An illustration from a card Kathleen Wong Bishop
made for Leslie Ann Hayashi.
Friends
4-everBy Nadine Kam
Assistant Features Editor'Fables From the Garden' By Leslie Ann Hayashi and Kathleen Wong Bishop (University of Hawai'i Press, 40 pages, $14.95
"ONCE upon a time," a story begins, "there were two young girls. Leslie was spunky and good at reading and writing. Kathy was a little shy and artistic."
Now, in most modern stories the girls would grow up, go their separate ways, work, marry, move to different cities and never hear from one another again.
But that's not the case with this tale, jotted down and illustrated by Kathy in a birthday card for Leslie two years ago.
Leslie is Honolulu District Court judge Leslie Ann Hayashi. Kathy is Kathleen Wong Bishop, now Christian education coordinator at Shepherd of the Hills Church in Phoenix, Ariz. They not only remained friends, but they've bridged 37 years and thousands of miles to bring young readers 10 "Fables From the Garden."
The book includes the tale of a chameleon whose vanity threatens his safety, a baby dragonfly who longs to soar, and a lone orchid that must learn to get along with a bunch of snobby roses. Each story is summed up with a tidy moral.
"They're life's lessons for sure," said Hayashi, a constant witness to the bad choices people can make when they don't have a strong sense of morals and values.
Also a mother of two, she said, "I really wanted my children to grow up with a core set of values because it's so hard to be a child today. There are so many more choices and so many more stresses and I can't be sure I'm teaching them everything."
Bishop said, "Things are really different now in the '90s. Everybody's working really hard to earn a living. Families are separated and parents are searching for ways to bring out their children's' natural goodness."
The two have adopted into their work many of the state Department of Education's 14 "core ethical values," which makes ideals such as perseverance, cooperation, respect and responsibility part of a public education.
Beyond fulfilling civic duty, Hayashi always knew in her heart that she wanted to write stories. In 1995 one of her efforts paid off. "Thoughts for a Dead Japanese Fisherman" won her Honolulu magazine's grand prize for fiction.
Hayashi wanted to somehow share the creative experience with Bishop, who she imagined would be her illustrator/partner since they were both 7-year-olds at Wahiawa Elementary. The only problem was that the grown-up Bishop didn't know how to paint.
By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
Leslie Ann Hayashi, back,
and Kathleen Wong Bishop
at Kamanele Square.
"I didn't take it seriously until Leslie won the contest and 3-1/2 years ago she kept sending me these fables. I said, 'Oh no, I better learn to paint.' I took about three classes," Bishop said.She chose the most tricky of media, watercolor. "I just took to it, although people warned me it's really hard," she said. "For me, it was easier than oils. I didn't like the smell of oils. And acrylic didn't seem to flow the way I wanted it to."
The first piece of art Bishop created for the book was the dragonfly spread over pages 16 and 17. Bishop managed to capture the transparent quality of the wings and her palette of vivid greens, splashy reds and calm blues bring joy to the page.
"That was the first time I realized, wow, I could do it!" she said. It was 3:30 a.m. and the painting had taken 15 hours to complete at her kitchen table.
It seemed that of the two, Bishop had the harder task, but she says it's not so. The text went through 20 revisions and she said "tons of research went into each detail. We needed to make sure hawks eat chameleons and mynahs eat mangoes.
"Both jobs just required different skills. To me, that's what friendship is about. Each of us bringing something out of the other."
For Hayashi, the perfectionist and more aggressive of the two, this meant learning to coast. "Kathy has a great spiritual side, which I like. She gives me a good sense of balance, which has helped me to decide on priorities. The house can be a little dirtier. The clothes don't have to get washed as often. I've learned to focus on life's nice moments."
There wasn't a lot of bickering on the project. Bishop chalks it up to having worked out any differences years ago, when they teamed up on many a 4-H and class project until the 10th grade, when her family moved to Manoa and she attended Roosevelt High. Hayashi stayed at Leilehua.
"We were competitors, too," Bishop said. "Did you know Leslie was the Junior Miss of Hawaii in 1972? I was in it, too. It didn't bother me that she won. I was glad. I got the scholastic achievement award."
Photo courtesy of Wong family
When they were 10 years old, Leslie Ann Hayashi,
left, and Kathleen Wong Bishop worked on a 4-H project
about picnic foods. Hayashi came up with the concept
while Bishop illustrated it.
Similarly, in 4-H, Bishop won a photography award and Hayashi won overall achievement honors. The only real beef the girls had was in the 9th grade when they both developed a crush fir the same boy when they all performed in "Bye, Bye Birdie" together. And that wasn't exactly a knock-down, hair-pulling fight."We had crushes on everyone," Hayashi said.
Today, Bishop can't even remember the boy's name, recalling only that he was shorter than both of them but had a cute face.
"I have a feeling I started liking him only because she liked him," she said.
Hayashi remembers his name was Frank, but says now, "He really wasn't our type."
As for how Hayashi's birthday card tale ends, Bishop had included some morals of her own, writing, "keep friendship alive," "follow your dreams" and "embrace the gifts of life."
"I wanted to thank Leslie for helping me discover this gift of painting. Both of us are middle-aged -- she's older ..."
"By a month," Hayashi points out.
"... and to discover we can do something new is a gift."
Most important, Bishop said, is to hold onto your friends, if for no other reason than they will jog your memory about the parts of your own life you've forgotten.
"Remember the time you pulled me out of the (Lake Wilson) reservoir?" Hayashi asks.
"No, why? Did you fall in?"
Hayashi relates her attempt to jump a three-foot span, only to sink waist-deep in the muck on the opposite side.
"Ooooh, gross!" Bishop says, vaguely recalling the rescue.
Then there was the tadpole incident, in which the girls took it upon themselves to save every tadpole in Wahiawa from drying up like raisins when there was a drought.
"We wanted to save them all," Bishop said. "We were frantically trying to scoop them up and move them to bigger puddles."
That might be an adventure for their next book, "Fables From the Sea." Working on the illustrations for that book hasn't allowed Bishop time to ponder what she might do next with her newfound skills.
"I'm just concentrating on the book. Leslie's a slave driver, you know."
