The Story

Every night, they ate together. Ten people minimum — the family alone was ten — and usually more. A neighbor. An aunt. A girlfriend of one of the sisters. A cousin from your father's side, of which there were many. Your father came from a family of thirteen. Your mother from eleven. The table was never small.

Bobby was the youngest. The only boy among seven older sisters. He sat at the corner, next to his father, and he watched. Watched the discussions move around the table — his sisters animated, opinionated, fully present. Watched his father listen, measured and steady, the kind of man who had already seen enough of the world to know what mattered and what didn't.

You learn things sitting at that corner. You learn to observe before you speak. You learn that a room full of strong women is not chaos — it is a different kind of intelligence, one that operates on feeling and relationship and the long view. You absorb it without knowing you're absorbing it. And decades later, you find it living in everything you build.

His father was born in 1914. Farm boy from Minnesota. The kind of man that era produced — practical, unshowy, capable of anything with his hands. Before Bobby was born, his father had spent four years in the war — North Africa, Algiers, Tunisia, Morocco. Then France. Two years on the continent. Farm boys from all around America, dropped into ancient landscapes, asked to hold the line of civilization.

He came home. He sat at the head of that table. He never made much of it. But a man who has seen North Africa and France before he was thirty carries a particular kind of perspective — a quietness about what is truly difficult and what is merely inconvenient. Bobby grew up inside that perspective without ever being told about it directly. Some things are transmitted not by words but by presence.

When the neighbor women's washing machines broke, they called his mother and asked if she could send her husband over. He always went. Bobby went with him — holding the flashlight, handing tools, watching his father's hands work through a problem with the patience of someone who already knew how it was going to end. This is how you learn. You show up. You watch. You hold the light.

Northwest Detroit in those years was a melting pot in the true sense — not a metaphor, but a physical reality of blocks and stoops and corner gatherings. In the morning, kids would collect at the street corner and walk together down to John C. Lodge Elementary, a group moving through the neighborhood like a small river finding its natural course.

Bobby was interested in science from the beginning. Not science class — science. The actual questions. How does this work. What is this made of. What happens if. His fifth grade teacher Miss Wade recognized it and encouraged it. "Why don't you start a club?" So he did. President of the science club, fifth and sixth grade, Detroit public school. They did all kinds of things. He remembers it as one of the first times he understood that if you want something to exist, you build it yourself.

While other kids read comic books, Bobby read encyclopedias. The golden book series — animals of Africa, geology, the natural world. He could sit down and read the whole thing straight through, not as a chore but as pleasure. More information. More data. History, not fiction. The real world, not an invented one. He didn't read a novel until he was in his thirties, when the woman who would become his wife handed him one and changed that habit too.

Detroit meant cars. It always had. A couple of Bobby's sisters worked billing and office at dealerships. Brother-in-law Ed had the garage — Saturday mornings working through engines, learning the language of machines at close range. Another brother-in-law, Warren, an HVAC tin knocker, took Bobby every Thursday on 240-mile drives to Traverse City — to fix pinball machines, do carpentry, concrete and fencing at the family's Driftwood Motel. These were not odd jobs. These were an education.

A brother-in-law got Bobby a job as a new car porter at a dealership. Big Bill Anderson — the master himself, navy trained — taught him to swab the deck and mop the showroom floor the way he'd learned at sea. Bobby mopped. He watched the service department through the glass. He was drawn to it the way he'd always been drawn to what was underneath, what was actually happening inside the thing.

He enrolled at Oakland Community College — a five-hour night class, five to ten, Automotive Electrical Systems Servicing. The room was full of union men from the assembly plant in Pontiac, mandated to attend. Bobby was the youngest in the room by years, and the only one there entirely by choice. The teacher — who worked days at the assembly plant — looked at him early on and said: "They're going to be begging you to come work at the dealerships. You'll know things most of them never learned."

He learned how an oxygen sensor works. How a starter works. What a diode trio does. How a rectifier bridge takes alternating current — electricity moving back and forth — and through a series of diodes converts it into the direct current a car needs to run. He could take the rectifier bridge apart, test each diode with a DVOM, and tell you exactly where the failure was.

This was not just automotive knowledge. It was a way of thinking — the same foundation that would later show up in soil microscopy, in bamboo joinery, in the diagnosis of why a garden wasn't thriving or why a structure wanted to fail. Great stance first. Feet on the ground. Then the rest. The same principle, different materials, decade after decade.

The dinner table from Northwest Detroit never really ended. It just kept expanding — new cities, new people, new generations pulling up chairs. By the time Bobby was hosting his own family parties in his first home at twenty-five, there was already a garden out back — tomatoes and cucumbers climbing higher than the children running through them. The instinct to grow things, to feed people, to gather them around something real — that had been seeded long before he had a name for it.

His mother's family had deep roots in Hawai'i — she had lived there in 1946 and 1947, and the connection never fully severed. When Bobby eventually chose the Big Island, it was not an accident. It was a homecoming of a kind, to a place that had been part of the family story long before he arrived. The ohana he found there — Hapa Hawaiian, Filipino, the full beautiful mix — was another version of that Northwest Detroit table: many people, many stories, one gathering.

From the dinner table in Northwest Detroit to the zen gardens of the Kohala Coast, the thread has never broken. A boy who sat in the corner and watched. Who read encyclopedias while other kids read comics. Who held the flashlight and learned that patience is not passivity — it is paying attention until you understand something well enough to act.

The bamboo structures, the biodynamic gardens, the luxury home projects, the soil microscopy, the martial arts, the ikebana, the farm — none of it is separate from that corner seat at the table. All of it is the same conversation, conducted through different materials across six decades of one life.

My Work is a Reflection of Myself. — Grandmaster Sang Kyu Shim said that. But Bobby had already been living it since he was small enough to need a boost to reach the table.