"If I ever met Barack Obama," the retired airplane mechanic said, "I'd tell him how much I admire his oratory, but how much more I admire Michelle's." I told my story about Obama and the skinhead, and then about the time I saw Michelle leaning over to look at me through outstretched hands as she shook mine at Ke`ehi Lagoon. (I felt her husband's hand on mine, but he didn't peak.) Alison, with whom we were walking, counted the six degrees of separation she had from Obama, including a cousin who went to Punahou with him when he was Barry.
Up the hill from those stories, she and I ran into the woman who lives on the corner, her house always dolled up with flags and signs. A loud house. We talked about the heat, how she suddenly wished for the rain she'd wanted to have stop just the other day. She said she ran a lot of things in Honolulu, including the zoo, the Shell, the Blaisdell. She was really happy that they might make the zoo into a sanctuary for old elephants. Her expressiveness manifested itself several times in exclamations of "Oh shut up!!" as when Alison said she'd been at the circus when Tyke killed her trainer and ran out into the streets of Kakaako, only to be shot dead by police (1994). The police are still traumatized, she told us. Not her daughter, who was only two at the time. Her husband had told her to close her eyes when the trainer was killed, and she did. I said Tyke has a memorial stone in the pet cemetery nearby, though her body was disposed of in the Waimanalo landfill, which is somehow in Waianae. "Oh shut up!!" said the woman, who said she'd go look for it soon. She was pleased that the new zoo director used to run the zoo in DC; he also used to work for Obama, who made him ambassador to Australia. A good man, she said of the former president, whose 2008 campaign shirt I was wearing.
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