32 hours pass and I look into but one human face - guess who's? Wrap of Jobe's baby shower

Just after 9:00 PM Sunday night,  as is now the norm, Margie left here with Jacob and Lavina so that she could spend the week babysitting Jobe. From that moment up until this morning, 32 hours later, I spent my entire time, save maybe three minutes, alone with the cats. I caught not even a glimpse of Caleb. I looked into but one human face, and that for only about three minutes.

It was Carmen. She showed me this little vase from which not flowers but little hand-prints grow. It was her Mother's Day present from her four year-old son, Branson. Thus I shot,

Through the Metro Window Study, #1212 - Carmen with Branson's Mothers Day present

She was very pleased, but still she found it in her to sigh. "Pretty soon, he's going to be chasing girls, Bill. He will Bill, he will."

I should hope so.

OK. Now I back up again to last Friday. What are all these people so raptly looking at? Even that guy on the TV is looking.

Why, it's little Jobe, still tied into a cradle nap.

Jobe is admired by his aunties, Melanie and Lisa.

After he wakes, he gets passed around. Sandy takes him.

Jobe received many wonderful and exotic gifts, from cute little outfits to diapers and toys.

That's little Anna, sitting peacefully upon the floor. That's Cooper in the background. Yesterday, I mentioned that Cooper is mischievous.

Here is proof.

Cooper, Anna and Ian were all watching TV when Ian leaned too far back in his chair. 

This is Ngone and her daughter, Kathleen. Ngone comes from Senegal and has been in the US for 6.5 years, Alaska for a year-and-a-half. She does not much care for life in Alaska. "The winters are crazy," she explained. Before she and husband Dave, who wears the baseball cap in the group picture, moved here, they lived in Los Angeles. She liked it much better there. She loved getting out on the freeways to drive anywhere she wanted to go. Here, she is surrounded by big, huge country and there is no easy way to get into most of it.

She also remembers Africa with much warmth and fondness - all the little neighborhood shops and street vendors, the brightly-colored, beautiful clothing that the women sew and wear.

By comparison, everyday American clothing looks kind of drab. When she shows her mother pictures of her and others running around the US dressed in blue jeans and casual clothes, Mom is a little horrified to think that women would actually dress that way.

One thing about Jacob and Lavina's home - it has no shortage of stuffed Muzzys. Kathleen finds one and loves it.

Yesterday, did I not say that Kathleen is not only beautiful but cute, too?

And very bright, too.

She is a girl with roots in North America and Africa. I wonder where life will take her?

I know it seems unlikely, but I hope that in 20 years I am still around, still taking pictures, still writing stories and that I might come upon her somewhere. I would take her picture again, talk to her, find out how things are going, where she has been and where she hopes to go.

Kathleen - 20 years from now, if I still walk the earth, remember to give me a call. We must get together.

You met Kathleen's brother David yesterday. Well, here he is again.

What will he be doing in 20 years?

And this little beauty, Ashlyn, here in the arms of her mother, Tamara, what will she be up to?

Ashlyn also found a stuffed Muzzy to love.

Yesterday, I also posted a group shot from the shower, but there were a few individuals present, such as Caleb and Kalib, who were not in it, but they came running to get into this one.

I am not certain how it happened, but there was a beautiful young friend of Lavina's by the name of Toni in the lower left hand of the shot that ran yesterday, right there alongside Natalee and Jazmin, but she is out of the picture in this one. I tried to make certain everyone was in, but to take this picture, I stretch my arms upward and hold the camera as high above my head as I could reach and so I had a very poor view of the LCD screen.

You will note that of my immediate family, Rex is missing. He had gone to Seward to take some sailing lessons in a 45-foot boat with a pretty tall mast. One day, I hope to get pictures of him sailing such a boat.

Little Anna, Ian, Anna and Sharon are not in this picture, either. I thought this was because they had left.

They must have just gone down to the playroom to play, though, because soon they came back.

Rusty, husband of Natalee, father of Cooper. I mentioned that Cooper is mischievous. So is Rusty.

Sandy, with Andrew. The two plan to marry in September, in Hawaii. Even though I am not a wedding photographer, Sandy looked at the album that I made for Jacob and Lavina. She wants one like that. She wants me to come to Hawaii and photograph their wedding.

Again, let me reiterate... I am not a wedding photographer!

But Hawaii...?

A photographer must be flexible, right?

This post has gotten entirely too long, but, crimeny, you didn't expect me to leave Kalib out, did you?

A man drifts through Wasilla; Jobe, Kalib and Lavina come out; they take Margie back with them

This would be Margie's last day home before returning to Anchorage - this time for five days and nights - to babysit Jobe, so we took a short outing together in the afternoon.

On the edge of the bike trail that follows the Parks Highway through Wasilla, we saw a man, drifting by, sitting upon the ground.

Then he got up and moved on, leaving a puff of smoke behind him. A short time later, as we drove past Wasilla Lake, which on this day the ice had mostly disappeared from, we saw him again, his thumb out, hitching a ride north, towards Fairbanks, but who knows what his destination was?

It was a hard-looking scene and, had I been able to photograph it, it would have told the story far stronger than either of these two pictures. Unfortunately, I had put my pocket camera in my pocket and, given the traffic, it would have been far too dangerous to try to extract it, activate it, and point it at the man in the little time that I had between spotting and passing him.

Yet the image remains burned into my mind.

I wonder still - will that man drifting past, on the roadside, not a youth but an individual of mature years, hitchhiking to an uncertain destination, yet be me? It often times feels to me like that is where I am headed.

And if so, what will that mean for Margie?

I often times think that she is only reason that it hasn't happened yet. She is the reason why I can't let it happen.

Shortly after we arrived home, Lavina showed up with Kalib. He was feeling much better. I don't really know what was wrong with him but he was doing good now.

He was feeling good enough that he was not about to be tied down by a newspaper - not even the Anchorage Daily News...

...not when there was a whole house to roam about in.

It won't surprise regular readers to learn that his mom had brought Jobe along, too.

Margie and Lavina left to do some shopping and to get a hamburger and had given me instructions on what to do should Jobe wake up. He did wake up, but Caleb got to him before I did.

Caleb is the ultimate bachelor uncle.

Soon, Caleb was feeding Jobe - just as I had been instructed to do.

Caleb and Jobe.

Caleb can't wait for Jobe to get a little bigger, so that he can do the kinds of things with him that he does with Kalib - like play, golf, shoot rubber bands, and whatever.

He thinks Jobe is growing way too slowly, but he isn't.

He is growing way too swiftly.

Soon he will be a big rebellious teenager - not long after that, an old man who has lived his life.

I will be long gone then - hopefully, with my ashes set free to drift the planet, my molecules to help construct other organisms.

Maybe potato bugs and spiders.

I have never seen a potato bug in Alaska, but I remember them well from childhood. They were very fun bugs - the way they would curl up into a little round pellet.

It was like they were custom designed to please children.

They went into the bedroom where Kalib and his parents slept during the year-and-a-half that they lived with us. Kalib had a rubber wristband, which he pulled back, hoping to smack the ceiling with it. "Shoot it up to the stars!" Caleb encouraged him.

Not so long ago, those stars glowed through the winter nights, directly over Kalib in his crib.

Kalib removed Caleb's cap, and put it on his own head.

Then Caleb was in the living room, Kalib in the front room, ready to throw some cardboard package cushioning at his uncle.

Both of them loved this game. Kalib laughed outrageously after each toss - and there were many tosses.

Royce and Jobe. I still wish Royce would get the chance to raise Jobe the way he raised Kalib, but that is not going to happen. He is doing better on his medication and improved diet, but as life goes he is still on the declining slope.

Hell. So am I.

One thing I need to make clear - in some reader's minds, it was Royce who scratched Kalib when he was a crawler, but this is not correct. Royce would never have done such a thing. The patience and tolerance that this cat always granted Kalib, no matter how rough Kalib got with him, was amazing to behold.

It was Martigny that scratched Kalib. She did not do it out of meanness. She did it because she paniced when he got too rambunctious with her.

Margie with Jobe, shortly before they left to go back to Anchorage.

I hated to see them go, because now I am alone again for the next five days, except for the occassional glimpse of Caleb.

But it is far more important that Jobe is cared for by someone who truly loves him than it is that I have the company of my wife.

They back out the driveway, then drive away.

A free cup of coffee; 65 degrees, four-wheelers, the Little Su, black cat outside, a golf course far away

Just as All Things Considered began on the radio, I pulled up to the window at Metro Cafe yesterday afternoon only to discover that someone had bought me a cup of coffee and a cranberry muffin. She did not leave her name, but remained anonymous. And the day before, I found a gift card waiting for me from Funny Face.

My goodness!

Thank you all!

As Sashana prepared to hand me the cup, she and Carmen posed for:

Through the Window Metro Study, #3.3333333... and so on to infinity

As I drove away, sipping, I saw these two - father and son, perhaps; uncle and nephew, maybe; perhaps just friend and friend, out enjoying the 65 degree weather on a four-wheeler.

Yes. You read me correctly.

SIXTY-FIVE DEGREES!

I thought for a moment that I had moved to The Bahamas.

But it was still Wasilla. I could tell by the four-wheeler dust. Can you believe it? Just a few days ago, the ground surface varied between frozen solid and muck, and now a kid on a four-wheeler can have a blast, kicking up dust.

As I crossed the bridge over the Little Susistna, I saw this man and this young girl walking along the bank.

It turned out that he is Mike and the young girl is his 26-month old daughter, Dagne. They live five miles from the river and this is the first time that they have visited it since before the snow came down in October.

Jimmy also ventured outside for the first time. He kept pawing at the window until finally I relented, but only under the condition that he would remain always in my eyesight.

Chicago observed, but did not follow. In the ten or 11 or 12 years that she has been with us, Chicago has ventured outside exactly once. As I have mentioned before and will someday tell in detail, here or in a book or both, it took us seven weeks and two days to get her back and then she was damn near dead - nothing but a dehydrated bag of bones.

She is fat now.

As eager as he had been to go out, once he got out, Jimmy was spooked. Something out there was frightening him. He refused to leave the porch.

As for Royce, there in the background, I would have been happy to let him out but he never wanted to venture past the window - which is odd for Royce.

I am happy to report that, at long last, he is gaining some weight. Yet, he is still skinny. He eats a ton of food - more than the other three combined, I would say, and it just seems to go right through him.

But he is gaining some weight, so he must be retaining some of it.

It was Caleb that had spooked Jimmy so. Caleb had knocked some balls way back into the trees, at the bottom of the little hill and had gone down to search for them.

Jimmy could not see him, but he could hear him. He did not know what he was.

A bear, maybe.

If Jimmy even know about bears.

I doubt that he does. How would he?

He probably imagined that Caleb was something even bigger and more frightening than the biggest, baddest, bear out there.

From behind my office window, Pistol-Yero calmly observed it all.

This is Caleb this morning. Where do you think he is and what is he looking at?

He is at IHOP. Caleb had to drop his car off at the shop at 8:00 AM. He asked me to pick him up and then he took me to breakfast, his treat. Caleb loves IHOP pancakes, so that's where we went.

Well, he's still looking. At what?

Passing cars, is all I can think of.

Or maybe golf courses, far away, like Pebble Beach, Tucson, or Scottsman's Head.

The Vietnam veteran and the returned Mormon missionary; the bicycle and the wrecked airplane

Doubtless, regular readers are wondering what a man in my financial situation is doing dining out at Mat-Su Valley Restaurant for breakfast? Four nights have now passed since Margie went into Anchorage to stay and take care of baby Jobe and one more will pass until she returns to spend just two nights here before she goes back again.

As much as I love this house and the cats who wake with me, it feels awfully chilly and damn bleak in here in the mornings. Whereas, it will be warm at Family Restaurant. There will be smiling people there, waitresses who will serve me coffee and laugh even if I make an unfunny joke.

This is Jobina, doing just that.

I like the name, "Jobina." It's like a feminine version of Jobe. 

If I can, I always like to get this spot, because from here I have a good view not only of all the people sitting and moving around inside this busy, warm diner, scented with the aroma of breakfast cooking, but of those wandering to and fro outside.

My observations tell me that a very broad array of Wasilla life passes in and out of this diner, particularly at breakfast time.

Also, if I am very lucky and the train comes bye, I can often get a pretty good look at it from this window seat.

So I would rather be here in the midst of all this than all alone inside my chilly house. The melting snows did expose a fair amount of firewood that had been hidden in our yard, so I can always heat the house up, but, by the time it gets comfortable, I will be done with breakfast. 

And even if I have no cash, I do have a credit card. So its off to Family I go.

Plus, to eat here is a sign of optimism, that things will soon get better and I will be able to pay all my bills.

I took this picture for future reference and it had not been my intent to post it just yet. Many veterans come into Mat-Su Family, and I have a desire to know their stories to the extent that they would be willing to share - just as I would like to know the stories of so many who I see gathering at Family. 

I have this idea in my head that as time progresses and I figure out how to fund this blog so that I can have the time to more effectively pursue my goal of finding the soul of Wasilla and to tell such stories, I will do just that. Seeing the hat, I thought this veteran might have a good story to tell, so I took the picture to remind me to look for him in the future, when that time comes.

As it happened, we wound up in line together at the cash register, so I asked if he had been a POW. No, he said, he had friends that had been and the experience had been hell for them. However bad combat might get, he said he had always kept a bullet in reserve for himself, just to make certain that he would never become a POW.

He served in Vietnam in the very early '70s, in what he described as the clean-up stages of the war, as the US was deciding to quit and pull out.

When I talk to such men, I am always self-conscious of the fact that they risked their lives in Vietnam and I did not. It had been my intent to go. When I was a senior at El Camino High School in a suburb of Sacramento, I decided that I would break with what had become the tradition in my family and what all of us males were expected to do. I would not go to Brigham Young University and I would not serve a two-year Mormon mission. I would enlist in the Army, and go for the Green Beret.

But I was in love with a red-headed girl who did decide to go to BYU. I knew that if I did not follow her there to protect my interests, she would marry a returned Mormon Missionary, as any good Mormon girl would.

So, at the last possible moment, I surrendered my plan to enlist, applied to BYU and was accepted. I followed the red-headed girl there and lived in misery as a returned Mormon missionary courted her. We would still get together to share an occasional lunch or movie or a concert and I took her motorcycle riding a couple of times. The the RM who courted her ordered her not to ride with me anymore, as it was just too damn dangerous.

I might crash and break her neck.

She did marry him, but by then I was in love with her best friend and was not troubled.

Vietnam was a very unpopular war and many people felt that the draft was being most unfairly applied. If you were wealthy, a college student, a Mormon missionary or fell into a number of other categories, you could get a deferment and most likely never be drafted to serve.

But if you did not fall into such a category and you were in good health, then you could pretty much count on being drafted.

This unfairness created such an uproar that a lottery system was instated in which each date of the year was drawn at random. If one's birthday came up number one, then, in theory, whether he was rich, a genious in college, a Mormon missionary or whatever, he was going to be drafted.

If one's birthday came up at #365, there was no chance in the world that he would be drafted.

My number came up 321. After that, the draft was not an issue for me anymore.

In the meantime, I found myself the object of a horrendous amount of social pressure, filled with exhortations that I repent, make my life right with God, yield to The Spirit, accept the call and go serve a mission. Worse yet, I looked into the eyes of my sweet mother and saw that if I did not go, I was going to break her heart. And there was no chance that the best friend would ever marry me if I didn't.

So I told everyone that The Spirit had come to me and so I had repented and was ready to go on a mission. No more weed for me. I had toked my last joint, taken my final hit off the hookah.

That's how I wound up not going to Vietnam. Instead I went to South Dakota, to teach the Lakota that they must never drink coffee. It was my mission to remake them, but they remade me. After two years, I returned to BYU - but found that I could not really return. 

As to this gentleman, he remarked that Vietnam was an unpopular war and that when he returned, he found out what it felt like to feel the wrath of the people for whom he had served. He said that people sometimes ask him why served, did he believe in the war?

It was not a matter of whether or not he believed in the war, he told me, but rather that the fact that he had a duty to serve his country and so he did.

This is what passed between us as we paid our bills at Family Restaurant. It was a very brief visit, and I thought that I would wait until another time and then have him tell me more of his story. I would take a portrait to go along with the interview, and would then include this picture as well.

But what if that time never comes? What if I do not see him again at Family?

What if I forget I ever took this picture and it just slips away unseen into my archives, as do the vast majority of the pictures that I take, never to be seen by anyone?

So here it is, with this tiny fragment of the man's story along with one from my own.

I got lucky! The train came rumbling by!

Yes, many veterans come to eat at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

When I came out, I saw this dog in the back of a truck. When I see such a dog, I find the urge to reach out and touch it to be...

...irresistible!

Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #8881: Carmen and Tyler, who is ten and loves to play football - and me, too.

After I completed the study, Carmen caught the unmistakable scent of cologne wafting off Tyler. She teased him a little bit for that, as she now knew that he had interests even beyond football.

After driving away from Metro Cafe, I saw a man riding a motorcycle.

And another sweeping the place where his driveway meets Church Road.

Some days I see Caleb and some days I don't. As he works all night and sleeps in the day, our waking paths seldom cross.

They crossed here, though - with me going one direction down our street and he the other. They also crossed when he stepped into my office to pay me a surprise visit.

"Dad," he said. "I patched your back tire. Your front tire was low, so I put air in that, too."

So I took my first bike ride of 2010. I am badly out of shape now and did not know far I should go. I decided to pedal the 1.5 miles to Church Road and see how I felt when I got there. If I felt good, I would turn right, go to the Little Susistna River and put my front wheel in the water.

If it felt like that might be overdoing it, that the return trip, largely uphill, would overstress my flaccid muscles and tear apart my weak lungs, then I would turn left and follow a shorter, flatter, more easy route.

The final approach to Church Road is all uphill, and I was a bit upset when I realized how it was taxing me. I deemed myself unfit to make the return from the Little Su and so concluded that I must turn left.

I turned right, anyway, and headed for the Little Su.

I did not put my front wheel in the water, though, because I felt that if I did, the under-cut ice might break beneath me and I would get my shoes, socks and pants wet. I wanted to keep them dry.

After I left the Little Su and neared the curve that leads to the biggest and steepest hill, I saw this guy ahead of me, cutting down the vegetation alongside the road before it can begin to grow.

No more snow plows for awhile.

After I topped the first big hill, I pedaled along on a flat stretch toward the corner where I would turn back onto Church Road and then face the next set of up and down hills. At some point, I glanced behind me and saw another biker, who had just topped that hill. I pedaled a little further and then looked back again. It seemed he was gaining on me.

I did not want him to pass me, but I realized that he was almost certainly younger and stronger and in better shape, that he was going to pass me whether I wanted him to or not.

I reached Church Road, turned right, climbed up the first big hill, then began my descent towards the next upward grade.

As I coasted down, I glanced back and there he was - closer yet, I was certain.

Damn. He was going to pass me.

Oh well. I would take a picture of him as he pedaled by me.

I decided that I would take a series of pictures of him closing the gap, passing me, and then moving on. I began with this one.

I then climbed the next hill and then again coasted toward the bottom of the third. Again I looked back. I was surprised to see that my competitor was now further back than he had been.

I figured maybe it was because I was going downhill now and he had been going up. Now he would be going downhill and I would soon be going up. I was certain he would yet close the gap and pass.

But no, he never did - even though he turned left on Seldon just like I did and followed me all the way to my street. In fact, each time I looked back I found him to be a little further behind. It became pointless to take any more pictures, for he had become such a small dot, readers could not have even picked him out.

That's what he gets for deciding that he, being so young and strong was going to humiliate a much older man who hadn't pedaled a bike since early October.

Of course, he never came close enough for me to actually confirm age or sex for certain.

I supposed it is possible that he was actually an 87 year-old woman who was pretty damn pleased that, though she never caught him, she kept that young guy worried every pedal of the way that an old lady was going to smoke him.

Or maybe it could even have been Patty, out keeping her cancer at bay.

When I got home, I parked my bike by the wreckage of my airplane, The Running Dog. I thought about the good days, when this dog and I flew together all over the main body of Alaska, up and down the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, through the valleys of the Alaska and Brooks Ranges, across Canada's Yukon Territory and into The Northwest Territories.

Why did I ever have to get cocky and crash the damn thing?

I can't stand it, being grounded like this. As I have said before, I dream about airplanes - usually this one, every night.

I have a friend in Cordova who says that if I really wanted another plane, I would have one by now. He cites himself as an example, pointing out how he wanted a big crab boat once, didn't have the money for it but got one anyway.

I'm glad for him, but he's 100 percent wrong about me. He is a bachelor and lives in a house that he inherited from his father and he simply has no idea what I face.

But he's right, too. To accomplish what I want to accomplish, I must get another airplane. Somehow, there is a way.

On this day, when I have no money to pay the simplest bill, when I owe the IRS, when I go to Family Restaurant only because I have a credit card and then I bring the leftovers and derive a second meal from them later and to Metro for coffee only because Margie has given me access to the bottles full or quarters that she has saved up over years, it seems utterly impossible.

But it's not impossible. It can be done. I must yet find the way.

A Pay Pal donation button to help with this blog isn't going to do it, but still, you who have urged me to put on on here have convinced me that I am not begging if I do, so I will.

Soon.

Margie goes off with Jobe and leaves me alone; I see a dark cloud over my valley, my nation

Lisa came out Sunday morning and took her mom and dad out to breakfast at Family Restaurant. Sadly, when I pulled out my pocket camera to photograph the occassion, I discovered that I had forgot to put the card back in - just like I had done when I had breakfast with Aaron Fox in New York.

Just like then, I did take a few pictures with my iPhone, but have not yet bothered to download them.

In the afternoon, Kalib and Jobe showed up with their parents. Lisa tried to entice Kalib to give her a hug, but he wasn't going for it.

I tried to get him to give me a hug, too. He didn't want to.

I don't feel too badly about it. I remember when I was small and I never wanted my grandmothers to hug me and it seemed just smothering and awful when they would do so anyway and then try to add a kiss on top of hug.

My one grandfather who still lived never did try to hug me. At that time, in the family and society that I was born into, males just didn't hug each other, period. We would shake hands.

I'm glad that nonsensical code is behind me now.

How awful it would be, never to hug my grandson - if only he would hug me.

How nice it would be to get the opportunity to hug my grandmothers, and kiss them on the cheek - my grandfathers, too - both the one who I marginally knew and the other, who descended into the earth before I had the chance.

The reason they had come out was to snatch Margie away from me and take her back to Anchorage is because Lavina had to go back to work today and someone needs to care for Jobe. That someone is going to be Margie.

From now until sometime in August, when a spot is scheduled to open up for Jobe at daycare, Margie will spend four days of the week in town, caring for him in the day and staying overnight in his family home.

I do not like the fact that she will be gone so much and I will be without her, but for little Jobe, it is worth the sacrifice. He is too little to be going to daycare, anyway. When he is with his grandma, I know he will be loved and cared for to the full measure of her devotion.

This will not be easy on Lavina, either, for she is a woman who loves being a mother.

They had to load up a mattress for Margie into their Tahoe and as they did, Kalib went into the back yard to golf with Caleb. See how he keeps his eye on the ball and how hard he concentrates as he draws back the club to make the swing?

His aim was right on.

Golf never interested me much, but this kid is a natural, I tell you!

Uncle Caleb then prepared to give nephew Kalib a demonstration of what can be done with a different kind of ball - a softball that had just emerged from the snow.

Uncle Caleb tossed that ball and the three of us watched as it climbed high into the sky. I kept waiting for gravity to take hold and draw that ball back to the earth, but it just kept rising, higher and higher, until it was just the tiniest dot. Then it disappeared altogether. It looked as though it had gone into orbit.

Soon, it was time for Margie to go back to Anchorage with them - but after they put the mattress in the Tahoe, there was no room for her.

So I drove Margie to town. Kalib rode with us.

Jacob, Lavina and Jobe reached home well ahead of us. When we finally got there, Jacob came out to get Kalib, unbuckled him and removed him from his car seat. He began to carry him back to the house but then stopped, looked up into the sky and stammered, "what the...????"

It was the softball that Caleb had launched! Maybe three hours before! Finally coming back to earth! In Anchorage! I wonder how many orbits that softball made? Why didn't it burn up on reentry?

I tried to take a picture, but the swoosh of wind from that softball as it plunged downward to bury itself deep in the frozen earth beneath the snow ripped my pocket camera right out of my hands. Fortunately, it suffered no major damage.

This is the bed they fixed up for Margie to stay in, four nights a week for the next four months. Lavina made certain that it included a stuffed Muzz, just for Margie.

I left Margie among family a bit after 9:00 PM to begin my drive alone back to Wasilla. According to the metadata, I took this photo at exactly 9:40:50 PM and it looks exactly as I feel, for inside me wages that ever present battle of light against darkness, of black clouds and night moving against the sun - even during this time when the length of the day steadily increases.

I feel this way for many reasons - some economic, the fact that I am in this house alone with the cats (always good company, by the way) but also because I attended the Wasilla Tax Day Tea Party rally. That rally was largely about getting out the vote to turn around a situation that many participants see as intolerable. They lost out in the last election and now they want to get out the vote and reverse that situation.

That is the way the American system is supposed to work; when it comes to choosing our leadership and the political course of our nation, we leave our guns at home and go to the ballot box. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. When we lose, we gear back up and work toward the next election. And so it goes, back and forth over time. One side rises after the vote, then falls, then rises again, then falls again... and there is impeachment, should enough people and their Senators be persuaded that they had erred in the last election and that the situation has become too urgent to wait for the next election.

Voting. An act of light - one that keeps people from killing each other over political differences.

But there were also clouds darkening at that rally, not-so-subtle insinuations made by people who proclaimed themselves to be patriots, loyal Americans eager to defend the Constitution of the United States even to the point that if they must, they stood ready to nullify by violence the majority of votes, constitutionally cast in 2008 by other loyal Americans, in order to force an outcome more to their liking.

I do not attribute this attitude to all who participated, but the sentiment was there and prominently so.

It is the words of one man that keep coming back to me the strongest. When he was called to the mic, he did not rant, he did not scream, he did not yell. He was articulate and spoke softly, clearly, in words that he chose carefully. He referenced his military service and that of the sons that he had sent to war.

He said many things that I agree with and, in fact, that most Americans, be they Republican, Democrat, or Independent would agree with. I would say 95 percent of his words were along this line. While the comparison would undoubtedly offend the man, in Garrison Keillor's own unique style I have heard him say the same things this man did.

Yet, he spoke with a different end in mind. He made it unequivocally clear that as a Patriot and soldier, he had taken an ever-binding oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic and stood ready to kill or be killed in order to do so.  He said that domestic enemies now held the highest offices of the United States, that Barack Obama was not a legitimate President and was not his Commander-in-Chief. In other words, he stated his readiness to kill me and how many other loyal, patriotic, Americans from Wasilla, Alaska and elsewhere, in order to nulliy those votes that we Constitutionally cast in November of 2008, because he does not approve of the President we elected and installed as Commander-in-Chief. To be fair, he was still definitely a part of the "get out the vote" in 2010 effort, but he clearly implied what he felt needed to be done beyond the vote, should that effort fail to accomplish his larger goal.

There is no way around it. That is what he said. I can see no other way to interpret his words. And he was applauded. 

Perhaps I make too much of it and it is nothing to be concerned about - just words spoken by a calm, angry, man exercising his First Amendment rights; words that will be blown away and forgotten in the winds of history.

Yet, he spoke as a movement leader to a small town audience of maybe 400 people, with more recycling in and out, their overall numbers growing. Others continually drove by, too busy to stop, but not to honk their horns in support. Over 1000 hot dogs were sold.

A lack of time has prevented me from posting the pictures that I took at the Tea Party rally and time is passing by and the timeliness of the event is fading. An argument wages inside me, should I still take the time to post those pictures and do my write up or should I just move on and let this do it?

I want to make that post, and I don't want to make that post.

I want to just move on, forget about it and just live a peaceful life and let others do the same, whatever their political leanings. We can work it out at the ballot box - but I'm not sure I can just forget about it. Perhaps we now all plunge forward in a direction from which no u-turn can be made.

Perhaps not. I don't know. It's too easy to get carried away by hyperbole.