Close by and Far Away Dad is There

I got the call mid afternoon California time:

"Hi dad...do you still have that 'Find your phone" Ap on your computer?"

Which means that Kailana, who is on spring break in southern California has lost her iPhone. "Yes", I tell her and fire up the software to track the where abouts of her phone. So, try and get your mind around this, my daughter has lost her iPhone next to the Huntington Beach pier, where me and my brothers, her uncles grew up surfing. And she is calling me in Kona, Hawaii from her boyfriends phone to help her find her lost phone. Got it?

Well,  I fire up the Ap and put in the proper phone # and password and low and behold up pops a map shwing downtown Huntington Beach, California and a blue dot showing my daughters iPhone is just above the surfline south of the pier! Absolutely amazing!

I call her back on her boyfriends phone and tell her to head for the sand on the south side of the pier. I sit at my computer in Kona, Hawaii and watch the dot/phone move up the beach and just then get a call from Kailana on her phone telling me they found it!

Absolutly amazing.

Later that evening my son Luke and I are were having a peanut thai chiken dinner on the lanai and he asks me if I have ever been in a fight.

"Yes" I told him, "when I was younger I was in my share of fights" I was the only haole kid in the seventh grade in Kalihi and pretty much every afternoon was 'Kill Haole Day', so I learned how to run and how to fight. Later in life I found myself in several situations that I had to physically fight my way out of.

I explained to him over dinner what were the best methods to end a fight quickly and in your favor. The techniques are quite simple, but require focus and disipline to drop your opponent quickly without seriously hurting him and ending the fight before it begins. He seemed to think deeply about what I had told him.

Two hours later the same evening I get a call from my oldest daughter Leilani. She has found herself walking in a bad neighborhood all alone at 11:30 at night in Seattle. She had left her car at her hotel and had gone with some friends to dinner. Afterwards she checked her phone and saw that is was only five minutes back to her hotel and told her friends she would just walk. A digital/GPS fart, five minutes by car at 50 MPH or 25 minutes by foot through a dark nasty neighborhood at 11:30 at night.

And so she called her Dad. I spent the next twenty minutes talking with her on the phone as she walked through a dark bad neighborhood all alone. "Keep your head up, ignore anyone who tries to talk to you, just walk on by, don't look back..." I gave her my best advice from the center of the Pacific Ocean.

Leilani made it to her hotel and I relaxed. Kailana found her phone and I relaxed. Luke gave me a look like he knew what I was saying and would take my advise should he have to defend himself and I relaxed.

I thought that my job as Dad would end when my kids left high school...I was wrong.

It ends when either they or I die.

Brian