It's hard to believe how fast time flies. When I first moved to Mililani, back in 1977, I was a young 26 year old, enjoying life as a freewheeling mortorcylce salesman. Mililani was the first Planned Community in Hawaii, and it was planted "way out" in the pineapple and sugar cane fields in what has now become Central Oahu. Back then, it was "the boonies".

Driving home after dark used to be a lonely trek down the unlit two lane road, part of Kam Hwy (Kamehameha Highway for the tourists), until the H-2 freeway was built. The first phase of the freeway got you to the Waipahu exit, at which point you jumped back onto Kam Hwy, drove past the sugar cane on your right, pineapple on the left and on through Kipapa Gulch into Mililani. Once in a while an owl would swoop out of the trees and float across the road, momentarily brightened by your headlights. On dark rainy nights, the Bufos (fieled toads) would come out to the roads edge and stare up at the sky, soaking in the gentle rains.

Little by little, the planned community took shape. On my routine jogging route, I would run past the Mililani Shopping Center, the first evidence that an actual community was taking shape. Anchored by McDonalds, the fire station, and Foodland Super Market, the community soon began to spread across both sides of Kam Hwy.

The Mililani Golf Course soon had an entire neighborhood on the south side, and Meheula Parkway was extended another mile from the highway. Halfway down the Parkway, the Mililani Market Place sprung up, with a Safeway supermarket and a Long's Drug Store. Across from the Marketplace, the Mililani Parkway Apartments sprang up, just behind the Hokuahi'ahi apartment complex. Next came the Mililani Town Center, with Star Supermarket, another Longs Drug store, and a three plex-theater. At last, no need to drive twenty miles into town to go to the movies!

Now, some thirty years later, the Star Market and Longs drugstore are just a minor part of the Mililani Town Center. There is now a WalMart, a fourteen-plex theater, a Starbucks, a slew of fast food outlets, restaurants, shops, businesses and a bus terminal to boot. There are pizza parlours, a home improvement center, banks and a Radio Shack. I still take my routine jogs, but now when I cross Kam Hwy, I have to wait at the stoplights. Wait for the lights to change, to sequence through the left turn for one direction, then for the other; wait for the oncoming traffic to cycle through, then for the cross traffic.

When I jog down the tree lined streets, I see some of the trees that are bent from when hurricane Iwa  blew the immature trees in 1982, just enough to lean them slightly, not enough to knock them down. Then there were the ones that, having grown bigger, were brought down by Hurricane Iniki in November 1992.

Mililani is no longer the sleepy little bedroom community that it was thirty years ago. It's now a a vibrant bustling planned growth suburban neighborhood, with all the conveniences of shopping and entertainment, a location that is central to anywhere on Oahu, close to Schofield and Hickam Air Field Military bases, and yet still maintains the hometown atmosphere I remember when I first moved here in 1977. The trees are matured, the homes that were so new when I first moved here are now often being remodeled, with new additions and second floors. The little children have grown up and now have children of their own, attending the same elementary schools they went to as kids.

Oh, Home, Sweet Home!