Category Archives: Personal

“Pinking up”

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That’s a phrase that I was not familiar with until last Friday, when I was putting together last week’s Feline Friday photos and couldn’t help but notice that Kiko’s belly had grown, and those nipples looked, well, a little more pink than previously.

“The first notable sign of a cat pregnancy may be nipple changes at about 16–20 days into the pregnancy, known as ‘pinking up.’ This is where a queen’s nipples become pinker and more prominent.”

Source: PetMD

A background worry that I had been repressing quickly rose to the surface. Is she pregnant? I shared my worry with Meda. We both had the same thought. Call the vet!

Luckily, I was able to get an appointment on Saturday morning at the Hawaii Kai Veterinary Clinic with Dr. Eric Ako, who we first met 40 year ago when we our cats were cared for by the vets at the Kahala Pet Hospital. It was located where Straub’s Kahala Clinic is now, across Waialae Avenue from Kahala Mall, and close to our townhouse in the Tropic Gardens development.

It didn’t take long for Dr. Ako to determine that Kiko was, indeed, pregnant. He advised that if we didn’t want kittens, then we needed to spay her ASAP. We felt it would be irresponsible of us to bring more kittens into the world, and would also create practical problems in getting them adopted when the Humane Society is currently full of dogs and cats. So our decision was clear, although not necessarily easy to make.

“As soon as possible” turned out to be today. We dropped Kiko off at 7 a.m., had a brief consultatio with Dr. Ako, the surgery was done by 9:30, and we brought her home about 3:30.

She walked through the living room and then jumped up onto one of our dining chairs, which creates a nice safe space when it’s pushed in under the table. Kini did check her out, but didn’t disturb her.

Hopefully after she rests for a while, she’ll be ready for a small meal, and then begin her recovery.

Thinking about my sister, Bonnie

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Today, April 10, would have been Bonnie’s 81st birthday. She was 4 years my elder, although the Haden mango tree planted to mark my birth had long since outgrown the Piri planted when she was born.

We had celebrated what proved to be her last birthday on April 10, 2016.

In a previous post here, I mused about that evening.

At the end of her life, Bonnie left us with a mystery.
She must have known for some time that she was very sick, but why did she fail to reach out to family and friends?
I don’t have an definitive answer, but she did drop a clue.

The last time I saw Bonnie before she finally called for help and was hospitalized, was to celebrate her 73rd birthday last April (2016).

My wife and I had just finished renovating the old house in Kahala where Bonnie and I grew up, and that day we sat on our deck in the shade of the mango trees planted when Bonnie and I were born.

Bonnie took the occasion to point out the many colorful crotons still thriving around the edges of the yard.

She reminded me these were grown from clipping collected by our Hawaiian grandmother from around the islands. That launched her on the story of our grandmother, who self-diagnosed her own cancer back late 1950s, and quietly decided she could not afford to go to the hospital for medical treatment.

Instead, she packed her bags for the trip of a lifetime. She rode a bus across parts of the mainland she had never seen, sometimes having to ride in the back of the bus due to Southern sensibilities. She traveled to other Pacific islands, including Fiji, Tahiti, and Samoa, and then she crisscrossed Hawaii from one end to the other, seeking out and renewing ties to friends and family, and finding those colorful crotons.

And when her travels were done, she came home, and passed away.

Perhaps Bonnie was just talking about the plants. In retrospect, though, she may have been saying much more. But we’ll never really know.

In any case, here’s a photo of the two of us taken in November 1948. I was about 15 months old. The photo was taken behind our house on Makaiwa Street, which had been converted from farms to suburban houses not long before.

And here we are, somewhere around 1960, gathered around the car we called “Goliath” as my mother prepared to sell it. There are other photos of Bonnie scattered throughout the 20+ years since I started this blog. Someday I’ll go searching for them.

Sept 16, 1960

Light, clouds, and rain

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That was our early morning.

After walking down to the beach park and surveying the weather, we decided to just turn around and walk home rather than continuing on to see some of our canine friends, which involved walking toward the rain that was drifting our way.

So that’s what we did. We walked home.

Poured some coffee.

And when I looked up, the light on my mango tree caught my attention. I consider it “my” tree because it was planted at the time of my birth.

In any case, here are two views of this morning.

The first, at the beach park looking toward the ocean.

The second is just out in our back yard looking up at my tree.

Oldie alert–June 1987

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The photo below shows the kitten we named Kua on my shoulder back when we lived in a two-bedroom townhouse Mauka of Kahala Mall. This was less than a year before we bought a house in Kaaawa and moved to the “country,” where we stayed for more than 25 years. The photo is taken at my work desk, which also did duty as our dining table in that Kahala townhouse. I was working on my trusty Macintosh, with Kua whispering advice in my ear.

Kua was the #2 adoption in that first cohort of calicos.

That was a story!

Meda had a bad case of kitten fever, so we wandered out into the world on June 6, 1987, looking for a kitten. We found this one in a Kalihi pet shop.

Here’s an excerpt of something I wrote after Kua died, way too early, on Bastille Day, July 14, 1998.

This tiny calico was the runt of the litter, but an obvious match. Soon we were back in the car with a kitten, in a cardboard box, sitting on Meda’s lap. It turned out to be one of those impulsive decisions that violated the accepted laws of kittens. Did the kitten have runny eyes? Did the kitten have runny, well, you know? Yes. The vet soon informed us that she had about everything from coccidia to mange, which at one point left the tip of her tail exposed and hairless .

“Foodface.” That’s what our vet called her because, for whatever reason, Kua didn’t clean herself at first and her face was a constant mosaic of meals past.

We persevered, and Kua became a big part of our feline family. She moved to Kaaawa with us and enjoyed a decade there before a bad heart ended her life.