Family Restaurant: the Little girl, her umbrella, the Vietnam vet and his Harley; Wasilla graveyard and thoughts of death; Red Escape at Midnight

I can hear the criticism already. "Bill, you are damn near broke, yet you waste entirely too much money eating out, driving to Taco Bell and going to Family Restaurant for your damned eggs! You should have stayed home and cooked yourself some oatmeal with raspberries."

You who thus criticize are entirely correct, yet, this is how I look at it: Margie, Kalib, and Lavina have been gone to Arizona for nearly ten days now. By the time they get back, I will be gone myself, not to return until late July. Basically, since they left, I now spend my entire day hanging out with cats but no people. Combined, I see Caleb and Jacob for 8 minutes and 47 seconds per day. 

I am a person who does good alone. I always have something to do, I never get bored and if am not working on photographs or words or such, which I almost always am, then there are many interesting conversations taking place in my head.

Yet, sometimes, I feel this ache, this unbearable feeling. I tend to feel it very strongly right after I get up. I do not want to cook, not even oatmeal. I just want to let my head and mind relax, not worry about anything. I want to sit down somewhere and have someone take care of everything for me - cook my food, pour my coffee, bring me toast, lie to me and tell me how handsome I am. Some waitresses will do that.

So I get in the car and head to Family Restaurant.

The girl above is Nya Lee, "I just turned four," and she also headed to Family Restaurant this morning. It was not raining, but she brought her umbrella, anyway. "When it rains, I am ready."

She dressed herself this morning. She was very proud of that.

This is Dan, Vietnam veteran, who also ate at Family this morning. He is from Fairbanks and drove his big Harley down, but now that he had eaten breakfast, he was going to drive back. Given the overcast, I do not think that he would have gotten the chance to see Denali today - but, oh, how magnificent that would be, to motor by Denali on a big Harley!

And the lady with Dan is Sue. She has her own big Harley, but moved to Dan's to get in the picture. Sue has lived in Fairbanks all her life, which is 50 some years - I can't remember precisely. She likes Fairbanks, but she is tired of winter. She can hardly stand the thought of another winter. She wants to get out for the winter.

I do not know how Dan feels about the Fairbanks winter. We did not talk about it. We talked just the tiniest amount and that was about Vietnam. He could not remember for certain when he went there, but thought it was in 1969, and 1971 when he left. He served in the Navy, both on a surface ship and a submarine, which he said was the last World War II sub still in commission.

I wanted to know more, of course, but he was anxious to hit the road. "I'm going to start to sweat if I don't get moving soon," he said. So I thanked him, both for posing for my blog, and for giving himself to my nation. Maybe I would have wound up in Vietnam, too, but when the draft lottery was instituted, I drew number 21. So I would never be drafted.

I thought about enlisting, but did other things instead. 

Someday, I will write about some of those other things.

Many of you will be surprised, if not shocked.

I took this picture as I pedaled my bicycle past the Wasilla cemetery. This is the upper, newer part of the cemetery. The lower part looks more traditional, with larger crosses and tombstones. I never want to lie here. I want to be cremated, and spread about.

Not that I will give a damn.

Shortly before I took this picture, I was pedaling along the bike trail that follows Lucille. There is one point where that trail rises up a hill, maybe 30 feet above the road. As I pedaled up that slope, my mind dwelt upon the topic of death, because I know a great many people who are dead and one cannot help but contemplate who might be next and when that next person might be he.

Just as I reached the top of the hill, I raised my eyes from the trail and looked down at Lucille Street. There, coming from the opposite direction, almost directly below me, was a van with these words emblazoned upon it: "Rock of Ages." It surprised me, and I momentarily lost control of my bike. As I had been pedaling uphill, my momentum was erratic. The bike turned sharply to the left, towards the drop off down to the road, towards a telephone pole.

I recovered at the last possible moment, just before I would have went over.

That would have been an interesting way to die. Trouble is, no one would have known about the series of events that led me to that death, except for me. And I wouldn't have known either.

I'll bet "Rock of Ages" would have just driven on, because by the time I went over I would have been out of the driver's vision. So he would have driven on, not even knowing he had just helped send someone to the promised land, whatever that might be.

Three nights ago, I stopped writing in this blog just a few minutes before midnight, as I had not taken a single picture that day and needed to get some kind of image before the day ended. I stated that you would probably never see that image, but I changed my mind.

This is it. I headed straight for the front porch and took this picture off of it.

So this is the red Escape at midnight. Midnight in Wasilla, Alaska, as the summer solstice draws near.

This is nothing compared to the Arctic Slope - as you will soon see.