Who is Kail-Pea (cahlee-payuh)?Well...Kali-Pea is me, Gare-Bear, Gary Berndt. Three things I remember of Christmas my third year...smoke, talk, and laughter. My toddler years were odd for a Bozeman kid. The music my mother seemed to play the most on our big RCA console "HIGH FIDELITY!" TV. was made in Hawaii. You see my fathers family were Portuguese people that settled on the island of Kuai in the late 1800's; and became firmly Hawaiian. All five of my portagee aunties played the uke and danced the hula and when the Christmas visits occurred in Montana the uke's and grass skirt made the flight too. I was two. My room was right above the kitchen table and I was looking straight down to the top of my aunt Jean's head as she puffed furiously on her cigarette, the same thing my other two aunts, my mom my dad my grama and... I lived in a cloud of nicotine. I have been to Spain but seven wonders of the world awe inspiring, amount of flying verbiage issuing from seven portagee's, all at the same time, and at a sustained volume and intensity that later on in life humbled my own "portagee mout" into silence and contrition. It was always amazing and a little frightening to sit back and listen and watch while seven mouthy opinionated people vie for verbal supremacy; and not by volume or force but by the sheer number of conversations one person can have going on at the same time. The winners best lines get repeated ad infinitum by the others all night. Full contact combat story talkin...no one beats a portagee auntie,I remember the sound a vinyl record makes when it drops from the spindle to the turntable; I should, I heard it over and over through fever dreams and the fog of hot menthol compresses applied to my clogged chest most of my second year. Evidently I was one sickly little boy. Mom said that for the first two years of my life she thought she would lose me several times, I caught it all. Chicken pox, of course! Measles, heck ya toughen that kid up let's see if he can survive mumps (yep no kids) strep throat, tonsilitis flu, and to top it off summer allergies with no viable antihistamines. My poor mom. Dr. Dee pumped so much penicillin in me when I hit fourteen I had an allergic reaction and spent three days in agony till Dr. Dee got home and could give me Benadryl (prescription only then). It was one of those tweed type couches, kind of flat and kinda hard and I spent most of my second year on the couch so mom could tend to me and my seemingly constant fever. Mom said I slept the best when she played dad Mel's Hawaiian records and to this day nothing tends to my heart like the old Hawaiian folk songs. Mostly what I remember was the soothing croon of a deep man's voice singing "Aloha Hawaii". (later in life I learned it was Don Ho). So...after all that, the oddity is that I am pretty sure We were the only family in Bozeman in the sixties that listened to music from Hawaii more than any other kind of music. Kali-Pea is (arguably) a loose translation in Pidgin Hawaiian of Gary Bear. The last name Berndt means brave bear" or ''hard bear' in German. So...Gare Bear.
