The Vietnam veteran and the returned Mormon missionary; the bicycle and the wrecked airplane

Doubtless, regular readers are wondering what a man in my financial situation is doing dining out at Mat-Su Valley Restaurant for breakfast? Four nights have now passed since Margie went into Anchorage to stay and take care of baby Jobe and one more will pass until she returns to spend just two nights here before she goes back again.

As much as I love this house and the cats who wake with me, it feels awfully chilly and damn bleak in here in the mornings. Whereas, it will be warm at Family Restaurant. There will be smiling people there, waitresses who will serve me coffee and laugh even if I make an unfunny joke.

This is Jobina, doing just that.

I like the name, "Jobina." It's like a feminine version of Jobe. 

If I can, I always like to get this spot, because from here I have a good view not only of all the people sitting and moving around inside this busy, warm diner, scented with the aroma of breakfast cooking, but of those wandering to and fro outside.

My observations tell me that a very broad array of Wasilla life passes in and out of this diner, particularly at breakfast time.

Also, if I am very lucky and the train comes bye, I can often get a pretty good look at it from this window seat.

So I would rather be here in the midst of all this than all alone inside my chilly house. The melting snows did expose a fair amount of firewood that had been hidden in our yard, so I can always heat the house up, but, by the time it gets comfortable, I will be done with breakfast. 

And even if I have no cash, I do have a credit card. So its off to Family I go.

Plus, to eat here is a sign of optimism, that things will soon get better and I will be able to pay all my bills.

I took this picture for future reference and it had not been my intent to post it just yet. Many veterans come into Mat-Su Family, and I have a desire to know their stories to the extent that they would be willing to share - just as I would like to know the stories of so many who I see gathering at Family. 

I have this idea in my head that as time progresses and I figure out how to fund this blog so that I can have the time to more effectively pursue my goal of finding the soul of Wasilla and to tell such stories, I will do just that. Seeing the hat, I thought this veteran might have a good story to tell, so I took the picture to remind me to look for him in the future, when that time comes.

As it happened, we wound up in line together at the cash register, so I asked if he had been a POW. No, he said, he had friends that had been and the experience had been hell for them. However bad combat might get, he said he had always kept a bullet in reserve for himself, just to make certain that he would never become a POW.

He served in Vietnam in the very early '70s, in what he described as the clean-up stages of the war, as the US was deciding to quit and pull out.

When I talk to such men, I am always self-conscious of the fact that they risked their lives in Vietnam and I did not. It had been my intent to go. When I was a senior at El Camino High School in a suburb of Sacramento, I decided that I would break with what had become the tradition in my family and what all of us males were expected to do. I would not go to Brigham Young University and I would not serve a two-year Mormon mission. I would enlist in the Army, and go for the Green Beret.

But I was in love with a red-headed girl who did decide to go to BYU. I knew that if I did not follow her there to protect my interests, she would marry a returned Mormon Missionary, as any good Mormon girl would.

So, at the last possible moment, I surrendered my plan to enlist, applied to BYU and was accepted. I followed the red-headed girl there and lived in misery as a returned Mormon missionary courted her. We would still get together to share an occasional lunch or movie or a concert and I took her motorcycle riding a couple of times. The the RM who courted her ordered her not to ride with me anymore, as it was just too damn dangerous.

I might crash and break her neck.

She did marry him, but by then I was in love with her best friend and was not troubled.

Vietnam was a very unpopular war and many people felt that the draft was being most unfairly applied. If you were wealthy, a college student, a Mormon missionary or fell into a number of other categories, you could get a deferment and most likely never be drafted to serve.

But if you did not fall into such a category and you were in good health, then you could pretty much count on being drafted.

This unfairness created such an uproar that a lottery system was instated in which each date of the year was drawn at random. If one's birthday came up number one, then, in theory, whether he was rich, a genious in college, a Mormon missionary or whatever, he was going to be drafted.

If one's birthday came up at #365, there was no chance in the world that he would be drafted.

My number came up 321. After that, the draft was not an issue for me anymore.

In the meantime, I found myself the object of a horrendous amount of social pressure, filled with exhortations that I repent, make my life right with God, yield to The Spirit, accept the call and go serve a mission. Worse yet, I looked into the eyes of my sweet mother and saw that if I did not go, I was going to break her heart. And there was no chance that the best friend would ever marry me if I didn't.

So I told everyone that The Spirit had come to me and so I had repented and was ready to go on a mission. No more weed for me. I had toked my last joint, taken my final hit off the hookah.

That's how I wound up not going to Vietnam. Instead I went to South Dakota, to teach the Lakota that they must never drink coffee. It was my mission to remake them, but they remade me. After two years, I returned to BYU - but found that I could not really return. 

As to this gentleman, he remarked that Vietnam was an unpopular war and that when he returned, he found out what it felt like to feel the wrath of the people for whom he had served. He said that people sometimes ask him why served, did he believe in the war?

It was not a matter of whether or not he believed in the war, he told me, but rather that the fact that he had a duty to serve his country and so he did.

This is what passed between us as we paid our bills at Family Restaurant. It was a very brief visit, and I thought that I would wait until another time and then have him tell me more of his story. I would take a portrait to go along with the interview, and would then include this picture as well.

But what if that time never comes? What if I do not see him again at Family?

What if I forget I ever took this picture and it just slips away unseen into my archives, as do the vast majority of the pictures that I take, never to be seen by anyone?

So here it is, with this tiny fragment of the man's story along with one from my own.

I got lucky! The train came rumbling by!

Yes, many veterans come to eat at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

When I came out, I saw this dog in the back of a truck. When I see such a dog, I find the urge to reach out and touch it to be...

...irresistible!

Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #8881: Carmen and Tyler, who is ten and loves to play football - and me, too.

After I completed the study, Carmen caught the unmistakable scent of cologne wafting off Tyler. She teased him a little bit for that, as she now knew that he had interests even beyond football.

After driving away from Metro Cafe, I saw a man riding a motorcycle.

And another sweeping the place where his driveway meets Church Road.

Some days I see Caleb and some days I don't. As he works all night and sleeps in the day, our waking paths seldom cross.

They crossed here, though - with me going one direction down our street and he the other. They also crossed when he stepped into my office to pay me a surprise visit.

"Dad," he said. "I patched your back tire. Your front tire was low, so I put air in that, too."

So I took my first bike ride of 2010. I am badly out of shape now and did not know far I should go. I decided to pedal the 1.5 miles to Church Road and see how I felt when I got there. If I felt good, I would turn right, go to the Little Susistna River and put my front wheel in the water.

If it felt like that might be overdoing it, that the return trip, largely uphill, would overstress my flaccid muscles and tear apart my weak lungs, then I would turn left and follow a shorter, flatter, more easy route.

The final approach to Church Road is all uphill, and I was a bit upset when I realized how it was taxing me. I deemed myself unfit to make the return from the Little Su and so concluded that I must turn left.

I turned right, anyway, and headed for the Little Su.

I did not put my front wheel in the water, though, because I felt that if I did, the under-cut ice might break beneath me and I would get my shoes, socks and pants wet. I wanted to keep them dry.

After I left the Little Su and neared the curve that leads to the biggest and steepest hill, I saw this guy ahead of me, cutting down the vegetation alongside the road before it can begin to grow.

No more snow plows for awhile.

After I topped the first big hill, I pedaled along on a flat stretch toward the corner where I would turn back onto Church Road and then face the next set of up and down hills. At some point, I glanced behind me and saw another biker, who had just topped that hill. I pedaled a little further and then looked back again. It seemed he was gaining on me.

I did not want him to pass me, but I realized that he was almost certainly younger and stronger and in better shape, that he was going to pass me whether I wanted him to or not.

I reached Church Road, turned right, climbed up the first big hill, then began my descent towards the next upward grade.

As I coasted down, I glanced back and there he was - closer yet, I was certain.

Damn. He was going to pass me.

Oh well. I would take a picture of him as he pedaled by me.

I decided that I would take a series of pictures of him closing the gap, passing me, and then moving on. I began with this one.

I then climbed the next hill and then again coasted toward the bottom of the third. Again I looked back. I was surprised to see that my competitor was now further back than he had been.

I figured maybe it was because I was going downhill now and he had been going up. Now he would be going downhill and I would soon be going up. I was certain he would yet close the gap and pass.

But no, he never did - even though he turned left on Seldon just like I did and followed me all the way to my street. In fact, each time I looked back I found him to be a little further behind. It became pointless to take any more pictures, for he had become such a small dot, readers could not have even picked him out.

That's what he gets for deciding that he, being so young and strong was going to humiliate a much older man who hadn't pedaled a bike since early October.

Of course, he never came close enough for me to actually confirm age or sex for certain.

I supposed it is possible that he was actually an 87 year-old woman who was pretty damn pleased that, though she never caught him, she kept that young guy worried every pedal of the way that an old lady was going to smoke him.

Or maybe it could even have been Patty, out keeping her cancer at bay.

When I got home, I parked my bike by the wreckage of my airplane, The Running Dog. I thought about the good days, when this dog and I flew together all over the main body of Alaska, up and down the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, through the valleys of the Alaska and Brooks Ranges, across Canada's Yukon Territory and into The Northwest Territories.

Why did I ever have to get cocky and crash the damn thing?

I can't stand it, being grounded like this. As I have said before, I dream about airplanes - usually this one, every night.

I have a friend in Cordova who says that if I really wanted another plane, I would have one by now. He cites himself as an example, pointing out how he wanted a big crab boat once, didn't have the money for it but got one anyway.

I'm glad for him, but he's 100 percent wrong about me. He is a bachelor and lives in a house that he inherited from his father and he simply has no idea what I face.

But he's right, too. To accomplish what I want to accomplish, I must get another airplane. Somehow, there is a way.

On this day, when I have no money to pay the simplest bill, when I owe the IRS, when I go to Family Restaurant only because I have a credit card and then I bring the leftovers and derive a second meal from them later and to Metro for coffee only because Margie has given me access to the bottles full or quarters that she has saved up over years, it seems utterly impossible.

But it's not impossible. It can be done. I must yet find the way.

A Pay Pal donation button to help with this blog isn't going to do it, but still, you who have urged me to put on on here have convinced me that I am not begging if I do, so I will.

Soon.

Through the Metro window study - Carmen and Burt; Ron Mancil, horse and boys; deer and hunter/Aaron Fox story rescheduled for tomorrow

I have had to delay the Aaron Fox story for a day, as I find myself short of time to do it justice. Before I left on my recent trip to the East Coast, it was my general practice to create my blog posts late at night and then schedule them to appear at 4:00 AM.

I could not maintain this schedule as I traveled and so found myself making my posts in the morning, before I got into other things. I then decided I would continue to do so after I got home - I would put up my post in the morning, be all done with it no later than noon, and then I would have the remainder of the day, the evening, and the night to do all those other things I need to do.

This is, in fact, what I have done since I arrived home, but today I just couldn't pull it off. Now, I find it is already past noon. I must get a post up before the day grows any older, but it will take me at least a couple of hours to do the Aaron Fox story, so I am going to delay it until tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, here I am, yesterday afternoon, back to my usual, taking my 4:00 PM coffee break, which I began at the drive-through window to Metro Cafe. That's Carmen's brother-in-law, Burt, posing with her in:

Through the Window Metro Study, #6628.

Once again, I took the long way home from Metro and found Ron Mancil with a horse and two boys, up visiting from the Kenai Peninsula. The little boy is Roland. The bigger boy is... G.... G....

Damn! Why doesn't the rest of his name come to me?

I remember the "G," but nothing after that.

I woke up this morning broke. And I mean broke. No means to pay a single bill, not even my house payment, due in two days, or any extra taxes that may be due Uncle Sam the same day. No possibility of any income coming in for at least two weeks, maybe three. After I finish this blog, I am going to call the doctor and cancel the appointment that I have scheduled for tomorrow, because I can't pay for it.

Very soon, I will begin to receive a bunch of irritating phone calls demanding payment from me that I am currently unable to pay.

So I decided to go to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and have breakfast. I do have a credit card, after all. Whenever I get down to my last few dollars, I go out to eat. I don't give a damn about wisdom and common sense.

I go out to eat.

After I sat down and placed my order, I noticed this kid sitting across from me, playing with his toy deer, his toy motorcycle and his toy truck. Sitting at the table in front of me was an old man and a young man. I did not eavesdrop on their conversation, but just after I noticed the toy deer, these words rose out of the whispery din of their spoken words, "...go deer hunting."

Strange coincidence, I thought.

The little boy was with his grandma. When they finished their breakfast, picked up their ticket and started to leave, I stopped them and showed them this picture. I told them about this blog and gave them the address. Then I asked for the boy's first name:

Hunter.

Hunter - have a good day. And when I get older and can no longer care for myself or Margie, please remember me, and bring me a slab of venison, or a hind-quarter of moose. I will share it with Margie, and perhaps a tiny piece with any nearby cat who might plead for it.

Margie, by the way, has gone to town to babysit Jobe.

We take Kalib to breakfast; Cars and snowmachines, ravens and airplanes

The check that I had been waiting for finally came yesterday, so I decided to take Margie and Kalib to breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant this morning. From Friday night through Saturday night, Kalib was pleasant, happy and in good spirits.

Today, he seemed a little down and out. I think he surpassed his tolerance of being away from Mom and Dad. He did enjoy helping Grandma to sweeten her coffee.

He also seemed like perhaps he was coming down with a cold. Still, he did go exploring beneath the restaurant table.

Margie shared her breakfast with him, but he didn't eat much. He did drink most of his cranberry juice. Despite having received my check, I still paid for breakfast with a credit card. The money will not be in the bank until tomorrow and I did not want to suffer an overdraft charge for breakfast.

We do have a big auto-bill pay tomorrow. We will rush the check over in the morning, but I do not know if it will show in time to save us from whatever penalties the bank will be delighted to charge us.

Just before we left, I saw Melanie, not my daughter but the Melanie who works at IHOP, with her son Duncan. When he was just a baby, I photographed the two of them at Carr's.

After we got home, I went for a walk. Many cars zoomed by me.

In just two months, these bare trees will burst out in new green. Given how warm it has been this winter, the leaves might come out a little earlier than the normal mid-May.

But then April could be cold, so who knows?

Snowmachiners passed by on the left.

Two ravens flew overhead.

So did this airplane.

It has been a long time since I have cut through Serendipity, just because it depresses me so. But today I did. I stress again - I hold nothing against anyone who lives in Serendipity, but if you once had a place where you retreated every day that you were home, just you and your dog, to hang out with moose, bears, ravens, eagles and if you rarely ran into another person in that place and then one day they tore your woods down and it wound up looking like this and you could find no solitude there, it would depress you, too.

When I returned home, Kalib was waiting at the window for me.

Kalib and I.

Even though he now has one of my old fish tanks and gets to feed fish every day, Kalib always wants to feed the fish when he comes out.

He insists that his grandma come out and observe.

In the early afternoon, he carried his little stuffed muzzy to the car, along with his Grahamn Krackers. Uncle Caleb buckled him in and then Margie drove him home to Anchorage.

She said that she was not going to be gone long, that she would just drop him off and then come straight home. I have heard this before and I did not believe her. She stayed in town for several hours.

She reported that Kalib's mom was so anxious to see him that she came out the door even before Margie could out of the car.

Kalib was also overjoyed to see her, and Dad, too.

As for Margie, she looked very dejected when she got home about seven hours after she left.

"I sure miss Kalib," she said.

I have a great deal to do this week. Once again, I must push the blog to the back of my priority list. I will post every day, but lightly so - unless something happens that I just have to go all out on.

At Family Restaurant, I am reminded of an assignment in my quest to find the soul of Wasilla; a girl squirts ketchup in her face; other moments

When I finally stepped into our room a bit after 5:00 AM to go bed, it was ice cold in there. This is because the five chords of wood that we began the season with is now down to a few sticks, so we had heated the house very conservatively, keeping the bedroom doors closed to hold the heat in the living room and kitchen, which left the bedrooms cold.

Plus, now that it is mid-March and spring draws nigh, the unusually warm weather that dominated December, January and February is gone and the temperature has dropped. I found Margie buried beneath her quilts, sound asleep. Although her knee injuries are much improved, she still must sleep in a bed by herself. Every night, I find myself lonesome for her.

Once I got down to my barefeet and was about to climb into bed, I realized that I needed to medicate Royce, so I did. By the time I was done and ready to finally go to bed, my feet had grown cold. In fact, I was cold all over. I climbed under the covers and waited to warm up.

My body gradually did, but my feet stayed cold. I would fall asleep and then they would wake me up again. Repeatedly. I kept thinking that they would warm up, but they didn't. Finally, after a couple of hours, I got up, put two pairs of socks on and went back to bed.

It didn't help. My feet stayed cold. I kept waking up and a bit after 8:00 AM, I reached a point where I simply could not go back to sleep - although I kept trying until about 8:45. Then I got up and came out here to my office, heated by natural gas, spent a couple of hours on my computer and then headed for Family Restaurant for breakfast.

I had not been there for awhile and I am still waiting for a check that I anticipated receiving last week, so I didn't really have any money to go but I did have a credit card. After staying up almost all night and then not sleeping well, I really needed to go to Family Restaurant for breakfast. Just Family. Nowhere else would do - not even home.

I invited Margie but she did not want to step outside into the cold, not even to pass through the short distance to the car. Plus, although I had been warming the car up for several minutes, she knew that the interior temperature would still be cool, but Caleb had made a fire in the living room so it was warm on the couch. That is where she decided to stay and eat her oatmeal.

When I stepped into the Arctic entry into Family, I saw this gentleman sipping on his coffee, looking right at me through the glass. I did not want to scare him, but it was a scene that I had to photograph and he was agreeable enough and so I did.

Afterwards, I chatted with him for just a couple of minutes and told him about this blog. He asked my name and when I told him, he said, "I've read your blog."

As it turned out, he is Tim Mahoney, son of the late Paul George and Iona Mae Mahoney, whose graves I came upon last summer in Groto Iona, after I pedaled my bike past a bare-breasted young woman and wound up on my knees amidst their graves.

At that time, I gave myself an assignment to learn something about who these two were as part of my quest to find the soul of Wasilla. I have not yet had the time nor have I been organized enough to do so, but I still intend to. Little reminders keep popping up - like my friend, Ron Mancil, appearing as a worker on the Mahoney Ranch, where those horses that I sometimes photograph hang out. Just last week, I received an invitation by email from Matt Mahoney to take a tour of the entire original spread, once summer comes and the snow is gone.

Tim's sister, Paulie, has also been in touch with me and has offered to help.

And today, I found a new reminder in a pair of eyes looking at me over a coffee cup as I entered Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

I was surprised when, shortly after I sat down, I saw a waitress who has often waited on me in the past enter the restaurant as just a regular Wasillan. It was Jolene, who you can find waitressing right here. She had told me about her children before, but I had never seen them and now here they were, with her - Javin, Jocelyn and Justice.

They were escorted to the table immediately across the aisle from mine.

Even though I know the names of all the children, and Javin is the little one, I forget which of the two older ones is Jocelyn and which is Justice. The older one took hold of a bottle of ketchup, but she squeezed it too hard and it squirted her in the face.

What kind of Justice is that?

She grimaced as her mother cleaned her face.

There was just enough commotion to catch the attention of the elder gentleman at the next table, who was amused by the whole little mishap.

Then the elder gentlemen visited briefly with young Javin - or perhaps Javen - I really should have followed Journalism 101 practice and asked for the correct spelling, but I wanted my interruption of their meal to be as short as possible so that they could just enjoy their food, along with each other's company.

When I went back to my car, I found this guy and one other, putting up a new sign on the marquee.

At 4:00 PM, I got back in the car and headed towards Metro Cafe for my news break. Michael was out, blowing the new snow out of his driveway. We chatted for a bit. He heads to work at Prudhoe tomorrow, but said when he gets back he will come and get me and we will go to Hatchers and go cross-country skiing together.

I can't believe that I have not been skiing once this entire winter. Last winter, sure, because I was in recovery from my shoulder injury and surgery and it would have been too dangerous. This winter, I have just been too behind and too unorganized, all winter long.

Maybe next week.

On the way to Metro, I drove by this moose, grazing from the Lucille Street bike trail.

Through the Window Metro Study, #392

Carmen, with Shoshanna, who she had just hired to help her out.

This is actually from yesterday, one of the photos that I had planned to use but did not, because I devoted the space to my friend, Vincent Craig.

This is what it looked like on Church Road, as I drove toward the Talkeetna Mountains on my way home. The shortest route would have been for me to turn right, very close to where I took this picture. Instead, I continued straight, then turned left, crossed the bridge over the Little Su and then drove out past Iona Grotto and the Mahoney Ranch.

I looked for Ron but did not see him, so I turned around and came home. That was seven hours ago. I have been here ever since, mostly sitting at my computer but not accomplishing nearly as much as I had intended to.

I will do better tomorrow.

The blond girl who checked me out, then engaged me in a discussion about politics and religion; the humiliation of bare grass in February; Royce

Margie drove into town to see Jobe and Kalib, but I could not go because I had too much work to do. So I had her drop me off at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant, which would leave me with a four-mile walk home, but that's good. I needed to walk four miles. Five would have been okay. In fact, I probably did walk five, because I did not take the most direct route.

As I ate my ham and eggs, a little girl from three tables up and across the aisle saw that the table in front of me was empty, so she came over to check me out.

Her name was Nona.

We discussed the fine points of politics and religion. We did not agree on everything, but it was a civil and friendly discussion, with each party showing complete respect for the other's point of view. It was a discussion that Senators and Preachers could learn from.

This is Nona's sister, whose name I did not get. She wanted to see Nona's picture. I showed it to her. She was very pleased.

Across the aisle, one table down. After I finished my breakfast I sat and sipped my coffee for about ten extra minutes, hoping that they would finish their breakfast so I could introduce myself, show them the picture and get their names, but they weren't even close to being done and I had things to do, so I left.

It is not supposed to look like this around here in mid-February. I don't like it at all. In fact, it is humiliating, but there is nothing that I can do about it.

This is Willie. I did not catch the names of his people, but they look really familiar to me.

That was yesterday. This is today, when a raven flew over my head.

I know some of you are very concerned with Royce. A couple of days ago, he vomitted clear stuff repeatedly, but has been fine ever since. At least as fine as a cat in decline can be expected to be.

By the way, I uploaded every single picture in this post and wrote every word with my good black-cat buddy Jim sprawled out across my chest, his rear legs resting upon my left forearm and his front on my right.

You might think that it would be very hard to manipulate a computer under such circumstance, but I have much practice behind me.

Now I hate to shut down and make Jim move, but I've got to go to bed.