When Margie and I entered Jacob and Lavina's house for Thanksgiving dinner, we found Kalib with a spatula. The word is that he keeps this spatula with him almost all the time now. It has become his favorite toy.
After he climbed onto the arm of the couch, Kalib wanted to be certain that I was watching him.
When he knew for certain that he had my attention, Kalib leaped. Afterwards, he came running to me so that he could look at this picture on my camera's LCD monitor. It was the first time that he had done that.
I don't think it will be the last.
Jobe was there, too. Still in his mother's arms. As you can see, he has great admiration for his grandpa.
Jobe and Muzzy.
As I had never seen Kalib in the dinosaur outfit that he wore on Halloween, he modeled it just for me: Kalibsaurus.
Kalibsaurus runs into the kitchen, ready to devour all that he sees.
Suji - this one's for you.
Jobe, looking for his Aunt Suji, who is 9000 miles away.
Jobe has turned into a rolling baby. Instead of learning to crawl, he is learning to roll. I had to put my foot on him, just to keep him from rolling out of the house and all the way off to India to look for his Aunt Suji.
Gramma and Jobe.
The Ckaleibs.
Jake let's Bryce sample the turkey.
There were two tables - a higher one with stools and a lower one with chairs. It was too hard for Margie to sit on the stools, so she sat at the shorter table. I joined her there.
This is what it looked like, when I stood up and peeked over the top of the crowd. The fellow to the left is Carl, a friend of Rex's and that's Charlie's parents, Jim and Cyndy, next to him.
At first, I was a little disappointed that dinner was going to be at Jacob and Lavina's instead of our house. They planned it this way because I had intended to stay on the Slope for Thanksgiving, but after the tragedy I wanted only to come home.
As it turned out it was, perhaps, the most excellent Thanksgiving dinner that I have ever eaten - much better than Margie and I would have done. This because Jacob and Lavina are on their way to becoming master chefs. They love to watch shows like Iron Chef and other cooking extravaganzas, none of which interest me much.
But my goodness, what they have learned!
Who would have ever thought that you could cook cherries into dressing and come up with something so wonderful?
And it is not just what they see others do on the shows, but the creative thought process that it has helped to create in them. Before they began to prepare this meal, Jacob read up on the original Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims got together with the indigenous people who had saved their lives and they feasted as friends.
He read that they ate squash, cooked with nuts and berries. So he cooked squash with walnuts, almonds and berries... and... oh my... just ask Lisa... who is still raving over it...
Delicious beyond delicious!
Scrumptious. Exquisite. Tantalizing!
The turkeys were pretty darn good, too...
...as was the company.
We are very fortunate in this family in that we, including those who have joined in to become part of us, all enjoy being together.
I was thinking about various Thanksgiving and holiday TV dramas and sitcoms where people come in and engage in verbal combat and unpleasantness before coming to or failing to reach whatever resolutions are necessary, but it is not that way here.
We all live tumultuous lives in our own ways, but we like to be together.
We are not only family, we are all friends.
Even so, to be quite honest, I sometimes had problems staying with all the conversations throughout, because my mind and spirit was burdened with a huge hurt. After we ate, several of us went into the living room to converse, but my body felt so tired and weary and my eyelids grew so heavy that I could not keep them open.
So I closed them, and reclined on the reclining chair, picking up snippets of the conversation until it morphed into dream bits in my mind and then became a dream.
I have no idea how long I stayed this way, but at some point I dimly heard Charlie's dad speaking of an airplane, maybe a Super Cub, flying at 30 mph and landing on a dime. And then I was in my now broken airplane, the Running Dog, and I was sliding between the tops of spruce trees along the Yukon River toward a frozen slough, covered in untouched, pristine, snow... slipping ever so slowly downward, my power pulled back to the minimum, my prop spinning slowly, my skis soon to slide into the snow.
I could feel the air as my wings slipped through it at minimum speed.
And sitting in the back seat was Soundarya, seeing all this frozen, wintry, magic of Alaska for the first time.
This jolted me to full awake.
I opened my eyes and the above is what I saw.
Elsewhere, I found that the turkey had overcome Rex, who would be leaving for San Francisco to join Ama in just a few hours.
Now, he is with her and her family at Lake Tahoe, where I suspect the snow is probably 10 feet deep - maybe deeper.
Back in the dining room, I found people going at round two - desert. Pumpkin pie and cookies and a superb blueberry crunch that Cyndy had made. Little Jobe was pigging out on some fruit-flavored, dehydrated treats made just for babies.
They are quite tasty. So I had one. Maybe I had two. Perhaps three... it's possible that I even ate four, but I certainly didn't eat the whole thing and I never have.
This is a story that Jacob is spreading and it is simply not true.
If you hear Jacob say it. Don't believe it.
Perhaps I ate five, but certainly no more than that.
The evening ended with Kalib chasing Melanie around the little tent. Or maybe Melanie was chasing Kalib. I was never quite certain who was chasing who.
I was glad they were not tigers, though. If they had been tigers, they would have chased each other until they got hold of each other's tails and then they would both have turned into butter.
That's what tigers do.
About 9:00 PM, Margie and I set out for Wasilla.
The roads were icy and slick. Off to the sides, I could see many dark forms of vehicles that had slid off the road. This one, however, still had its lights on.
At one point, up ahead, across the divide in the oncoming lanes, I barely managed to pick out the outline of a trotting moose silhouetted in the brief flash of a headlight and I could see that we were on a collision course.
Even with the new anti-lock breaks, braking on slick ice is a very tricky thing, so I began to hit the breaks in firm but gentle pumps, always letting go just when it felt like the car was going to go into a spin. I stopped, just in time, as the moose passed through my headlights.
I think of that moose and how it looked in our headlights at the last instant, its eyes big and fearful and I wish that I had got a picture of it. There are times that one must keep both hands on the steering wheel and this was one of those times.
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Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 2:32PM ;)
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