A birthday party

Margie had me load the uncooked pinto beans that she had been soaking all afternoon into the car in such a way so that they would not spill, unless we hit a moose or something. We then headed to town to throw a party for Rex on his 32nd birthday.

I can hardly accept the idea that Rex is 32, for I am only slightly older than that, myself. The gap of years between us just keeps narrowing and if it continues on like this, it won't be long until my youngest son is older than me, and that will be a very strange occurrence. 

I do not believe that anything like it has ever happened before in all of history.

We arrived in Anchorage about 4:00 PM, as the sun was going down.

The party was to be at Melanie's house. I was so tired when we first arrived, that, after I hauled the beans up the stairs and into Melanie's house (she was still at work) and helped Margie rinse them off, then refill the pot and put them on the stove to boil, I laid down upon the couch and there I stayed as Margie cooked.

After about an hour or so, other people began to arrive. Lisa got onto Melanie's computer. Charlie went out into the kitchen to put his raspberry cheesecake on the counter and to melt chocolate chips. I maintained my spot on the couch, but every now and then raised my pocket camera up into the air to take a picture.

Rex and Kalib arrived at about the same time. They greeted each other robustly.

Bear Meech and Diamond watched in wonder as their house filled up with more people than they are used to seeing.

And that's Cassie, Rex's dog, the one that came with Stephanie when they got married. No, Stephanie cannot be seen in any of these pictures. Perhaps in time, I will provide the required explanation, but this is just a time to give space.

Even as Kalib played with his grandmother's phone, Melanie's land line rang. But the receiver was not about. Rex is living for awhile in Melanie's basement apartment and had taken the receiver down there. He jumped up and ran down the stairs to get it.

You guessed it - when he picked it up, he heard Kalib gibberish on the other end.

Lavina cooks the frybread. This would make it Navajo frybread. If Margie had cooked it, it would have been the same but then it would have been Apache frybread.

As for me, I maintained my position on the couch. I was really tired and lazy.

When Melanie left work, she went straight to the airport to pick up Ryan, who had flown in from Calgary to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with family and friends. Ryan and Melanie were special friends during their college days at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and spent some time in Europe together.

We all loved Ryan then and we still do, just as we love Charlie. And they are friends.

Here is Charlie's cheesecake, covered with the melted chocolate chips, which solidified into something very hard. A fork could not pierce this chocolate armor, an ordinary table knife could not cut through it.

The only way to get through the chocolate chip frosting was to saw with a serrated knife.

But... oh, was this cake good! The chocolate, the pumpkin cheese filling and the raspberries...

an absolutely magical combination!

You probably wish you could see the Navajo/Apache tacos that we made out of Lavina's frybread and Margie's beans. I should have photographed them, but I was too busy eating my share.

Ryan pets Diamond. In fact, he "overpets" Diamond.

Charlie saws his way through the chocolate on a piece of his cheesecake as Kalib jumps up and down.

After the food had been eaten, we all engaged in good conversation.

Jacob and Lavina had brought a store cake and regular birthday candles to go along with it. The candles could not be found, but someone did find these three big ones somewhere in Melanie's house. 

Kalib helped Rex blow them out.

Jacob gives his little sister some love.

As Rex unwraps presents from Jacob and Lavina, he finds the missing birthday cake candles.

Rex continues to unwrap his presents.

Soon, it was all over. Rex hugged Kalib goodbye. We all hugged each other goodbye. And then Margie, Kalib and I headed back for Wasilla, leaving Jacob and Lavina to spend the night in town with Melanie and Rex to begin a new year of life.

CM*D33: Margie returns to the scene of her injury; Rex and his sailboat, Willow the dog, Alaska Dispatch and potential young citizen journalist

Margie had a therapy session scheduled at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage today, so I drove her in, dropped her off and then headed straight over to the Merrill Field offices of the Alaska Dispatch to chat with the editor, Tony Hopfinger. 

I then rushed back to pick her up, after which I took her to lunch at Cafe Europa and then to a movie at Century 16. During my stays at home, we used to go to a movie almost every single week, but it has been a long, long, long time since we have.

I did a search in this blog and the most recent movie I came up with was one we saw February 25 - and that was our first outing after she originally broke her left knee and right wrist on January 20.

We have been out since she broke her knee for the second time on July 26, but not to a movie - just here and there to get a bite to eat, a cup of coffee or an ice cream come.

I fell asleep in the movie about five times. Not because it was boring; it wasn't - it was fun: The Informant. There are some gaps in the story for me, but the thrust of it all came together.

The fact that I could fall asleep five times during what may have been my first movie outing in eight months kind of gives me a clue as to why I am having such a struggle completing my project.

Afterwards, we returned to the place where she fell on July 26 - which is now owned by our daughter Melanie. Her fall happened right after she stepped through the door to her left. Later, as we were leaving, I was going to take a picture of her atop that step. I got it framed and everything, but when I pushed the shutter, the battery died. I got no picture.

A couple of nights ago, I wrote about the dog that was given to me by the Norwegian Iditarod musher, Ketil Reitan. I told how I put her in the back seat of my airplane and flew her home from Kaktovik on the Arctic Coast at the top of ANWR - the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

I mentioned that she is now buried in our backyard, along with some other individuals dear to us who wore fur all the time.

In comments, a reader let me know that I had slipped up and had not named her.

Well, this is she, Willow. I took the picture in the spring of 2005, right after she found a chunk of bone that I believe to be moose. She was very pleased.

Rex felt real bad after her death, so I made this print for him.

By the way - seasoned readers are familiar with my lament about Serendipity, the subdivision that robbed me of the woods that I used to roam - and so often with Willow.

This picture was taken in those woods, which died right along with the dog.

And on the fridge were these pictures of Kalib, Rex and his Grandpa Hess, my late dad. Two years ago, right about now, my Muse, Soundarya, wanted to know about my dad and asked me write up some stories about him and email them to her in India. So I did.

This past summer, when I was in Barrow, she emailed and instructed me to put those stories on my blog. She felt that readers would enjoy them. I promised her that I would. Sooner or later, probably during our next trip to Utah and Arizona, I will, and I will introduce the whole family, mine and Margie's. Time and money permitting, I want to go to the Navajo Nation and introduce Lavina's as well.

The very first image that I posted on this blog was of the tiny sailboat that Rex had made. He is now making a bigger sailboat and this is it. There is a much larger story here, but I cannot get into it just now.

As you can see, this bout of unusually warm fall weather is continuing. It got well into the 50's today. It feels like we live someplace else, but we live here.

Meanwhile, I see more reports of snow at various places in the Lower 48. This is very embarrassing.

Now I will back up to earlier in the day. I mentioned that I stopped at the Alaska Dispatch to visit the editor. I completely forgot to take any pictures while I was there. I don't know why, I guess because we had a fast-paced conversation and when it was over, I had to race off to pick Margie up.

I forgot even though Alice Rogoff's big Cessna 206 on floats was sitting in the hangar, and it was the cleanest looking airplane I think that I have ever seen. It filled me with desire and want and still I forgot to take a picture.

Alice, by the way, is the very good woman who helped us out in Washington, DC, after Margie got hurt following the Obama Inaugural. She put us up in her very fine Bethesda guest house and told us to stay until Margie could travel. We did. I do not know how we would have coped without her.

She also bought into the Alaska Dispatch and that is why they have their offices in a hangar at Merrill Field.

Tony and I spent some time talking about how online journalism is changing everything. We talked about the emerging roll of citizen journalists, ordinary people with cameras and cellphones, documenting and reporting on life and getting it out to the world in a new way.

And then I took Margie to lunch and the first person that I saw when I stepped through the door of Cafe Europa was 17 month old Luca, looking very much like a citizen journalist.

His mother said that this was the first time that he had ever held a camera. He was still figuring it out. I told her that if he got something, she should email it to me and I would share it with you.

No promises.

We will see.

The kid's got his own mind. He will do what he will do.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month (obviously, now, more than a month. Perhaps forever, it feels like) Oh, hell! Let's face it - I did not keep myself within cocoon restraints. This does not qualify as a cocoon entry. But I will leave it as one, just the same. It was supposed to be. 

We gather together to make a health care reform statement to our Senators; dinner with Rex at Bombay

I had to deliver some photos to a client in Anchorage, so I decided to time it so that I could go straight from the drop off to the "Send Congress back to DC" event, held for those who pledge their support for health care reform to urge our Senators to vote for reform. As it happened, I hit a couple of traffic jams coming in and so had to go straight to the event, because they were going to shut the doors shortly after 6:00 PM and then no one would be allowed to enter.

Shortly after the meeting began, the host, Jonathan Teeters of Organizing for America, asked all those who had health insurance to raise their hands, then all those who had lousy insurance to raise their hands and finally, all those who had no insurance at all to do so.

This guy sitting next to me raised his hand when the "uninsured category" came up. It had been my intent to ask him a couple of questions afterward, but he got up and zipped out, just before the event ended.

He did a lot of shouting, though, all on cue, and in favor of health insurance reform.

This is Jonathan Teeters himself, holding a bundle representing the 5000 petitions received so far from Alaskans who want Congress to pass a good health care reform plan. That would include me, as I have previously made known.

The highlight of the event came at 7:00 o'clock when Senator Mark Begich made a planned surprise call from Indiana, where he had stopped with his son on their drive back to Washington, D.C. The surprise call was announced five minutes beforehand to give the crowd a chance to practice the response they would shout out for Begich to hear when asked a couple of different questions.

Before this happened, Begich chatted for awhile, telling folks how, as he and his daughter have been traveling, they stop here and there, to get breakfast or dinner, buy gasoline, wander around a park or something and just chat with people. He said that he does not tell them that he is a US Senator and the only Alaska politician most of them would recognize is Sarah Palin, so they don't even suspect.

Again and again, in these casual conversations, Begich said, the subject of health care comes up and people are frustrated. Some have lost jobs and with them their health care. Some are afraid to move to a new job and lose their health care. Some have health care, but get shafted by their insurance companies when the time comes. Some have no health care at all.

Anyway, when the time came, Sarah pointed to the script, and, minus a tiny sprinkling of silent nay-sayers, the crowd shouted out the very words that she points to here.

Senator Lisa Murkowski did not show, nor did she call in. So Jonathan's father videoed the crowd while they shouted out this message to her.

Here folks are, shouting out their message to Senator Murkowski. Mike is the guy in front and he has health insurance and had not been too politically active until the Bush versus Gore election was settled under suspicious circumstance in Florida.

That angered him, as he believes that Gore was cheated out of the victory that should have been his and America has paid a high price. Now, he wants his voice to be heard.

In some ways, it was kind of a funny moment for me. It is my training as a photojournalist that when you cover such events, you do not shout, cheer, clap, jeer or do any such thing. You shoot pictures, you gather notes and you do not display your own sentiments. You pretend that you have no sentiments.

But I had not come as a journalist. I had come as a regular citizen, frustrated and angered by a health care system that absolutely threatens to destroy him. Still, when the call came to shout out, I tried, but I could not shout. I squeaked. It just didn't feel right to shout. It goes against my grain. I'm not a shouter, anyway.

So there you go, I went to this event to make my voice heard by our Senators and then, when the time came, I didn't even make it heard. And I didn't cover the event as I would have if I had been in photojournalism mode. I just shot these few pictures pretty much from the place where I sat.

Still, I have at least made a tiny record of the event, a statement that it happened.

Afterwards, I delivered the photos to my client and got together with my youngest son, Rex, who I had not seen for awhile and took him to dinner at Bombay. I had hoped that my beautiful and intelligent daugther-in-law, Stephanie, could come, too, but she had to work. The waitress, a young Philipina woman who had been terrified to eat Indian food for the first few months that she worked here, saw me taking this picture and volunteered to take one of both of us together.

She did pretty good, too. So here we are, Rex and I together, in the photo taken by the waitress who finally conquered her fear and found Indian food to be quite delicious.

Rex and I had a good visit. 

And, as always, being in this environment took my mind right back to India, to Sandy, Murthy, Vasanthi and all the rest of the family there, to the Indian highway, the bandit monkeys, the elephants that bless people and those that at night appear suddenly at the side of the road in the headlights of your courageous and skilled taxi driver.

It is so sad. I have so many photo stories from India that no one has ever seen, not even me, save for when I took them, because I have had no time to do anything with them.

One day.

On Father's Day, the mast snapped and then we ate at Bombay Valley

Rex called from Anchorage to announce that, for father's day, he would bring his sailboat out - the very same sailboat that launched this blog. A brisk wind blew, so he planned to drive straight to Memory Lake, give me a call from there and launch. 

Then I could come and he would take me on a little ride around the lake. Next, Melanie called to say that she was on her way out and Lisa would be leaving Anchorage a bit after she did.

So Melanie arrived with Charlie and we decided to go get a coffee. Rex called immediately after the decision, and said he would soon launch and to bring him a coffee, too.

Finally, we arrived at Memory Lake. Rex and his boat were a tiny dot on the other side of the lake, but no sail could be seen.

A man sat on the shore, fishing, and told us that Rex had really caught the wind and had been sailing fast, when suddenly his mast broke. Rex then called to report that he could not make any headway trying to paddle against the wind, so he was just going to let it blow him to the west end of the lake. We could pick him up there.

So, off we went. None of us had ever driven to the west end and we did not know how to get there. Melanie pulled up a map on her iphone, put in our GPS location and then navigated.

She got us there, but it was private property.

Still, Rex needed to be picked up so we picked him up.

Back at the house, a bit tired, slightly discouraged but not at all daunted, Rex uses Muzzy for a footrest. I hope to have some free time in August. I will be lucky if I can take even a single day off between now and then - maybe by late July.

But if I succeed at my goal, then we can go sailing in August. Out on the high seas. In gale force winds. The mast will be reinforced then. It will be great fun. Maybe we will wind up in China. I have long wanted to visit China.

We could wind up in Russia, but I've already been there.

Stark and harsh though it was, I liked it, but I would rather go to China this time.

Thus followed a great debate about what the kids should do for me for Father's Day.

In the end, we decided to go out for dinner at Bombay Valley Indian Food Restaurant. It is kind of amazing that there is an Indian food restaurant in Wasilla, but there is.

The food was really, really, hot - hotter than anything I had in India.

It was good, though. Very good. 

Yet, still, when the taste of Vasanthi's excellent cooking still lingers... along with the master chef's that catered Soundarya's wedding... and the other great cooks that we had, including Sandy herself, who cooked our very last meal in India...

It would just be unfair to compare, so I will just say Bombay Valley is quite good and, if you can't get to India, I would recommend it.

And my food was free, because I'm a dad, and at Bombay Valley, dads ate free today.

Kalib's first birthday, part 2: The one year-old throws an insane party

On December 26 at 3:19 AM, Alaska Standard Time, Kalib Lokaa' Dine Hess, my first grandson, turned one. About 12 hours later, he was presented with his first birthday cake. Kalib did not know that he was supposed to blow out the candle, which looked to him to be something fascinating, something that he should reach out and touch.

So his mother prepared to blow it out for him.

Of course, the party did not begin with the cake.

It began with the arrival of guests, most of whom were adults - uncles and aunts, and friends of his parents. Two other little people did come, both of whom were slightly older than Kalib.

This is party-girl Bryne, Kalib's senior by three months. Sadly, she and her parents had to go to another dinner elsewhere, so she was unable to stay to the end, but Bryne was a delight while she was here.

And this is party boy Lafe, Kalib's senior by one month. Lafe just might be the strongest baby that I have ever seen and he is a real tough guy. 

He and Kalib have been buddies practically since the day Kalib was born. I think Lafe will be a good person to have as a buddy in future years.

I hope that the two don't raise too much hell together, but that they do raise just enough. For what is the life of boys if they don't raise some hell?

Hell. That's what such a life is.

Hell.

A group picture of the three tots is needed, so Dad Jacob sets about to pose them on the front-room couch. He will face greater challenges in life, I am certain.

The three tots: Kalib, Bryne and Lafe.

Can you remember when you were very small and an adult, especially a pretty woman, smiled at you and spoke in a certain kind of voice and said something that made you feel like you were very unique and special?

That is how Sarah, Bryne's mom, is causing Kalib to feel, right here.

Cake time! Lavina blows on Kalib's behalf, lays the flame down and out it goes.

Sadly, Bryne was gone by now, leaving the cake all to the boys. Left to their natural male tendencies, they made hogs of themselves.

"That's enough sugar for you," Lafe's Mom Markie says just before yanking him prematurely from the cake. "Remember what happened the last time you ate too much sugar?"

With Lafe removed, Kalib has the cake to himself. He will be hyper not only for the remainder of the day, but on and off through the night, as well.

One only gets one first birthday party. Might as well go full hog.

The adults eat their cake (cut from a second slab that no one had wallowed in). Kalib demands more.

Something has upset Lafe. Maybe a ride in Kalib's new sled will make him feel better.

When Kalib saw Lafe riding across the floor in the sled that he had received for Christmas, he came crawling across the floor about three times faster than I had ever saw him crawl before. Until this moment, I did not realize that Kalib had such a strong sense of ownership over that sled.

Kalib opens his presents.

A present lights up; Kalib reaches for the light.

Among Kalib's new presents was a frog puppet. At first he wasn't interested, but Lafe was. Then, when Kalib saw how much Lafe liked the puppet, he became interested.

Eventually, everyone had to say goodbye. Of course, this goodbye is from much earlier, when Bryne and her parents left, but I only wanted to have one goodbye here, so I saved it for now.

My dear Melanie! When she arrived at the house, the driveway was filled with vehicles, so she decided to park at the side of the road. She did not realize that the snow plow operator had drug his blade partially over the culvert, cutting flat the snow that topped it so that the culvert looked like it was the shoulder of road.

Thus, when Melanie pulled over to park, her right wheels sank through the deception and into the culvert.

Jake had to pull her out. Kalib helped hook up the car as Muzzy supervised.

See how pretty the snow is, bunched up on the spruce branches?

A big wind would arise overnight and blow it all away.

Life, right here in Wasilla, Alaska, is like that.

Click on any photo to see a larger copy.