The email said: "I asked all my cousins who had lived at Ka'iulani Home if they remembered the song about Ka'iulani. They all said no, they don't think the song even exists. I think you and Jackie are both having big, fat brain farts."
The message was from my classmate Nanette -- "Titi" to intimates, which is to say, everybody except the IRS. She, Jackie, myself and maybe a dozen of our slightly older or younger sisters and cousins had spent our first boarding year at Kamehameha Schools in the early '50s at Ka'iulani Home in Downtown Honolulu. It was a desperate measure on the part of the Girls School, which had too many boarders to house on the Kapalama Heights campus.
A couple of weeks before the email, Titi, Jackie and I had celebrated the golden anniversary of our friendship. To mark it, we visited the site of Ka'iulani Home at 567 S. King St. and tried to sing songs we'd learned when we were 12.
The old board-and-batten house named for the tragic princess who died in 1899 had long since been replaced with the concrete and glass of Kawaiaha'o Plaza.
When we lived there in 1952-53, an enormous full-length oil portrait of the beautiful Ka'iulani loomed over us in the parlor. Rubber-treaded steps formed a central interior staircase that split left and right, leading to two wings of a dozen or so rooms. Each was spartanly equipped with a set of bunk beds, two desks, two chairs and two dressers, the surface of which we each were expected to cover with one of the two dresser scarves from the precise list of items we were to bring with us.