With two of my favorite people, probably around 1993, give or take a couple of years.

That’s Meda, my wife of many decades now, and the late UH Professor Ann Keppel between us. Ann was one of Meda’s colleagues and mentors, served for a time as chair of what was then the Women’s Studies Program (now a UH department) and she grew into one of our closest friends. She had a way of doing that with people. I’m guessing this was taken somewhere in the early-to-mid 1990s. Ann retired from the faculty in 1992, according to one clipping I found, and within the next couple of years Meda’s first book received the top annual award from the American Society of Criminology, and she also was given the UH Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. We had several celebrations of those recognitions, as well as Ann’s retirement, and this could very well have been at one of them.

I’m holding a little Nikon film camera, a pre-digital point-and-shoot. Another clue as to timing. By about 1998 or so, I had become an early adopter of a digital camera.

After finding this picture, I went looking at the collection of stories I pulled together following Ann’s death in 2002.

Here’s what I wrote about her at the time. It’s still one of my favorite little essays.

I’ll always remember our Friday nights on Ann’s deck overlooking Diamond Head and Waikiki, with wine and good food spread on the table, cats making furtive runs past to test our willingness to share, and Ann pumping us for stories, commentary and arguments until we were as dry as the last bottles of wine. Just inside the door, crisp new books recently arrived from Amazon would be stacked haphazardly amidst the general chaos, already read and now ready to be loaned at the slightest sign of interest.

I don’t know if I’ll cook, she would say in the morning, but by evening the kitchen would be filled with the glorious aroma of some Keppel production. She often seemed so impatient and resistant to prudential matters that I had trouble envisioning her taking the time to cook. But she did, with obvious skill and taste.

We shared a belief that the world can and should be a better place than it’s allowed to be, but Ann added an appreciation of both the broad tides and minute details of history. She had a mind for those details, a passion for them. You could always learn from her, and we did.

She was invariably the first person to call whenever one of my stories made it into print, and usually one of the only people to immediately ask about the juicy unpublished details.

We also shared a love of cats, and watching Ann’s feline interactions was always a joy. She could sweep any of her cats off their feet and clamp them firmly in the crook of her arm while administering wholesale affection. It was a most awkward position for the cats, but they never fussed or complained, having long since learned there was little room for resistance if Ann wanted to fold you into her life.

That was a lesson, I suppose, that we all learned over the years, cats and people alike.