Three images from coffee drive: hot dog in puddle; dropping seeds; a small spot of rain

I have no time to blog today, so I'm going to keep it very simple. After I made my 4:00 o'clock run to Metro, I drove home the long way and saw this dog standing in this puddle.

The dog must have been hot - a hot dog who wanted to cool off.

And I drove by this man who appeared to be dropping seeds in a cleared lot. I don't know what kind of seeds. Radishes, perhaps.

Up ahead, I spotted a place where the rain had hit the ground in a small, well defined spot and had left a border on the road. When I drove into the rain spot, it was still sprinkling there - very lightly. Out of curiousity, I turned left down a side road, drove for about two or three hundred yards and came upon a rain border as distinct as this one. I then drove back onto the road you see here, continued on, and drove across the far side border a few hundred yards beyond the top of this little hill.

Now, as for me, I am in a bit of predicament. I feel an urgent need to catch the plane north tomorrow morning, but the resource that will enable me to purchase the ticket has not yet come in and I don't think it is going to in time for me to do that. Plus, I really need to get some new Arctic gear before I leave on this trip. Until I get those resources, I am stuck. I think I will be okay even if I leave as late as Thursday, likely even Friday, but I am growing nervous and would like to get going.

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He drinks his mother's milk; the cross and the rifle; when the visits end, loneliness sets in

Lavina and Jacob stopped by early Sunday afternoon to drop Jobe off so that they could take Kalib to the State Fair. Poor Kalib! For so long, he got used to being the one and only, the center of attention, for his parents and all of us.

And then along came little Jobe, smaller yet, not only cute and adorable, but one of the most good-natured babies ever born on this earth. Suddenly, Kalib had competition for all that love and attention that had belonged to him only.

Jacob and Lavina could have taken Jobe to the fair, too, and pushed him around in a stroller and it would have been fine, but they decided that on this day, they were going to devote their attention solely to Kalib. On this day, for the several hours between when they left Jobe at our house and then returned again, Kalib would be their one and only.

So here is Jobe, on his grandmother's lap, drinking his mother's milk.

Kalib is nowhere within range of my camera. He is off with his parents, enjoying their attention at the Alaska State Fair.

Doing what was at once right, healthy, and fiscally prudent, I had cooked steel-cut oatmeal in the morning and had eaten it with blueberries.

Yet, all through the day into mid-afternoon I had that Sunday morning, go-out-for breakfast feeling; the kind of feeling that makes you want to sit down in a restaurant and be served ham and eggs, with your cup being refilled by an attentive waitress as quickly as you can drain it.

So, at about 3:00 PM, I said "see you later" to Margie and Jobe, neither of whom wanted to come, drove to Family Restaurant and ordered just such a breakfast.

Afterward, as I drove through the parking lot toward the exit, I spotted this scene.

As I continued on towards home, I spotted this couple. Apparently, the male half lives with the worry that someone will feed him to the bears. He obviously does not want to be fed to the bears.

I came home via Church Road, and found myself behind this vehicle.

This is a crop from the previous image, so that readers can clearly see what the Astro owner wants you to see: a decal of a man with a rifle, kneeling before a cross. There are many ways this could be interpreted and, frankly, I do not know for certain what message the Astro owner is trying to send. 

The decal could represent a soldier, stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq, about to go into combat and so he prays for guidance and protection. It could signify a hunter who desires to feed his family, so he also prays for guidance protection and for help to put food on the table. It could signal the conviction of someone who believes that the barrel of a gun is the way to advance the gospel of He Who commanded those faithful to him: "whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" and "whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain."

Update, 5:52 PM: I just looked at this again, and was struck by another possibility: it might represent a soldier, kneeling before a monument to his fallen friends.

Sometime after I returned home from my truly wonderful late afternoon breakfast, which also served as my lunch and dinner, Melanie and Charlie arrived at the house. Melanie performed for Jobe's amusement.

Charlie showed me his new, used car, a hybrid Honda Insight that he says gets 56 miles per gallon. My nephew, Thos Swallow down in Salt Lake City, engaged to marry in October, has such a car. Only his is a bright, lime, green. You can see it coming, even in the fog, from ten miles away, on the other side of a mountain.

I like that little car.

Jacob and Lavina reported that Kalib, who appears to be completely restored from the ailment that had him down last week, had a happy time at the fair - so much so that he ran his parents into a state of exhaustion.

I did a self-portrait of Jobe and me. And don't be worried that Jobe might suddenly pitch himself backwards with no support. See that patch of maroon and yellow just over my right shoulder?

That's Jacob, and he has his hand on Jobe's back.

Charlie took a picture of me taking this picture. He posted it on his Facebook page.

Kalib never came into the house, because he also exhausted himself at the fair and so he stayed in the car to sleep. All too soon, his parents and Jobe joined him so that they could go home and prepare for the work week ahead.

Margie joined them, too, as she needs to be in Anchorage to babysit Jobe.

Not long afterward, Melanie and Charlie climbed into Charlie's new car so that they could burn less than one gallon of gas and still get home.

I hated to see my daughter go. And Charlie, too, of course, but a daughter - no one holds the heart of a father quite like a daughter. And my daughters - yes, they own my heart.

Still, she and Charlie had to go.

Once again, I was left alone, me and the cats.

By now, I suspect most readers have deduced that I spend a tremendous amount of time alone. I write alone, I drive alone, I walk alone, I bike alone, I sit in airplanes alone, I dine alone.

I am a person who does good alone, because the people that I have met and countless people who I haven't but know of and many who don't even exist outside my imagination all inhabit my mind and when I am alone, many conversations and actitivities take place there. For every word that I write in a form that others can read, I compose ten thousand in my mind, when I am alone.

So I do good alone.

But somehow, on this night, after Melanie left with Charlie, I slipped into a horrid, hollow, state of painful loneliness. I sat at my computer and did the usual things, but nothing could diminish the ache - perhaps because I know that if things go as I hope, in no more than two or three days I will be on a plane going north and then I will be in a place where wireless does not reach. 

I will have no contact with my family - perhaps for a week, two, three... hard to say. It depends on many factors, not a single one of which I will have any control over. So maybe that's why I felt lonely to such a painful degree

At 2:02 AM, I received an email notification that Thruptha Mp had just sent me a Facebook message. I met her in Bangalore, India, during Soundarya's wedding. I had not heard from Thruptha in quite some time, but she wrote to tell me that she had created a folder labeled "Best of Bill's photography" but was frustrated, because she was having a hard time narrowing the images down.

That message cheered me. I went to bed about an hour later, still lonely, but not near as lonely.

Yet, even now, on this new day of this new week, the loneliness has returned in full. Many lonely hours await me.

But don't feel sorry - if one never experienced loneliness, one could never do what I do. It is an integral part of the process and must be faced.

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On a rainy, lazy day, I relax with hard work; What am I to make of the strange convergence of my past and present that just took place at the Lincoln Memorial?

On Saturday, I woke up lazy to the sound of downpour beating against the roof. It was a pleasant sound to hear while wrapped in the warmth of my covers and I contemplated the possibility of just not getting up at all but to spend the entire day in bed, alternating between dozing off and then waking up just long enough to listen to the rain before dozing back off again.

But Jimmy, my good black cat, wanted to be fed and so he caused some commotion until I got up and fed him.

Margie was already up and had cooked herself some oatmeal of the usual variety, so I cooked myself some oatmeal of the steel-cut kind, which I like better, and ate it with blueberries.

I am too broke to go anywhere or do much of anything right now, but as soon as the last invoice I sent out gets paid, I am going to buy me some new Arctic gear and a ticket to a seat on an airplane going north and head out on my next trip, hopefully no latter than Wednesday, although I had been hoping for Tuesday and if I get that money tomorrow, then it will be Tuesday.

It would actually be better to go tomorrow, Monday, but there is no way it will happen by then.

Aside from buying gear and a ticket, there is a long list of tasks that I need to accomplish before I leave and it seemed that I ought to do some of them Saturday - but even after I got up, I felt lazy. I had a great desire to stay lazy, to feel no pressure, to do nothing but lay around and be lazy, or to lazily go about doing something unimportant.

Perhaps I would not have even left the house, but Margie needed an onion for some lentil soup and some Stone Baked, Spent Grain bed to go with it. I had not stopped at Metro Cafe since late Monday afternoon, so I took off to take care of both.

I forgot my camera, but I did have my iPhone, and so I decided that on this lazy day, I would limit my photography to iPhone pictures that I would take from the car, through the rain-smacked windshield.

So here I am, in the parking lot at Carr's, about to go in and buy an onion and some spent grain bread. Although it is not on my list, I will see a bunch of watermelons of the same brand, shape and coloring as the good one I ate in front of Jobe.

I will thump a few, find another that sounds perfect and buy it, too.

I will put it on the one credit card that still has a couple of hundred dollars available, because, as noted, until I get this next check my cash reserves are nil.

I love being freelance, but I am an artist, not a businessman and making money is always secondary to me and so I am in this jam. I have been living like this, with a few brief periods of seeming prosperity, for over 30 years now and sometimes I grow so weary of it that I just want to give up and go hop a train and disappear, let the kids take care of their mom.

Late the week before last, I was contacted by a person who thought I would be just the right man to take over a public relations position in the corporation that he works for, very near the top, and he urged me to apply. It would mean a steady income, health insurance and all that, but it wouldn't work.

It's just not what I do and if something is not what I do, I can't do it. Something inside me just will not let me do it. I cannot explain. It is just how I am. It is amazing that Margie and I have survived this long at all.

So I did not apply.

As long as I had a camera and a laptop and occasional access to power and wireless, I could hop freights, though. That is who I am.

But here in Alaska, the train only goes from points in Seward and Whittier to Fairbanks, probably less than 500 miles, so you can't really go very far when you hop a train. Plus, it can get mighty cold in those freight cars.

Besides that, the Alaska Railroad is pretty strict about keeping train hoppers out of their cars.

So that wouldn't work.

For nearly two decades now, I have lived by the comforting belief that it is okay that I am not a businessman, that I have not been able to accumulate the wealth to carry and sustain Margie and I into old age, because I have honestly believed that my cats would save us.

I have recognized that as important as the work that I have done out and about in Alaska is and that importance will only grow over time, it is not work that will ever put much money in our bank account... but my cats... that is another thing... they could put money in our bank account.

I have all these wonderful photos of cats, ours' and other people's, and good stories to go with them. So I have lived with the belief that it is just a matter of getting these photos and stories into the right hands and then they will market them and the revenue will come and Margie and I can slip comfortably into old age, me to sit at my computer and write, write, write, sort through and organize a life's work of photography, bring the writing and photographt together and leave something behind that tells the story of what I saw and witnessed during my short sojourn on this earth.

But, damnit, so far those cats just aren't coming through for us!

Yet, I still believe in them. I still believe the cats will come through. And so, early in my lazy Saturday, my day of doing nothing, without ever planning to do so, well before I set out on my expedition to purchase an onion and bread, I sat down at this computer, pulled up a single cat photo and then began to write a story to go with it. I thought that I would make the story very short, perhaps two paragraphs long.

The story covers the time period between February 13, 2001 - September 22, 2001, as it relates to our cats, and I have in fact written it up before. The first draft was over 400 single-spaced pages long and the selected photographs numbered in the hundreds.

Impossible.

This time, I decided to do it with one photo and two paragraphs of modest length. And then I would submit it as a photo with caption to a certain online publication, dedicated to exposing great photography. Yes, this is kind of arrogant of me, to even imagine that this one cat-and-family related image could possibly qualify as great photography.

Still, I decided to write the two paragraphs to submit along with the photo.

As I was putting in a lazy day and wanted to feel no pressure, I told myself there was no hurry. All I needed to do was to sketch out the idea, let it simmer and then revisit it later, perhaps after I complete my next round of travels.

Yet, except for the break to stop at Metro (where I found they had closed early so that everybody could go get drenched at the State Fair) and to buy the onion, bread and watermelon, I just kept sitting here, lazily writing at that story.

I would estimate that I sat here for probably 12 hours, maybe 14, and when I finally stopped about midnight, I had a 1500 plus word story and I had added three more pictures.

I decided just to go ahead and submit the damn thing right then and there because I knew if I didn't, I would pull it back up today and would spend anywhere from a couple of hours to a full day going through it and I couldn't afford the time and it probably wouldn't read that much different and besides some pretty sloppy writing appears in this magazine because they are concerned with photography, not words and if I could catch their interest with the photo maybe they would let me have another go at the words and maybe I would then even go ahead and cut it down to two paragraphs.

So I uploaded it all and clicked "Submit."

That left me with one more thing to do before going to bed - this blog. So I plugged my iPhone into this computer, downloaded the pictures, did a quick edit, which I then rapidly processed and organized into the slide show linked at the bottom, from which I posted the images that accompany this narrative. Now, all I had left to do was to write the narrative and then I could go to bed.

I still had the feeling that I had been lazy and relaxed all day, that I had done no work at all, but when I put my fingers upon the keyboard to create the narrative, I could not make my fingers type. The problem was not in the muscles and tendons that control my fingers but in my brain.

My brain was just too exhausted to provide the words to my fingers. I guess I hadn't relaxed as much as I thought.

So I went to bed, and held off this narrative text until after I had gotten some sleep, after I had cooked oatmeal, eaten it, read the newspaper and entertained an unexpected visitor, who came even as I was writing.

I feel totally bombed right now - lazy, tired, unambitious. It is Sunday and I do not want to do anything.

This iPhone picture, by the way, is not from the car window. I took it just after I got out of the car and saw Caleb through the front window, riding his bike on a device that let's him stay in one place and pedal and pedal and pedal, kind of like a rat in a spinning wheel.

I mentioned that I took all of today's photos with my iPhone. When I went to download them, I accidently let the download start from the beginning of the iPhone cache, way back in January. I caught my mistake and stopped the early download almost immediately, but not before this picture of the late Royce popped up in my editor.

Given how I had spent the day, it was as if a ghost had appeared on my screen.

So here is Royce, who many of my longer term readers came to know and love, back from the dead, to give you all a purr.

Now... one more thing... most all of you know that despite the fact that I live in Wasilla and that I could easily increase my readership by many multiples if I would just write about Sarah Palin every day, that is not the purpose of this blog and I do not want to do that. While we may live in the same town, she inhabits a world that I simply do not care to dwell in.

Yet, yesterday, I was struck by what from my point of view is somewhat of an amazing convergence that sooner or later I may be forced to take a look at - although I am certain neither of the subjects would cooperate with me.

Regular readers know that I was raised Mormon, served a Mormon mission among the Lakota/Dakota and that afterward I followed a life dream, left the exile that I was born into and moved to Alaska.

There are certain threads moving in this blog, such as what I see and experience when I travel to other places, most often elsewhere in Alaska, but anywhere. Then there is the Wasilla thread, and, although I have not gotten heavily into it and am not a good church goer of any kind and never expect to be again, there is the Mormon thread. These threads come from the tapestry of my life. 

And yesterday, 47 years after Martin Luther King took history in his hands and reshaped it for the good in a powerful way that has not been matched since, I realized that the Mormon thread and the Wasilla thread had converged at the Lincoln Memorial in a manner that I would never have imagined. Glenn Beck, you see, is a Mormon and while he may be speaking to a largely evangelical audience and adopting the kind of language that he knows will appeal to that audience and is not saying anything specific about being Mormon, it is clear to me that he sees himself as playing a pivotal roll in the fulfillment of Mormon prophecy.

And there he was, sharing the stage with my fellow Wasillan, Sarah Palin.

What am I to make of this? I want to ignore it all and just let it all go away but, somehow, against all that I see as logic, I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon.

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The missing days of the five that Kalib and Jobe spent with Margie and me: golf, Kung Fu, cloud burst, watermelon, bath, Sentimental Journey...

There are times when I think that I should just drop all else and call this, "The Grandpa Blog." But I don't think that I will do that. I am certain that by now regular readers have observed that, no matter what I am working on, at some point I tend to get overwhelmed, I fall behind. New things happen and so I just drop it, move on to the new and state that I will come back to it later. 

Sometimes I do come back; more often, I suspect, I don't. 

Early this week, I had to pull back from posting the pictures that I had been taking of Kalib and Jobe during their five days with us because other things that I was working on just took over. Still, I had the pictures, so I stated that I would come back and post them.

This time, I am really doing it. I begin with this photo of Kalib, in the back yard, golfing with his Uncle Caleb.

They got into something that was kind of like a game of catch, not with a baseball, but with golf ball and club and no one ever really caught the ball. 

Caleb would chip it to Kalib...

...and then Kalib would club it back to Caleb. Golf catch.

Sometimes, when they were with us, I had to take off to go to Metro Cafe for my 4:00 PM All Things Considered coffee break. They, and Margie, were always invited to come with me, but Margie always preferred to stay home and keep them with her.

On one such break, a cloud burst caught me just as I left Metro.

It was a grand one.

A couple of times, I saw flashes, then heard thunder.

One time, the flash seemed to strike directly over my head and the thunder boomed out simultaneously. 

No flash here, though.

Just rain, pouring down.

I loved this storm. It was grand.

It made Earth seem like a good place to live.

Rain that burst from the clouds to fall down upon us.

School bus in the rain. I felt badly that Kalib was not in the car with me at this moment, because he loves to spot school buses. He always points at them and excitedly exclaims, "Bus! Bus!"

Have you ever been out in the rain, soaking wet and cold, and then you get to come in and take a hot shower? You know how good that is.

Well, Jobe had not been in the rain and he did not get to take a shower. But he did get a wet diaper. Then he got plopped down in the kitchen sink where his grandmother gave him a bath - just as she did every night that he was here.

He seemed to think it was pretty good.

Jobe and me. In case either of us should drool or spill food from our mouths, we've both got something to catch it.

I went to the store and thumped a few watermelons. One gave me that perfect hollow sound, so I bought it and brought it home.

I had thumped well. I have sampled some excellent melons this summer, everywhere that I have been, from Greenland to Anaktuvuk Pass to Fort Yukon to Barrow and right here in Wasilla.

But this was the best melon of all.

Jobe was curious, but not really ready to handle a watermelon yet.

Someday, when he is older and can carry on good conversations and has had time to learn about good watermelons and bad, I will open up this blog and show him this picture.

"This just may have been the best watermelon I ever tasted," I will tell him. "And you were right there to witness it."

"I can't ever remember tasting that melon. If it were that good, I am certain I would remember. Did you share the best watermelon that you ever ate with me, Grandpa?" he will ask. "I was right there. Surely, you shared it?!"

"No," I will answer. "You were too little to eat such a melon. You might have choked on it."

"Damnit, Grandpa!" Jobe will cuss. "Now I know why I have felt this quiet anger toward you all these years. You should have shared the damned best watermelon that you ever ate with me!"

I found Kalib on the couch with his grandmother, twisting his hands and arms into various positions and making Kung Fu noises.

What in the world had he been watching?

"Eeeyaaaah!"

Kalib Kung Fu bows to an imaginary opponent.

The Kung Fu warrior grows tired. His grandma is there.

I journied past Mahoney Ranch. They were putting up hay. When you take a picture through a car window as you drive by something, you cannot really control what the pocket camera grabs hold of as a focus point - in this case, grass in front of the barbed wire fence.

Still, it seemed kind of appropriate to me that the main subject was a bit out of focus. I had Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion on the radio. A guest act was performing the World War II era classic, "Sentimental Journey."

That took my mind right out of the car and put it in an exercise room in the part of an extended care facility in Murray, Utah, where people go to die.

The person who had gone into that room to die on this night was my dad. My niece, Shaela Cook, who had largely been raised by he and mom, bought a Glenn Miller album for him and he left this world to the music of that album; he departed to Sentimental Journey:

Gonna take a sentimental journey

Gonna set my heart at ease

Gonna make a sentimental journey

To renew old memories.

Got my bag, I got my reservation

Spent each dime I could afford

Like a child in wild anticipation

Long to hear that: "All aboard!"

Seven, that's the time we leave at

- seven

I'll be waiting up for

- heaven

Counting every mile of railroad track

that takes me back.

Never thought my heart could be so yearning

Why did I decide to roam?

Gotta take this sentimental journey

Sentimental journey home.

How's the journey been so far, Dad?

Did you renew old memories?

Or did you just disappear, 

into the ground, into the ether?

Is your heart at ease?

Or is it simply that it no longer beats?

So this was on Monday, just before I took off to Anchorage. Jobe came out to say goodbye.

And this is what I saw later, after I got there. An airplane. Flying over the steel and concrete canyons of that great metropolis: Anchorage, Alaska.

God, what a fortunate man I am, to live in Alaska. Even when I am in Anchorage, I can feel Alaska. It is out there, beyond and encompassing the steel and concrete, always embracing me.

The Alaska embrace can be a dangerous and deadly one.

It kills people all the time, in its great beauty it kills, without remorse.

Maybe one day it will kill me.

Yet it feels so good.

No - I could never again live in the Lower 48.

I was born down there - born into exile in the state of Utah, city of Ogden.

But even down there, at the time of my birth, I was an Alaskan. Alaska is the only place that will ever feel like home to me. It is the only place that has ever truly felt like home.

I am so glad I finally made it home.

I know - I've said this before, but sometimes I just have to say it again.

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Train thrills; Jobe and Kalib, revisited

I was supposed to drop Margie off at Jacob and Lavina's at 8:00, so that she could babysit both Jobe and Kalib, as a fever had kept Kalib home from daycare. This meant that we needed to leave the house by 7:00, but things just kept going wrong. 

First, after we locked up the house and got into the car, I discovered that I had left my keys inside. Margie did not have her keys either. I knew Caleb was headed home from work so at worst the wait would be short - but we would not leave the house at 7:00.

Then, after I got my keys, we took off, drove one block and then I remembered that I had forgotten some publications that I had promised to give to some people at the Alaska Tribal Leaders Summit. So I went back and got them.

Finally, we set out on our way. It was now 7:30. Margie called Jacob and he said he could stay put until we got there.

As we approached the light at the Parks Highway, I suddenly realized that all this delay had actually been for the good. There was the train, rolling down the tracks toward Anchorage. Had I not been so forgetful, we would have missed this train altogether.

Now we would get to drive right alongside it.

We turned onto the highway and there we were, traveling right alongside the train.

It was wonderful!

I was a boy again, hoping freight trains with my friends in Missoula, Montana.

How could it possibly get any better than this?

I guess this is how it could get better - a person could actually live in this, the most coveted and highly exclusive condo complex in all of Wasilla.

It is such a coveted and exclusive place because no one in all of Alaska has a better train view and train listening perch than do the lucky few who live here.

Sometimes, late at night, when the wind and air conditions are just right, I lie in bed and listen as the train clatters down the track and the whistle blows. I just love it. It gives me this feeling of peace and tranquility.

And that's from 2.5 miles away - as the raven flies.

Can you imagine how soothing and wonderful it must be to be lying in your bed in one of these condos when the train comes by? Right outside your window?

Oh, if I could only hear how the whistle blows from in there!

I put in an excellent day in Anchorage and may well have witnessed some important history being made. I will prepare a report soon.

Afterwards, I went over to hang out with Margie, Jobe and Kalib until Lavina could come home.

Look how bright, alert, and good-natured Jobe! I have never witnessed a more bright, alert, and good-natured baby than he.

I found Kalib fast asleep.

Lavina came home a bit before 5:00, but we hung around for another hour or so in order to allow her to go to the store by herself and do some shopping.

Kalib woke up when she returned. Martigny came over to see him.

Then Kalib pulled her tail. She didn't mind.