Target is opening an eagerly anticipated store in Hilo this weekend and I’m sure that many locals will be crowding the store in its first weeks. What is it about new stores that cause such excitement in the Hilo community?

When Safeway recently opened up a new store, people flocked for the free samples (lunch, Costco-style!) and to see what they have to offer, despite a Safeway having been open in Hilo for decades, just down the street. Target has been on the Big Island for awhile, with its store in Kona, but how can you beat shopping right in town? I’m fairly sure that people will still be excited about the new store and what it brings to Hilo.

Personally, I’m excited to see how Target’s community outreach programs will contribute to the town.

So readers, will you be at Target this weekend? And if you don’t live in Hilo currently, is Target on the “must visit” list when you return home, even if you’ve been to Target dozens of times before?

As we watched the news tonight, CNN aired some amateur videos submitted by survivors of the great earthquake (great being the scientific term) and subsequent tsunami.

While aerial footage of the devastation had become a common sight when following the event, one of these videos was taken by someone watching the water flood into a town while on the ground, washing away entire buildings and homes. As I sat there in both awe and horror, I couldn’t help but think of home. The buildings being swept away made me think this horrifying sight must be just like what people saw when the 1946 and 1960 tsunamis hit downtown Hilo.

Residents of Hilo are no strangers to tsunamis, even if we weren’t around for them. That mint green clock down by the golf course is a sobering reminder of the 1960 tsunami; the clock having stopped at exactly the time the wave hit the town at 1:04 AM. Those dips in the sidewalk by the soccer field by Bayfront? Old driveways for homes long gone from the wave.

Or maybe on one of those return trips from Hapuna Beach, your parents stopped off at the Laupahoehoe tsunami memorial and told you the story of the school that got washed out to sea because no one knew any better about why you could suddenly see the bottom of the ocean.

I spent many years on the back steps of the family business, running around in a parking lot full of cracks and potholes. One day, as I bemoaned the state of all the crappy bumps I had to drive over, my mother told me that it was cracked because of one of the tsunamis that hit the town. That little statement silenced me then and stuck with me for the rest of my life.

I remember as a kid I stood on my uncle Mike’s driveway with my brother and cousins as we eagerly waited for the big wave to come washing on shore. Too young to grasp the magnitude or meaning of it all, it was a disappointment that nothing happened because all the adults had made such a big fuss and probably told us that if we behaved, we’d get to see a huge wave come sweeping into Hilo Bay.

Now, after having seen actual footage of a tsunami hitting a town for the first time, I want to go back and slap my little kid self on the head. But then I think of my own kids and remember that they’re just kids, and so was I. As I put my daughter to bed on the night the sirens blared here in Honolulu, she asked if I could please close her bedroom window to keep the wave out. I sadly smiled at her innocence and thought of the shattered lives in Japan, many many of them being children the same age as her.

The next day, I made sure to show her the images from Japan, to show her how serious tsunamis can be and to hopefully instill in her that same kind of unspoken respect for Mother Nature and the ocean that us Hilo folk kind of just grow up with, sometimes without even fully realizing it. In the coming week, I hope to show her how, even from far across an ocean, we can do our little bit to help.

If you would like to help relief efforts in Japan, please be aware that not all charities hold the same reputation and be careful to donate to a reputable organization. Here are some helpful links:

• American Red Cross
• GlobalGiving
• International Rescue Committee
• Tips for Giving Wisely to Charity

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It’s funny how three simple letters and one company logo can bring back so many different memories from small kid time.

Mad dashes from the parking lot cause it started pouring when you drove up. Taking one hour to buy milk cause your mom saw three people to talk to. Actually, who am I kidding, dad did it too. This was particularly aggravating in high school, cause taking this long to buy food meant less time to talk on the phone at home. Never have cell phones when I was a kid.

The KTA Super Store is something that’s just been there for pretty much all of us, though if you talk to an old grandma or grandpa, they’ll probably still refer to it as “K Taniguchi’s”. Even though I haven’t been to the store in almost 10 years, I could still walk in and know where everything is, provided they haven’t moved it.

KTA is like a rock in the middle of my memories of Hilo and I’m sure it’s the same way for a lot of other people who moved away to another island or the mainland. That’s why when I went home one year and saw that they’d painted the Puainako store beige, I had a mental freak out. That building is supposed to be blue, cun funnit!

The best KTA memory I have was inside KTA Puainako, when my kid brother pushed some button on the fresh coffee bean dispenser and hundreds and hundreds of coffee beans spilled out onto the aisle. I dunno how old I was, but I can still remember the look of complete and utter shock and terror on his face. His brain had probably frozen while he decided what to do: run up or down the aisle to escape. Meanwhile, he kept letting more beans spill out, hahaha.

I think this trait might be genetic, as my two kids will just stare at me dumbfounded when they spill food or drink, as if looking at me makes it not happen. They don’t snap out of it until I yell, “WELL? PICK IT UP!”

What’s your most memorable KTA experience?

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Back in 2009, my cousin Jennifer and I were reminiscing about our childhoods growing up in Hilo and we eventually decided to start a little Facebook “fan” page (can’t really call it that anymore) about what it meant to be from Hilo. We invited our old friends from back home to look at it.

Much to our astonishment, the page ballooned at an amazing rate and when we passed 1,000 fans, we simply couldn’t believe it. Today, the You Know You’re From Hilo if… page on Facebook has over 7,200 Likes.

We posted things as they came to us in a flurry and it started to sound like a great idea for a small, local book. Unfortunately, that didn’t go anywhere and after a while, our lives snatched us back and the page largely went untouched by us for a long time.

Then when Facebook made the recent changes to pages, allowing you to get email notifications whenever someone posted on the Wall, we realized that the page was still there and that people were still loving it. Suddenly, a blog sounded like a really great alternative to a book and thus, the “You Know You’re From Hilo…” blog was born.

We’d had big ideas for the book and we plan to take the blog in that direction, giving people not just a place to laugh at funny old sayings about “where we from”, but a blog to learn a little more about the place we know will always be a special kind of home and the people that still live there today.

If you’d like us to do a little article on something that you think people from Hilo will enjoy, please feel free to read the guidelinesor post a comment on the Submissions page. Pictures would be awesome, if relevant, but aren’t required.

In the end, we hope that your visit here brings back fond memories of da hanabata days growing up in this little town. While many of us no longer live in Hilo, it remains a part of us no matter where we go.

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