Transitions: Kaktovik to Wasilla and my grandsons, to Utah where Thos got married before the milk expired, a beautiful reflection of India

I have fallen terribly behind - in large part for the reasons explained in my entry of October 15 and in part simply because life just seems to plunge relentlessly forward at an ever-increasing pace and I simply cannot keep up or ever pause long enough to make sense of it all.

Before I fell into this blog hole, readers will recall that I had been in Kaktovik, where I took this picture nine days ago (really? Nine days already???), where I had gone to cover the Healthy Communities Summit.

I was riding with big Bob Aiken in the truck that he had borrowed from his aunt, The Reverend Mary Warden, and we had gone out to look at the mountains of the Brooks Range, a bit to the south.

Don't let this picture fool you. You cannot drive a car from Kaktovik to the mountains. You can only drive a little ways - in this case, a couple of miles from the village to the land fill. However, the water between Barter Island and the mainland was rapidly freezing over and I am certain that by now, people from Kaktovik are driving their snowmachines to the mountains and some have undoubtedly taken some snow-white, bighorn Dall sheep.

Just before I left Kaktovik, the temperature dropped very close to zero F, if not all the way.

This is not all that cold for this time of year, it's just that recent years have been so warm. In fact, I remember that in our first winter in Wasilla, the snow set in for good on October 2 and within a week of that we had had our first sub-zero temperatures - and Wasilla is a much warmer place than Kaktovik.

That winter was colder than average, but the fact is, Alaska is just not as cold of a place as it was when we first moved here.

A bit later that same afternoon, I saw the snowplow clearing the runway. I left Kaktovik the next afternoon, Saturday, October 9. As I did, I shot a very nice little photo story of riding around beforehand with Big Bob, of airplanes, coming and going, of people deboarding and boarding, of flying to Barrow, where I had less than two hours before I had to board my flight to Anchorage - but that was enough to get a picture of Roy Ahmaogak with some of the slabs of maktak from the whale his Savik crew had landed - and then of the flight home.

But I can find none of those images now. I have this horrid feeling that I accidently erased them.

The Alaska Airlines flight arrived in Anchorage late in the evening and Margie came to pick me up. As we drove back to Wasilla, I sent a text message to Lavina, "I need a Kalib and Jobe fix!"

And my dear daughter-in-law! What did she do? After I had gotten some sleep and rest, she drove them out to Wasilla, just to give me that fix.

Here is Jobe, soothing my soul.

Since I left on these latest rounds of travel, Jobe has entered daycare. Margie no longer must go to town to spend her week days babysitting him. While she is glad to be able to stay home - and I will be glad to have her here, something I have not yet had the chance to experience - she already greatly misses hanging out with him all day.

Kalib went out into the back yard to golf.

Before taking his first shot, he contemplates, seeks to psych himself up.

He zeros in on the ball...

...and drives it hard and far. I would tell you it was a hole-in-one, but there was no hole in which to drop it, so there was no hole in one.

It was a darn good drive, though.

I had barely gotten my fix when the two got strapped into their car seats and their mother drove them back to Anchorage.

Soon, I was on a red-eye flight that left Anchorage at 12:47 AM and arrived in Salt Lake City just after 7:00 AM. I had a "B" seat - a middle seat.

It was not a pleasant flight.

After I exited the plane, I followed these two pilots toward baggage claim.

During my short time in Wasilla, Margie kept after me to get a haircut, but I had too much to do and couldn't take the time.

"I'll get one down there," I said.

She was doubtful.

After I arrived in Salt Lake, I went to the house in Sandy that my brother Rex inherited from my parents and lay down upon his bed to take a short nap.

That damn short nap lasted until about 2:25 PM. This aggravated me, because I did not want to waste my day napping, but I guess I needed it.

I then spent about an hour visiting with the ghosts of my parents as they now manifest themselves in their old house and then went to breakfast at the nearby IHOP. I finished breakfast a little after 4:00 PM. Then I headed over to "Great Clips" and got my hair cut.

I got my beard trimmed, too. It is no where near as long now as in this picture.

This is why I dropped everything and flew to Utah: to be present during the time of the wedding of my nephew, Thos Swallow, to Delaina Bales. The wedding had been scheduled for 10:00 AM Friday, and I and all the other family members who could not attend were told to be there by 10:40, when they would emerge as husband and wife from the granite building behind.

The drive took me a few minutes longer than I had anticipated and I arrived about 10:48. The sun shone brightly and reflected off the nearly white granite with an intensity that hurt my eyes. I found the temperature shocking - already into the mid-70's.

I looked all around, and while many people, including other new brides and grooms, milled serenely about, I could not see Thos and Delaina, nor could I spot a single familiar face.

I did not think that I had come so late that they had already taken their post-ceremony pictures and left, but I was just a little bit worried, so I called my sister, Mary Ann, Thos's mom, to see where she might be. 

She had not yet arrived, but was wandering around down below with her husband, the granite building in sight above them, trying to find the road that would take them there.

As I was talking to her on my cell, I saw Thos and bride Delaina emerge from the wedding hall. He, too, was talking on his phone. She had to shield her eyes from the harsh glare that she had just stepped out into.

Here they are, the bride and groom - Thos and Delaina Swallow, outside the Draper Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) in which they had just married.

That golden fellow blowing his trumpet toward the east, the direction from which it is prophesied that Christ will appear at His Second Coming, is the Angel Moroni. Moroni was a huge character in the intense life that I grew up in and that I can never step fully away from even though my thoughts and beliefs have traveled into new territory.

The Church is very particular about who it will allow to enter its temples and, notwithstanding the fact that my direct ancestors hung out with Joseph Smith, set out across the plains toward Utah with Brigham Young and received multiple wives in wedding ceremonies conducted by him, I no longer am numbered among those allowed to enter.

In some ways, it is kind of a funny feeling to travel over to 2000 miles to be present during a wedding that you know you will not be allowed to attend, but I understood all this before I left. Margie and I did the same thing to her parents and family on the day nearly 37 years ago that we married in the Provo Temple. As I have noted in the past, I feel bad when I think about that now, but I do not want Thos and Delaina to ever feel badly that I found myself subject to the same exclusion at their wedding.

I understand - but as for my father and mother-in-law, they had already been excluded from so much by the larger, mostly white and Mormon society that had taken over so much of their country and had then surrounded them on their reservation. I deeply regret the fact that, at our wedding, Margie and I added to that feeling of exclusion.

In the case of my nephew and his wife, the one thing that matters to me is that he, Thos, be given the assurance that his Uncle Bill loves him and admires him, that he is an important man in my life and that she knows that I honor the commitment that she and he have made together and that I embrace her as a part of this, in many ways shattered and scattered, family.

To give them that assurance, I traveled far to be present for their wedding that I knew the Church would not allow me to attend.

On September 30, Thos wrote this on his Facebook page: 

"By the time the milk in my fridge expires, I will be a married man.

By my standards, I restrained my photography on the day of the wedding. As regular readers know, I am not a wedding photographer and Thos and Delaina had hired a real wedding photographer to shoot the event for them. She worked hard and from what I could tell, did a good job. She was cordial toward me, but I could see that my presence with my camera did annoy her a bit, so I did my best to restrain myself.

Even so, I took a fair number of pictures. I have it had it in mind to do a good photo summation of the day, as I experienced it. Yet, except for the two images at the temple and this one, I have not yet had a chance to even look at my take. I still hope to produce a summation of the wedding day, plus at least one or two other posts dedicated to my trip to Utah, but, as usual, life continues to rush forward. Images rush through my camera in a non-ending blur and Utah is now behind me. The bright, warm, sun has been replaced by the cold and gray of post-fall Wasilla in need of the grace of its white blanket.

I got to bed a bit before 4:00 am this morning, took Margie to breakfast at Family Restaurant at noon and have a non-revenue generating project (most projects seem to be this way, these days. Now that everybody has a digital camera, this concept that photographers have no need to make a living just seems to be growing and growing and I buy into it myself, as this blog proves) that I have committed to my underfunded client that I will finish before I go to bed tomorrow morning.

So maybe I will get a chance to post those other Utah stories and maybe I won't. I hope I do. I want to.

We will see.

But, in case I don't, after I pulled out the two pictures of Thos and Delaina coming out of the temple, I zipped way down through the take, very near to end of that day, and quickly grabbed this picture.

This is Ada Lakshmi Iyer, 17 months old, the most recent member born into this family. Ada is the daughter of my niece, Khena and her husband, Vivek Iyer, who grew up in India. The fabric for her beautiful little dress was selected by her grandmother, Vasanthi, a devout Hindu, and sewn by a tailor in Bangalore.

Ada was born in Minneapolis, but recently paid a visit to India, where she was reportedly loved and adored by all.

As for Vivek, who married into my once devout Mormon family, he says he is now pretty much an atheist, but that does not mean he is no longer Hindu, because one can be Hindu and still be atheist. As Vivek's dad, Murthy, also devout Hindu, once explained it to me, one can be just about about anything, Mormon included, and still be Hindu, because in the end, however many journeys it might require before one undergoes all the hardships, purification and education necessary, one will find his or her way back to God and the truth, whatever God be, whatever truth be.

Me, I still don't know and don't ever expect to. I'm just shooting through life, amazed at the hard and beautiful wonder of it all, trying to capture a few images and hazy meaning along the way.

Little Ada Lakshmi! So beautiful, so adorable, so full of life and excitement! I just wanted to pick her up and hug her, but she is not the kind of person to sit still long enough for that. Just before I left, she did let me give her a hug as her mother held her. 

When I did, she smiled.

It is good to be alive.

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Preview of Nannie Rae's Cross Island birthday party; Kalib and Jobe return to the blog

In about one hour, I must leave for an overnight trip to Nikiski, where I will spend the day tomorrow, so I am just plain out of time to put together the Cross Island post that I had planned to do today. The fact is, while I had hoped to have done a complete initial edit of my entire Cross Island/Nuiqsut take by now, so far I have gone through less than one percent of that take.

Once I do go through it, there are huge sections of it that I will not post at all, but will save exclusively for Uiñiq magazine. As for Nannie's birthday, I plan to put it in both the blog and Uiñiq, but in Uiñiq I will probably have to limit it to one or two pictures, whereas here I can post a few.

Here, at least, is a preview of what I plan to post Monday, when I will return this blog to Cross Island/Nuiqsut for two or three more posts:

It is Nannie Rae Kaigelak, with a few of those who gathered in the Cross Island cabin of successful whaling captain Billy Oyagak to celebrate her 22nd birthday.

So I will dedicate my Monday post to a spread that will focus not only on Nannie's birthday, but on a particular Eskimo drum that happened to play a role in that birthday.

If you love Cross Island and you love Nannie Rae - and a great many people do - or even if you have never met Nannie Rae and all that you know of Cross Island is the tiny bit that you have so far seen on this blog, be sure to come back Monday.

In the meantime, come Sunday, I will let Barrow Whaler fans know how the team fared in Nikiski.

So I finally got to see my grandsons and their mom again, yesterday afternoon, when I drove into Anchorage to pick Margie up from this week's babysitting stint.

Here they are, in their driveway.

Little Jobe ALWAYS has a big smile for his grandpa, everytime I see him. 

Martigny was there, too. She never smiles, but she does purr.

As I Margie and I prepared to drive away, Lavina brought Kalib to the window to wave goodbye to us. He did not want us to go. He wanted us to stay. He cried to see us go.

And now, once again, I must go.

That's how my life is. I seldom have time to ever settle down, except for when I was hurt, or Margie was hurt. I am always going.

Go... go... go...

Always.

One day I will be dead and then I will go no more.

I wonder how much I can get done between now and then?

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Margie and I take Kalib and Jobe for five days, part 3: We bring them home, Kalib phones a kiss to his far-away mom, they grow sleepy

In time, we arrived home. Jobe was happy to be here, but I know he misses his mom. See that bottle on the table? That is her milk. I don't know how she managed to provide a supply for the whole five days that we will have Jobe with us, but she did.

Love, I guess.

As I was working on my computer, Kalib came into my office to feed the fish. Soon, Margie came in with the phone. It was Lavina, eager to talk to her eldest son. Kalib took the phone and looked at it. He heard his mother's voice.

Kalib didn't have much to say, but he gave her a kiss over the phone. Did you feel it, Lavina?

In the evening, Jobe grew very sleepy. Margie put him in the Apache cradle board that his great aunt LeeAnn made for him. He fell asleep.

Jobe, asleep in his cradle board.

Caleb returned home. Kalib was overjoyed to see him.

Caleb and Kalib. As usual, Kalib insisted that we turn the Christmas lights on.

Soon, Kalib grew tired, too. 

We all grew tired. We all went to bed. Margie and I didn't really sleep all that much, though, as Jobe kept waking us up. I remember how hard it was when our children were babies and we had to get them through that time when they would wake us at all hours with needs that had to be met. It was hard and I longed to sleep. It seemed at the time that there would never again come a night that we could sleep all the way through. Yet, such nights did come - and, oh, so rapidly.

Jacob and Lavina go through this on a daily basis now, yet still get up and go to work.

It was tough last night, too. I just wanted to sleep. Yet, what I now know is what an honor and privilege it is to be woken up at night by a little person fully dependent upon your care.

Soon, some of us will go see some dinosaurs. Margie does not think she will go. She plans to stay here with Jobe.

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Margie and I take Kalib and Jobe for five days, part 2: We dine on Fourth Avenue hot dogs, where Kalib and I intimidate a security cop

As explained in the first post of this day, Lavina had left early yesterday morning to attend a work conference in Las Vegas, I had driven to town to pick up Kalib, Jobe and Margie to bring them back to Wasilla, and Melanie had showed up to drive Jacob to the airport so he could join Lavina at her conference, but Jacob had not yet returned home from work.

Soon, he did return. He kissed his boys goodbye and then he left with Melanie for the airport.

Anchorage's seemingly interminable, record-breaking streak of consecutive rainy days - 33, I believe - had finally come to an end. It was a wonderfully warm, sunny, and beautiful day - the perfect kind of day to go downtown and buy hotdogs from a Fourth Avenue street vendor.

Margie agreed. I wanted to leave immediately, but Kalib had gone down to the family room, where his parents had put up a tent for him with a tubular passage to the entrance.

So many people have given Kalib so many amazing gifts that I can't get over it.

I found him in the tent. We spent a little bit of time throwing little plastic balls back and forth through the passageway.

Then Kalib had to do a little bit of golfing.

He golfs in the style of the great masters.

Kalib - the golfer.

Finally, we headed for the car. Before he got in, Kalib found a pretty flower, plucked it and held in in his hand.

I strapped both of my grandsons into their car seats - Kalib facing forward, Jobe facing backward. Seeing them strapped in like this made me think about the ever-present dangers of the road. I would be driving with precious cargo. I might encounter another driver or two or three or more who might do something stupid, something to make one's blood boil.

If so, I would just have to ignore it and drive on as steadily and safely as possible.

Then we were downtown on Fourth Avenue, where we were fortunate to find a parking space just 30 yards or so from RA hotdogs. Margie and Jobe stayed in the car while Kalib and I got in line.

This uniformed gentleman got in line behind Kalib. Naturally, I wanted a picture with him standing behind Kalib and it would be best as a low-angle shot, but I did not feel like crouching and getting down on my knees. One neat thing about the pocket camera is that I can hold it quite a ways from my face and still see what it sees in the lcd.

So I held it down a bit below my waist, framed the scene and then just as I pushed the shutter, Kalib moved, halfway out of the frame. This was okay - I like the picture this way - but I still wanted to get a frame with the uniformed man standing behind Kalib with Kalib's face visible.

So I tried again and I sort of got it, but on a bright day when I am holding the pocket camera a ways from my face, I can see the relationships of the more prominent shapes to each other, but some of the little details disappear, such as light fixtures in the background.

And so I wound up taking this image, with the light fixture appearing to be a goofy hat atop his head, or perhaps a bizarre implant.

I had to try one more time.

I decided that the only way that I could be certain to get the image as I wanted was to drop down to one knee so that I would be looking directly into the LCD and could clearly see all the detail.

At the moment that I dropped down and raised the camara, however, the uniformed man stepped backwards, in the belief that he had just exited the frame.

"You're part of the scene," I protested, "you don't need to step out of the picture."

"I really shouldn't be in the picture," he said.

But he is.

A close look at the shield patch on his shoulder reveals that he is a private security guard - for whom I do not know - not a municipal policeman.

I ordered Kosher beef with onions and potato chips for Margie, Kosher beef plain for Kalib and Kosher Polish with onions and chips for me.

It doesn't really matter to me if a hot dog is Kosher or not, but the menu was exclusively Kosher.

Margie and Jobe joined us on a nearby bench. The food proved excellent, the conversation stimulating. Kalib held up a potato chip and mused with wonder as to how such a thing ever managed to be created in a universe so vast, diverse and ALMOST entirely empty of potatoes as ours is.

Kalib grew quite excited when a formation of military jets, presumably from Elmendorf AFB, came flying by. "Jehhh! Jehhh!" he shouted as he pointed at the jets. Actually, he is pointing a bit in front of them. The jets are very difficult to see in this tiny reproduction. If you look very closely at the somewhat larger version in the slide show, a bit over the roof to the right of Kalib's finger, you can barely make them out as tiny dots.

They show up a little better in the original, full-resolution image, but even there they are tiny.

After the jets had flown by and we had finished our hot dogs, we burped politely and then climbed into the car headed towards Wasilla and home. Along the way, I was surprised to see that one traffic officer had pulled over another. I wonder if he had been speeding?

I'll bet he felt a little silly when he asked his fellow, "could I see your license, please?" They have probably known each other for years, perhaps decades.

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In part 3, Kalib and Jobe will arrive at their grandparents home. They will grow sleepy. I may post it tonight or I may post it in the morning. I am kind of sleepy myself and I have other things I need to do.

Margie and I take Kalib and Jobe for five days, part 1: Kalib takes a bump

Lavina had to go to a work-related conference in Las Vegas that lasts all weekend through Monday and Jacob took a couple days off work to go with her. Margie and I agreed to take care of Kalib and Jobe while they are gone. So, late Friday morning, I climbed into the Escape and drove off to Anchorage to pick Kalib, Jobe and Margie up and bring them back home to Wasilla. Remember - Margie has been spending her week days in Anchorage, babysitting Jobe.

I pulled into Jacob and Lavina's driveway and saw Kalib, greeting me through the living room window.

I went inside, where Margie and Kalib were watching something on the TV. Jobe was napping.

Soon, Melanie showed up. Lavina had left in tears early in the morning - something like 5:30 AM - because she did not want to leave her babies behind. After putting in a good morning's work, Jacob was going to catch an afternoon flight and Melanie had come to drive him to the airport.

As she waited for Jacob, Jobe awoke from his nap. She went and got him.

Soon, Kalib came running, laughing, to crash into his aunt, but he bumped his lip on the armrest of the chair. He began to cry.

Kalib cries, grips Melanie's hand and pulls it toward his wound. Jobe is unmoved by his brother's plight.

Kalib feels his wound and gives his Aunt Melanie a pleading look.

He studies the thing that hurt him.

Aunt Melanie extends a hand of comfort.

He looks up into her eyes.

Soon, the pain is gone. Kalib is happy, laughing again. He sees his aunt walking across the dining room floor and launches a surprise attack.

After striking from the back, he cuts in from the front.

The attack comes to a joyful end.

Next, Melanie is amused by Jobe.

In my next post, which could go up in as little as half-an-hour and as much as four, five, six, seven or more hours from now, we will see Kalib golf, we will all go downtown, where Kalib and I will intimidate a cop, to eat hot dogs.

I don't know how many posts this series will include. Seeing as how we have these two until Tuesday afternoon and tomorrow we expect to see some dinosaurs, it could be several.

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