First Person: Brownies make magic between a son and his sick mother

On a gray day I was driving my mother to a doctor’s appointment near downtown Honolulu, the least Hawaiian part of the entire Hawaiian Islands chain. She peered out the Prius window and said, “Wow, I never noticed how beautiful those buildings were before.”
I looked out the window. “Mom, those are some of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen.”
She stared at me for a beat. Then she started to giggle.
For 20 minutes straight.
My 79-year-old mom was stoned off he