Jobe falls, gets up and becomes a rolling toddler

As I prepared these pictures of my bright-eyed grandson, Jobe, for today's post, I could not help but think repeatedly of the equally bright-eyed children of Japan who have lost their homes, or even their lives, who have been displaced, and now live in dire circumstance.

In contrast to that, being very much aware of the arbitrary of this life and knowing that what hits Japan today can hit Alaska tomorrow, I begin today's happy essay with this image of my grandson, Jobe, who has discovered that with the help of his little wagon, he can now toddle about the house.

But oh, no! He falls on his butt. He looks up into my eyes (note that in this picture I am holding the camera low and off to the side in front of Jobe, so those are my feet and legs that you see to the left and he is indeed looking into my eyes) and cries. He wants me to pick him up, to comfort him, to put him back on his feet.

"It's okay, Jobe," I tell him. "You don't need me to help you. You can get up. You can do it yourself."

Jobe realizes that he must do this for himself. He begins to get up.

Jobe is up, a little bit unsure of himself, but ready to go again. In the background, his Uncle Caleb prepares to putt an imaginary golf ball.

 Off Jobe goes, as Caleb putts his golf ball through the roof and 400 yards down the road.

Jobe dashes into a sun beam.

He rounds the corner toward the kitchen...

...he passes by the kitchen table...

...gleefully, he charges through the kitchen, his fall forgotten.

Then back into the living room where he will do it all again... and again... and again...

I had to do some other things, so I retreated to my office as Jobe continued to wagon-toddle his laps. After a bit, I heard someone pounding on the window in front of my computer, where Jimmy likes to sit, bask in the sun and watch for moose, ravens, little birds and whatever else he might see out there.

I stood up, lifted the curtain and there was Jobe, looking in at Jimmy and me.

How did he ever grow to be so tall, so fast?

Later still, I stepped back into the house and saw that, using a couch for support, he had risen to his feet all on his own. He reached out for me.

So I took his little hand, and the two of us went walking. Again, in this picture, I am holding the camera away from me, so as to get my hand in the picture. Again, he is looking straight into my eyes.

And all this happened as children in Japan struggled for their very lives.

Let us not forget them even as we live our own lives.

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Sylvia Carlsson - the woman who gave me my start in Alaska; contemplating the future of this blog, part 3

Memorial services for Sylvia Carlsson were held at the Alaska Native Heritage Center and were presided over by the Alaska Native Sisterhood.

In the final years of her life, Sylvia Carlsson became well known for her letters to the Editor of the Anchorage Daily News, which appeared on a regular basis. This is her final letter, published January 21, 2011 - just two days before she died unexpectedly at the age of 76:

Anybody can destroy; ability to create valued

Following the State of the Union address, some Republican and tea party members of Congress will fall into full assault mode and will begin battering the health care legislation signed into law in 2010. They've dubbed it "Obamacare" and labels not fit to mention. The legislation is actually entitled the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act or Public Law 111-148, but it is rarely referred to by its proper title in any of the media offerings -- "Obamacare" is more sensational maybe?

A few of the newly minted members of Congress seem to view themselves as foot soldiers specifically elected to wreak havoc on anything with President Obama's name on it, especially the PPAHCA. At least that's the impression I'm getting from interviews on the tube and in print.

Is there anything in the PPAHCA that could have helped the deranged shooter in Tucson? That question has yet to be asked.

When We the People begin electing members to Congress to destroy rather than create law, are we in trouble? Answer that question for yourself.

-- Sylvia Carlsson

I knew Sylvia for a different reason. I was a homeless person when I met her, and I had a homeless family. But I also had a dream - to make a life in Alaska for my family and me, to move out of the two tiny tents in which we endured the almost constant rain of the summer of 1981 into a house or apartment and to get to know something about this place they call Alaska.

It was Sylvia Carlsson, then President and Publisher of the Tundra Times who made it possible for me to begin to live that dream. She gave me my first and only non-freelance job in Alaska when, working in conjunction with Linda Lord-Jenkins, she hired me to come on as a reporter and photographer.

I worked there for 3.5 years and in that time, thanks largely to connections that enabled Sylvia to oversee agreements with the airline companies to provide me free transportation in exchange for ad space, I was able to do work in every region of Alaska, from the rain forests of Southeast, the wind-blasted volcanic islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Southwest Y-K delta, the Interior and, of course, the Arctic.

It was great fun and a big learning adventure. At times along the way, Sylvia backed me up against powerful individuals and organizations within her own Native community. Other times, we disagreed, and strongly so.

None of what I have done would have happened had Sylvia not hired me - not only my work for Tundra Times, but there would have been no Uiñiq magazine, no Alaska's Village Voices as I once shaped it - so many things.

So, when her niece and my good friend Diane Benson informed me that Sylvia, Tlingit, of the Raven Clan, had passed away, I made certain to attend her memorial service at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. There, I found her ashes on a small table alongside her picture.

I paid her my respects and gave her a Gunalchéesh, "thank you" in Tlingit, for hiring me and for giving me this great opportunity.

As Margie walks into one of the many campsites that we stayed in during the two months between the day we arrived in Alaska and when I was hired on at the Tundra Times, Caleb plays in the dirt. Melanie and Jacob visit in the master tent. Summer, 1981.

By June of 1981, it had become clear to me that if I was ever to realize my dream of making a life in what I knew to be my spiritual home - Alaska - I could wait no longer. I could not sit around until someone in Alaska gave me a job, I could not wait until a pile of money sufficient to finance the move and transition from Arizona to Alaska fell upon me. I had to go to Alaska and I had to go right then. I had dreamt long enough. It was time to take action - time to go.

So Margie and I held a yard sale, sold most all that we owned and then packed what was left on top of and into our Volkswagen Rabbit along with two tiny tents and our children, who then numbered four, and hit the road north.

Among those who loved us, many gave me good and loving council - "don't go!" You are not a kid anymore - you are a man with a wife and four children - a baby daughter, for hell's sake! Put your childish dreams behind you and be a man - be responsible, don't go!

Alaska is a harsh place. You're not prepared. Alaska will be cruel to you. Alaska will show you no mercy.

When we reached Salt Lake City, we stopped to visit my folks for a week or so. Rex Jr, my oldest brother, said he had shown my National Geographic work to a friend of his at the Salt Lake Tribune and she had a job there, waiting for me. He gave me her number and told me to call her.

I did not call. I loaded the family back into the car and pointed the Rabbit north, once again. "You'll turn around and come back before you reach the Canadian border," Dad told me just before we pulled out of his driveway. I called him from Canada. "You'll turn around and come back before you ever get to Alaska," he predicted.

Next, I called him from Tok, Alaska, just on this side of border from the Yukon Territory. "You'll be back within a year," he said.

That was almost 30 years ago.

When I drove across the border from the Yukon Territory on July 14 - my 31st birthday - and looked out at Alaska, at big, wild, country that I had never before seen, country in which I knew no one - hard, cold, country where no job awaited me, I felt this warm feeling of exquisite peace. I felt that finally, after having spent 31 years wandering in that wilderness called the Lower 48, I had come home.

It has long been my contention that although I was born in the city of Ogden, Utah, I have been an Alaskan since birth - it's just that I was born into exile.

I wondered why it took me exactly 31 years to get here, but it was better to have arrived late than not at all.

Rex, doing his art at the picnic table that serves as a tie down stake for the tent he sleeps in. Summer, 1981.

When I first got into the internet, and when I first saw blogs, I had this feeling that both had been made and created just for me. Basically, I had made a career of creating publications that I wrote, photographed and designed on contract, and I had longed to create my own publication.

I even tried it once, but the effort went nowhere. Even though I have spent 29 years of my 35 year career in business for myself, I am not a business man. I always put what I want to do ahead of money, and so tend to often wind up short. The expense of keeping a high-quality paper publication going while I figured out how to fund it was beyond my resource. I published one issue and then the thing died.

But with the internet - with a blog - the expense of producing and distributing a publication with a potential worldwide audience would be nominal. 

Yet, I hestitated for over a decade. I feared that if I put my photos on the internet, people would steal them, put them to unauthorized use. In fact, people had already done so, but I feared that on the internet, the problem could prove severe.

So, as badly as I wanted to launch an internet publication, I didn't.

Too bad. If I had have done so, perhaps I could have figured it out long before now. Perhaps by now, I would have a self-sustaining publication going. There are a good number of these out there, you - many produced by individuals, most of whom seem to have jumped in and built there readership and found their support before there were a billion blogs to compete with.

I don't think "a billion blogs" is much of an exaggeration at all. 

But because of this fear of theft, I waited until it became clear to me that the entire photographic world was moving online, anyway. Not just the young up and comers, but even the greatest known works by the greatest masters were coming online.

So a bit of theft and appropriation would just have to be tolerated. If something major were to happen, there are always the courts.

To all my Facebook friends - be assured, none of this applies to you. It gives me pleasure when you place my pictures on your wall, or use them as your profile pic - so long as my copyright mark remains and credit is given. I liken this to when I step into people's houses and find my pictures, clipped from magazines and newspapers, hanging on the wall.

Rex visits Melanie in the master tent. The summer of 1981 was the wettest on record to that time. It rained almost every day, sometimes all day and all night, too.

Well, damnit. I have again surpassed my alloted blogging time today and once again have done so much rambling that I have not gotten down to the main point of this "Contemplating the future of this blog" thing.

So I will have to do a part 4.

From comments that I receive, both here and in Facebook, I see that some of my readers still fear that one of the things that I am contemplating is to shut down the blog entirely.

No - no, not all.

I see this blog, and the electronic magazine that I plan to add to it, just like I saw Alaska after I drove across the border on the Al-Can with my family. I was looking at my future - Alaska. My past was literally behind me. I would still make short returns back into that past. The places and people who had been important to my life down south would continue to be so. From time to time, I would go down there and we would get together and do things.

Sometimes, I would go to places outside Alaska where I had never been - but my spirtual home was now my physical home and would remain so. I had almost no money, no home, but I had desire. I did not know where the money would come from. I knew that  it would come and it did - never enough to make it easy, but enough somehow to always carry on.

Now, this blog, and electronic publishing - this is what is before me. This is my future. I will still make my visits back into paper, but this world of electronic publishing is where I am and I am only going deeper. Once again, I lack all but marginal resources and I do not know where sufficient resources are going to come from. The resources will come, though, I know it. 

And you readers - you have encouraged, by coming and by your support.

Tomorrow, I will see if I can do what I was going to do today so that I can close out this series.

Two Ravens, in honor of Sylvia Carlsson of the Raven Clan. Thank you again, Sylvia, for the many good things that you made possible in my life.

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Finally, last Sunday with kids and grandkids, abruptly remembered; jail house romance wrongly credited, near miss

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.

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I begin Christmas by taking a shower with a spider; we give gifts, eat, celebrate and the littlest among us falls ill

Late on Christmas morning, before the influx of family began to arrive, I took a shower. After I stepped out, I found this spider standing still on the shower curtain. I do not like to have spiders in the house, nor do I like to kill them. When I find a spider in the house between breakup and freezeup, I catch it and take it outside.

It seems cruel to do this in the winter, so in the winter, I apologize to whatever spider I find. "I am sorry, spider," I say. "I do not wish to harm you, but I just can't allow spiders to overwhelm my house." Then I will kill it.

When I looked at this spider, one word came into my mind: "Chooo'weet!" 

I could not kill it. It just simply was not in me to do. I dried myself with a towel, got dressed, left the spider in peace right where you see it and went out to greet family members as they arrived.

Jobe arrived with his mom brandishing a copy of the Anchorage Daily News. Whose picture do you think was in it...? Look close... heck, you don't even have to look that close... it's Jobe! Second from left on top, a crop from the Christmas card picture that I ran with yesterday's post.

Soon, Jobe took a seat on the floor. He looks good and happy as usual, but he had thrown up just a little bit earlier and he was not eating anything at the moment. None of us were too concerned. Babies throw up all the time.

You will note Kalib and Ama in the background. It is true that Rex is the one who discovered Ama and brought her into our lives, but I have to tell you, it was Kalib and Ama who were falling in love with each other on Christmas Day.

Jobe tried his hand at petting Jim. He was doing okay, but then he grabbed a big hank of fur and yanked. Jim turned around and meowed in protest.

Jobe was left with a clump of black fur in his paw.

When it came time for me to pass out the gifts, Jacob put a Santa hat on my head. Jobe came over and posed with Santa for this self-portrait.

Who would receive the first gift? I reached into the pile of gifts and grabbed one at random. It was addressed to Charlie, from Santa Paws. Which means it came from Muzzy and his family.

Charlie tore into the packaging to unwrap his gift.

It was a Betty Boop doll.

Well, actually, it was a grain mill. But if you squint until your eyes are almost closed and then look hazily at the box, those little pictures kind of look like Betty Boop.

Among the huge cache of gifts that cascaded down upon Kalib was this alligator, a triceratops, and a shark.

One gift was addressed to Diamond, Bear Meach and Poof, the cats who hang out with Melanie and Charlie. The cats had stayed home, so Melanie opened.

Somehow, I don't think those cats are going to wipe their paws.

As for me, I would rather wipe my muddy boots on the living room rug than to dirty this matt.

Margie held up a print of Jobe that I made for her.

"Joooooe - be!" Kalib said.

You will notice that Caleb is staying low key in the background, holding his throat. On Tuesday, he bought himself something to eat at Taco Bell and a crunchy taco shell scratched his throat on the way down. His throat grew sore and just kept getting worse and worse.

So he stayed low key, all day.

He didn't even play with Kalib.

Margie called me into the kitchen to tell me it was time to for me to carve the turkey, which she had just removed from the oven - with a little help from Lavina and Melanie.

Ama had been no help at all. As you can see, she had over-imbibed and had passed out on the dinning room table.

How could this have happened? This was an alcohol-free gathering.

It was Kalib that she had over-imbibed on. Kalib, and all his rambunctious energy.

So she passed out. Her head hit the table with a "thunk!"

I might exaggerate just a little bit.

As for me, I picked up the carving knife. The edge was dull. So I sharpened it, until it could have sliced right through a newspaper.

Instead, it sliced through the skin on the tip of my left pointer finger..

That knife was really sharp and went straight to bone, just like that.

Then Charlie brought some squash that Jacob had cooked with with berries and pine-nuts to the table. It was time to begin feasting.

Unrepentant and irreligious though I be, I have been walking a very ethereal edge these past five weeks and it did not seem right to start Christmas dinner without a prayer and a word of thanks. I did not feel up to the task myself and so I asked Lavina, whose strong sense of spirituality is rooted in her Dene beliefs. She agreed. I asked her to be certain to remember other members of the family who are grieving, those in South India.

She did, along with many others spread widely over vast distances.

Then it was time to eat. I put my camera aside and picked up my fork and knife.

Afterward, we were all stuffed. Turkey can put you to sleep. It put Rex to sleep.

But Rex would not be allowed to sleep long, for a shark came flying at him. It was Lisa who had hurled the shark.

Knowing how much Melanie hates the very image of a spider, I called her over and showed her the picture of the spider on my camera monitor. She shrieked, and almost dropped Jobe.

"Why would you do that, Dad?" she asked.

So I told about how the spider had showered with me and how I had left it in peace.

"Why would you want to shower with a spider, anyway, Dad?" Lisa chimed in. "Don't you know that a spider has eight eyes?"

Charlie had borrowed my guitar. The spider incident inspired him and he suddenly began to sing one of his improvised, on the spot, ballads.

I wish I could quote him, but I can't.

Anyway, the ballad was about a guy who took a shower with a spider. Everything started out fine, but then the spider got a little too perverse in taking in the sights with its eight staring eyes and wound up getting washed down the drain.

It didn't have to be that way, Charlie sang. Everything would have been fine, if only that spider had kept its eyes to itself.

As for Kalib and Ama, the two just kept at it. Melanie had given Charlie a top Canon Rebel. As the two frolicked, he read the manual so that he could begin using it.

Ama, by the way, is Jewish and also vegetarian. She grew up in New York and her family did not celebrate Christmas, but, as it was a holiday and they had the day off, they would usually go to a movie and a Chinese restaurant.

Readers who were with me then will recall that right after Thanksgiving, she and Rex flew to San Francisco and then joined Ama's family at Lake Tahoe. After that, they drove into Canada and then followed the Al-Can Highway to Alaska. On their way to Anchorage, they stopped here. It was the end of Hanukkah, and so they lit the last candle of the menorah, right here. I was in Barrow at the time.

Then they flew to New England but now they are back, Ama just found an apartment and will soon start her new job teaching massage therapy.

I lay down on the couch to rest a bit. I closed my eyes, and slipped into that place half way between sleep and awake. I am not quite sure how he got there, but when I opened them again, Jobe was on my shoulder.

Jobe truly adores me and I adore him.

So I did another self-portrait. A bit later, Jobe's mom put him down for a nap in his cradleboard. A bit after that, we heard a loud, awful sounding retching noise come from the master bedroom, where Jobe had been sleeping.

He had thrown up badly. He was feverish.

So Jacob and Lavina took him to the emergency room at Mat-Su Valley Regional Hospital.

Kalib stayed with us.

They came back about three hours later. Jobe had come down with some kind of mix of bacteria and virus and had been given medicine. He would be okay, the doctor had said. His spirits were good and his smile was there. His parents decided to spend the night here.

Kalib watched as his dad stoked up the fire.

By the way - today, Sunday, December 26, is Kalib's third birthday.

Happy birthday, Kalib!

How did it happen so fast?

And why do all events just keep shooting by, faster and faster?

About midnight, Jobe began to get fussy. He cried and cried and it was hard to see and hear - this little grandson of mine, who is always so happy and good natured.

Lavina picked him up and patted and soothed and rocked him. In time, he settled down. And he slept reasonably well until 5:00 AM, when he woke up and cried again.

He seems okay now, though.

While Jimmy had hung out with us through much of the day, we had caught only flashing glimpses of Pistol-Yero and we had not seen Chicago at all.

This was because Muzzy had come to visit. Jimmy doesn't care, he does not fear the big-hearted St. Bernard, but those other two stay away from Muzzy.

Now that Christmas, 2010, was coming to its end and it was bedtime, Chicago stepped half-way into the hall to see if she could determine what was going on.

Despite Jobe's temporary illness, it was a good Christmas Day, well-below zero outside but warm in the love of family inside.

I enjoyed it, and when Melanie brought up the memory of the exploding nitro-squirrels that we used to come upon when she was little and we would go walking, I laughed loud and hard.

Even so, were I to tell you that I went through the day without my eyes ever watering I would be lying.

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At the weekends important Alaska book signing: Jobe greets progressive Phil Munger in the gleam of Sarah Palin's smile; Jobe spills the coffee; Jobe rolls on the floor / Amazing Grace

Here is Jobe and Melanie speaking with classical music composer and Progressive Alaska blogger Phil Munger at the important Alaska book signing that took place this weekend. Phil's wife, Judy Youngquist, was one of Melanie's teachers during her days at Tanaina Elementary School, and sometimes Phil filled in and taught her, too.

Another substitute teacher that Melanie had at Tanaina was Chuck Heath. Undoubtedly by now, the reader has noticed the face of Chuck Heath's famous daughter, Sarah Palin, beaming out from the three books on the lower part of the shelf between Jobe, Melanie and Phil. Probably, cynical readers are imagining that I set this picture up just this way - but no, I didn't.

It's just how it happened. I didn't even realize Sarah Palin's face was in the picture until after I took it. I was rather pleased when I discovered this, because it gave me some opportunities to play with today's title a bit and thereby draw in those legions of potential readers who only stop by if there is a hint that Sarah Palin might somehow be on this blog.

While I have generally tried to stay away from Palin on this blog, Phil has not been so reticent. He has written a great deal about Palin, whom he has known for decades.

But I have begun with a distraction. I had come to this place, Fireside Books in Palmer, because a signing for a very important book about Alaska was taking place here.

The important book that was being signed was "Purely Alaska - Authentic Voices from the Far North," a collection of stories written by 23 authors, most of them Native, spread across the roadless regions of Rural Alaska. The writings were inspired, encouraged, compiled, and edited by John Creed and wife Susan Andrews.

The two both began their careers as journalists, but then became teachers of journalism and writing at Chukchi College in Kotzebue - an extension of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. They eventually set up a statewide, long-distance learning program conducted via the internet. The stories in the book come from their students.

They are the real thing, written for love, not money and driven by the human desire to communicate one individual to another, one culture to another.

So I would suggest that readers consider buying this book, just as did Heather McCausland, for whom John is seen adding his autograph to Susan's. It will be worth it.

John, Susan and family.

John photographs Jobe.

I met first met John in September of 1981, when I flew into Kotzebue for the first time. He took me to a fish camp in Noorvik and helped me in many ways. I came back again after freeze-up and it was a wonderful, glorious, thing, because Kotzebue Sound had frozen solid and thick but there was not a snowflake upon it - just miles and endless miles of clear, smooth, slick ice.

We walked out onto that ice and then could not stop ourselves from running and sliding, running and sliding, running and sliding, until we had ventured well beyond the limits of common sense and safety. We had no gun and had a hungry polar bear come along, we would have been defenseless.

But it was such great fun that we didn't care and we knew that the odds were in our favor.

Yes, there was another book signing this weekend, at Costco in Anchorage, and it drew a whole lot more attention than did this one.

Trust me, though - this book will be the better, most informative and enjoyable read. The power and strength of the stories in it will live on when those in the other book have fallen into their place as a political curiousity and trivia, lacking depth and substance; hyperbole - a memento of a strange fad that rose out of my own little town at a troubled time in America to place an absurd and perplexing grip upon my homeland for a limited number of years.

But if you want substance, not fad, then read "Purely Alaska." Read the other one, too, if you like and if you are up to the task.

After we left the book signing, Melanie, Jobe and I walked less than one block to Vagabond Blues to get some coffee.

I know - some are wondering how I could be so fickle as to go get my coffee here and not at Metro Cafe, but Metro is closed on Sundays and we were in Palmer, anyway.

You know what the lyrics to the famous rock-and-roll song say:

"When you can't drink the coffee you love, love the coffee you can drink."

Such is my philosophy on the subject.

We ordered our coffee, got it, sat down and then Jobe grabbed Melanie's and spilled it all over the floor. It was okay. She just got another and we proceeded on, unperturbed.

Jobe did not get a coffee. Jobe drank from a bottle of his own mother's milk. Then he and Melanie played with the bottle cap.

Jobe is a very bright fellow, by the way; observant. He takes in everything around him. He enjoys the magic of learning and each conscious moment is magic for him. He brings magic back into my own life, even now, at this time.

And to Sujitha, sister of Soundarya - he brings magic back to her as well.

Jobe found that the lid to a bottle of mother's milk can also make a nice hat. He was very pleased with his new hat.

I should note that when Phil Munger first came to Alaska, he piloted a fishing boat by the name of Jo-be, pronounced just the same as Jobe, from Ketchikan to Cordova.

The three of us lingered at Vagabond for probably close to an hour, every minute of it pleasant and wonderful.

Finally, we had to leave. I had driven to Palmer alone with Jobe. Melanie had driven out from Anchorage to meet us. We wanted to drive back to the house together, so we left Melanie's car in Palmer and I drove us home to Wasilla.

I didn't time it, but it usually takes close to half-an-hour, so I suspect that it did this time, as well.

When we pulled into the driveway, Jobe was fast asleep in his car seat.

The light was exceedingly dim, so, even though I was shooting at 6400 ISO, I had to drop down to a quarter or half-second exposure, - very difficult to do shooting free hand - so I took my time and took several shots.

I knew that from inside the house, all Lavina could see would be our headlights. She had not seen her baby Jobe since the day before. She did not discover that I had shanghaied him off to Palmer until she and Jake arrived at the house to find us gone. I knew that she was wondering why I was taking so long to bring him in. 

When finally we did go in, we found people baking, icing, sprinkling and eating Christmas cookies. I would have taken Kalib to Palmer with me as well, but he was asleep when I left.

Melanie observes Jobe as he rolls across the floor.

And this one from India:

This is just a few frames short of being the final picture that I took during the trip that Melanie and I made to India to attend the wedding of Soundarya and Anil. I took the picture as our cab driver approached the Bangalore Airport. As I have earlier noted, other than the wedding pictures, I have never had the time to sift through my take to see what I have.

It has now become very important to me that I do, even though the task seems immense and impossible, given my other responsibilities. I have put the entire, India, Part 2, take into my Lightroom editor and so I set out to skim quickly through to see if I could get some kind of idea of what I have - particularly when it comes to images of Soundarya, and of Soundarya and Anil, as well as the man who walked a scorpion, the monkey who jumped the gap and the dinner of bananas that Vijay fed to us.

I scrolled rapidly through the entire take over the course of maybe three hours, possibly four, bypassing hundreds of images at a time but stopping every now and then, especially when I would spot an image of Sandy.

As I did this, I had the radio tuned to KSKA. In the final hour, as part of whatever program was on the air, a female folksinger was being interviewed. Every few minutes, the interviewer would pause to let her perform a song. I was absorbed in the pictures and did not pay much attention, but she had a nice voice and it made pleasant backgroud music.

Then, to my dread, I came to the final series of frames that I will ever shoot of Soundarya. At the very moment - THE VERY MOMENT - that my final image of Soundarya appeared full-screen in my editor, the folksinger began to sing...

Amazing Grace...

...and she sang it beautifully...

.. she sang it for Soundarya, my cherished Hindu soul friend - she sang it for me, the rebellious, strayed Mormon who has chosen to walk an indeterminate path...

Here is Judy Collins, singing the same song, for any who might care to listen.

I have probably listened to it 20 times since coming upon that final picture. I am listening to it right now. My eyes are not dry.

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