Seven days is not enough on Oahu. Each one has been crammed with activity but I've barely scratched the surface of life here. It's time to start packing up now, but as I come to leave (full of resolve to return) I find myself pondering the gentleman I met yesterday, Buttons Kaluhiokalani.
Buttons is a man who's had one hell of a life. When I asked him about his lowest moments, he said there were two - and both were when he'd been clinically dead. On the first occasion, when he was 38, he was DOA after partying just a little too hard down in Waikiki. He came round in hospital when his sister started tickling his feet. Two weeks later, he did the same thing again. This time, a la Pulp Fiction, a syringe full of adrenalin stuck into his chest brought him back.
Being dead a couple of times is on the gnarly side of things. But Buttons - a progressive surfer who was way ahead of his time - was locked into the party scene. It took meeting his Tahitian wife, Hiriata, for things to turn round. They met five years ago, when Buttons was in his mid-forties, and have a four-year-old son, Nuutea, and a baby daughter, Nawaiomalukea. In total, Buttons has eight children and eight grand-children. Nuutea and Nawaiomalukea light up his life today; all his children surf.
When he fell for Hiriata, Buttons got his life together. She played a huge part in his rehabilitation. As he told me: "Hiriata said that if I wanted to be with her, I had to have a plan. So I came up with one - to run my own surf school." That surf school has gone from strength to strength, and Buttons doesn't plan to return to his old ways.
"People still offer me stuff but I always say no. I don't say 'No thank you', because why should I thank them? I just say I don't do that stuff anymore. In that world people are always looking to see you take a fall, to bring you down. I don't thank them; I just say no."
Buttons today is full of charisma, lean and fit thanks to surfing and daily 40-minute home gym routine, and big on the aloha spirit. "It's about giving and sharing. It's the way I was raised. It's the Hawaiian way. If you give love, you get love back. If people come here to surf and remember that, they'll be fine."
The more I spoke to Buttons, the more memories of the Wrecking Machine days came back to me. I felt a kinship that I hadn't expected; I felt melancholy about mistakes made; I felt regretful and sad. Maybe Buttons has these emotions too, but, as his life shows, there's no point dwelling on them. The only thing to do is keep going and try to live a better life, perhaps even the right life.
loving this
Posted by: Surftwisted | December 20, 2011 at 04:05 PM