A bunch of us entered a fishing derby at Liliuokalani Park, which was newly opened after the tidal wave took it apart. The county parks and recreation department had announced that a fishing derby was going to be held at the park, and anyone who wanted to enter could do so by showing up on the designated Saturday.

Artie Kimura, Ron Takata, Gary Sato and I (there may have been others) got our gear in shape, buying new bamboo rods, tsuji, floats, hooks, buckets to keep our fish in, and frozen prawns to use as bait. I was actually quite excited and had dreams about the huge mullet that I was going to bring home for dinner.

So we show up, and there are about a million people there, all jostling for space and the hot fishing spots. After registering, we picked a likely looking area and waited for the starter's whistle. When the shrill blast filled the air, a million lines hit the water, floats started bobbing, and suddenly the water boiled with hungry fish. To the right of me, a kid pulled out a big tilapia. To the left of me, another kid pulled out a large mullet. Across the pond, dozens of fish were being hauled out of the water. At the pond behind me, the anglers were going crazy.

And I stood there with my line in the water. I dabbed my bait on the surface, pulled it in, threw it back out, moved it from left to right, pulled it in again and threw it back out again.

Nothing.

What? Did I have bad breath, or something?

How embarrassing. Kids who had no idea what they were doing were catching fish, and there I was, my line in the water. Artie caught a few, Ron and Gary did okay too. Me, I was the only one with nothing but warm, stink bait to show for my day's efforts.

Plus, I got a sunburn -- the back of my neck, my forehead, nose and cheeks were red and irritable for a week. Serves me right for thinking I knew how to fish.

I had some experiences with smoke during my Junior year.

Smoke Adventure #1: The Sato brothers, Keith Furukawa and I used to smoke at the basketball games. We'd go up to the top rows at the Hilo Civic Auditorium, light up, and puff away. One of my classmates saw us, and called my Dad to tell him.

When confronted, I 'fessed up and Dad gave me a lecture on the evils of smoking. I asked who had told him, but he refused to tell me, saying that she (he let that slip out) had called in confidence, and that I should feel that she had done me a favor.

Right. It's a judgement call. Did she think she was doing me a favor? Or did she think I just shouldn't be smoking and was judging me by her own values? I guess I'll never know, unless I ask her someday. And I may, because I am reasonably sure that I know who it was.

Smoke Adventure #2: Harold Goya and I caused some excitement with smoke in the Chemistry lab. We went into the lab one lunch hour and began fooling around with stuff. We got a teeny tiny piece of sodium out of the kerosene, put it in a crucible, and held it over the bunsen burner.

Immediately, huge clouds of smoke began pouring out of the crucible! How could so much smoke come out of so small a piece? We panicked, dropped the stuff on the table and ran out of the lab, trying to look nonchalant. "Act cool, act cool."

To our horror, we saw that the smoke was pouring out of the windows, and teachers were running toward the building. One of them was yelling, "The chem lab is on fire! The chem lab is on fire!"

Our chemistry teacher, Allan Kondo, was first to arrive. He took a quick glance at us, rushed into the lab and doused the smoke "bomb," then came back outside to let everyone know everything was okay. Then, of course, he turned to us for an explanation, even though he knew exactly who had done what. I mean, you could read it in our faces that we were the ones, and he did see the smoking sodium, the crucible and the bunsen burner.

We stumbled through some kind of answer, trying to make it sound logical as hell, but of course, when it came down to it, we had done something stupid.

To our eternal gratitude, we weren't punished. In fact, I like to think that deep in his heart, Mr. Kondo was pleased that we were so curious about chemistry that we wanted to experiment on our own.

I like to think that.

We got a new teacher for English that year. Miss Vecchione -- Italian, nice boobs, a little over-bearing. A little condescending too. We were used to the word "function" in describing what parts of speech did. She used the word "job." More specifically, she said "jawb."

"This is a noun. What's its jawb?" "This is a verb. What's its jawb?" "This is an adjective. What's its jawb?"

A real New York-New Jersey type of woman.

Got on all our nerves. We thought it was unfair to have her.

Irritating. End of story.

One day, during chem lab, I was trying to force a dry glass tube into a rubber stopper (real stupid, kind of like trying to wipe up a spill with a dry sponge). The tubing broke, and I gashed the inside of my right middle finger. There was blood all over the place, and Mr. Kondo sent me to the school nurse to get it bandaged up. Fortunately, the cut wasn't deep, and didn't require stitches. It did leave a light scar, however, as a constant reminder of how I shouldn't every try to force anything again without thinking it through carefully.

But that isn't the lesson I want to relate.

Every school has a few really unattractive students that everybody makes fun of. It's cruel, but you know how it is; teen-agers don't think with their heads very often.

There was one girl in particular in my class who was extremely unattractive. Everyone made fun of her, including me (and I didn't even know her). In intermediate school, we used to sign their pictures in our friends' annuals: "To so-and-so. Love, (her name)." We'd laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and not think anything of it. Me too, until the day I cut my finger.

As I was waiting there with my finger in the air, I heard the nurse comforting someone in the next room. I sneaked a peek, and there was that particular girl sitting in a chair, crying her heart out.

When the nurse finally came to tend to my wound, she told me the girl had been teased during lunch period by some students for being so ugly. She hadn't been able to stop crying, so her teacher brought her to the dispensary for some privacy.

I wish I could say that I saw her differently from that day forth, but I can't say that. I wish I could say that I went up to her for the first time and became her friend. I can't say that.

But I did change that day. I realized that people with physical "faults" do have feelings too. Their hearts can be broken just as easily as mine can. They can't help how they look, at least not while they're in high school. I learned never again to make fun of people's faces, or their names for that matter.

After all, those are the only two things that they own outright.

I went on my first date during my Junior year, escorting Marian Nagai to the Junior-Senior Prom. Of course, Dad just had to meet her parents, so one day he and I drove to her home 'way deep in the sugar cane fields of Papaikou, and he spoke with her mother.

Embarrassed the hell out of me, but what can I say, I guess he thought it was the right and proper thing for a father to do.

I doubled with Raymond Miyashiro and his date, Eunice Minamoto, and drove Dad's Chrysler -- rented the white dinner jacket, bought the red double-carnation lei, drove out to the boondocks to pick up our dates, had a great pre-prom dinner, had a great prom, truly enjoyed the entire evening. It was a highlight of my life.

But the story here isn't the prom. It's what happened as Raymond and I were coming back into Hilo after taking the girls home. Driving on the Hamakua belt highway is spooky at night. There are no street lights, nothing but sugar cane fields, red-dirt cliffs alongside the highway, and an occasional passing car.

Just as we were negotiating a particularly dark and lonely stretch, we heard a loud bang on the right side of the car. Uh oh, I thought, I hit a mongoose, or ran over a branch or something. I stopped and got out to inspect. I looked under the car. Nothing. I inspected the sides. Not a scratch. Nothing wrong with the grille, except that the right headlight was out. I couldn't find anything else wrong.

Everyone was sleeping when I got home, so I just went to bed. I got up early the next morning (Sunday) to tell Dad before he made his hospital rounds. He said he'd stop by the service station on his way home and have them look at it.

So here's the scoop. I was lucky again. Dad had needed new tires a few weeks earlier and decided to save some money by buying recaps instead of brand new tires. The recap was faulty and a good-sized chunk of it simply broke off the tire. It was bound to happen sometime, and it was just my luck that I was driving on a dark and lonely road in the middle of the night when it happened.

The chunk had hit the headlight wiring, tearing the wires away. That's why the headlight wouldn't work.

I was just fortunate that the tire hadn't blown completely, sending the car careening off the road. Raymond and I could have been killed.

We were just lucky. Scared, but lucky.

The summer of '61. We finally got a second car -- a small, green Dodge Lancer that Mom used to run her errands, buy the groceries, and get to her hair appointments. It was a neat car that I got to drive off and on throughout the rest of my high school career.

Everyone was into making their cars look "cool," but seeing as Dad was a highly respected citizen about town, we couldn't very well buy outlandish hubcaps and lower the rear end. It would not be good for the family image.

So instead, I settled for white fur around the rear-view mirror, and a jewel-eyed tiki that I carved myself and finished with shoe polish. New car, hot mirror. It was great. Unfortunately, that was also the summer that I had my first car accident.

The accident was one of those mortifying moments that seem to pop up every now and then. It was a Saturday in late August, about a week or so before school started. I was bored, so I hopped into the Lancer and began cruising down Waianuenue to Kamehameha, down Kamehameha to Mamo, up Mamo to Kinoole, and down Kinoole to Waianuenue.

Boring, and ineffective. I saw not a soul that I knew. So, I reversed the pattern. Not much better.

Then, as I was heading home on Waianuenue, just before I got to Keawe Street, a car made a left turn out of a gas station into me. I hit its right front fender with the corner of my left front fender, looking up in time to see a wide-eyed woman staring back in shock at me from inside the other car. The police arrived in no time, and as we were blocking the two middle lanes, traffic began to back up.

I could handle the accident, I could handle the woman insisting to the policeman that I hadn't braked. I could handle being in the middle of a record-breaking traffic jam. What was hard getting over was that at least a half-dozen people I knew drove by the accident scene as I stood there in the middle of the street answering the officer's questions and trying to look cool.

Damage to our car was light. The left corner simply buckled under. Damage to the other car was quite heavy -- a new fender was definitely in order. God bless the people who designed the Lancer. They did a helluva good job.

"You can go now," the officer told me. He turned to the driver of the other car. "Lady, come with me. I think the judge will want to say a few words to you for making an illegal left-turn across the double lines."

"But he didn't brake!" the lady insisted. "How do you know? Could you see inside his car?" the officer asked.

"But he was speeding!" the lady insisted. "But you agreed with him that the light was turning red. He had to be slowing down," the officer replied, motioning to me to go on home.

Turns out the lady worked at a bento shop where we used to get our Sunday box lunches. And, the other driver's name also was Miyamoto. They reported it in the Tribune-Herald the next day: "Miyamotos meet in middle of the road and cause a traffic jam," or something like that.

I was extremely concerned that I was going to get teased unmercifully when school started. Once again, I thought, Craig was going to be embarrassed. But lo and behold, the friends who had seen me regarded me as some kind of hero. I apparently projected some kind of macho image standing there in the middle of the street with a police officer. Unreal.