Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

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Airport has secret spot for lei-overs

I WAS feeling the usual pang of guilt as I walked up to Martha's lei stand at the Honolulu Airport lei stands. I have to go to Martha's. It's tradition. It's custom. It's an order from my wife, Martha, that we buy leis only from Martha's. So all the little old lady lei makers from Bertha's and Beula's and Tootsie's or whatever the other lei stands are called were eyeballing me sadly as I tried to ignore them. I can't stand to look at the mournful faces of the other proprietors. Their withered hands work the flowers onto the needle while their eyes say, "Why are you forsaking my little lei stand? Why do you hate me?"

I accidentally make eye contact with the lady in the next stand over and feel I need to explain: "I have to go to Martha's. It's a law. Really." She looked down at her bowl of flowers like I had just killed her puppy.

Pangs of guilt! This is ridiculous, I thought. I don't even know what a pang is.

It turned out that the lei-maker at Martha's was named Marilyn, which I thought was a dirty trick. If you run a lei-stand named "Martha's" you should at least tell people your name is Martha. But, then again, my Martha goes by the name Margie, so go figure. Maybe the lady in "Rachel's" lei stand next door was named Buddy.

I LET Marilyn/Martha know that I had been coming to these lei stands since they were actually shacks (35 years of pangs!) and wasn't going to be sucked into buying one of those artificially blue-colored lei. We are strictly a tuberose, plumeria, pikake family. Or occasionally those little red berry things that look like something you'd put on your cereal. But no blue-dyed flowers. It's a law.

Martha/Margie was landing about then, home from taking our daughter to college in Oregon. I was waiting for her to call me on the cell phone saying she had claimed her bags and was ready for pickup. Because of the War on Terror, the three-minute-loading-zone rule is enforced with SWAT team backup. So I sat in the car with Martha/Margie's non-blue lei expressly violating the 10-minute lei stand parking rule by a good 13 minutes. Better to challenge Homeland Security at the lei stands than the terminal. The lei ladies were armed only with long needles.

I got the call and pulled out, waving bye-bye to Rachel, Tootsie, Marilyn, Buddy, et al., and picked up Martha/Margie a minute later.

Martha/Margie told me that at the Portland airport they have these free parking lots called "cell phone waiting areas." I told her we've sort of got that here. It's called the lei stands.