. But the area where Florida Sunshine and I lived and played has been torn up and replanted with a more modern Army community. The new playground, while functional, isn't peel-able. The new Army brats aren't inadvertently consuming specks of paint as they play. And now I'm thinking, it may have been lead paint that we peeled as the Army intended for its work to last. Florida Sunshine and I intended otherwise.