Two months later: the slow emergence from darkness; the moment she became Muse

Once again, after having slept for just a few broken hours, I found myself awake and unable to sleep further. I quietly got up, punched the remote to start the car so that it could warm up, dressed, quietly slipped out of the bedroom without disturbing Margie, came to this computer, checked emails and then drove to Family Restaurant to eat an early morning breakfast in solitude.

It is now two months to the day since Muse and soul friend Soundarya chose to follow her husband Anil into the "thereafter," whatever the "thereafter" might be.

I put "thereafter" in quotation marks because Anil once used this word in an email to me to describe how long the journey that he would take with Soundarya as her husband would last - "life and thereafter."

Today is also the first day since November 18 that the sun will completely rise above the horizon in Barrow. A few days ago, I began to read reports from Facebook friends there that the top arch of the sun had been spotted peeking over the drifted tundra, but today is the first day that it will arise in its entirety.

I wish that I could be there to witness it.

Early in this process, I resigned myself to also living with an inner darkness for all the time that the Barrow sun would remain below the horizon. I most certainly have.

Now the sun is coming back.

What I always remember about the winters that I spent completely or mostly in Barrow is how, after the sun would come back, that was when the really deep, bitter, brutal, cold would set in.

I don't know. In my mind, I had imagined myself writing many things about all this in this post, but now that I am sitting here, I don't feel like it. I find that once again my eyes are moist and I feel a trickle on my cheek and I don't want to say or write anything.

I don't know why I am. To write in all circumstance is just who I am, I guess.

I feel so tired. So very, very, tired.

And I am not getting anything done. Except this blog. It is the only thing that I am getting done.

In many ways, this blog has helped me to get through, but I have found myself incapable of doing my work. I open it up and I try, but I just stare at the computer and get nothing done. For some reason, I can always blog, but I can't work.

I have accomplished almost nothing since I last returned from Barrow.

No, that's not true. Besides this blog, I also have a novel that I am working on. I started it quite awhile back, made some progress, stuck it aside, picked it up later, made a little more progress, stuck it aside again.

In the fall, I picked it up again and resolved that this time, I would stay with it, if even for as few as 15 minutes a day, until it is done. I figured that might take ten years - if I live and have a mind for ten more years.

Then, when Anil and then Sandy died, I quit working on it altogether.

But I picked it back up again a couple of weeks ago and I have worked on it every day since.

I set out to do 15 or 30 minutes but often wind up going anywhere from one to three hours. So I am making progress there.

But of course, that puts no money in my bank account.

Amazingly, thanks to the donate button that I have put up on the side bar, this blog does put a little money into my bank account. Nowhere near enough to live on or to allow me to become a full-time blogger, but enough to give me hope that such a thing might actually be possible.

If I could increase my regular readership 100 fold and have support come in at the same level percentage wise that it has been coming in, I could do this blog full time. Then, I could really create something here. Right now, it is just a whisper of what I envision it to become.

Surely, for every individual who does come here on a regular basis there must be 100 more who would if they could somehow be brought into it?

See, all I want to do now for the rest of my life is to work on my books, this blog and the electronic magazine that I plan to add to it.

I suppose that I have rambled like this before and this all sounds redundant. But its true. And that is how the rest of my life should be spent.

This picture, by the way, is me driving back home after breakfast - although I suspect most of you have probably surmised that already.

There are two other things that have helped me get through the darkness so far. One, my family. I don't talk about it much to them, but just to have kids and grandkids swing by now and then, to come around, to go out and get coffee, to carry a spatula everywhere, to look with adoring baby eyes into my eyes and to feel the often sad but sweet spirit of my wife who has endured through this insane, risky, always insecure, forever teetering on financial destruction, life-stye that living with me these past 37 years has subjected her to.

And there is Soundarya's family, which is also my family. Her brother, Ganesh, my nephew - he credits me for introducing him to the fact that he is a photographer. He is a natural and has the potential to be great. In our communications, although she is always there, we do not talk about Sandy much, but rather about pictures, and about what we are going to do in her memory, namely to take a long hike in the Brooks Range.

Then there is her sister, Sujitha - Suji - my niece, who has appeared in this blog, who loves Jobe and Kalib and who leaves a comment or two here now and then. In so many ways it is she, who has been hurt so very, very deeply, more deeply than I can even hint at here, who has helped me to the deepest degree, just in the communications that we share back in forth.

While it may be difficult for some to understand this deep, platonic, relationship that I share with her sister, still, now, even in her death as I did in her life, Sujitha does understand and she lends comfort that could only be lent by one who understands and is hurt and grieving to the maximum degree herself.

The maximum degree. Yet, she helps me. I am happy that little Jobe, in particular, helps her. And from 9000 miles away.

It looks like Suji and Manu's wedding will happen late next month. I wish that I could be there, but I see no way.

There is also Kavitha, or Cawitha, Soundarya's cousin. I met her only one time and that was at Sandy and Anil's wedding. We do not exchange emails all the time, but every now and then and, except for those that came with announcements of death, I always enjoy receiving them. Kavitha is a trekker. She treks in the Himalayas, she treks about southern India, she treks into dark caves.

She plans to come on the Brooks Range hike.

I hope the rest of us can keep up with her.

One thing worries me a little bit about this hike. My Indian relatives are all vegetarians. We can carry a certain amount of dried food, maybe even enough to get us through with some fairlly significant weight loss, which will be good for me, but I would kind of like to supplement our diet with at least a few fish and maybe some ptarmigan. If there are enough of us to eat it all, maybe even a caribou. But I can't feed fish, ptarmigan and caribou to vegetarians!

We will have to carry a gun or two, both for protection and as a survival mechanism, should it come to that.

I think we will figure it all out, though.

Last night, I dreamed that we had just left on this hike. We were very unprepared. Margie had packed my pack and I did not even know what was in it.

When I opened it up, I found a suit, white shirt, tie and a pair of shiny, black, shoes.

The above image, by the way, is Metro Cafe as I drive by on my way home from breakfast.

There is a folder within my pictures folder labeled, "Ravens for Sandy." It has many photos in it, many that I sent her and others that I did not, but that I placed in the folder to hold until the day that I would.

And all these ravens that continually appear here, I still photograph them for Sandy. I no longer put them in that folder, but only here, in my daily blog folders, but still I photograph them for her.

I photographed this one yesterday, as I walked to Metro to get my afternoon coffee. Both Kalib and Jobe had fallen ill, could not go to daycare and so Margie had gone to town to babysit them. I was left without a car and so I walked.

I am a little surprised to realize that I took no pictures while I was at Metro.

I don't know how that happened. I had my camera. It just never occurred to me to take a picture while I was there. 

And this was one of those rare times when I was on the inside, at a table, slowly devouring a hot cinnamon roll as I sipped and savored the coffee - not on the outside, looking in through the drive-through window. Maybe I am beginning to lose it.

Hey - just a couple of weeks ago, it would have been completely dark at the time that I took this picture.

So the light is coming back. It feels kind of strange - as it always does when the light first manifests itself in the new year. We have had plenty of cool weather in the sub-zeros here in Wasilla, but we have yet to experience any true, deep, cold this year like we can get in this neighborhood this time of year.

I guess we had better brace ourselves. It ought to be coming any time now.

The moment she became Muse

Although I have been running this little series of India pictures in memory of her, I have not been including pictures of Sandy herself.

Today, I make what I believe will be my one exception, because I did not explain this muse thing quite well enough. I did explain how, after my first trip to India, I began to photograph the world that I live and work in here in Alaska with the goal of producing images that could explain it to a young woman in India and thus she was my muse.

But this is the moment - the very moment - she became Muse.

In the early 1990's, at the request of Melanie and Lisa, whenever I would travel, I began to photograph cats wherever I could find them. If I went to a new community, village, city, state or country, I would always seek out a cat and photograph it for my daughters.

So, when my sister's daughter Khena and Vivek planned their wedding and it became clear that I was going to go to India, I immediately began to imagine the cats that I might find to photograph there.

But Khena told me that in all her travels with Vivek in India, she had not seen a single cat. She did not believe that it was common there for people to keep cats the way they do here. Vivek could think of no cats, either. When I got off the plane and met his parents, they did not know about any cats.

And then, after the wedding feast where two soul friends from who knows how far back recognized each other, Sandy invited me to walk and so we walked.

We talked of other things and did not speak of cats.

Then all of a sudden she squealed with delight. She had spotted a cat - this one. She hurried over to the fence. She did not know the lady but asked her to hand her the kitten and let her hold it for awhile. The lady picked up the kitten and lifted it over the top of the fence. I raised my camera.

Hence, Soundarya! Muse!

May her memory live forever.

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To find, to lose, to find and lose again - my India take vanishes into digital ether; I search, I plead

I shot only one frame all day yesterday and this is it - two ravens through my car window as seen through the drive-through line at Taco Bell and this is how I wound up there:

I had it my mind that when I could, I would sort through my India pictures and put together some sort of package on Soundarya to share with the family. I did not know where those pictures were and I dreaded the search to try to find them.

Behind and to the sides of my computer monitor, my desk was a clutter of hard drives, cables and wires - a couple of dozen hard drives, in fact - some of them plugged in, some of them not. I had once known where everything was on those hard drives, but over time, in the constant juggle and shuffle of digital information - moving images from this drive to that, then erasing from here, etc. etc. etc., it had become a tangle of confusion.

I came up with a system in my head to finally get on top of it, but to do so would require that I remove the harddrives from the enclosures they came in so that instead I could just insert and take them out of hard drive docks at will.

I checked with an expert and he said, yes, this would work - I could just remove all those drives from their enclosures and this would free them up for use in the docks.

So I did, and it took me a long time, because once I would figure out how to take one sort of enclosure apart, the next would be completely different and I did not have the right tools.

To simplify a complicated story, by the time I finished, I discovered that six of my harddrives were of an earlier design and would not seat into the docks, so I could no longer read them. Plus, two harddrives would seat and spin, but would not sign on to the computer. So I made four trips back and fourth to Machous were Bruce helped me reconstruct those that needed reconstructing and tried to help me bring the two that would not read back, but they had gone bad and could not be brought back.

During one of those trips back and forth to Machaus, I stopped at Taco Bell and picked up an order for myself and another for Margie, who was not feeling good.

In my office, I carefully searched every drive that could be read - and was horrified to discover that my India take, #2, when Melanie and I went to the wedding of Soundarya and Anil, could not be found.

Although I blogged the wedding, to this date I had not found the time to go through the big majority of the thousands of photos that I took afterward. I know there are some good pictures of Sandy in there, along with many other things from those times that Sandy and Anil were off by themselves and Melanie and I were traveling elsewhere with Vasanthi, Murthy, Buddy and Vijay.

All this now appeared to be lost, vanished into digital ether. If I could not somehow find them, then all I woud have from that trip would be the few low-res images, mostly from the wedding, that actually appeared on this blog.

I searched and searched and searched, venturing into the shadow areas. At one point, I thought that I had found a set, for I did find folders for those dates - but the folders were empty.

They are only photographs and their loss is a tiny and insignificant thing in comparison to her loss - but still, photographs are all that is left. I sank into despair. My body shook and my hands trembled.

I realize that what I am about to state is going to sound really corny to some, but it is how it happened, so I am going to state it. Not knowing what else to do, after a day-and-a-half of searching but not finding, I said aloud, "Sandy! I need your help! You've got to help me."

After I spoke the words, I suddenly noticed one of those tiny, portable, black plastic hard drives that you can buy at Wal-Mart, sitting beneath the computer tower on my desk. I always take two or three of these into the field with me, so that I can make duplicate copies of everything that I shoot as I move along. After I get home, I dump the images into my big harddrives and then erase these little ones, so that I can take them back out into the field the next time I go.

I picked up the little drive and plugged it into the computer.

The India take was all there.

Coincidence, my brain tells me. My heart wants to believe otherwise.

The truth is, I do not know. 

I now have the pictures, but Sandy is still gone.

Even as I type this, I am loading those pictures into my Lightroom editor. This is the very first image from that take - it is Melanie as we wait at Ted Stevens International Airport to board the first of the four planes that will fly us to Bangalore.

And here we are, Melanie and I together, reflected in the window of the underground train that shuttles passengers between various terminals at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Now we have left Chicago, enroute to Mumbai.

And here we are, in Mumbai.

In Mumbai, we saw a sleepy little girl.

Now we ride the shuttle that will take us from one Mumbai terminal to another.

Through the shuttle window. What you don't see is the heat. Despite the late hour, it was stifling hot. We are about to board the flight to Bangalore.

Now we are at Murthy and Vasanthi's in Bangalore, where I fell asleep. It was Sandy who woke me up - Soundarya Ravichandran. After I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I took a picture of her and this is it. The next day, she would wed and would become Soundarya Anil Kumar.

I now have many pictures to sort through and edit. This barely begins it. It is going to take some time and I do not know where I am going to find that time.

I know that I promised that I would not let this blog dwell where it seems to be dwelling, but one does not just turn away from an experience such as this and suddenly find that it is over.

Still, it is my commitment to now get back on track and to blog about other things. After I have a picture package ready to share with the family, perhaps I will put up a few more up here.

I suspect that this will take me about one year.

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Hello - and goodbye

Christian hymns have been playing in my head continuously for the past several days. I believe this is because I was unable to travel to Soundarya's funeral and so my subconscious mind had to create a funeral for me. The only way it knew how to do this was to pull up the hymns that it has heard at so many funerals - none of them Hindu. I just don't know any Hindu funeral hymns.

Within the past few hours, the hymns have gone away. They have been replaced by two Beatles songs, which come and go as they please: To Know Her is to Love Her and "I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello." So my personal funeral for Soundarya must be over. I did not see her body or the beautiful saree and flowers that would have adorned her. I did not witness her cremation. I did not observe or participate in the rituals. I did not get to embrace her mother and father, her brother and sister or any of her large family of relatives - my relatives now.

I did not get to weep with them.

Even so, my brain provided what it could by way of a personal funeral and now that funeral is over and I must move on.

Before I do, I thought that I would put up one last picture of Soundarya and I thought that it should be from when we first met - either from the wedding feast for Vivek and Khena or from the walk Sandy and I took afterward.

So I typed "Sandy" into my computer's internal search engine and then chose several candidates from the many thumbnails that appeared upon my screen. I narrowed these down to the three pictured here on my monitor and then finally chose the one to the left, desaturated of most of its color.

Then I realized that I could not just put a picture from the past up in the context of the past, but that my "hello-goodbye" picture had to be as I saw it today - looking out at me from my computer screen in my dimly lit office.

The two model airplanes on the wall to the right, as some of you know, were made by my deceased brother, Ron, before he broke his neck and became tetraplegic. 

Ganesh Facebooked a link to me of a song, Kabhi Kabhie Mere Dil Mein, performed by professionals. He and she once sang it together and ended it with a big laugh fest. I listened to the song several times, but each time I closed my eyes so that I would not see the actors in the video, but only her and I saw her strongly. She once told me online that she had visited a seer who had told her that we had been close in lives past and would be close in lives future.

This life is the only life that I know and am certain is real, but it is a nice thought and would explain many things.

Now I will let her go. I will not stop thinking of her, my tears for her will not altogether dry, but I will let her go and I will deal with the things that I must deal with everyday and I won't be blogging about her anymore.

At least not for now, not for awhile. Someday, when I find the money to return to India and capture the time to find a way to better tell her story, then I will blog about her again. How can a storyteller have a muse and not tell her story?

I will tell it, Muse. I will tell your story. The world will know about you - your sweet, gentle, caring soul that could bestow kindness not only upon a kitten but even upon a bug - or a cobra... the fierce defense that you would throw up to protect those you loved against those more powerful than you... the dreams, passions, ambitions and desires that filled you... the bitter disappointments that you pushed through again and again right up until this last one... the beautiful even if painful memory that you have now become.

I will tell this story - but not now. For now, I must pull back and do other things.

As for these two on their snowmachine, I saw them yesterday afternoon off Church Road as I was cruising and drinking a Metro coffee that I had bought from Shoshana.

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A snowball for Soundarya; Margie and I drive off to Anchorage and stop at Metro Cafe; a feeling of peace and serenity; raven stories

Margie started the car with the remote at about 1:00 PM. Maybe five minutes later, I went out to clean the snow off of it as she gathered up the things that we would need to take to the Thanksgiving feast. I scraped the snow off the windshield with my hand. Our snow here, at least in the past, is most often cold, dry and powdery, but this snow was warm and wet, so I packed it into a snowball.

I was trying to decide what to do with the snowball when suddenly I thought about an email that Sandy sent to me just over two weeks ago. She had dreamed that she had been sitting in the living room of our house here in Wasilla with Margie, Kalib and me drinking coffee and then she and I had decided to go on a bike ride.

It was snowing, and she was exhilarated, because snow was new to her. She was enthralled by the view of the mountains around her. We pedaled for awhile and then stopped, so she could play in the snow for the first time in her life. "I behaved like a five-year old," she wrote. She dreamed she made a snowball, smashed it on me and then we got into a snowball fight. 

The dream ended when the sound of Anil's snoring awakened her and she found herself not in Alaska, but back in India.

So, Soundarya, this snowball is for you.

Margie came out, carrying the dough that still needed to spend time in a warm place and to rise before she could bake it into rolls.

She looked so pretty to me, standing in the weak light of a dim winter afternoon, the headlights of the car striking her knees.

I thought about throwing Sandy's snowball at her, but I knew that she would not appreciate getting struck by something cold, wet and hard when she was carrying bread dough. I tossed the snowball into the yard, to join the other snowflakes that were piling up there.

Metro Cafe was closed, but Carmen was having a family and friends Thanksgiving get-together there and had asked me to swing by with Margie on our way to Anchorage.

We swung by. Scott was in the driveway, so we stopped and said "hi" to him first.

Then we pulled up to the window, where Carmen gave us each a coffee and a biscotti and wished us a happy Thanksgiving. Then she was joined by her sister, Teresa, Carmen's son Branson and Teresa's son Evan and together they posed for:

Through the Metro Window, study 242,996.88: Thanksgiving Day, 2010

After we shared our few minutes of smiles and laughter, they returned to their gathering and we drove away. As has been the case for every conscious moment since I learned the news, Soundarya's image was in my mind and grief in my heart.

I felt determined to move forward and to have a wonderful holiday with my family, yet I still felt absolutely, hopelessly, bitterly, crushed. There would be no snowball fight - never. Sandy would never sit in our living room and drink coffee with Margie and me while Kalib performed his antics. We would share no bike rides. She would not look upon Alaska's mountains.

The business of her heart and dreams that she had been laboring to launch in Bangalore would never blossom to fruition.

As we drove through the snow on towards Anchorage, I felt a completely unexpected feeling of peace come upon me. In many ways, I did not want to feel it, because it did not seem right, given that Sandy's many and passionate dreams had all been taken from her, but that feeling of peace was there and it just kept growing stronger.

It felt to me like Sandy was there, right there, in the car with us, here in Alaska, and that this feeling of serenity was coming directly to me from her.

As I have said many times, notwithstanding my religious upbringing, the preaching and testifying that I myself have done in the past and the fact that I constantly intermingle with people of faith, many faiths, so many of them firm and sincere believers striving to make their way through this hard life into the sweet beyond, I know nothing of God or of the hereafter. It is all a mystery to me and will be for as long as I reside on mortal earth.

Yet that's how it felt to me - that this feeling of peace and comfort was coming to me directly from her - that she was there, in a form that I could feel but not see.

She was giving me the feeling that somehow, in the eternal ethereal, it is all okay.

We drove on. Here and there, drivers had slipped on the ice and left the road, this one to tip over.

This one just got stuck.

They have ravens in India too, but they are different than ours - smaller, and while the black of our ravens tends to also reflect a slight, iridescent blue hue, in southern India that reflection seems to lean more toward a burgundy-brown. Sandy loved ravens. Before she got together with Anil, she once brought an injured one into her apartment to care for it. 

When her landlord discovered what she had done, he was outraged, as it is believed by many in India that a raven in the house will bring many years of bad luck and ordered her to get the raven out. She didn't care. She had compassion for the raven and was willing to be booted out of her apartment, if that's what it took to help it.

Later, she found another injured raven when she was out with Anil during their time of engagement. She cradled the raven in her arms and took a seat on the back of her motor bike, behind Anil. As he drove in search of a vet, she sang to the raven.

"What song did you sing to it?" I asked, via internet chat.

I expected her to name a Hindu song, or perhaps an Indian lullaby - something that I would not even know.

"Safe in the Arms of Jesus," she answered.

They found a vet, but the vet wanted nothing to do with the raven. He scolded her for bringing it to him. She scolded him right back with such intimidating force that he relented and treated the raven.

The raven healed, and when it came time to let it loose, a crowd gathered. The raven looked around, flapped its wings and rose above the packed streets of Bangalore. The crowd applauded.

Such was Soundarya!

Well.

I said that I would not let this blog dwell upon the memory of Soundarya, but would move on, just as life always moves on. 

I meant it, too.

But this blog will never forget her, either.

As we drew near to Jacob and Lavina's house in Anchorage, we passed this guy, blowing the snow out of his driveway.

Then we were there - and there was Lavina and Jobe, in the window above, waiting for us to come in and join them - to join the entire family in Alaska, Charlie and his parents included, for Thanksgiving dinner.

That dinner will be the subject of my next post.

Maybe I will get it up today. Maybe not until tomorrow. 

It will be history by then, but so what?

Each action that we take becomes history at the very moment we become aware of having taken it.

I kind of feel like I have blogged enough for today.

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they will appear larger and look better

Transitions - Barrow to Wasilla: iPhone communications to the living and from the dead - I have opened comments on the previous post*

My flight on Alaska Airlines was scheduled to leave Barrow at 8:20 PM, but it was running about one hour late. So I took a seat and pulled out my iPhone to occupy myself. Soon, Hazel Pebbly and her granddaughter, Makayla, whose Iñupiaq name is Pamilaq, sat down across from me and pulled out their own phones while the fellow at left played on his iPad and the woman at right worked on her laptop.

I am not certain, but it sounded to me like Makayla was talking to a young sibling - a brother, I think. It might have been a cousin.

"I love you," she said. "Now you say it..."

There was a pause. 

"Say, 'I...'" she continued...

"Now say, 'love...'

"Good! Now say, 'you!...

"I... love... you!... I love you!"

Sometime after Jacob and Lavina gave me my iPhone, I began to use it to send email messages to Sandy from different airports whenever I would go traveling.

Just before I had left Anchorage to come to Barrow on this trip, I sent this message from Gate C 4:

Hi Sandy,

Here I am, sitting at gate 4, Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, about to board the jet to Barrow. I have been insanely busy, yet I did not even come close to getting everything done that I needed to.

Oh well. It will all come together - it always does. I hope you get a chance to read my blog today - the one about the movie set.

Got to go. It's cold and windy. It will be colder in Barrow.

Love,
Bill

Sent from my iPhone

I felt extremely exhausted that day and a very strange thing happened after I boarded the plane. It was a cold day and the wind was howling. I was so unfortunate as to get a middle seat, squished between two big guys, so I sank myself as deeply into my seatback as I could, folded my arms over my chest and closed my eyes.

After awhile, I heard the engines rev up a bit and felt the plane begin to taxi. I kept my eyes closed. I felt the motions of the plane as it rolled down the taxi-way and made its turns, then heard the engines thrust to full power. I felt the g's as the jet accelerated down the runway. Still, I kept my eyes closed. My eyelids were so heavy I had no other choice. Then I felt the airplane rise into the air. Very soon, it slammed into rough turbulence, created by the wind as it tumbled over the mountains.

Turbulence is nothing new to me. I kept my eyes closed as the plane climbed through, buffeted and jolted until finally it rose above the turbulence. The flight smoothed out and the roar of the engines settled into pleasant background drone.

After we had been flying for what seemed to be half an hour or so, I suddenly heard a new sound come from the engines - that kind of minor acceleration that a pilot will use to shift directions or change speed while rolling on the ground.

Startled, I opened my eyes and saw that we were rolling on pavement. I could not believe it. How could we have landed without me feeling the jolt? I looked beyond the runway into the dim winter light, expecting to see the hills and vegetation of Fairbanks, but instead saw those that border the Anchorage airport.

I had dreamed the whole thing.

Now, the plane really did pull onto the runway. The engines accelerated, I felt the g's, the plane lifted off, then flew into a blast of turbulence and began to climb through it - exactly as I had experienced in the dream.

After we landed in Fairbanks, I sat in my seat doing nothing as departing passengers left the plane and others boarded. After awhile, I decided to tell Sandy of the experience, so I pulled out my iPhone, opened an email to her and wrote this:

Hello again...

Now I am sitting inside the jet as it waits outside the Fairbanks terminal for the new passengers who will fly on to Barrow with us.

It looks pretty cold out there.

I had a pretty strange experience after I boarded in Anchorage, I was clamped into the middle seat between two big guys, I just sunk as far back into seat cushion as I could and ... Oo got to power down

 
Sent from my iPhone

I did not get to finish, because the Stewardess had given the order to shut down all electronic devices.

The next evening in Barrow, I received this email back from Soundarya:

Hi Bill,

My laptop crashed again & I wondered how long I had to wait to read your mails...I'm glad I could!

Guess you had a squeezy journey?

You are quiet busy! Takecare...don't push yourself to the extreme.

Gotto rush now. Sorry for such a short mail. Will mail you later....

Love & Stress-Free hugs!

Sandy

These were the last words that she will ever write to me. Perhaps what I wrote above was the last of my words that she ever read. I did send her three emails in the short span between Anil's death and hers, but I do not know if she ever received or read them. I suspect that she didn't.

After I stood up and got into the security line, I heard someone call out my name. I turned and saw a woman looking at me and waved shyly, because I was not quite certain who she was. Then I heard the same voice as before call out my name again and say, "over here!"

I had been looking at the wrong person. It was my friend, Misty Nayakik from Wainwright who had called my name. She was with her young son, Caleb. She had just come in on the jet from Anchorage with her special man, Kennedy Ahmaogak, who was elsewhere in the terminal waiting for their bags to arrive.

He has been receiving treatment for cancer in Anchorage. Happily, that treatment has gone well and Kennedy is doing well now.

Finally, we boarded and then the jet was climbing into the darkness above the Arctic Slope.

Jeffrey Maupin, an entrepreneur, was sitting in the "C" seat across the aisle from me. I had been assigned to seat "D," but "E" and "F" were empty, so I scooted over to sit by the window. Not because I wanted to see what was outside - only blackness could be seen out there - but so I could lay my head against the wall and doze.

I did, too, and every now and then I would slip off briefly, only to find that my dreamy state was every bit as dark as the blackness pressing in at the window.

Jeffrey told me that every time he sees me, he thinks about his college days. I told him that I everytime I see him, I think about his college days, too.

I was working for the Tundra Times then and I did an article on Alaska Native college students. I interviewed Jeffrey in a place where Native students gather but that interview was continually interrupted by female students who saw Jeffrey and swung over to say "hi," to get his attention and even to flirt a bit.

They all seemed to be quite interested in him.

I reminded him of that.

"Could you tell me where those ladies are now?" he joked.

Once, many years ago, I was walking down the street in Barrow when Jeffrey stopped and offered me a ride.

I wasn't really going anywhere and neither was he. We were both just wandering about, to see what we could see.

The Running Dog was in top flying condition then, so I told Jeffrey to take me to the airport. I jumped into the front seat and took the stick. He jumped into the back. Then I took him flying, weaving about over various of the myriad million lakes of the Arctic Slope until we found ourselves near Atqasuk. I then brought him back to Barrow.

"Wow!" he said. "I was born and raised here but I never saw the country like that before."

That was then.

"Do you still have your airplane?" he asked, from the seat across the aisle.

"Yes," I said, "but it's wrecked. It doesn't fly anymore."

This is now.

In front of me sat someone with nicely coiffed hair.

When we began to draw near to Fairbanks, the pilot turned on the landing lights. The glow reflected off the leading edge of the wing and the tiny little stabilizers that run most of its length.

Then we were on the tarmac in Fairbanks and it was a shocking sight. Rain was falling, splattering against the window and pooling in slushy puddles outside. It used to be that even when the warmest Pineapple Express would blow in off the Pacific to turn winter-time Anchorage and Wasilla into a slushy mess, Fairbanks could be counted on to remain well below freezing, if not below zero. The snow there would stay good and dry.

Long-range forecasters predicted that this would be a cold winter, but so far it seems to have been warm - the warmest yet. In the past, when I would go to Barrow this time of year, the temperature would usually stay below zero the whole time that I was there. This time, it never went below zero and it got as warm as +32.

And Fairbanks! Look! The temperature in Fairbanks was about +40. Forty below would not have surprised me, but +40?

My niece Shaela had called from L.A. before I left Barrow. She said it was about 40 there.

Before we left Fairbanks, the plane filled completely up, they closed the doors and then the mysterious and enchanting stewardess delivered the preflight briefing. Her gaze seemed to reach somewhere way out beyond the fuselage walls.

I wondered what she could see that was invisible to the rest of us?

Lighted signs pointed the way as the pilot taxied toward the runway.

Then the plane was airborne and we were rising over Fairbanks International Airport.

A week or two ago, Sandy sent me an email to tell me that she had taken up the study of Spanish. She asked what language I would most like to learn. Iñupiaq, I answered, followed closely by Apache so that I could speak to Margie in her own tongue. Next would be Tamil, so that I could talk to Soundarya in her native language.

After the jet landed in Anchorage, I called Melanie's phone and Charlie answered. He said he would tell Melanie and she would leave for the airport right away. When I stepped into the terminal, I found that I had entered at Cate C-9, the one farthest from baggage claim. That was okay. I needed the walk.

The last place that I ever saw Soundarya was at the Bangalore Airport. Murthy had hired a big, van-like taxi-cab operated by a trusted driver and much of the family had come along to say goodbye to Melanie and me. Anil and Buddy traveled on Anil's motor scooter, sometimes zipping ahead of us, sometimes falling behind, sometimes right alongside. I sat in the passenger seat so that I could take photos. Sandy sat behind me and leaned forward so that her head rested on my seatback and from where she could lay her hand upon my shoulder. When my camera would go down, she would clasp my hand.

Sometimes, she would lean her head against my shoulder.

After we arrived at the airport and left the taxi, she again took my hand in hers. It was a complicated process just to approach the airport terminal and only ticketed passengers were allowed to enter. Melanie got through the outside confusion before I did and entered the terminal ahead of me. This worried me a bit, because I did not want to lose sight of her.

Sandy kept hold of my hand as I worked my way through the bureaurocracy and then walked to the terminal door, where a guard stood to see that only those with tickets entered.

I showed him my ticket and my passport. He motioned me to enter. Still, Sandy held firmly and warmly onto my hand, but remained outside as I passed through the doorway. Our arms began to stretch. "Look!" Sandy's mom, Banu, said. "She is going to the US with him!" The family laughed. Then the stretch grew too great. Her hand slipped away, her fingertips brushing mine as it did.

I turned, looked at the faces of all the family behind, then into her eyes, filled now with a painful mix of joy and sorrow, moistened by tears. I walked on. Sandy disappeared from sight. I searched the crowd for Melanie and found her - although she would fly out on a different airplane.

Melanie arrived at the baggage area before I did, but thanks to the heavy traffic had to park a good hike away.

As I hiked toward her, I came upon little Iqilan, held in her aaka's arms..

I am not certain that I have spelled her name correctly. If I haven't, her Aapa Charlie is invited to correct me.

I had always believed that one day Sandy and Anil would get off the plane in Anchorage so that I could finally give that tour of Alaska that we so often talked about. I would have Woody Guthrie plugged into the car's stereo system through the iPhone and the first thing she would hear would be him singing, "This land is my land, this land is your land..."

Then I would drive through Anchorage and would show the sights. Yes, even this diner. I have never eaten here, because some of my children have and they were not impressed. If she wanted to, it would be okay, but I doubt this diner has much of a vegetarian menu.

Margie and I went to this new movie theatre complex for the first time about two weeks ago. Afterward, I wrote an email to Sandy and told her about the movie and that if she got a chance to see it, she should watch for a certain kind of black taxi-cab that we had talked about before, a kind that I have seen only in London.

She answered that it would take the movie at least 45 days to reach India, but when it did she would go and she would watch for that taxi-cab.

The movie? Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. It begins with what can only be the tsunami that struck southern Asia in December, 2004 and that killed over a quarter million people, including many in India. Matt Damon stars in the movie as a psychic with the ability to help the troubled living connect with their dead loved ones and then bring them comfort.

Despite the late hour and the fact that she would only have to turn around and drive back to Anchorage, Melanie drove me home. I don't remember precisely when we arrived, but I believe it was after 2:00 AM. I was very glad that it was Melanie who picked me up.

We both needed to spend some time alone together. It wasn't enough time, but it was good time.

As you can see, the warm weather that has gripped all of Alaska was here, too. I have not seen any forecasts, but Melanie tells me that it is supposed to get cold in a day or two. Below zero.

I hope so. It bothers me when the climatic world gets so off-kilter as it has been lately.

We passed by Eagle River, but did not stop to eat.

And then we continued on to Wasilla. Maybe because I was so tired, I forgot to take any pictures after we arrived. I will take plenty of pictures at our Thanksgiving feast. It will be at Jacob and Lavina's this year.

*Although I had disabled the comments on the previous post, a few readers left comments elsewhere and made it clear to me that I had been unfair to readers who themselves mourn this loss.

I know it is too late to accommodate most of those who would have left comments, but I have gone ahead and enabled comments for that post.

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