Category Archives: Personal

Say “Happy Anniversary”

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You would think that after 50+ practice runs, we should have the “special occasion” routine down pat. No such luck. We consistently fail this test. But at least it’s a mutual failure. We’re in it together. That much should be obvious.

I don’t feel old enough for this to be true, but…Meda and I were married 54 years ago today by Judge Sidney Feinberg in his chambers at the Santa Clara County Municipal Court.

Here’s a photo immediately after he led us through the necessary rigamarole.

My parents were there, along with my sister and her (first) husband, as well as Meda’s mother, and my dad’s mother. It wasn’t much of a ceremony. When it was over, we adjourned to my sister’s house on Loma Verde Avenue in Palo Alto for a small party, where we were joined by two friends from Whitman College.

So what do should we be doing to mark 54 years of marriage? I’m not at all sure. Once again, we’re kind of ad-libbing, I’m afraid.

It’s also complicated by my birthday, which arrives in two days.

We did decide to spread things out. We started with lunch last Saturday at the Honolulu Museum of Art, introducing two of our more recent friends to the place.

Today started with our early morning walk, and we’re looking forward to lunch at the Elks Club overlooking the ocean near Diamond Head, followed by a regular weekly Zoom call with a group of friends from our college years. One of them was at that “after the ceremony” party 54 years ago.

Tomorrow night, in limbo between anniversary and birthday, we’re having dinner with another longtime friend. Before the week is over, we have to make visit with Julie and Paké at their wonderful store, Antique Alley. As one recent comment on Yelp said, “Who needs therapy when you can visit Antique Alley.”

And on Saturday, we’ll be back at the art museum for lunch with two other longtime friends.

We’re not wired right for a fancy restaurant celebratory dinner. But we did grab a “better-than-our-normal” bottle of champagne, which we’ll open tonight. And I’m sure I can dig something reasonably good out of the freezer for a nice home meal.

An unexpected twist in the family tree

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Every once in a while I wander back and browse a bit more through the results of several DNA tests I’ve taken, and end up wasting more time pondering the mysteries they reveal.

Here’s one of them.

I have a 2nd cousin–our grandmothers were sisters, and we have always known that we descend from common great-grandparents on our mother’s Hawaiian side of the family, Kina Kahooilimoku and Robert William Cathcart. In recent years, we’ve gotten to be good friends, and I’m closer to him than any other known cousins. Meda and I both met and spent a little time decades ago with his grandfather, and with his father, so we’re familiar with the family ties.

But the amount of DNA we share is significantly less than would be expected of a 2nd cousin, according to Ancestry.com. According to the company’s calculations, there is only a 3% chance that we are 2nd cousins, versus a 27% chance we are half-second cousins. The latter would mean that our grandmothers were not sisters, but half-sisters. And, since it’s hard to misidentify a child’s mother, it would likely mean that one of us traces back to a different great-grandfather.

This came to my attention when two women about my age, sisters, showed up on my list of matches with nearly as much DNA overlap as my known second cousin. And they have an associated family tree identifying their great grandfather as William Dennis Toomey.

Hmmm, a clue.

My great-grandmother, Kina, had children by three men during the mid-1880s. Two of those children by William Dennis Toomey, followed by three children attributed to Robert William Cathcart.

So I am trying to evaluate a working hypothesis to account for less shared DNA with a “known” 2nd cousin on my Cathcart side than expected, and a DNA match with sisters descended from Toomey.

Could my grandmother have actually been a daughter of Toomey?

There’s some family lore in favor of this hypothesis. My grandmother, Heleualani, apparently bore a striking resemblance to her half-sister, Florence (Flora) Toomey. My mother recalled them having the same stocky body type, similar hair and facial shape. And in some photos of events in which they were both present, my mother wasn’t able to easily tell them apart.

That was the possibility that came to mind first when I saw Toomey on the family tree of those two sisters on my DNA match list.

But there’s a key against this. If they are descended from Kina and Cathcart, we would be 2nd cousins, and the amount of DNA we share should be greater than the cousin I now suspect might be a half-2nd cousin. And that’s not the case. But DNA is not inherited in a rigid pattern, so all these probabilities are just that, probabilities.

And there are many other possibilities, of course.

It’s complicated. I’ve done DNA tests with different companies, and uploaded my DNA results to a couple of others to see matches in their data bases. Now, using these different testing systems, I’m trying to test different hypotheses. If my great-grandfather was Toomey rather than Cathcart, what differences would I expect to see in my list of DNA matches? Are there other people on my list of DNA matches with Cathcart or Toomey in their family trees? Any additional clues there? It will help if I can eliminate one or more of the most plausible explanations.

And then there’s another background issue. My great-grandmother was from Hana, and a number of generations lived in that area between Keanae and Kaupo. The population was relatively small, intermarriage was common, creating problems discerning direct genealogical connections from the background of shared DNA.

Ancestry.com has an algorithm that attempts to correct for this by screening out the DNA “noise.” How well this works is, well, another unknown.

While trying to think through all this, I stop. Does it really matter? If this branch of my family tree turns out to have taken an unexpected turn, so what? Am I a different person that I previously thought? Is my connection to my cousin different? No, I don’t think so. But then why worry about it? I’m not sure.

It’s more that this expected DNA finding creates questions in my mind that I would naturally would like to answer. So it takes its place alongside other questions posed by my DNA results. Why do my Lind family DNA matches suddenlly disappear four or five generations back? What or who is the family link to the large number Australian and New Zealand “cousins,” including lots of Maori?

It’s at this point that I usually put the whole matter aside again and turn my attention to more immediately productive things.

But the nagging questions continue somewhere in the back of my mind.

Mother’s Day 2023

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Thinking about my mom, Helen Yonge Lind, on this mother’s day.

She’s been gone ten years, since early 2013, She died a few months before Mother’s Day, and her 99th birthday.

Mother’s Day was always a “problem” because her birthday was May 15, always in close proximity to Mother’s Day. Sometimes they were a week apart, other years just a day apart, as this year.

Meda and I were both busy working, and many, maybe most years, we would try to combine the two celebrations, Mother’s Day and birthday, into one shared evening. It worked well for us, but in retrospect, it also essentially took one of those annual family events away from her.

Here are a couple of photos.

The first photo was taken in about May 1950 by a next-door neighbor who was an advanced photographer with his own darkroom on the side of the garage that, as I recall, always fascinated me.

That little Jack-in-the-Box toy gave me endless laughs! When you turned the crank, it would play the traditional tune, “Pop! Goes the weasel”, ending as the lid popped open and the little spring-loaded monkey would come flying out. I have the sense memory that I was continually surprised and delighted by it!

We’re sitting on the stairs from my parent’s house that led down onto the lanai. You can see one of their rattan chairs in the house behind us, and my mother’s pack of cigarettes on the step next to her.

Meda and I moved back to their Kahala house in 2015 after a total renovation. The stairs are now just a memory, replaced by a deck at the same level as the floor of the house, so that you now just walk out onto the deck, instead of down the stairs to the lanai. Little changes like that help keep the ghosts at bay.

And then here we are 52 years later. We were sitting out in front of the Honolulu Academy of Arts before going in for lunch to celebrate my birthday, which had been nearly two weeks earlier. She was 88.

Both my parents, my mom’s brother, my older sister, and her husband, chose to have their ashes scattered in the ocean. My dad was spread in the ocean just outside the surf line at Ala Moana, the rest around the Diamond Head buoy. I honored their wishes, but it kind of leaves me at loose ends, something I wrote about several years ago.

Two words from small kid time

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Remnants of small kid time.

“Tubalard”

There’s a word that hasn’t come to mind in many a year. Used often when I was somewhere in the early grades in elementary school.

It was a strange word that somehow just rolled off our tongues as kids, often conveyed in a taunting sing-song cadence.

“Tub a lard, tub a lard,” turned into three elongated syllables, but still all one word.

I can almost hear it hurled as a weapon, and still see the fingers pointed at the targets.

Yes, kids can be cruel, and I guess this means we were into what would now be called “fat shaming.” Of course, as I recall our own chubby friends were exempted. “Tubalard,” it seems, was an insult reserved for others, those who were on the outs.

Tubalards.

It took a long time for me to finally figure out it wasn’t just one weird word, but was really a phrase, “tub of lard.”

And, of course, at that time, lard was still a “thing” in many or most home kitchens, although it was challenged by Crisco, that canned fat that was marketed as “pure” and, we were supposed to think, was more healthy as a result.

I haven’t heard the word in many decades, and thought it was just an archaic relic from that distant past. But a quick online search appears to indicate the word may still be used occasionally.

And there’s another word I recall from the same general era. Again, something you yelled scornfully at other kids.

Bakatare (although pronounced like “baka tade”).

Japanese translated something like “fool,” “stupid,” or “idiot”. You get the idea.

A lot of students went to Japanese school in the afternoons, and this is one of those words that migrated back to the rest of us, I guess.

It was a useful word, as I recall.