Intentions and actions are often jarringly out of sync. Oddly, Hawai‘i law takes intention into account, as in causing injury with intent as opposed to accidentally. The injury may be the same in each case, but the response to the perp differs according to intent.

I’ve intended to come back to update this site for...oh...years. Now I intend actually to do it. Maybe. You know how intentions go.

David Bertley Babineau was the Babineau Hawai‘i paterfamilias. Dad died at home in Kailua in 2005 at the age of 93 and is now one with the Pacific; we scattered his ashes on the waters off his beloved Kailua Beach.

My branch of the family came from Canada. Dad was one of seven kids from Saskatchewan born to Mary Thompson, my Scottish grandmother, and Joseph Babineau, my possibly-French-Canadien grand-père. Dad was apparently the only one of the gang with sense enough to forsake the Great White North for these tropic islands: mahalo, Pops.

Dad’s final project was tracing the patrilineal tree of the Babineau family from France to the New World and beyond.

While Dad was researching his ancestry, my mother, DorothyRose Fisher, was busily writing her memoirs, engagingly if not concisely titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Funeral.

Mom was once known as the Bird Lady of Kailua for her dedicated and selfless care of all manner of birds. She had Federal licenses to care for endangered species and became a valuable resource for our local veterinarians. Among my favorite memories of Mom are the images of her overlooking the beach, arms flung wide as she releases a shearwater she nursed from serious injury back to health.