I awoke today mourning my failure to protect a little trinket from the past. I don’t really know why it has left me so unhappy. It just feels like I’ve failed, and another fragile link to the past has been broken.

It started last night when we were cleaning up after dinner. Meda flipped on the disposal, but the small racket that followed prompted her to quickly turn it off. After a safe time, I came over and reached down into the disposal. First I found a bent piece of metal that I didn’t recognize. Perhaps the disposal mechanism was breaking apart, I thought. Reaching in again, and my fingers tracing a circle across the blades, I felt something else, a larger piece that didn’t belong there. I had made a chicken soup for dinner, and perhaps a piece of bone had ended up in the disposal. It took me a minute to finally get a grasp on the errant item and pull it out.

And my heart immediately sank as I recognized what it had been.

It was a miniature brass rat that had been part of a small collection of Professor Carey D. Miller, who had come to the University of Hawaii in 1922 armed with a Masters Degree from Columbia University, and a position on the faculty to develop the tiny Home Economics Department on the university’s Manoa campus. She was a nutritionist, and immediately set up a laboratory with eight white rats that might have made the trip from Columbia with her.

She was proud of those rats. When a friend from graduate school passed through Honolulu a few years later on her way to a teaching job in Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island, Miller sent her off with Romeo and Juliet, a pair of white rats that would start a new laboratory down under.

Miller became my mother’s mentor when she entered the university in the fall of 1931, and the two became close lifelong friends. My mom later served as executor of her estate. While sorting my mother’s belongings after her death at the beginning of 2013, I found a number of items that had belonged to Carey D., as she used to call Miss Miller. Things with sentimental rather than monetary value. Several albums of stamps from around the Pacific and Asia collected in the mid-20th Century. Copies of old research notes that informed some of Miller’s many publications. Descriptions of the diets of Native Hawaiians and newcomers to the islands taken from 19th Century diaries and letters, later interviews with Hawaiiana experts about typical diets, traditional medicines, etc. Several versions of a condensed history of the UH Home Economics Department. A few personal items. A high school graduation photo taken in Boise, Idaho. A lock of carefully saved hair. A few family photos. A painting Miller had purchased directly from the artist a half-century before that evoked memories of Idaho’s mountains.

And the small, beautifully done brass rat which showed its age proudly.

The rat itself was only about an inch long, with a tail that wrapped around and nearly doubled it’s overall size.

The tail. It only took me a second to recognize the first piece of metal that came out of the disposal was none other than this tail. And the piece I expected to be a chicken bone was the remains of Carey D.’s miniature rat, now badly scarred, with a piece of one ear chewed off by the spinning disposal blades.

It had been in a spot of honor on the window ledge above the sink in our kitchen. The window looks out across the front yard to Kealaolu Avenue, which runs past the house. My mother always found a lot of time to stand there at the sink doing something or other, which I later realized was an excuse to observe this little piece of the world, to keep track of the comings and goings of neighbors, watch the changing seasons, the growth of the shrubs she was forever planting and replanting, keeping mental notes of who was walking past the house and wondering where they were going and why.

Somehow one of our cats had not only knocked Carey D.’s rat off the ledge, but managed to score a hole in one, right into the disposal. I could easily see how it happened. And I couldn’t blame the cats. It was an accident, just “one of those things.” Life goes on.

So why am I so depressed about it? It had no real value. It was simply among the detritus left behind by two generations of long-lived women, Carey D., who died at age 90, and my mom, Helen Yonge Lind, who passed away a few months before her 99th birthday. It’s not the first, nor the last, of the things with sentimental value that I’ll misplace, break, or otherwise have to part with.

I suppose it was, in my mind at least, a memonic talisman, a small tie to my memories of the past, my personal and family history, Hawaii’s history.

And maybe that’s the source of what I’m feeling. Time passing. Things changing. That little rat is just a small thing, perhaps for me a symbol of a slowly eroding past.

One thing at a time. Lost, stolen, broken, or strayed. Just another one of those things, I suppose.

It was mid-August in 1952.

And I had a 5th birthday party. In our back yard in Kahala.

Only a very few people were there. I found this photo while rummaging through photos that I archived several years ago. I was glad to see it.

Left to right: Larry Olney, Robin Williams, Yours Truly, Barbara Williams (?), Helen Williams, and my big sister, Bonnie.
Larry Olney, who lived right across from us on Kealaolu Avenue, was my best friend. He had to be there. He’s the one on the left.

The Williams family lived right behind us on Makaiwa Street. The panax hedge between the two properties had a well worn portal where we regularly went back and forth with ease, adults and children alike. Bonnie and Robin were about the same age, as were Helen and I.

At that time, early 1950s, the Williams had a television set. We didn’t. Televisions for your home were cutting edge technology. So many nights we all walked across the back yard and through the gap in the hedge to watch television with the Williams family. I distinctly remember only a couple. Amos and Andy. The Lone Ranger. It seems to me Dragnet might have been in that early group. There just wasn’t much programming available yet in Honolulu, and only during certain hours.

I was surprised by one thing in this photo. In the lower right of the photo, that appears to be my mother’s dog, Kiki. I remember Kiki. I remember when she died. But I have no concept of when that was, or how old I was at the time. It’s interesting to see that she was alive in August 1952. That adds to my own self-knowledge, I guess.

Kiki’s health decline and death was traumatic for my mother, who loved that dog dearly. She already had Kiki when she and my dad were married. Kiki’s death hurt so much she never wanted to have another pet for fear of living through similar pain again.

Back to the photo. It looks like I’ve got some kind of toy weapon stuck down the front of my shorts. A water gun, perhaps?

And Larry is in the favorite present of the day–he’s holding the reins of a cardboard horse. You stepped into it, grabbed the reins, and then you rode that pony around the yard, walking, trotting, or running while pretending all the while that you were astride that cardboard horse.

I don’t recall other specifics of the afternoon. My overall recollection is that I ended the afternoon somewhat peeved because Larry monopolized the paper pony for most of the party, while I–the birthday boy–tried to hide my annoyance.

The Williams moved away a few years later. I sometimes wondered what became of Robin and Helen. But I have been in touch on and off over the years with Larry, who became a self-employed tax accountant in California. The last time was in 2017 after his wife of “49 years, 5 months, and 6 days” had passed away. I reached out to him again by email a couple of days ago, but haven’t heard back this time. And Bonnie died in 2016.

Time passes.