Ann Keppel was a good friend and mentor who died at home of a heart attack in 2002. She was the director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawaii when Meda joined the Women’s Studies faculty.
I’m not sure why I got to thinking about Ann and her cats early this morning. That led me back to a set of remarkable reminiscences I had gathered from her friends and colleagues after her death.
I was startled at how much my attempt to capture our experience of Ann still resonates. I’m sharing it here for Throwback Thursday.
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whenever one of my stories made it into print, and usually one of the only people to immediately ask about the juicy unpublished details.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.
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Thanks for sharing this loving and delightfully written tribute.
I think of Ann often and have fond memories of her. When I graduated Bard College in 1966 and my French prof. heard I was headed to the Univ. of Hawaii he told me to look up his friend Ann Keppel. He said: “she is a great human being.” And so she was. I looked her up (knowing no one else in Hawaii) and she took me in. We would go to anti war (Vietnam) protests together. When Lyndon Johnson came to the EWC and made a big sign with the word WHY on it plus a ?….In those days protesting the war was a big deal…especially for a professor. I would frequently visit her and get fed…sometimes she would reminisce about her family…how she missed an older brother killed in WWII…and sometimes she would mention the difficulties she had as a woman graduate student in an almost all male environment. She let me store 4 automobile tires under her house for a period of years. I do miss her as do many others…but I think she would be happy knowing that people think she. made a difference for the good.
I took an education course from her. She gave me an “A” even though she felt I was overly pro-life in the pro-choice debate.
When my family spent the summer of 1968 in Honolulu we spent time at Ann’s place – my dad had befriended her when at U of Wisconsin. She turned us on to the Moody Blues and discussed with my folks how she viewed pot as less harmful than alcohol. As a 5th grader my eyes were opened a bit by her views. Best of all was her laugh. Head back and her full body laughing at whatever amused her. Good memories of a very special friend.