The California Connection on Maui

The last cardinal I had seen was sitting on a winter-bare branch against a cold blue sky in Falls Church, Va. The ground was covered with snow, and it was a Christmas card bird. Either it had missed the takeoff when the rest of the flock left for warmer country or it stayed behind on purpose to make me catch my breath at its beauty on that brittle December day.

The cardinal I saw two weeks ago was hopping around picking up crumbs on the deck of the tennis club at Stouffer Wailea Beach Resort on Maui. It was more fire-orange than red and didn’t look as large as its Virginia relative.

But Donn Takahashi assured me that it was really a cardinal and that its mustard-tan companion was its mate. Jean Erck and I were having lunch with Donn, who is the tall and handsome manager of the resort.

I had never been to Maui before and was as swept in by the air, the colors, the mountains and the soft ocean as I expected to be. Jean is thinking that she might buy some property on the island, and I went along to be sure she didn’t make a mistake. It’s all so beautiful, I don’t think a mistake would be possible.

Everyone I talked to said, “Oh, you should have seen Maui 20 years ago, before all of the building.”

That’s what everyone says about a beautiful place and now I feel that way about Maui.

Donn is 6-feet, 6-inches tall and looks like an 18-year-old, but he swears he’s not. He’s been in the hotel business since the ‘70s. He went to UCLA and so did his parents who were tall, too. His mother was 5 feet, 9 inches and his father was 6 feet, 2 inches. When they hit Westwood, they both wondered how they’d ever find someone tall enough to date, so they both went to Bruin Walk, a traditional gathering place for UCLA students to meet. They met, finished school and married.

While Donn was at UCLA, he worked at the St. Francis Hotel as a bellman in the summers. His parents had moved to San Francisco.

“Bill Hewlett hired me, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Get a haircut.’ ”

That was in 1972 and college students were still wearing long hair. Donn asked Hewlett how he would know what kind of a haircut to get.

“Go into the lobby and look at any of the bellmen leaning against the pillars.”

Donn did and the bellmen leaning against the pillars were all over 60 and had very little or no hair. He finally asked one who didn’t look as if he had been put in place at the same time as the pillar what to do about a haircut. He said, “Go up to the barber shop at the Clift Hotel and ask for the bellman’s special.”

Donn said he got a Marine boot camp haircut and didn’t have to get another one for eight months. It must have pleased Bill Hewlett because he put Donn in the executive training program and now the tall young man runs this entire Wailea resort.

Jean and I had a room in shades of cream and beige right on the ocean, with the sound of the waves putting us to sleep. Most of the people we met were from Pasadena or the California coast, including Donn, whose grandmother still lives in Pasadena.

A pretty blond woman who was hostess in a restaurant told me I looked familiar. We narrowed it down to Carmel Valley. Her mother recently bought the house next door to the post adobe I spent a year restoring in a sunny cul de sac beneath the soft curve of a tawny hill. It’s just like my father said. There are really only 1,300 people in the world and we just change places.