Jobe and Kalib stand in as I put, "Contemplating..." on hold for yet another day

Yesterday, before I headed off to the funeral that I had mentioned, Lavina called to let us know that, once again, Jobe was not feeling well and to ask if Margie could come and spend the night and care for him Monday, today. Naturally, we agreed - we would do anything for little Jobe and his big brother, Kalib.

So I dropped her off before I went to the funeral.

As recent readers know, my plan for today was to delve into "contemplating the future of this blog, part 3" and to let three parts do it.

But I have a huge amount of work that I want today on what for me is a most important projectand I do want to be distracted from it any more than necessary, not even by this blog.

So I am going to keep it short and simple. While I will still be working on that project tomorrow, if I can get enough done on it over the next 12 to 14 hours I think I will feel okay about taking a couple of hours in the morning to nail down part 3.

And, as coincidence so often seems to happen in my life, the funeral - or rather my history with the woman for whom the funeral was held - ties into this theme in a way that I had not even considered until mid-way through the services for her.

So I will use a few of those pictures as I contemplate.

In the meantime, here is Margie and Jobe.

Even when he is feeling under the weather, Jobe tends to be optimistic and pleasant.

He is a very rare and wonderful little guy.

He did cry though - he cried when he saw me start to leave. He reached out his arms toward me. 

So I did not leave as quickly as I was going to. I went back, took him in into my arms, retired to the couch and held him for a bit and did a self-portrait of the two of us.

The thought occurred to me that in so doing, the bug that has got him might come and get me, too.

But what the hell. I've been got by lots of bugs in this life. I have always gotten better. Should this one get me, I am certain that I will get better again.

Before I left, I also had to find Kalib with his spatula. I looked into the TV room, that will be his bedroom when the time comes for him to move out of mom and dad's room. There he was, watching TV. He had his spatula with him.

And this from India: Banu and Ravi

Banu and Ravi - parents of Soundarya, Sujitha and Ganesh. It is the morning following the wedding of Soundarya and Anil.

View images as slides

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

Folks, I feel very abrupt today. For many reasons which I will not delve into, save to note that this damn computer, which has served me so well these past three or four years, seems to be getting ready to fail and it is wasting a lot of my time. This post should have been completed an hour ago.

So I am going to be abrupt today.

Sunday, however, was a good day. 

So I will return to Sunday, and will abruptly tell you how Jobe sat down and the waiter came...

Oh, hell... why should I tell you at all?

Look at the picture! You can see for yourself!

There were adults at the table, too. I was there, as well.

When you are little, you are as aware of the bottom of the table as you are the top.

Honk, honk!

At one point, Kalib got up and ran off to another table, being mischievous. He could have got away with it with his dad, but not his Auntie Mel. He had to come back and sit back down.

This is what you call, "sibling rivalry."

After we returned home, Melanie and Charlie tried to get comfortable on the couch. Kalib whipped them with a blanket.

So they got up and danced instead. Kalib played with the voice mail box on the phone. The first message was, "no new messages." So Kalib made it go, "no! no! no! no new. no! no! no new messages." Kind of like a disk dj. 

Then he got into a message left awhile back that I have not bothered to erase.

A gruff but happy sounding voice comes on talking to me, Bill Hess, saying I will know right away who he is and he leaves a number and tells me to get back to him.

I did not know who he was and there was something about the familiarity of the message coming from a voice that I did not recognize at all that put me on a bit of an edge, so I never called back.

Then one day he called back and got me. Turns out, he had spent time in jail in Palmer with a Bill Hess who was not this Bill Hess and that Bill Hess had somehow introduced him to the woman who became his wife and when he saw that this Bill Hess lives in Wasilla he thought it must be the same Bill Hess and so he was just calling to let that Bill Hess who wasn't me know how great everything had worked out with his marriage and to thank that Bill Hess for bringing the two together.

Sorry, I said. Wrong Bill Hess. I haven't been in jail since I got out of Juarez in November of 1969, just in time to eat Thanksgiving dinner in a casino in Las Vegas.

I don't know why we even bother to keep this phone anymore. Everybody calls us on our cells phones. Except for people wanting money, and folks who think they did time with me.

Then Melanie danced with Kalib, who seemed to enjoy it.

Kalib takes a break.

Caleb watched the NFL playoffs.

Lisa talked to Bryce on the phone.

At 4:00 PM, a bunch of us went out to get coffee. Metro is closed on Sunday so we went to the place at the corner of Fishhook and Seldon. As we waited for our coffee, we saw an exchange being made. Money for pizza. 

Now, there are two things notable about this picture. It is 4:00 PM and look how much light is in the sky! The long nights are in rapid retreat.

Also, the temperature stood at about -10 F (-23 C) but no real snow on the ground. Just ice and a hard crust.

Lisa and Jobe, back at the house.

After we returned home, Kalib laid his spatula upon the floor and ran circles around it. 

As always happens, it was soon time for them all to go. Lisa and Kalib head out the door.

Melanie and Kalib walk to the car.

They backed out and then, with their headlights shining through their frozen exhaust, began the drive back to Anchorage, where they would drop Kalib and Jobe off with their parents.

"It sure is quiet in here," Margie noted, after they had been gone awhile. 

I had not seen Chicago since Kalib and Jobe had arrived. Now that they had left, she came back out. 

Quiet is how Chicago likes it.

And this one from India:

This is what it is like riding on the Indian highways. Constantly. While it is exhilarating to a certain degree and on the surface seems to carry a bit of romance, it is deadly. And once that deadliness catches up to you it is awful and that, more than all the other reasons combined, is why I feel so abrupt today.

View images as slides

On the seventh day: Kalib of the chocolate face; Jobe adores his grandpa

Okay. It is Sunday now - the first day of the calendar week, yet the one that much of the world has chose to recognize as the seventh, to be set aside as a day of rest.

To be frank, I do not think that I will rest much today, but I will try to stay away from my work as much as I can force myself to do so and I will spend some time with my daughters and Charlie, who came out and took us to breakfast today and are still here. I will also spend time with Margie, Jobe and Kalib, and probably get in a few words with Caleb, who is in the house but present elsewhere for the NFL pro-football playoffs.

So I will keep this blog post short and chocolate sweet.

I shot a few hundred frames Saturday, but I have not even looked at them yet - with the exception of this one, which is the very last frame that I shot, shortly before we went to bed.

Well, there was this one, too, which I shot not as part of the day's usual take, but on my iPhone, as he lay upon my chest, so that I could quickly send it to Lavina in order to her assure her that baby was doing good here, without her, at his grandparents house.

Not to boast or brag or anything, but, to be quite honest, I can never think of having seen a baby take so strongly and quickly to his grandpa as Jobe has to me. As you can see, he adores me. This is not a rare moment, captured well. This is just how it is with him and me. And it has been this way since he first focused his eyes upon the world and landed them upon my homely, graying, bearded face.

I have adored him for all of this time, and more, as well.

So, for today, the seventh day...

Tavra!

View images as slides

The wind tries to blow the moon away; Jimmy is a bad good cat; we pick up Kalib and Jobe; beauty at the cave temples

Again, I found myself walking in the hard, cold, wind which has seemed to become perpetual lately - temperature about 0 F. Yesterday afternoon, I heard a forecast on the radio calling for an overnight high wind advisory, with winds gusting up to 80 mph (130 km/h) at some places in this valley and temperatures going to -20 F (-28 C).

That would be quite a wind-chill factor.

Well, the night has past and none of that quite came true here - maybe it did somewhere else in the valley but not here. Still, it was a mighty cold brisk wind out there and when you went walking in it, it let you know it.

Even so, Ubiquitous Raven came sailing by.

On the moon, there was no wind at all. See how still it is up there?

The day before, a triple stop sign had ordered me to stop three times. Now, I was ordered to stop once, but I was on foot, so I did not obey that order.

Well, I guess I stopped to take the picture.

But not because I was ordered to.

If I were a child, and  had a sled...

So, just why did the chicken cross the road? I don't know, and this dog doesn't either. Furthermore, neither one of us cares. If a chicken wants to cross the road, that's the chicken's business.

Why do people make such a big deal about a chicken crossing the road, anyway?

When I left to go on my walk, Jimmy had been sitting on the sill of my office window, looking out. This had made me a bit nervous, as Jimmy can do some pretty bad things when he has the office to himself. He turns off hard drives, erases things from my computer and types gibberish into my stories.

I am not making this up - he does all of these things.

Plus, he loves to push things off counters, desks and tables and watch them fall to the floor.

Even so, he looked so happy in the window sill that I decided to chance it and leave him there.

I came home the back way, through the marsh, hoping that I might find some moose there.

I didn't, but when I came up through our back yard, I saw Jimmy sitting right where I had left him about one hour before.

He had been a good cat.

But then Jimmy is always a good cat, even when he is bad.

I don't know how there could be a better cat than Jimmy.

He is ten-and-a-half years old now.

If he goes before me, which seems quite possible, it will be very hard.

Jacob and Lavina wanted to do some major house cleaning this weekend, so they asked us to take the boys. We agreed and in the late afternoon drove into Anchorage to get them.

As you can see, Anchorage has not been scoured by the same high winds that we have - except for the Anchorage Hillside, populated largely by rich people who every winter endure 100 mph plus winds, but they have a really good view from up there. They can see Cook Inlet, Denali, Foraker and a host of active volcanoes.

The snow did not mostly all blow away there the way it did in Wasilla. Plenty was left behind to weather the big warmup - that warmup now being history.

Here we are, picking up the boys. Muzzy wants to come, too. We will not let him.

Now we are getting ready to leave, but before we do, Lisa stops by. That's her and Jacob in the driveway.

On the way out, we stopped at Taco Bell on Muldoon and found a cop with his lights flashing, parked behind an empty vehicle.

I have no idea what the story was. You could look in the Anchorage Daily News, but I doubt that you will find it there, either.

I could have played the role of the true reporter, gotten out, interviewed the officer, took a picture of any suspect with her hands over her eyes. I could have done something like that. I have those basic skills, you know.

If I had done it, then I could tell you why the cop had stopped behind the empty car.

But I was more interested in eating my burrito than in getting the story.

Nobody can fire me.

This is my blog and if I would rather eat a burrito than report on a cop-stop, I can.

We then drove on to Wasilla. The winds weren't bad at all until we reached the hay flats. Then it felt kind of like being in an airplane, flying through turbulence, except that the bumps and jolts were all lateral - no up and down.

A couple of times, we damn near got blasted out of our lane. I could hear the sound of dust and small pebbles smacking the car.

But we made it. I was glad, too, because if we hadn't have I would never have seen this tanker truck roar through the intersection of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

I don't know about you, but, at the end of a long, hard, tough, day, I really enjoy seeing a truck blast through the intersection like this.

It just takes all the stress that I feel and carries it down the road with it.

Poor truck driver! Now he must deal with that stress.

Better him than me.

He's probably tougher than I am, better able to take it.

Truck drivers are known for being tough, able to take it.

Once in the house, Kalib found a flashlight. I found another. We played flashlight games.

Jobe does not know how to use a flashlight, but that did not stop him from joining in the games.

Yes, Kalib had brought his spatula - none of the expensive, fancy toys that he got for Christmas and his birthday. Just his spatula.

And this from India:

Two girls in front of the cave temples of Badami.

I hate to say this, and I mean no offense to any of my fellow Americans, but after one spends a little time in India and then returns to the US, the way people dress here - at least the women - just seems kind of dull and drab by comparison.

The women in India just dress beautifully - even poverty stricken women, begging in the streets.

They remind me of the Navajo saying, "I walk in beauty."

Badami is a long way from Navajo land, but the red rocks kind of remind me of it, as do temples, built in caves - not the same at all but yet evocative of cliff dwellings.

View as slide show

What would you do if you found $50,000 lying in the road in an unmarked suitcase?

As 2010 drew to its close, Gilford Mongoyak, Jr. was driving near Sam & Lee's Restaurant in his hometown of Barrow when he saw a suitcase lying in the road. Gilford does not own a car, but he had rented this one so that he could take care of some year-end business. Before returning it, he thought that he would just take a nice little evening drive about Barrow and that is what he was doing when he came upon the suitcase.

There were other people out and about, on the road, walking, driving, but no one paid any attention to the suitcase. Gilford drove right past it himself, but then decided that he ought to check it out. He backed up, picked up the suitcase and examined the outside of it.

It carried no identification, so he drove home and took the suitcase inside and showed it to his wife. They did not want to open it, but they did want to return it to its rightful owner and so they opened it up to see if there was any ID inside.

There wasn't, but there was something bundled up in white wrapping paper. "I opened that up," Gilford told me over the phone after I called him to find out this event that I had first learned about through Facebook had come to pass. "I found bills. I said to my wife, "it looks like $10,000."

They did not know what to do, so they started to talk.

"My hands kind of started really shaking with that kind of money right there," he says. "We say, really, what should we do? So my wife and I decided the best thing to do was to take it to Public Safety (Police Department)."

I took the above snapshot of Gilford day last August after I happened upon him as I walked through the Iñupiat Heritage Center in Barrow. I thought that it would be good to include Gilford in a project that I am working on and so I took this quick snapshot to remind me to go back and find him at later date when I had the time to do it right.

So Gilford and his wife took the suitcase to the Police Department. They entered to find a receptionist behind an opaque black window. They stated their business and then a police officer came out to see them.

"You won't believe what I found," Gilford remembers telling him, "look, it's $10,000."

The officer opened up the suitcase and studied the contents

"Then he took a look up at me and said, 'you know what? It's not $10,000. It's $50,000.'"

Gilford asked the officer if anyone was looking for $50,000. The officer told him yes, a woman from Osaka Restaurant.

Due to a back injury, Gilford is unable to work in the labor force that once sustained him. He supports himself primarily through the sale of his art. Here, he has set up in the Heritage Center. Some days, he does okay. Somedays, there are no sales.

Shortly after that, some other officers came in, as well as woman from Osaka who Gilford believes was the owner. I called Osaka to see if could find out who she was, talk to her and get more information, but was told that no one could talk to me about the matter. I also called the Police Department, where a spokesman told me that they could not comment at this time.

Gilford describes the woman as being very happy to get the money back and says she was wearing mink. He believes she had planned to leave on the evening flight south.

"She asked for my name and number. She was happy, shaking," he recalls. "I thought she would call me that night."

She never did call, so a couple of days later, Gilford called her. "I asked her if there is any reward. She said, 'I buy you dinner?'"

The offer did not appeal to him.

There were those who told him that instead of an offer for free meal, he could have kept the entire $50,000 and no one would ever have known.

"A lot of my friends told me that. But I was raised in a good Christian home with a good Christian mom and dad. They always taught me to do the right thing. I have friends who are saying that I was a good Samaritan. My daughter is proud of me." 

His sister, Claudia Mongoyak, who first informed me of Gilford's discovery is also proud of her brother. "I am honored to have such an honest and trustworthy brother," she told me on Facebook.

"My brother Gilford is unemployed due to back problems and makes a living out of selling his carvings and jewelry. He once found a wallker with $500 or $600 in it and called that person and that person was so appreciative to get her wallet back." 

As to the offer of a free dinner at Osaka, "I don't know what to say about that. LOL."

If he could have kept the money, one friend asked, what would he have done with it? "I would have bought a brand new washer and dryer. Our windows are no good. They let too much cold air in. I would have totally fixed the house up.

"I was rich for like 15 or 20 minutes," he laughed.

If anyone should care to learn more about Gilford and his art or to make a purchase, he can be contacted at gmongoyakjr@hotmail.com.

And this from Wasilla:

The holiday is over and the boys have returned to Anchorage to go to day care and be with their parents, but, before they did, Kalib grew bored with doorknobs. He decided the best way to get into a pantry is with his spatula.

When his mom arrived to pick him up, he raced to the window and kissed her through the glass.

Jobe was greatly amused by the walking fingers of his grandma.

Jobe and Kalib spend their last moments with this season's Christmas tree. I am very sad to say it, but next time they come out this tree will be gone.

The holiday season is over.

The carols will now fall silent.

That certain feeling that comes only at Christmas is gone and will not be back for nearly a year.

And this one from India:

About 35 or so miles south of the broiling city of Chennai sits the temple at Mamallapuram, cut entirely out of the rock face of a low cliff.

View images as slides