We get our Christmas shopping done early; Todd - met at Carr's; Melanie gets the blessing of an elephant

We had no milk for oatmeal, so I didn't cook any. Instead, I sat down right here at my computer and started to work on pictures. Then Margie came in and wondered what we should do about Christmas shopping. "Well," I answered, "we're out of milk so we might as well go to breakfast and then see if we can get some shopping done."

She agreed. I remote started the car, let it warm up for about 15 minutes. It was still very chilly inside and the seats were like solid blocks of ice, but we climbed into the car and headed for Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant. As we neared, this raven passed over the car.

"This guy is really annoying," Margie told Connie, our waitress, as I took this picture. Connie did not agree, but she laughed politely so that Margie would think she did.

I believe that I may have ranted about this before, and I probably will again, but this is one of the great ironies of my life as a photographer. It is only in recent years - pretty much since grandkids began to enter our lives - that Margie has tolerated me taking photographs of her at all.

True, I did manage to get a few in here and there, mostly when the children were somehow involved, but fundamentally, I, who am possessed with genuine passion to photograph anything and everything, found myself with this exceptionally gorgeous and beautiful wife and everyday that we were together I would look upon her and I would want to photograph her and everyday she would refuse to be photographed.

Be assured, I still find her beautiful - sometimes so much so that it makes me ache just to look at her. She now has the beauty of an aging woman who has weathered much in life, suffered many hurts and disappointments but has created a family that loves and adores her.

Each one of us loves and adores her.

Back when we were first married, she possessed a different kind of beauty - exquisite physical beauty of the most desirous kind - her hair so deep black, long and wavy against her lovely brown skin, her eyes radiant, dancing with fun and mischief - and I, the artist, who looked upon her every day, was not allowed to document this beauty - except on rare occassions, almost always involving children.

The only exception that I can think of is this one, which I posted on Mother's Day last.

I cannot remember how I persuaded her to pose that day, but, even though she relented, if you click the link and look at the picture, you will see that she was not happy about it.

And now, as the years and decades push those days of youthful beauty ever farther back, I sometimes long to look at the photos of my beautiful, young, wife. I long to show the photos to her children, her grandchildren and say to them, "see how beautiful she was? She had a host of would be suitors and yet she chose, short, awkward, shy, socially inept, me and together we made you."

But those pictures do not exist. I cannot look at them; I cannot show them to anybody.

If all the people who I have photographed over the years would have reacted to my camera the way she did, I would have utterly failed as a photographer. I would probably be selling newspapers on the street somewhere, because there's nothing else I could have done.

Our first stop was at Meta Rose Square, home of All I Saw Cookware. Get it. "All I Saw?" "Wasilla" backwards? Was-i-lla?

We parked right next to this car. I am not quite certain why some guys feel compelled to emblazon their vehicles in this manner. To attract attention, I guess.

In my case, it didn't work. I didn't even notice. I didn't notice at all. I walked away without even giving it a sideways glance.

I am not quite sure why, but, as we walked through Meta Rose, I found myself wondering why I had to grow up Mormon; I was sort of a cowboy, once, briefly, but a Mormon sort of cowboy and it wasn't like this.

Inside the store, we came upon this piggy bank. As piggy banks always do, this one transported my mind back to Pendleton, Oregon, when I was five years old. My mom had taken me downtown to go shopping and when we came to JC Penney's, there was a red, plastic, piggy bank in the window. Or maybe it was the window of a bank. Or perhaps Woolworth's. Whatever window it was, the pig on the other side was wearing a little hat.

I wanted that piggy bank. I wanted it badly.

Mom had grown up very hard in the Depression and was against all spending that was in any way frivolous. And a piggy bank was frivolous. One could make a very fine bank from an empty Morton's salt box, or a band-aid can.

She did not understand that it was not that I wanted a bank - I wanted the little red pig with the hat on its head, but in the name of frugality I was denied this item that maybe cost 25 cents. I never did get a piggy bank. I kept my coins in Morton salt boxes and bandaid cans. And every time I would go into a store and see a piggy bank, I longed to have it.

Then, when I became a young man, a curious thing happened. I would go into a store, see a piggy bank and feel the same longing. So I would buy the piggy bank.

I bought all kinds of piggy banks. It became a waste of money. There was no place to put all these piggy banks. At the Alaska State Fair, I even found a little red plastic one, wearing a hat - made from the very same mold as the one that I had been denied in the first place.

Finally, I had to get rid of most of those piggy banks.

As for the ones I kept - I don't even know where they are now - not even the little red plastic one.

When I saw this one yesterday, I wanted to buy it - not as a gift but for me.

But I didn't. I resisted temptation and moved on.

I am not going to show you what Margie is holding in her hand, because it might be a gift for someone. It might not be, but if it is, I would not want to spoil the surprise.

Out in the hall, a little boy took a ride on giant duckling.

We left the store with two days to go. This is the earliest we have ever done our shopping. Especially me. I am usually in a store at closing time on Christmas Eve, buying ceramic roosters, things like that.

Next we went to Fred Meyer's, where a raven sat upon a pole. You can't tell it in this tiny window, but that raven has its head cocked to one side. It looks very "Chooo 'weet."

Margie checks out some socks as gifts for grandkids. When I was small, it was such a great disappointment to open up a gift only to find socks. I wanted toys!

Now, this looks like a gift that a little boy could like! At least if his name is Kalib Hess. But then Kalib already has a spatula. What would he do with another?

I suppose this must be adorable, but personally, I found it to be just a little bit eery and frightening, somewhat macabre.

Then we happened upon a very cute scene - the two month old puppy, Brisa, held in the warm embrace of her human, Sierra.

Although we had eaten breakfast out, we found ourselves feeling hungry again. So we drove past the little cove at the west end of Wasilla lake, looking for hotdogs.

We found two hotdogs - both at Dairy Queen.

Dairy Queen has good hot dogs - especially the foot-longs. To all those from out of town who wonder whether or not they should come and visit Wasilla - come. If nothing else, for the Dairy Queen hot dogs.

They will taste just the same as the Dairy Queen hot dogs in your town, if you are an American.

So you will feel right at home - even if our little city is a bit more odd than yours. Which, trust me, it will be.

The view from Dairy Queen as I eat my hot dog. How come these guys are still up here in the north?

Late in the evening, Margie and I headed to Carr's, to buy turkeys and other food for Christmas dinner. Just as we reached the turkeys, this fellow stopped me. "Are you the guy who does the Wasilla 300 blog?" he asked.

Indeed, I am.

He told me that we disagree politically, but that he loves the blog - especially some of the stories that I do in Rural Alaska. He said that he has been looking out for me as he moves around town.

"Wasilla is a small town," he said. "I knew we would cross paths some day."

And there she is, my Margie, checking out the turkeys. We bought two 16 pounders.

And this one from India:

Remember the scorpion from yesterday? Photographed at, as Cawitha refreshed my memory with the name that just always flees my brain, Hampi?

I took this picture approximately 100 yards away from the place where I took that one.

It is Melanie, about to be blessed by an elephant. A "chooo 'weet" elephant.

For those who did not read the comments left on yesterday's post, one was left by Cawitha, Soundarya's cousin.

Yesterday, I speculated how Sandy might have reacted if I could have showed her the photo of the scorpion, and that was with the word, "Chooo'weet! I added that there was one element in the photo that would likely have disturbed her - namely, that the string had been tied to the scorpion's stinger.

Cawitha agreed, and took it one step further. She imagined Sandy not looking at the picture but being there at Hampi with us:

"Am sure Soundarya (Sandy) would have said "Chooo 'weet" and if she were to see this she would have ensured the arthropod was set free. She was the most compassionate person."

Thank you, Cawitha. I am certain that is exactly what Sandy would have done. And no matter how tough a guy the individual walking the scorpion might have imagined himself to be, he would have had to back down to her, just as did the vet who at first refused to treat the raven that she saved with Anil's help.

Cawitha, btw, has been my friend since the day that Sandy wed Anil. Like Margie, Cawitha does not like to be photographed and so that day asked me to please not take her picture. I didn't, unless maybe as part of the crowd, so I cannot show you what she looks likes. 

However, we are committed to one day going "trekking" together, perhaps in the Himalayas, perhaps in Alaska, maybe both. I expect that then, I will get her picture.

I can't be postive, but I think so.

Now, contrast this picture to yesterday's. Everything is turned around. It is the animal who is huge and powerful, the person who is small and relatively weak - especially because this person does not have the protection of a poisonous stinger.

But the elephant is gentle. The elephant blesses my daughter with its strength. The elephant does not harm her. And when the elephant laid the end of its heavy and powerful trunk upon my daughter's head, so powerful that it could easily have wrapped it around her neck and broken it, it felt like a blessing to her. 

As it did to me, when the elephant blessed me.

This was the second elephant in India to bless me.

No, I do not worship elephants. But this does not mean that I cannot appreciate being blessed by one.

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Thos and Delaina's wedding day, part 3: We plunge in our forks in American Fork, where I experience the curse of the Wasilla traveler in the age of Palin

We left Rex's car at the Draper Temple and he rode with me south toward American Fork, the plan being that I would drop him off on the way back and he could then pick up his car. The wedding lunch was to be held at the Rodizio Grill. As has become my way, I did not bother asking anybody for directions, but just entered "current location" and "Rodizio Grill" into the Google map feature of my iPhone and it laid out the route for me.

That route ended at the freeway exit into American Fork, so I figured that once we got there, I would just pull off at the exit, zoom in on the iPhone map, spot the exact location of Rodizio's and drive right to it.

As we drew near, Rex said that I needed to take the Lehi exit, the one immediately before American Fork, and then go west. I chose to listen to my iPhone and continued on to the American Fork exit. As I did not know which direction Rodizio's was from the freeway, only that it had be very close, I took Rex's word and turned right, to the west. 

By the time we had traveled 100 yards away from the exit, it was obvious there was going to be nothing to the west, so I pulled over and took out my iPhone. Rex was insistent that I should have taken the earlier exit and then gone west from there.

So I did a new iPhone map from the spot where we were parked to Rodizio's and it drew out a half-mile route to a spot that appeared to be right on the freeway, right near the entrance for north bound traffic on the east side.

Rex still insisted that I should have taken the last exit and that we needed to go west. He said he had got his information from Mary Ann.

"But it shows it right here," I pointed to the map on my phone.

However, because it showed Rodizio's looking as though it sat right on the freeway near the entrance, a slight amount of doubt crept into me. What if the iPhone did not know where Rodizio's was, but had merely given me the route to the American Fork exit?

But this could not be... iPhones are smart! It had to know the location of Rodizio's!

Anyway, it showed me the route to that spot, I started to follow it and we reached this stoplight. Rex called Mary Ann for clarification. Just beyond, there was a fork in the road. One fork continued on the iPhone route, crossed over the freeway, then veered slightly north and came back to the spot where Rodizio's appeared to be right on the freeway. As the sparrow flies, we were maybe 300 to 400 yards away.

The other fork led back onto the freeway, going south, toward Las Vegas. 

The light turned green, I started out on the iPhone route, but Rex ordered me to turn right, onto the freeway ramp. And you know... he's the big brother. I did. As it turned out, the iPhone was right. There was road construction to the south and the next two exits were out of commission. 

It took us nearly 20 minutes to double back and return to the dot that appeared on the iPhone to be right on the freeway but which was, in fact, Rodizio's, sitting right alongside the freeway.

Never doubt your iPhone - not even when your big brother speaks.

See that mountain? That's Timpanogos, 11,749 feet. I climbed it once in the winter and slept on the side, in a snow cave. Nothing compared to Denali, but a nice little adventure, anyway.

About eight months after Jacob was born, Margie and I dropped him off at my parent's house in Sandy, then we drove to the north side of this mountain, which is forested and has glaciers near the top. Robert Redford's Sundance ski resort sits on the north slope of Timp, which was also the setting for much of his movie, Jeremiah Johnson.

We climbed to the top.

Coming back down, we reached a slide on the glacier. Margie took a seat at the top of the slide but looked at the steep slope below her and was afraid to go. She just sat there, immobile. So I gave her a little push on the back and down she slid, shrieking.

I plopped down and slid down behind her.

When I reached her, she was both shrieking and laughing, scolding me for pushing her, yet happy that she had made the slide. 

In Rodizio's, we found the bride and groom, not eating, but milling about, entertaining the guests.

I took a seat right beside Delaina's dad. "Where do you live?" he asked me.

"Wasilla, Alaska," I answered.

"No!" he shot back, in genuine disbelief. "No you don't!"

"Yes," I said. "I do."

"No you don't!"

"Yes," I held my ground. "I absolutely do."

"Oh. Well... you're good then."

And he never asked me another single question. It was as if the fact that I live in Wasilla told him all that he ever wanted to know about me.

When I travel Outside, I frequently find that many people peg me as soon as they learn where I live. Right wingers will often immediately embrace me as a soul brother. Upon hearing the word, "Wasilla," left wingers, who were friendly and open one minute before, will sometimes suddenly shy away, cease all conversation and want nothing more to do with me.

Folks...!!!! We who live in Wasilla are individuals. We do not all think alike. We do not all eat the same food. Some of us prefer coffee to tea and many don't drink either. We do not vote as a block. We don't all hang out together and we don't all worship Sarah Palin.

Some of us remember how life was before this odd phenomena that is her burst so irrationally upon America and we wish it could be that way again.

We want our Wasilla back!

He is a physical therapist. He got into the field as a student at BYU. He went on to work with the BYU football team and other athletic teams, which caused him to spend much time traveling. He spent many years in Texas.

Now he does his physical therapy on inmates at the Point of the Mountain Utah State Prison.

Occasionally, an inmate will get hostile. Every inmate that he works on is restained, usually either by hand or leg cuffs, depending on what part of the body needs therapy.

Now, I will just move quickly along. The food at Rodizio's... hey, it's not quite as good as Iñupiat and native food, but it is mighty fine and tasty. You start out at a salad bar that has about 30 selections, some of which could qualify as the main course, then guys like this keep coming by with skewers of everything from spicy chicken to spare ribs, to grilled pork and, as you can see, grilled pineapple.

That pineapple... whoa!

I want some more, right now!

Can't have it.

Maybe never again.

A once in a lifetime experience.

I bet they have it in Hawaii.

Even better there.

How can I get to Hawaii?

This is the turkey, wrapped in bacon. Rex has two pig valves in his heart and so does not eat anything wrapped in bacon.

I do, though, and it was... heavenly!

Mary Ann and her daughters are all vegetarian, and this place was good for them, too.

The intellectual banter was continuous.

Shaela and Delaina's mom.

More pineapple.

The thing was, each shaving of food was tiny, leaving the diner to always feel that he (or she) can take another.

So the diner eats and eats, all the time thinking that she has room for plenty more. And then, at the end, suddenly, the diner realizes she is stuffed beyond stuffed.

Or he realizes it. Because I am a he and at the end I was stuffed beyond stuffed.

I could hardly waddle back to the car.

The Rodizio Grill - a place where young people meet...

...and get to know each other.

The bride and groom, at the beginning of their life together.

The other men attached to my sister's daughters. That's Eric sitting by Amber. He is an adventurer, a mountain climber. He loves the Arctic and has scaled tall, icy, peaks that rise from Baffin Island in northeastern Canada.

The other fellow is Steven, Shaela's husband, who, like her, is making a career in the brutal film industry called Hollywood.

Shaela.

A hand upon the shoulder of a granddaughter.

You should know these two by now.

It is time to go. But before we do, Rex visits Tom and his mom.

My sister and her step-granddaughter.

I constructed this and part 4, the final wedding day post, before I went to bed last night, but I will give this a half-dozen or so hours to hang at the top of the list - to see how many extra hits are drawn in just because the word, "Palin," appears in the title.

It will be a bunch, I'm sure.

Update: After reading this, my niece Shaela posted a picture of me being blessed at the Indian temple at Shravanabelagola on her own blog.

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Thos and Delaina's wedding day, part 2: On temple grounds

Before I continue, I must apologize for the many omissions I am about to make. I met a good many people on the day that Thos married Delaina and I was also extremely tired. Hence, most, if not all, of those names have simply flown out of my head. I could try to contact Thos and Delaina, run the pictures by them and have them supply all the missing names, but they are honeymooning in Vermont and I am certain that they are busy admiring the fall colors and do not wish to be interrupted by me and my questions.

So, except for my immediate blood family members, I am just not going to name all these people, including Delaina's beautiful little niece.

This is beautiful Delaina, my new niece-in-law and her beautiful little niece.

As I mentioned in my last post, I, a constant photographer, had to restrain myself and hold back, as Thos and Delaina had hired a real wedding photographer. If anyone should wonder if I was at all offended not to have been asked to shoot the wedding day... no, no, no!

I was glad they had a photographer. Very glad.

They will be glad, too, because they will get their pictures a lot faster than they would if I had shot them.

Anyway, here they are with their photographer, who was a dedicated and hard worker. I have no doubt at all that she did an excellent job.

There will be no polar bears in her pictures, but that is okay.

Polar bears would not be happy in Utah.

They just wouldn't be.

Utah is not a polar bear place. That is why I never want to live there again.

Once you have lived in state where polar bears roam, no other state can quite hold up.

Thos and Delaina, posing for their photographer.

Now, they do a pose for me.

Might I add that this Thos is a very special young man. If it were not so, I would not have traveled all the way to Utah from Alaska to be present outside the Draper Temple on the day of his wedding. My impression of Delaina is that she is special as well. I know she has chosen well.

They look good together.

I hope that they both live to be very old and that they are together through all that time.

In the Mormon faith, the purpose of temple marriage is to wed your spouse not until death do you part, but for all time and eternity.

I do not know about eternity, but if such a thing is possible, then I hope their love will bind them through it.

I hope the same for non-Mormon couples who love each other as well.

Even though I am not a wedding photographer, every now and then I find myself photographing a wedding. Not always, but most often, there comes that exciting moment when I must photograph the groom removing the garter from the leg of the bride.

I do not expect to see such a thing in connection with a Mormon wedding, and so I was bit surprised when I saw the bride begin to hike up her gown for the photographer - but it was so she could photograph her red shoes.

Red shoes also have a reputation as being a bit sexy.

But who says a Mormon bride can't be sexy?

Margie was a Mormon bride and she was sexy - oh, my goodness!

Was she sexy!

That's why we wound up with all these kids.

A little dog came running by.

It was a righteous and holy dog.

Sorry. I couldn't resist.

Thos gets a hug from his stepdad, Gregory Hayes, husband to my sister.

My sister Mary Ann hugs her new daughter-in-law. My niece, Shaela Ann Cook, who sometimes leaves comments on this blog, looks on from the left. Looking on from the right is Tom Swallow, Mary Ann's first husband and the father of all four of her children.

Soon, the photographer was lining all of the family members present together for a group picture, the bride's family on one side and us of the groom's on the other.

You can see that I am standing very close to my former brother-in-law, Tom. Over the past few decades, I have had to give great thought to just what defines a family. It first happened after my brother, Ron, died in 1987. His divorce had been a painful one, but his ex-wife came and despite all the pain of the past, she came as family.

As the mother of my nieces by Ron, she was family. The first wife of my older brother, Mac, also came. Their marriage had also come to a bitter end, but at the funeral it was, once again, as though she were still an integral part of the family.

I will be honest, when Tom and Mary Ann split up, my feelings toward him were made hard and they stayed hard for a long time.

Then, Shaela got married and there Tom was, as family, in the midst of family. It was his place to be there and so those hard feelings had to be put aside. Next, my father lay dying and Tom was there again. Again, it was the right place for him to be and his presence was appreciated.

Next was Khena's wedding in India, and we did some touring together - Tom, I and several others.

And now here we are together again, at Thos's wedding.

He is no longer my in-law, yet, he is family, bound to me through my sister's children. Twenty years ago, I would not have believed it possible, yet I find I now feel a certain sense of love toward him. When we parted company at the end of this trip, we hugged. It was a real hug, with love in it.

Finally, the wedding photographer had us all posed as she wanted. I let my camera hang useless as she took her pictures of the unification of our once separate families.

When she finished, I told everybody to stay put for just a moment, so that I could take a picture of the family group - absent myself, of course.

As I did so, the wedding photographer studied the situation and suddenly decided that she, too, liked the scene without me in it and so stepped back in (see lower right) and again shot the family group - absent me.

If you look at the bigger picture in the slide show, you will see that some eyes are looking at my camera and some at the real wedding photographer's camera.

I don't mind such a dichotomy in my photos, but I did not think that she would want it, so I quickly stepped aside, as quickly as was feasible, anyway.

Thos and his three sisters, Amber, Khena and Shaela. Amber hates to be photographed and has been known to take extreme measures to avoid the camera lens. I was the official photographer for Shaela and husband Steve Cook and Amber was part of the bridal entourage, and so she had to yield and I got some wonderful pictures of her.

I might also note that my sister's children are all brilliant. If you were to drop them in amidst the honor classes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT - any damn place - and pull together the four other brightest people present and put them in a group, these four right here would still be the brightest quartet in the room.

I won't elaborate now, but maybe I will sometime in the future, should my time and travels allow.

I tell them I am done with this picture. They step away. I take another. I like to do things like this, to get the scene just when the pose has been broken.

In my last post, I used a picture of the bride and groom that I shot at this very spot, just seconds apart from this one. In that one, they were standing slightly apart, so that the picture would show the words engraved in the granite behind and above them.

So I figured that I had better use this one now, so readers can see that they are not stand-a-parts, but rather a genuine, loving, hugging, couple of newlyweds.

And here they are, loving each other some more.

And this was my first glimpse ever of my youngest niece, Ada Lakshmi Iyer, held in the arms of her father, Vivek. She had been sleeping and so Vivek had stayed in the car with her.

Ada Lakshmi, in the midst of all.

Ada grew irritated and began to cry. Her dad showed her something on his iPhone and she calmed down.

Then Vivek took Ada off to the side of the temple and pointed out something above. I can't be certain, but I suspect that it was the golden statue of the Angel Moroni.

This is my brother Rex, the eldest of the two twins and also of all five of us original siblings. He is an insurance investigator and some little disaster had happened that he was called to early in the morning, about 7:30. He thought that he would be able to get it taken care of quickly and then join us at the appointed time, but he was wrong.

He did not arrive until after the photographer had taken all of her temple pictures, until after the bride had changed out of her gown.

Things often happen this way for my brother, Rex.

Now that Rex has arrived, we all leave the temple grounds and head back to our cars. As we do, I think of my trips to India and the temples that we saw there. One of those temples, dedicated to the Hindu God Ganesha, is located less than a block away from the home where Vivek comes from.

Just like this building, it is a temple, but the two places could not be more different. There is an elephant at that temple and if you give it a banana or a coin, it will raise its trunk, lay it upon your head and give you a blessing. The walls are covered with many brightly painted statues and in the evening monkeys leap about among them.

You must walk through a gantlet of beggars to get that temple. It is not in me to ignore and shun them, but it is hard to give to all.

The first time I went to that temple, I was very nervous. I feared that I would not be welcome, that nobody would want me there and I would not be allowed to enter.

I was wrong. I was asked to leave my shoes outside and then I was very welcome inside (as was any money I might care to leave behind). Their holy men blessed me in their way and although I did not understand it, I appreciated it and it felt good to me.

I really liked it when the elephant blessed me. That felt good.

In essence, although neither group may recognize it and some might get angry at me for saying so, the people at both temples are striving to do the same thing - to find their way through a hard and puzzling life into a good death, a death that isn't death.

Now that the temple part was over, there were three more functions to take place on this wedding day: lunch, a post-wedding ring ceremony held for the benefit of those who could not enter the temple, and a reception.

It is now 6:55 PM. I will try to get it all blogged, one way or another, before I go to bed, so that I can move this blog along and return it to Wasilla.

Update: After reading this, my niece, Shaela, posted a picture of me receiving a blessing from a holy man at a temple in Shravanebelagola on her own blog.

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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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Four scenes from rolling coffee break: Michelle with Cali the calico kitty and the stone lion; Mormon graffiti car; fourwheeler, skateboarder

First, let me assure those interested that I still plan to post a few stories from my trip north - in fact, I spent more time working on doing so today than I could afford. I have a huge amount of material to digest and it will take some time. I might post a series from that trip Tuesday, but I might wait until Wednesday.

In the meantime... now that I am home here in Wasilla and Margie has gone back to Anchorage to babysit Jobe, I broke away from my computer at the usual time of 4:00 PM to venture out for my rolling coffee break, as All Things Considered played on NPR.

I saw many interesting things, but the most interesting was a lady painting a rock down on Sunrise Drive. A calico cat stood by to watch her work.

So I stopped, to see what was up. This is the lady, Michelle and the 13 year-old calico cat, Cali. As Michelle explained it to me, a fellow who lives here found this rock, dragged it home, looked at it from this side and saw the face of a lion. He asked Michelle if she would paint the lion's profile onto the stone and she agreed.

If one looks closely at the other side of the rock, currently bare, one can see an eagle.

So, after she finishes the lion, Michelle plans to paint an eagle portrait on the opposite side of the rock.

Michelle puts detail into the lion's eye.

Michelle steps back to take a look.

At the post office, I saw this car, heavy with inspirational graffiti. I wondered if the car belonged to a Mormon, as Gordon B. Hinckley was the President of the Church, considered a prophet by the faithful, from March of 1995 until his death on January 27, 2008.

Plus, many of the statements written on the car, including the Shakespeare quote, were ones I often heard my own mother speak as I grew up.

Mom would never have allowed anyone to graffiti up the car, though - no matter how inspirational the words.

As to the Shakespeare quote, it always sounded pretty righteous and noble, coming from Mom's lips as I grew up, so I was kind of surprised when one day I actually sat down, read Hamlet, and saw that in the story the words were spoken by one Polonius, a devious, self-serving, self-righteous, man of many bad works. Mom would not have approved of Polonius at all, had he appeared in her life as a real character.

Rearview of the inspirational, perhaps Mormon, car.

As I drove down Church Road, I passed this man traveling by four-wheeler.

As I headed up Shrock Road from the bridge that crosses the Little Susistna River, I saw this guy coming down the hill on his skateboard.

I used to travel by this method myself.

In my dreams, I sometimes still do.

PS: as you can see, the weather is incredible. Sunny and warm. - more like one would expect in California than Alaska. It was this way in Fairbanks and even in Nuiqsut, so far above the Arctic Circle.

I wonder how long it will last?

For however long, I should cast aside all responsibility and do nothing but play.

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