Even on this birthday, Melanie remains trustworthy; cats are not wierd, they are normal

Those of us who were free gathered together to celebrate Melanie's birthday. I will not tell you what birthday it was, but I will note that when I was a young adult, we feared this birthday above all others. The belief among young people was that no matter how good a person was before they hit this birthday, once they reached it, the ways of the world would overtake them and they could not be trusted after that.

Hell.

Melanie can still be trusted.

Now I will move write along, writing very little, because I have already spent quite a bit of time editing, preparing and placing pictures and I do not have time to write much. So I won't. Because if I write words that I do not need to write, it will just eat up my time, so why should I write such words that waste time when I do not need to write them?

So I won't write much.

Just a little bit.

Not much at all.

Because it would waste time.

And I do not have time to waste.

So I will write very little today.

I will just show you the pictures.

And not worry about writing many words.

That would be a waste of time when all that you need to know is in the pictures.

Well, maybe are other things that should know, too - like how to do math, for example.

Math is a good skill for anyone to have.

Here is Lavina, making frybread.

Once must have some comprehension of math to make frybread.

Otherwise, one might make 100 frybreads, when one dozen would do.

Or use 6 teaspoons of salt when one would be just right.

Kalib entered carrying his spatula, but then laid it down. I picked it up. He did not quite know what to think about that.

Melanie prepares her Navajo/Apache taco.

The tacos were damn good.

The day before, Rex had submitted his entry for a grant to help him with a sculpture that he hopes to create and then display at Burning Man in Nevada this summer. Unfortunately, due to some computer shenanigans, much of his proposal did not get submitted. Only a piece of it.

Anyway, this is model of only a piece of what he hopes to create. In the real thing, this salmon skeleton will be five foot long and there will also be a whole salmon, concrete, five feet long and a number of other elements as well.

His sculpture will cover some significant space.

I hope he gets the damn grant. 

Melanie was presented with two birthday cakes, not one. I am not sure why. I did not ask. I know Charlie made one of the cakes. I'm not sure who made the other.

Lisa made the frosting.

We ate the cakes with vanilla ice cream and they were damn good.

Afterward, she opened gifts.

All of the gifts were damned good.

Charlie gave her a damned good book titled "Cats Are Wierd." Not withstanding the fact that it is a damned good book, I take exception to the title.

Cats are not weird. As you can see, Diamond is as normal as normal can be.

Bear Meach is not weird.

Melanie observes Bear Meach being normal as Rex and Margie wash dishes.

Kalib studies Poof. "This cat is not weird," he would have proclaimed, had the proper words come to him to thus proclaim.

Perhaps it is little boys, not cats, who are weird.

Jobe goes for Poof, who is not weird.

The Three Musketeers showed up: Carl, Charlie and Bryce. They did not bring their swords. I was disappointed. I wanted to borrow a sword to cut the cake.

As the party drew towards its wild conclusion, Kalib crawled up to see his mom.

Two of my children, paired off. Lisa came late to the party, because she is carrying such a heavy load between being a full time student and full time job, and taking on extra tasks to help pay for it all.

She must deal with stress.

And then, as always happens, the time came to say goodbye, see you later.

Always this time comes. 

What a fine thing it has been these past 30 years to have Melanie as my daughter.

An absolutely fine thing.

Oh, dear! I was not going to say, "30 years," but I did.

Even so, I trust her.

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Clyde flies twice and I sleep long

You know all those mornings when I wake up shortly after I go to sleep, after getting just three or four hours of interrupted sleep? Those mornings when maybe I head off to breakfast alone in the solitude of early morning Family Restaurant?

This morning it happened just the opposite. I slept and slept and slept. I did wake up a few times, very briefly. I would look at the clock and then go right back to sleep. When I took my final glance at the clock, it read 10:03 AM. I still felt very sleepy, like I wanted to sleep and sleep some more, but, it was after 10:00. It was time to get up.

So, I closed my eyes for just a few seconds, resolved and fortified my mind, then got up, did what needed to be done and headed out to the kitchen to get my oatmeal.

When I stepped into the kitchen, I noticed that the clock read 11:45 AM!

Over one-hour and forty minutes had passed in the few seconds between the time I looked at the clock at 10:03 AM to the moment I forced myself out of bed!

My point is, I used up all my blogging time for today in sleep. So, instead, I am just going to quickly present these two images that I took in the fall of 1992 showing our late, great, Clyde. Little Clyde Texaco.

Clyde was a bad cat. He was the baddest of all the cats that ever graced this household. The baddest.

Oh, but he was a good cat!

And he was an aviator. He knew how to fly. Here are two of his flights.

I will do "Contemplating the future of this blog, part 3" Monday.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I have a funeral to go to at noon and I have a good many non-blog things that I want to do today, so it is a cinch that I will not have time to post part 3 tomorrow - but I will put something up - something short, quick, and simple, like I just did today.

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Contemplating the future of this blog, part 1

On a painful day in the recent past, I wrote of how I once heard a teenage girl speak a name and immediately fell in love with the woman named, a woman who I had never yet met but who would become my wife and the mother of my children.

The girl who spoke Margie's name was Martyna White Hawk, Lakota of Manderson, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

One week ago, I received a Facebook message from Martyna in which she told me that on January 25, she was going to hold a memorial walk for the three children of hers who had been killed one year before in a terrible traffic accident. MADD - Mothers Against Drunk Driving - was going to walk with her and she hoped that the Lakota Times might come and cover the event.

As soon as I learned this, I just wanted to drop everything and go. I wanted to be there.

Yet, the total sum of my business and home checking accounts, plus the one cent still left in my savings account, did not add up to the required airfare from Anchorage to Rapid City, or the rental car that I would need from there.

I checked my frequent flier miles and came up 10,000 miles short.

I sent an email to an important person in the photographic world who works at a national blog that has plans to soon feature some of my work to see if by any almost impossible chance he might be able to help me get there.

He responded that he was moved by the story but did not have any resources available to help me do it.

So I had no choice but to resign myself to the fact that I could not go and to hope only that the Lakota Times would show up and they would do a good story and that I could read about it there and post a link here.

The night before the walk was scheduled to take place, Margie had gone to town to babysit Kalib and Jobe and so I had stayed up almost all night, pittering away at my computer. When she is gone, it is very difficult for me to make myself stop what I am doing and go to bed. Even so, as has so often been the case these past couple of months, once I did go to bed, I was only able to sleep briefly before I awoke, exhausted, yet unable to sleep further.

So I got up, thinking maybe I would walk to Family Restaurant - but that would be close to an eight-mile walk, roundtrip, and while I could use an eight-mile walk, I didn't have time for it.

Just as I was about to cook oatmeal, Caleb pulled into the driveway, home from his all-night shift at Wal-Mart. "You can take my truck," he said.

So I did. And here I am - at Family Restaurant, once again, eating breakfast and photographing reflections in the window.

The day must come - IT MUST COME - when this blog and its evolution gains enough resource that if I suddenly find I have the need to drop everything, hop on a jet and go to South Dakota, I can go. 

In one month, Sujitha and Manoj will experience a formal Hindu wedding in Bangalore. Those who have been with me since the day that I mentioned how Martyna spoke Margie's name know why it would be important for me to be there.

Last winter, my dear and best friend down in Arizona, Vincent Craig, lay in a hospital bed, battling cancer, and I wanted to drop everything and go see him, but I couldn't, until late May, and then I got there and stepped into his hospital room just hours before he died.

While I was glad that I made it, I should have been there in time to sit down with him, talk with him, joke with him, laugh with him, cry with him, but I didn't make it and I will regret that for the remainder of my days.

And then all that happened in India in November - I want to say that I should have been able to hop on a jet at the first notification to scoot right down and then maybe that could have changed at least the final, tragic, outcome but, you know what?

After someone dies in India, things happen so fast that even if I had left on the next scheduled flight, it would have all been over by the time the plane touched down in Bangalore.

Yet, still I should have been able to jump on that plane and if I had possessed the resource, I surely would have and maybe... maybe... I can't be sure... but maybe just the knowledge that someone was coming from Alaska could have forestalled and then prevented the outcome which has now become destiny - but it did not need to be destiny.

Destiny only becomes firm once it has happened and then it seems as if it was always going to be destiny and that it was just beyond anyone's ability to change it. But before any one destiny becomes set and firm, other destinies abound in endless possibility and this could have come to a different destiny.

Anyway, I am rambling, going off track. I did not mean to go here. I only meant to state that this blog must find a measure of self-sustaining independence so that when the need arises, I can get up and go to wherever it is that I need to go at the time.

Or, if I just need to stay home for awhile, I can stay home. I can't always do that, either, you know. Sometimes, I want to stay home, but I must go.

The kids in this bus, btw, might have wanted to stay home on this, the morning of Martyna's memorial walk, but they had to get up, get dressed and go.

Not a single one of them were thinking of Martyna, or of her children, but I was.

I fear that I have rambled too much, and have missed the opportunity to delve into today's headline, "contemplating the future of this blog."

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about different options that I might pursue to find the means to fund this blog and to build it in to what I want it to be, but I think it is time for me to stop just thinking about it, to write it down, and start coming up with a plan to achieve it.

It can be done - I am certain of it - but not if I just keep going as I am going.

So, I was going to begin that effort, right here, today. I was going to write down some of what I hope to do and to contemplate the possibilities of getting me there. While I do not expect any readers out there to have the answer for me, if any had any input or ideas after reading what I thought would write about today, then I would have been very glad to read those ideas.

But I have used up all my blogging time and then some, and have already written more words than most readers are likely to read.

This is a cat, by the way - a black cat that has just crossed the road in front of me. So maybe some good fortune will come my way.

One thing that bothers me about this blog is how small the horizontal pictures appear.

So small that the cat barely appears at all.

This is the same frame, cropped. Now you can see the cat better, but I prefer the full-frame, horizontal image. It just does not work so well on this blog. It works a little better in slide show view.

Anyway, since I blew it today, I will change the title of this post to "Contemplating the future of this blog, part 1." I will continue this discussion tomorrow in "part 2".

I have run out of time to even jump into my India folder to randomly grab an image. Even so, I have been posting the India images to accomplish a specific purpose, and in this post that purpose has already been accomplished.

This image, by the way, is from the drop-in to Metro Cafe that I made with Margie the other day.

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I take a blurry iPhone photo of Melanie and Charlie and see the impression of Mom; Little Miss Vaidehi: Eight studies

In midafternoon, I received a call from Charlie's cell phone, but after I answered, "Hello Charlie," I got this response:

"It's me, Melanie."

And indeed, it was. The two were just driving out of Anchorage with Charlie at the wheel, headed for Vagabond Blues in Palmer. Melanie asked if Margie and I wanted to come to Palmer and join them for coffee.

I said, "sure," but I could not get Margie to leave the house so I would have to go by myself.

I took a shower first, and then suddenly discovered that I was going to leave later than I intended.

I rushed out of the house and when I got to Vagabond, was shocked to discover that I had forgotten my camera.

This left me with only my iPhone, the lens of which is hopelessly smudged.

That was okay. I would go for the impressionistic effect.

Boy. When I look at Melanie in this blurred picture, the impression that I get is of my mom. Physically speaking, Mom really seeped through me into Melanie.

But Mom would have never joined any of us for coffee. The thought that we were even drinking coffee would have broken her heart.

As it happened, in the end, although she never saw me take a sip of coffee, her dedicated Mormon heart was thoroughly broken anyway and that broken heart took both her life and Dad's thereafter.

Afterward, Melanie rode with me back to Wasilla and Charlie joined us here. We ate Spam chunks for dinner, mixed with rice and veggies. It was pretty good.

Then Jim and Charlie hung out for awhile.

Chennai, India: Eight studies of Little Miss Vaidehi

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 1: With my lens cap

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 2: With her mom, Vidya

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 3: With her keyboard

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 4: She reaches for the ball

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 5: From the arms of her father, Vijay, she marvels at the girl in the mirror

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 6: With her Auntie Mel from Alaska

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 7: With her grandmother, Vasanthi

Little Miss Vaidehi, Study # 1: With her dad, Vijay

To anyone who would like to see a more contemporary version of Vaidehi on YouTube, as recorded by Vijay, here you can find her laughing or singing.

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Rex, Ama, Chicago and the burning man; Yes, we have bananas, we have lots of bananas today

We had not seen Rex and Ama since Christmas. Late yesterday afternoon, they dropped in for a visit. Chicago could not believe her happy eyes. She stepped onto Rex's lap and looked him in the eye. "Where the hell you been, bro?" she asked.

"I've been to Tennessee, cat," Rex answered. This was a lie. Rex had not been to Tennessee. He hadn't even been to Texas. 

Margie and Ama cooked up a stir-fry vegetarian meal in the wok that Jacob and Lavina gave Margie for her birthday last September. I went out to take a look.

"What would you add, Bill?" Margie asked.

I took a whiff of the scent and it suddenly seemed that orange would be just the thing.

"An orange," I said.

But we were out of oranges.

"I've got one in my pack," Rex said.

So he got it. It was a very red "blood" orange.

Margie put it into the stir fry.

The zing of the orange proved to be quite tasty in there.

Then I went and sat back on the living room couch. Chicago left Rex and came back to me. 

Late each August in northern Nevada, a very strange community of about 50,000 people comes together on a hot stretch of absolutely barren, alkaline, desert - a place where not even cactus, snakes, or spiders live. They call it "Burning Man" in honor of the huge, log, effigy of a man that is put up there every year and then burned to the ground at the end.

Except for water, coffee and tea, no concessions are allowed. Community members must bring in all their own food and supplies - and for many, that includes their own alcohol and drugs. People pedal about on the bare earth on bicycles and ride about in tiny vehicles that look like cupcakes. A hot wind blows, and dries out and dehydrates everything in sight. There is a big car that looks like a cat.

All kinds of sculptures go up. When it is over, everything must be removed so that all that is left behind is desert, looking like it did before the event.

Ama has been going to Burning Man year for years and last summer introduced Rex to it.

Now he is applying to Burning Man for a grant that would fund what he needs to build his own, large, sprawling, sculpture there, one that includes a life-size concrete replica of the largest salmon ever caught - nearly six feet in length.

I hope he gets the grant.

And now I want to go to Burning Man, too.

See what is says at the top of this blog?

One photographer's search for community, home and family...?

I think this very strange event would qualify.

And Margie, who usually shies away from adventure these days, says she would like to go, too.

I kind of doubt that we will be able to pull it off - but watch this space and find out. If not this year, then maybe next.

All I've got to do is get this blog and electronic magazine up, running and cooking along the way I want, generating income, funding itself, funding my work, being my work and then, if I want to run off to someplace strange like Burning Man just to take some pictures and blog about it, well, by hell, I can do it!

Rex and Ama are both doing Burning Man things in this picture, BTW. He is refining his ideas and she is pulling up Burning Man pictures to show Margie and I. 

From India: Vijay feeds us bananas

Here we are, in the Chennai fruit store where Vijay has brought us so that he can buy bananas and feed us - as I have noted before.

Look at all that fruit! There is probably more fruit in this one store than in all of Alaska!

Well, maybe not than "all of Alaska," but there is a lot of fruit.

Many varieties of bananas were available and Vijay wanted to give us as wide an experience as possible. He picked his bananas very carefully.

The fruit store includes a little juice bar, where you can buy fruit drinks of many types, so Vijay bought fruit drinks for Melanie and I.

And now I must say that I am very surprised and a little disappointed in myself. In my mind, I remember taking many pictures, like of Melanie getting served, the juice baristo handing my drink to me, of Vijay and such, little kids passing by on motorcycles and observing us as we drank. I intended to include a few of these in this post - but this is the only image from the fruit store juice bar that I have!

How could this be?

I am wondering if I was using two cameras and somehow forgot to download the images from one camera, because it just doesn't make any sense that I would photograph just this static scene and then quit shooting.

I also wonder if they really had Washington apples there. India grows many apples in the north and they are very good. And all of the fruit at this store, apples included, were very cheap in price compared to what the same items would cost here - just pennies on the dollar or maybe in some cases a nickel or dime.

I don't think Washington State apples would be all that cheap after having been shipped all the way to India.

I wish that I could remember the names of all these banana varieties, but I can't. In the upper right hand corner is the banana most like the ones we usually find in the store here. Those little tiny ones - they were my favorite! So sweet and tender and good and after you eat them for awhile and then come back to the states the bananas here taste kind of bland. 

The green bananas are supposed to be green. They are ripe when they are green like this.

Anyway, we ate them all. Every banana. Afterward, both Melanie and I were stuffed, but Vijay wanted to feed us more food.

I toast Vijay with a banana. The situation here is the same as the juice bar. I could swear that I took many more pictures, including ones of Melanie and Vijay eating bananas, but what you see here is all the banana photos that I have.

And that just isn't like me.

It's okay, though. Just the other week, Vijay told me that when next I, and anyone who might travel with me, come back, he is going to treat me to another banana feast, with even more varieties. Remembering how I came up short here, I will be certain to take more pictures and to tell the story right.

So just consider this to be a preview.

And this is little miss Vaidehi, daughter of Vijay and wife Vidya. In the background is Vasanthi, Vivek and Vijay's mom, who brought Melanie and I to Chennai by bus. She paid for our tickets, our lodging and all of our food except for what Vijay bought us. She would not let us pay for anything.

That's what hosts in India do - they assume complete responsibility for your survival. It is a different kind of concept for an American to grasp but that is the kind of generosity that is built into the culture and you must put aside your pride and accept, respect, and be grateful for it.

And don't argue about whose going to pay, because you will use that argument. And if by chance you see an opportunity to sneak in and pay for a lunch before your host can do so - don't do it. Because afterward you will look into their eyes and see that they feel badly. So be gracious, and accept the hospitality.

And, of course, that is Melanie who Vaidehi is so fascinated to meet.

This will do it for today, but tomorrow I will include a range of studies of little Miss Vaidehi. Her mom will be included in these studies.

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