Surfing encounter evokes grandfather’s love

Sometimes the dead send messengers. They can take any shape — people, birds, dolphins, dragonflies — but the message is the same: Remember me.

One Sunday morning in the waves at Walls, by the Kapahulu jetty, a thin local elder in a loose, black wetsuit kept asking me questions.

A newcomer amid a group of regulars, I felt as if I was being interviewed by senior management. There was no avoiding him, as he sat by the buoy that marked the prime takeoff spot in that lineup.

When I kicked back out after a wave, he was waiting to resume our conversation.

“Which one is your daughter?” he asked, motioning with his chin at a pod of fierce-looking young women whose long wet hair, clear skin and dark eyes sparkled in the morning light as they patrolled the impact zone.

“I don’t have a daughter,” I said.

His eyes widened in surprise, and I realized he must have overheard me chatting about my daughter-in-law with another woman my age.

“I have a daughter-in-law; she’s on the mainland, so I’m borrowing her board.”

“All my kids and grandkids stay mainland,” he said.

“Do they come home much?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head with a downcast look.

The sadness in his face and voice reminded me of my grandfather when he said goodbye to us at the Honolulu airport or called me long-distance when I lived in New York. As soon as he said, “Hello, Mindy?” I knew it was him, but he always announced, “This is Peepaw!”

I think he just liked to say the name that I had given him before I could pronounce the word grandpa. The grandsons and great-grandson who followed used it, too.

PEEPAW WAS only 41 when I was born, which was lucky for all of us. After my parents separated when I was 3, it was he who taught us to swim, took us to the library, chauffeured us to school, supervised homework, went to all my brothers’ sporting events from Little League through high school and, in partnership with our grandmother, kept us fed, clothed and housed throughout our mother’s three divorces and remarriages.

When I got married in Honolulu, my father and stepmother, who lived in upstate New York, didn’t attend; it was my grandfather who paid for the wedding and walked me down the aisle.

“Lawrence is a better man than me,” Dad wrote me in a letter, and I agreed.

We became estranged, but when my husband and I moved to New York City, Peepaw asked me to reconcile with Dad.

“You need your father,” he said.

“No, I don’t. I have you.”

“Do it for my sake, then. I won’t always be here, you know,” he said.

He had been the light of my childhood, granted my every wish and never asked me to do anything for him, yet I refused.

When my husband, Don, and I arrived in Manhattan, my dad and stepmother retired and moved to North Carolina.

Still, Dad missed Manhattan’s jazz scene, for which he came up to the city alone a couple of times a year. He’d invite us to join him at one jazz club or another, and we did. One of my sweetest memories is of Sunday brunch at the former Sweet Basil in the West Village with my dad, my paternal grandfather, my husband and our young son.

PEEPAW DIED in 1995, followed by grandfather Miles Pennybacker and Don’s father, Don Wallace, aka Huna, a former lifeguard who used to swim and dive through big shorebreak at Huntington Beach with his four children clinging to his back and shoulders and teach them to bodysurf on the sandbar at the outermost break.

Later, on summer days, his eight grandchildren would climb on him in the swimming pool and dive off his shoulders for hours.

My father, Bruce Pennybacker, lived the longest, but this month brings the first anniversary of his death and the shock of not having to rush to Longs to buy and send local goodies in time for Father’s Day.

I thought of Peepaw’s wisdom, and today I’ll swim out in the channel to the bend in the reef where we scattered his ashes and thank him.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.