We celebrate Margie's birthday and then wind up in the ditch

The knock on the wall caused me to leave my computer and go into the house for the party, but I was surprised to find that not everybody was present. The food was ready, but people were still here and there. 

Charlie and Melanie, for example, were out in the back yard. I was a little distressed to see Charlie sitting in that chair, because last week, I saw Muzzy lift his leg and pee on it.

It rained after that, so hopefully it was okay.

Kalib peeks out to check on Charlie, Melanie and me.

I go back in and close the screen door. Kalib wants back in.

It was an Apache-Navajo kind of meal, with frybread and beans. I made mine into a classic Navajo/Apache taco, with the beans, onions, salsa, quacamole, tomotoes, peppers, grated cheddar cheese and sour cream folded into the fry bread.

I meant to photograph it so that you could see, but I got so busy eating it that I forgot.

Lavina helps Kalib draw a little heart on his grandmother's birthday card. This is what I wrote: "September 5, 1949, was the best day of my life even though I was not yet conceived..." followed by some stuff about love.

There was one piece of frybread left, so I had Margie pose with it, just so you can see what it looks. After that, I ate half of it and Charlie ate the other half.

 I stepped out for a little bit and when I stepped back in, I was surprised to see Steffers sitting there, eating an Apache/Navajo taco. Lavina must have cooked some more frybread up, so I shot this picture. Steffers, who is Iñupiat, was on her way to a Rodney Atkins concert at the Fair, but she is competing with her sister for Kalib's love, so she stopped by to see him first - and to wish Margie a happy birthday as well as congratulate Jacob for being commissioned into the Commission Corp.

Margie prepares to blow out her candle. Not only is she actually older than one, there isn't even a "1" in her age. But there was only one candle in the house and it was "1."

Margie reads her card. She was pleased.

Margie opens a present from her kids, all of whom were here except for Rex and Stephanie. Rex works seven days a week, usually, and long hours, too. We sorely missed the two of them, but Margie was pleased with the gift.

Jacob hands her the first serving of cake and ice cream.

After we ate our cake and ice cream, some of us wanted coffee. It was evening, now, just after 7:00, but Charlie, Melanie, Lisa and I went out and bought some at Little Miller's on the Park's anyway. When we returned home, more guests had arrived and there was no empty space into the driveway. So I began to pull into the ditch.

"Dad!" Melanie scolded. "What are you doing? Don't drive into the ditch! Dad! Dad! Don't do it, Dad!"

But I did. We all got out. Everything was fine.

"That's so Wasilla!" Melanie said.

How the contest between Senator Lisa Murkowski and toddler Kalib turned out

I awoke with a tough decision to make - go to the town hall meeting being sponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski or follow Kalib to the Alaska State Fair. Ever since I learned about the town hall two or three weeks ago, I had been eagerly looking forward to it. I had prepared a little argument in my head and was ready to deliver. I knew it would upset some people but I suspected that they would not get so unruly and belligerent as we have seen in newscasts from the Lower 48 - but if they did, I was ready.

I had been debating whether to bring my big pro DSLR cameras or just the pocket camera and I had good arguments for each.

And then last night I learned that today was kid's day at the fair and Kalib would be going. I wanted to photograph that glorious expedition.

Two readers weighed in with opposing advice. Said aksuzyq, "Come to the fair. We will be there!"

To be moseying about and all of sudden have someone squeal, "Kalib!" and then come up and introduce herself - that would be fun. Good argument.

Omegamon said, "Go to Murkowski's meeting. We need some folks there who are for health care reform, so the yellers and shouters don't give the impression that everyone agrees with them."

There has been a curious phenomena at work here in Alaska. It seems that when Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat, holds town halls, most who come and sound out are in favor of health care reform. When Republican Murkowski does, it seems that most who speak up are against.

So, yes, indeed, she needs to hear from those of us who would like to see her do what I believe she knows at a fundamental level is right, but she does not want to buck party politics. And party politics right now is to bring down Barack Obama, at all costs and facts be damned.

As I mulled my decision, Margie and Lavina fed Kalib his oatmeal.

Finally, I decided to follow my grandson to the fair - and here is why: First, I have made my position on this matter known to Murkowski. I sent my first email to her several months ago and in the past couple of weeks I have sent her three more. I have called her office and left her a message.

I have stated my position in various online news forums, including my comment on the Bob Herbert column that was chosen most recommended by New York Times readers.

I have committed myself to attend a function in Anchorage September 3 that is designed to give both Murkowski and Begich a send-off message as they get ready to return to session in Washington, DC. So it is not as if I have not taken a stand on the matter.

And, the hard fact is, I could wave my hands all about at the town hall but many people would be doing the same and the odds are that Murkowski would never have called on me.

Most importantly, Kalib would be attending the fair as a one-year-and-seven-month-old only one time in his life. He has reached that absolutely magical stage where everything that he sees and touches is a new and wonderful discovery - and this year he would discover the fair.

Sure, he will get excited about it in subsequent years, but this year he would discover it. In his entire, life, he will make that discovery but once.

And I wanted to be there to observe and document the wonder of it all.

First, though, I had to take a short, vigorous, bike ride. So I did, and as I pumped the pedals toward home, I was surprised to see these three walking through the rain toward me.

So I stopped and laid my bike down. Kalib had to check it out - because, as I noted, everything is a new discovery to him.

He did not care that it was raining. This made me glad, because it would almost certainly be raining at the fair.

And then he decided to check out a mud puddle. It looked like he was going to stomp in it...

...but then he suddenly held back, but with great excitement, contemplated the possibilities..

He decided to go for it, but stepped cautiously.

And then he stomped his way through. Soon, we were all back home. His parents said we would leave within the hour. 

So I took a shower.

When I got out, Jake informed me that Kalib was exhausted, was going to sleep and that the trip to the fair was off.

At this point, there was about 15 minutes left in the Murkowski town hall.

Sometimes, life just plays funny tricks on you.

The thing that we mostly do at the fair is overeat. Not knowing what else to do, I suggested that we go somewhere else and overeat, but noted that one of the parents would have to stay home to watch over the dozing Kalib.

So Jacob stayed home. Margie hobbled out on her crutches and she, Lavina and I went to Jalepeno's. It was the first time that we had been there since May. Lavina insisted that she pay.

I invite her and she pays. I must invite her more often.

Kalib: the one who is about to change his life

Lavina brought home the latest ultrasound of the next Hess, our new grandchild-in-waiting, today. We do not know the sex and nobody wants to know until the birth, but, as you can see, boy or girl, (s)he is mighty handsome and beautiful, all at once.

Cute, too - just like innocent little Kalib is cute.

Last night as we lay in separate beds, waiting for her latest injury to heal, Margie expressed the longing she feels for Kalib, now that he is back at daycare and she can watch over him no longer.

Kalib and his mom.

How precious is one month? I walk, meet a friend who has discovered that she has a deadly cancer, but is determined to beat it

I passed these chickens as I walked, and thought of the day two years shy of four decades ago when I shot a pig between the eyes and then cut the heads off 76 chickens. It was a great feast, held in honor of a man 13 months dead, and it happened on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, not far from the new bank of the dammed Missouri River.

As I walked further, I saw a blond lady walking in the opposite direction, coming towards me. I had not seen her for a couple of months, since just before I left for the Arctic Slope in June. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, our paths have often crossed either on foot, on bicycle or, in the days prior to Serendipity, on cross-country skis.

Before Serendipity, these path-crossings happened mostly on trails, deep in the woods, but this cannot be anymore. Always, when we meet, we stop and visit for awhile.

"You're back!" she smiled. I noticed that she seemed more thin, more gaunt, then I had ever seen her. I attributed this to increasing age, and yet it seemed like too much aging to have happened in just two months.

She asked me how things were so I told her about Margie, and her fall. She listened and offered words of sympathy and consolation. Then, after a couple of minutes of this, she asked, "do you want to hear my story now?"

She had been suffering some abdominal discomfort for awhile and then had finally been able to go in for a cat scan. Immediately afterward, apparently before examining the cat scan, the doctor took off on a two-week vacation. 

Immediately after he returned, she received a call. Right after that, she checked into the hospital and got her gall-bladder removed.

During her surgery, the doctor discovered that she has cancer on her liver. Now she plans to see a specialist in the Lower 48. If that surgery goes well, then the odds are fairly good that she will have another year of life ahead of her. Without the surgery, or if it does not go well, she has only months.

"This is not right," she said.

"Can I give you a hug?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and she her's around me. She squeezed hard. It was a long hug. "It's hard," she said. "It's so hard."

She is a strong, tough, lady who has always kept herself physically fit. "If this had been done right," she said of her medical care. "I could have had months more." Months doesn't sound like long, but when you get down to counting in months, then how precious is even one month?

"I'm going to beat it," she said. "I'm going to."

Before we parted, she told me to pass her condolences along to Margie. "Tell her I hope she heals soon."

Margie just received some good news from the doctor. The original diagnosis - that there was no break but almost certainly ligament damage which might or might not require surgery, was completely wrong.

The break, as I have already noted, was not in her knee but on the outside of her femur, where it joins the knee. Now she learned that her ligaments were not damaged. She will not need surgery. Just time for the femur to heal.

So all that pain that we thought was due to ligament damage that really wasn't there was actually due to the break that we thought she did not have.

I told her about the blond lady. She cried.

She is a good woman, my Margie. 

And my daughter-in-law, Lavina, napping there on the couch beside her?

She is a good woman, too.

I drop Margie off for her MRI, see sights, big man gets stuck in children's slide, a femur fracture is found

"No, Royce!" I shouted as the old man orange cat ran through the door and dashed outside. I was about to drive Margie to town for her MRI and I wanted him to stay in the house. Even so, he went outside. After I helped Margie into the car, I picked Royce up and put him back inside the house.

"Where do you want to eat?" I asked Margie, once we got to town. She mentioned a couple of possibilites but when I noted that we had not yet feasted at the any of the Fourth Avenue hot dog stands this summer, she got excited.

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "Let's go for hot dogs."

So, while Margie waited in the car, I bought two reindeer dogs. As the vendor prepared them, a guy roared by on a loud motorcycle. "What's this guy who comes by here everyday at the same time on his motorcycle going to do when winter comes?" the vendor asked.

I did not have the answer.

"I don't understand people who have to drive loud bikes," he continued. "Who are they trying to impress? I drive a bike, but it's not loud. A bike doesn't have to be loud."

I handed the money to the pretty young woman who works with him and who might be his wife and he handed me the hotdogs. I took them back to the car, along with Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and original Lay's Potato Chips. Margie and I sat there and ate them as the rain drummed on the roof.

It was the nicest time that we had experienced since she got injured and the dogs were delicious. I must go back and have another, but I think I will get beef next time, or maybe Kosher Polish.

I could not accompany Margie to the MRI room, so I dropped her off. I was told that the MRI would take 25 minutes, so I headed off to see what sights I might see. I had not gone far before I saw a young man push a woman in a wheelchair across the road as another man crossed in the opposite direction, carrying what appeared to be two cups of coffee.

The rain fell upon them all, just as the Bible says it does.

It didn't fall upon me, though, because I was in the car.

But not for long. Lisa had left her driver's license at Penney's, Penney's had sent it to us, so, as Margie lay in the MRI machine, I took it to the Alaska Native Medical Center's Family Medicine Clinic where Lisa works and brought it to her.

She then took a break and followed me back to the car. We then stood in the rain for just a little bit and discussed important things.

We hugged. "Bye, Dad," she said. I drove away.

To kill time, I circled the Alaska Native Medical Center itself and as I did, an airplane came flying by. At that very moment, Margie was in the tube, getting her knee cat-scanned. She did not like it. She felt claustrophobic, she kept her eyes closed and focused upon mental images of Kalib, running, laughing, playing. She saw him pull the telephone book off of the tiny table that it sits on, place it on the floor and then dance upon it - just the way he did yesterday.

She saw him pull Kleenix's, one after the other, out of the box and smile ever so sweetly and mischievously, as he drop them to the floor - as he did just a few months ago. She saw him at just a few weeks of age as he sat in his car seat in the back seat of the rental car and she and his mom drove across the Navajo Reservation to introduce him to his other grandma and a host of aunts, uncles and cousins.

She saw him as they drove on to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and then how happy her own mother had been when infant Kalib met his only living great-grandparent.

She replayed scenes from his whole life thus far in her mind, right up to that moment when we stood outside the door to the birthing room and heard his first, beautiful, cry.

Next I drove up onto the campus of Alaska Pacific University, where I saw these children, gathered in a circle.

I then returned to ANMC, parked the car, and headed toward the building. There is a children's playground just outside the door to the emergency room, where I would enter the hospital. I saw a small child climbing into the slide, helped by his Dad.

The small child's mother scolded the dad. "He's not going to like it!" she warned. "He's going to be frightened." Just the same, the dad gave the small child a shove and down into the tube he disappeared.

His mother readied her hands to catch him.

Then the small child began to scream. He had gotten stuck, somewhere in the darkness within the tube.

So the dad climbed in, to see if he could unstick him.

The small child got the hang of it and came out with a smile on his face. Now the Dad was stuck. He could not go up. He could not go down. Why... look at the kid! It's my own grandson, Kalib! He had come to ANMC to greet his grandmother when she came out of the MRI tube. That must mean that the dad stuck in this tube... is my own son... Jacob.

Jacob wiggled a bit, and finally he slid out. Kalib headed back, ready to go again.

Margie had not yet exited her tube. I strolled through the hospital, looking at the art, reminded of what life was like in Alaska just a short time ago.

Finally, Margie hobbled out into the hallway and headed for the car. She did not know that Jacob, Kalib and Lavina were behind her.

"Kalib!" she squealed when she discovered them. "Thank you! You got me through the MRI. I kept seeing you in my mind and that's what got me through."

When we reached the car, Margie handed me her crutches so that she could climb in. Kalib took the crutches away from me and handed them right back to her. 

So she put them on the floor and then climbed in. Kalib was very pleased, for he knew that he had done something good for his grandmother.

Kalib, Jacob and Lavina then went off to do some house shopping. Margie and I met Melanie at the Title Wave Kaladi Brothers coffee shop, where we discussed the airplanes that fly over her new house, renovations that she wants to make, the dogs that come and pee in her yard, her cats and other important things.

It was even better than sitting in the car, eating hotdogs. It was, in fact, the most pleasant experience that I have shared with Margie since she got hurt, and all the more pleasant because Melanie was there, encouraging her mom not to be discouraged. "It will be better, soon," Melanie soothed.

It already seemed quite a bit better, although we did not know what secrets the MRI would reveal.

Shortly after we said goodbye to Melanie and began the drive back to Wasilla, we got a message that Margie's doctor wanted her to call, so she did. The doctor had taken a look at the MRI and had immediately discovered something the original x-rays had not. 

Margie did break a bone when she fell. Not her knee cap, but her femur, right on the outside where it meets the knee.

"Try not to put any weight on it," the doctor said.

We have yet to get a report on any ligament damage.

It still rains and as I sit here typing this on my computer, I hear the whistle of a train, passing by miles from here. It seems kind of odd, but sometimes when it rains around here, sound really travels.