Folks, I feel very abrupt today. For many reasons which I will not delve into, save to note that this damn computer, which has served me so well these past three or four years, seems to be getting ready to fail and it is wasting a lot of my time. This post should have been completed an hour ago.
So I am going to be abrupt today.
Sunday, however, was a good day.
So I will return to Sunday, and will abruptly tell you how Jobe sat down and the waiter came...
Oh, hell... why should I tell you at all?
Look at the picture! You can see for yourself!
There were adults at the table, too. I was there, as well.
When you are little, you are as aware of the bottom of the table as you are the top.
Honk, honk!
At one point, Kalib got up and ran off to another table, being mischievous. He could have got away with it with his dad, but not his Auntie Mel. He had to come back and sit back down.
This is what you call, "sibling rivalry."
After we returned home, Melanie and Charlie tried to get comfortable on the couch. Kalib whipped them with a blanket.
So they got up and danced instead. Kalib played with the voice mail box on the phone. The first message was, "no new messages." So Kalib made it go, "no! no! no! no new. no! no! no new messages." Kind of like a disk dj.
Then he got into a message left awhile back that I have not bothered to erase.
A gruff but happy sounding voice comes on talking to me, Bill Hess, saying I will know right away who he is and he leaves a number and tells me to get back to him.
I did not know who he was and there was something about the familiarity of the message coming from a voice that I did not recognize at all that put me on a bit of an edge, so I never called back.
Then one day he called back and got me. Turns out, he had spent time in jail in Palmer with a Bill Hess who was not this Bill Hess and that Bill Hess had somehow introduced him to the woman who became his wife and when he saw that this Bill Hess lives in Wasilla he thought it must be the same Bill Hess and so he was just calling to let that Bill Hess who wasn't me know how great everything had worked out with his marriage and to thank that Bill Hess for bringing the two together.
Sorry, I said. Wrong Bill Hess. I haven't been in jail since I got out of Juarez in November of 1969, just in time to eat Thanksgiving dinner in a casino in Las Vegas.
I don't know why we even bother to keep this phone anymore. Everybody calls us on our cells phones. Except for people wanting money, and folks who think they did time with me.
Then Melanie danced with Kalib, who seemed to enjoy it.
Kalib takes a break.
Caleb watched the NFL playoffs.
Lisa talked to Bryce on the phone.
At 4:00 PM, a bunch of us went out to get coffee. Metro is closed on Sunday so we went to the place at the corner of Fishhook and Seldon. As we waited for our coffee, we saw an exchange being made. Money for pizza.
Now, there are two things notable about this picture. It is 4:00 PM and look how much light is in the sky! The long nights are in rapid retreat.
Also, the temperature stood at about -10 F (-23 C) but no real snow on the ground. Just ice and a hard crust.
Lisa and Jobe, back at the house.
After we returned home, Kalib laid his spatula upon the floor and ran circles around it.
As always happens, it was soon time for them all to go. Lisa and Kalib head out the door.
Melanie and Kalib walk to the car.
They backed out and then, with their headlights shining through their frozen exhaust, began the drive back to Anchorage, where they would drop Kalib and Jobe off with their parents.
"It sure is quiet in here," Margie noted, after they had been gone awhile.
I had not seen Chicago since Kalib and Jobe had arrived. Now that they had left, she came back out.
Quiet is how Chicago likes it.
And this one from India:
This is what it is like riding on the Indian highways. Constantly. While it is exhilarating to a certain degree and on the surface seems to carry a bit of romance, it is deadly. And once that deadliness catches up to you it is awful and that, more than all the other reasons combined, is why I feel so abrupt today.