The boys come out for the weekend, Muzzy is shorn; the landing in Point Hope; the unsure takeoff

The boys came out this morning. They are going to spend the weekend with us so that their parents can work on their house.

It was their mom who brought them. She brought Muzzy, too. Muzzy had been to the dog groomers and now had a bit of the poodle look. Lavina and Muzzy couldn't stay, because Lavina had to get to work. So she opened the back door to her car and Muzzy jumped in.

He jumped right back out. So she had him jump in again. I think Muzzy enjoys making multiple jumps into the car.

And yes, my recent Arctic series is still in the works, still coming. To prove it, here is a picture that I took exactly one month ago today, right after we landed in Point Hope.

Anyway, the editing is going very slowly, because I don't have much time for it. Also, it just dawned on me that this is a holiday weekend and so my readership will be down - especially if the weather stays as beautiful, sweet and magnificent as it is right now. I will not bother to post the series until the holiday has passed and sunburnt readers come straggling back.

Perhaps I drive some readers nuts with my ever-shifting plans and frequent delays, many of which I just let slip unseen into the past as the present takes over.

Look at this way - you are getting to observe an experiment being conducted by a photographer/writer of at least some talent who has spent the past 35 years making a living in certain ways that he sees coming to an end. These ways of making a living have not ended for him yet, but the end is swiftly coming and it will soon be over and archived.

So he is looking for a way to both survive and create in the new reality that is ever shifting in front of him, dominated by bright, young, energetic and creative talent who understand current trends and digital code much better than he does.

This blog is not the vehicle that will allow him to truly survive in the looming new times, but it is a part of getting there, a part that he clings to as he struggles to find the solution, to take the next step, knowing just what he wants to do but not yet how to make it happen.

Will he succeed? Or will he fail?

I bet on success.

But it is a bet, a gamble, the outcome greatly in question.

So keep coming back, keep watching. Take a front-row seat and watch this spectacle unfold. In time, the answer will be clear.

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Kalib flicks dirt into Melanie's face - is he outgrowing the spatula phase? Branson graduates; Margie goes and I am left alone again

Melanie showed up late in the afternoon and gave Jim a pet as Kalib slyly observed.

This is the shoe Melanie wore on her left foot. The one she wore on her right foot looks pretty much the same, except that the toe tapers in the opposite direction.

When next I observed Melanie and Kalib, they had moved to the front yard. Kalib was busy observing something himself. What could it be?

It was ants. Fat, black, ants.

Not long afterward, I found them back in the back yard, a bit beyond the spot where Margie had placed the dinosaur boots that Kalib had muddied in the swamp the day before out to air dry after she had cleaned them.

But what are Kalib and Melanie up to in the background?

And what is that in Kalib's hands?

Oh - the thing that Kalib holds is a weed plucking tool. And right there in front of him is a dandelion, yet to bloom. Melanie is helping him shove the weed plucker beneath the dandelion so that he can yank it right out of the ground by the root.

Kalib yanks the dandelion from the earth and sends it and dirt flying straight into his Aunt Melanie. This turned into a big game - one that the two repeated time and time again, until all the new dandelion plants had been rooted out.

Even so, those dandelions will pop right back up again.

I view Kalib plucking out a dandelion from another angle.

Dandelion and dirt come flying right toward me.

As usual, Kalib brought his spatula to the house with him - but not once did I see him carry it or play with it. I only saw it sitting here, atop the classifieds on the coffee table.

Margie says she saw him play with it. She said he used to flip junk mail like pancakes. There, lying on the floor, you can see one of the pieces of junk mail that Margie saw Kalib flip.

Still, he basically left it alone.

It makes me wonder if he is outgrowing his spatula phase?

If so, the thought makes me a little sad.

It has to happen, sooner or later, though.

Later would be okay with me.

The original plan had been that Jacob, Lavina and Jobe would come out and pick Kalib up Sunday afternoon. Instead, Lavina called to say that Jobe was still sick and to ask if, instead, we could bring Kalib home and then leave Margie there to babysit Jobe for a day or two or a week or however long it would take until he was well enough to return to daycare.

Since Melanie had come, she drove Margie and Kalib back to town with her.

And once again, after just three days and nights together with Margie, I am left alone with the cats. Caleb is here, of course, but he works all night and sleeps all day, except for when he goes out to hit golf balls.

Now I back up to an earlier point in the day:

Branson Starheim, of Metro Cafe, just graduated from kindergarten Thursday night. I promised Carmen that if she brought him and his diploma to Metro Cafe I would take a photograph to commemorate this landmark achievement.

So she did and I took a pretty standard study of Branson and Carmen, posing with the diploma as Branson sat on his bike, but afterward I took this one of Carmen helping Branson don his crash helmet and I like it better.

Following the diploma photo session, Branson, the graduate, zooms past me on his bike. Branson calls me, "Uncle Bill."

Now - about that delayed Arctic Series that I had promised to run this week: I am going to! Starting tomorrow. It's just that I did not know that Kalib was going to spend the weekend with us. He did, and I had to post a few pics  for all of his many fans from Alaska to Arizona to India to see.

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Kalib gets his shoe stuck in the mud; straight "A" college student

Once again, Jobe had been feeling under the weather with his respiratory infection, so Margie and I went into town, picked Kalib up and brought him home to spend the weekend with us in order to make it easier for his parents to care for Jobe and do all they needed to do.

After he got up in the morning, Kalib laid lazily back down upon the couch.

He didn't stay lazy for long, though. Soon he was out in the backyard, gathering golf balls.

He knew just what to do with them.

Then he wandered down to the back part of the back yard.

Kalib, at the edge of the woods.

Soon, he wandered off into the trees. I wanted to follow, but I had let Jim out. I needed to keep my eye on Jim.

So Margie went off into the woods with Kalib while I kept my eye on Jim. Jim had not been out the whole time that I had been traveling, as he only goes out when I can watch him and make certain that he does not wander off and get eaten or run over.

It drove me a little nuts, though. 

I wanted to see what Kalib and his grandma were up to.

Finally, I got Caleb to take Jimmy into the house and I went off to find Kalib and Grandma. I found them returning from whatever adventure they had been on.

Then Kalib turned around and took off back in the direction from whence they had appeared. Margie followed. I followed, too.

Kalib left our property altogether and went out into what we still call "the swamp," or "the marsh." Dodd Shay, the friendly property owner, does not like me to call it "swamp" or "marsh."

"Meadow," he insists. "It's a meadow."

Perhaps he is right now. But for the first 10 or 15 years that we lived here, it was a swamp. If Kalib had been where he is in this picture, he would have been emerged in water to his hips - especially this time of year, when the snows have been melting.

Still, the swamp is not completely dry. A bit of water and a bit of muck still remains out there. Kalib scurried off to this four wheeler track, left by vandals who ignored all of Shay's signs telling them to keep their machines out of the meadow because machines damage it.

It looked to me like Kalib had stuck his foot into mud. "Kalib," his grandma and I both shouted out to him. "Don't put your foot in the mud! Take your foot out of the mud."

He just stood there, keeping his foot in the mud, smiling mischievously at us.

Finally, he pulled his foot out of the mud. We called him to come to us, but he would not. He just stood there with a troubled expression on his face.

No matter how much we called, he would not budge.

Finally, I walked to him. When I saw that he now wore only one of his little dinosaur boots, I understood the troubled expression. Look to the right of the frame. There you will see the little dinosaur boot that goes on his left foot - stuck in the mud.

His grandma came, pulled the boot out of the mud and helped him back into it.

Kalib did not want to walk in his mud-filled boot. He wanted to be carried. I offered to carry him, but he would not let me. Only grandma would do. Kalib is grandma's boy.

Then he got down and walked.

How did he get his knees so muddy?

Come night, Kalib and his grandma sat on the couch and reminisced about the day's grand adventure. They watched movies with Uncle Caleb.

A little after 10 PM, Kalib fell sound asleep in his grandma's embrace.

Yes, Kalib is Grandma's boy.

Grandpa then carried him into bed, tucked him in and there he slept for the next 11 hours.

Wow!

While I was traveling, Lisa completed all her class projects, took her finals and wound up with straight A's. It had been a very tough semester for her. She carried a full load, worked full time, and had to take on extra tasks such as dog sitting to make ends meet.

Once, we found her in tears and tried to give her some money to make it a little easier, but she would not take that money. She wanted to do it on her own and she did.

Right after she graduated from high school, Lisa went excitedly off to college in Durango, Colorado, but the year proved disastrous for her. She had an alcoholic roommate and she grew so homesick that when the year ended, she came home and dropped out of college.

But now she knows that college is something she needs to complete to go where she wants to go.

We are very proud of her.

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They'rrrrrrre baaaaack.... in the blog: Jobe, Lavina, Kalib, Jacob and Margie - in that order

How long has it been since this face has appeared in my blog? Six weeks? Something like that. And look, in this, the very first frame that I shot of him upon our reunion, he is just standing around. STANDING around. Not wobbling shakily. Standing.

As though it is no big deal at all. As though it is just something that a little kid would be expected to do.

Jobe. 

Standing around.

And he walks around at will, too.

I was worried that after all this time, he might have forgotten his grampa. Remember how he loved me? How he adored me?

Has he now forgotten me?

After a brief period of study and contemplation, he walked right over and sat down on my lap. He had not forgotten.

And then he went out to play with Martigny. Martigny did not not want to play with him. Maybe it was the "woof" on his shirt that scared her away.

I'm afraid Jobe has been sick the past couple of days. Respiratory infection. 

Jobe needed rest.

Still, he gets up and moves happily around. He is getting better.

Then Jacob called, to say that he and Kalib were coming home from their walk and would soon reach the nearby park. I went out to see and this is the first frame I shot, right after they came into view.

Last time I saw them, there was a still a good amount of snow here. Now the leaves have come out.

Kalib went straight for the slide. As he started down, he looked up at his dad to see what his dad would do.

His dad came sliding after...

Kalib threw some pebbles into a slide chute and then watched as they tumbled and slid back down.

Then he ran off and his dad chased after.

Soon, they were in the house, eating popsicles. When offered a variety of colors, Kalib chose the green one. Then he saw his mom pick a red one for herself and decided that the red one would be better instead.

I also had a red one.

The red ones are best.

Although the green is pretty good.

It was about 10:30 PM now. Margie's flight was scheduled to arrive at 1:38 AM. I had come in early just so I could finally see the boys, but Jobe was now asleep and the rest would soon join them.

That meant I had three hours to wait.

The prospect horrified me.

What I could I do with all that time?

I could go sit in a bar and sip root beer, wink my eyes at honkey tonk women and say stupid things as they danced and sauntered across the floor.

Instead, I laid back on the couch. I sank right into it.

I closed my eyes. The lids were so heavy, I did not feel like I could ever open them again.

I fell asleep right there. At 1:09 AM, I forced myself to get up and go. I drove to the airport and picked Margie up. Her plane had come in half-an-hour early and she was standing there waiting when I pulled up, so I stopped, she put the one bag that she had left with in the back plus the other that she had bought and filled in Arizona and jumped in. 

I took off without even taking a picture.

As regular readers know, it is our tradition to go out for breakfast the morning after either one of us returns from a trip.

So this morning we went to Family Restaurant - no, not Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant but Denali Family Restaurant, just a few miles further up the Parks Highway.

I would not have even known about this brand new restaurant had I not gone to Fairbanks to cover Katie John's graduation, but I saw it as I drove home.

If they had named it, "Mckinley Family Restaurant," I would never have tried it. I would not have walked through the door. I try never to patronize a business that bears the name, "Mckinley." I stick to "Denali."

Inside, it was very much like Mat-Su Family Restaurant. The decor was similar, the menu similar, the food similar and the plates exactly the same. Even all the staff that I could see, including the waitresses, were staff I recognized from Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

So I thought maybe it was an extension, built by the same owner to compete with him/herself.

No. It wasn't. It was built by a competitor and the staff that I could see had all been hired away.

Breakfast was very good - the hash browns cooked just right and, I hate to say it, better than at Mat-Su. 

I will still continue to patronize Mat-Su. It is a bit closer. And Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant has helped me bear some extremely hard mornings. Very hard mornings. Mornings that followed nights of turmoil and grief, nights without sleep.

So I will keep going to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

But I will patronize Denali, too. Good hash browns are a big draw to me.

Margie enjoyed it, too.

It was the first time she had drank coffee in weeks, she said. 

She stayed with her sister, who remains a pretty active, decent and abiding Mormon. She allows visitors to brew coffee for themselves, but Margie did not feel like brewing coffee for just one so she abstained.

Tomorrow, I will discuss a recent NPR story about the health benefits of coffee - particularly for the prostate - and will thank a generous, almost not-anonymous lady who bought me a coffee at Metro the other day.

Margie is glad to be home, but she says it feels cold here.

"I have come back to winter," she said.

This, even though the leaves are sprouting out here and it snowed three inches at her sisters house 6000 feet up in Arizona her final morning there.

Still, it was warmer there than here.

Which it ought to have been.

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(warning - slideshow contains additional photos of Jobe and Kalib not seen in the actual post)

All alone at Family on Easter Sunday morning

Margie has been gone for just about a week now and I have breakfasted out altogether too often, so I had resolved that on this morning, both for the sake of our pocketbook and my health, I would stay home and cook oatmeal.

But when I woke up for the final time, buried in cats, I did not want to get up at all. I certainly did not want to get up and cook oatmeal. So I lay there, thinking about it, and it suddenly occurred to me that it was Easter Sunday. I did not think it right that on Easter Sunday, I should get up, cook oatmeal and eat it all alone on the couch.

I decided that, fiscal prudence and dietary health be damned - on both counts, I am pretty much hopelessly lost, anyway - I was going to have my Easter breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

Had Caleb been around, I would have invited him, too, but even though we sleep under the same roof - I sporadically at night and he through astoundingly long hours in the day - I rarely see him. He was off, somewhere.

So off I went to Family, alone.

"Do you need a menu?" Connie asked, knowing full well that I wouldn't.

"No," I answered, "I'll go with the omelette today."

"Denver, with mushrooms, hash browns lightly cooked, twelve-grain toast on the delay," she filled in the rest. Normally, she would have been 100 percent right, but today, instead of toast, I decided I wanted pancakes.

A bit later, Norman came walking by, carrying coffee and water. 

I got to thinking about my grandsons, who I have not seen now for a couple of weeks. They will spend today with Margie, her mom, their parents, Lavina's mom, sister and other family members from both the Apache and Navajo sides of the family at Margie's place of birth - Carrizo Canyon, on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation.

It will almost certainly be warm, and they will gather seasoned oak and make a cooking fire. On that fire, they will cook Apache bread, slices of steak, hot dogs, and multi-colored Apache corn.

The adults will hide colored eggs here and there and then the little ones will go find them.

Some of those eggs will be hidden in plain sight and the bigger little ones will have to leave these eggs be.

These eggs will be for Jobe to find.

And yes, since he left here two weeks ago, Jobe has become a full-fledged walker.

In my mind, I can just picture the gleam in his eyes and his bright smile, as he toddles excitedly about, grabbing eggs with his chubby little hands. Maybe with a little help and guidance, he will then place his eggs in whatever type of basket he has been given.

And I will miss it.

I, his grandpa, who first photographed him only minutes after his birth, who, despite my wandering ways, have tried hard to document each step of his life as he has moved alone, will miss his first Easter Sunday Easter egg hunt.

Kalib, of course, will now be an old pro at Easter egg hunting. I hope he enjoys it, anyway. I hope he and cousin Gracie have a good time, gathering eggs.

I do pretty good alone. Better than most people, I think.

Yet, I felt awful sad and lonely, as I sat right here, in Family Restaurant, eating my Denver omelette with mushrooms. And yes, as I do throughout each and every day, I thought of Soundarya, too, and wondered how she and Anil might have spent the day, if they had but survived.

Even though she was Hindu, Sandy was very much up on all the Christian holidays.

Then along came Meda, refilling coffee cups. I had not seen Meda before today. She is new on the job - four or five days, she said. She said she loves the job, it is "awesome."

She was a little bit shy and slightly coy, but very friendly and warm and when she poured my refill, I felt a little better.

But still, I needed Jobe... and if not Jobe, at glimpse at that magical beam of the spectrum of life that Jobe currently occupies.

I looked around, and could not see a single child in Family Restaurant. I knew there would be plenty of children later, when families began to drop by after church, but I could see none, now.

And then, just as I finished my last bite, I heard a little squeal, accompanied by the sound of tiny foot-falls pattering rapidly across the floor.

A tiny girl, right about Jobe's age, scampered out of the large dining room beyond.

It was Molly.

Just Jobe's age.

On Easter Sunday morn.

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