Ka Puana: Rooster & Papaya

Excerpted from The Solid Green Birthday & Other Fables by Big Island author Kona Lowell

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There is a young wild rooster that likes to visit my house in the early morning and practice his crowing. He is not very good at it yet. Instead of the typical cock-a-doodle-doo thing he does sort of a cock-ork-ack-urrrgh. It’s pretty pathetic. I can do a better rooster impersonation. Anybody could.

The other problem is he doesn’t have a very clear idea of when roosters are supposed to perform this basic function for which they’re celebrated. A full moon is as good as a sunrise to him. Or a particularly bright star. Or a porch light. Or high beams on a truck coming up the mountain. A bright idea would probably set him off.

When you put this all together you get a rooster who is not making friends. Sometimes I’ll have a late night at the Liar’s Bar, shooting Chinese snooker and drinking Tennessee whiskey with the twin Srisai sisters from Patong Beach, and just be starting to fall asleep when I hear him practicing outside my window. I have never owned a gun, for a variety of reasons, but he is beginning to change my mind on this issue. I lie there imagining him disappearing in a puff of black and orange feathers as the shotgun goes off. Then I lie there feeling terrible because I never like to kill little critters of any kind, however annoying (or deserving). I stick an earplug in my ear and try to go back to sleep. My dreams are troubled by bloody visions of Foghorn Leghorn.

I just don’t like to kill things. See, I have what’s called a hale ‘au’au, a Hawaiian shower room outside my house. The local rats figured this was a good place to party at night. I did not agree with them and told them so. They didn’t listen. So I got a big rat trap at the hardware store. But my girlfriend (and me, too) found the results so unpleasant we ended up getting one of those sonic rat annoyers instead. It actually works and I don’t have to deal with dead rats the size of kittens. Unfortunately, the man at the hardware store said they don’t make them for roosters. But he did have a nice shotgun.

I told a local friend of mine about the problem with the rooster. He didn’t quite understand my reluctance to “just shoot da buggah” and gave me a great Hawaiian recipe for rooster. Apparently cooking it with papayas makes it nice and tender. I guess he figured that if I knew it would taste really, really good, it would be easier for me to kill it. I thanked him for the recipe but didn’t bother to tell him that my experience with preparing dead animals for eating was limited to fish.

So the rooster is still there. His crowing hasn’t improved. But lately he has been practicing out in the jungle so my sleep has been relatively undisturbed. This morning, as I drank my coffee on the front porch, he made his way through my yard, pausing to look at me before going about his own business. He is actually a very beautiful bird, extremely colorful, with long, shiny tail feathers and a bright red comb and wattles. Hopefully he’ll move on to some other place where there’s lonely hens who will appreciate him, lousy crowing or not. Meanwhile, I’m keeping the rooster and papaya recipe on the refrigerator door. ❖

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Kona Lowell hides out in South Kona, way up in the mist with his miniature wife, Chee, an assortment of odd cats and one rather small, supplemental cat-like creature named Miu. His new book, Don’t Pet the Sharks: Advice, Observations & Snark from the Big Island Hawaii is due out soon. A musician and composer as well, Kona is the leader of the progressive rock band, No Empty Sky.

The Solid Green Birthday & Other Fables can be purchased locally at Borders and Kona Stories as well as online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.