Something for your bucket list...

The pilgrimage was generally painful and fraught with frustration, but it did have one very bright point... a glowing, brilliant, scintillating beacon of light.  My father made reservations for Master and I to go on a salmon fishing trip down the Kasilof river.  The guide had this float boat powered by only the muscles in his arms... I mean having a handsome strong tanned man row your boat all day is amazing.  This is a pic of another group getting the same treatment. 

One of the most magical things was the weather... bright blue skies... warm breezes...

We did not catch any fish, but that did not matter.  It was just awesome to float silent and peaceful, holding the fishing poles, listening the endless stories of this fish caught here or another that got away... the voices of the old men resurrecting old memories and dusting them off, reliving those bright moments.  It was almost as good as catching the fish themselves.

I ended up with the worst sunburned nose... I am peeling now. 

If you ever have the chance, don't pass it up.  It was dreamlike.

Alaska pictures

So I am home again. A little older (I did have my birthday during my visit.) and a little wiser. I do know that I was doing a lot of mourning. While my mother is still very much alive, she is just not the same and I had to face that loss.

They gave me the "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", "The Girl That Played With Fire", and "The Girl That Kicked the Hornets Nest" for my birthday present. I am already done with the first two and half way through the third. They are good mystery thrillers.

Master has left with the 'struction to "finish that book" so I won't be sneaking off to read alla the time and he can give me longer lists of things to do. But to tell you the truth he was so happy to get me home that I have been totally spoiled since I have gotten here. Direction to "take nap now" twice a day. Order out Mexican put down in front of me when I rouse and blink bleary eyed. And he was right... I was pretty drained when I got home. Both physically and mentally exhausted. And lets not forget the amazing sex. I really needed the rest.

Here are some pictures of my Alaska trip.

If you get up very early in the morning...














... and you keep a sharp eye out, you will sometimes see the caribou as he swims across. He is the little black thing in the water.












And you will have a better chance of actually catching a salmon to eat.












Here is a picture of that unfortunate rainbow trout with the terrible facial scars from being caught and released so many times. He was big and strong and healthy... if a bit battered and having an ugly mug.









And here is that lonely Stellar Sea Lion at the Seward Sea Life Center.

















So I guess I better get to reading if I am going to obey the 'structions and finish that book.

Alask Trip

In all actuality it has been a perfect visit. The weather has been warm if pretty wet… but I expect the weather to be wet. We have fished and fished but there have not been very many catches. I did catch one HUGE rainbow trout… easily 5 pounds… though I am sure after a few more tellings he will get bigger and bigger, soon to be six, seven or even eight. He fought like a tiger, fooling us into thinking that he had to be one of those elusive silvers clear up until he was in the boat. He was fat, strong and beautiful, excepting his smile… he had lived in that little stretch of the Kenai River, stealing the baits of the salmon fishermen his entire life. And he had paid a pretty high price for this easy life; his mouth was scarred and twisted, mutilated by the endless number of times he had been caught and released. He has lived long enough and survived enough harrowing encounters to earn a name… he will forever be known as scarface.

We did catch a three silver salmon (Coho Salmon to some) and have filleted and frozen one and smoked two more. My daughter-in-law calls smoked salmon candy, and while the intellectual part of me agrees… it does taste good… the little girl that had few snack options other than pungent salty smokey “Squaw Candy”… (apologies for the culturally insensitive word… but that IS what it is called here in Alaska… even the native people call it that.)… anyway… just the smell of smoked salmon evokes too many visceral memories. I just don’t like it that much anymore.

We took a road trip to Seward and went to the sea life center there, a nice if somewhat smallish aquarium that shows the undersea Alaskan stuff. I think that the high point was the giant Stellar Sea Lion bull… but I felt a bit sad about how small his tank was in comparison to him. And he was alone… I think he looked lonely.

We have had endless good meals… I made “Hook Point Humpy”… deep fried breaded bites of fresh pink salmon that melted in our mouths. I could have cooked three times as much and still not gotten all I wanted… it was a marvelous thing to watch those delectable bites disappear into Livie’s stomach almost as fast as we dished up her plate. We’ve eaten tons of fresh vegetables from the garden… broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, turnips, carrots… fresh new potatoes stolen from under the still producing tops… it is a treasure hunt each trip into the garden.

Today has dawned bright and sunny… the first beautiful day here in these parts in over a month. My father, known to all as Grampa has orchestrated a coupe… he has decided to send my son, daughter-in-law and Livie off on another scenic road trip, handing over a C-note to insure dining and shopping fun… and I am slated to another docket. Assisting with taking Gramma out on the river for a fishing trip. This is a role my father loves to put me in… the first mate to his captain, the step and fetch’it, the go’fer, the legs and arms and eyes to keep his memories alive. Making the fishing trips of today carry just enough of the hint of those of yesteryear to feed the memories. It will be nostalgic and today I am brimming over with deep thoughts, nostalgia and tears. It won’t be exactly the same, nothing ever is, but I will sit and listen as they relive each memory, the fish caught here, the time they got tangled up there, each experience reviewed, savored, refreshed and relived … and I will be the witness to these stories and hearing them, commit them to memory… and remembering insure that they will live on, archived for another thirty years until I can pass them on to sons and granddaughters and great grandchildren…

There I go again, starting to overflow with tears… somehow, in this place mortality and eternity swirl about me… touch me more often… force me to stop and contemplate… and I had every good intention of making this post lighter, more palatable, easier to swallow… and there I go again… with a lump stuck in my throat… blinking, swallowing down unshed tears.

I can hear the freight train coming.

And now that I am here I am going through the same little spasms of sadness and apprehension I do every time I visit. Each time I come here… I see how my parents are just a little older than they were last time I saw them. Aging is like that, an imperceptible fade, the gradual erosion of time wearing us away, changing us…

I very much believe it is nature in its most gentle and merciful persona that does this, slowly steals away the person that once was so that when the inevitable occurs… the thing you lose is not your mommy or daddy… it has become a husk, a shadow, and echo of what was and perhaps… maybe, just maybe… it won’t hurt so much when they go. And I am realistic enough to see that freight train coming right at me. I cannot keep them forever… that is an impossibility… and it would be a cruelty for them and all the rest of us. And yet as I write these words, my eyes are brimming with little girl tears. I cannot imagine a world without my mommy and daddy in it. And no matter how much I know I am strong enough, that freight train is going to crush me.

I can’t see my mother in there very often now. She looks different, she sounds different, she even smells different. She forgets things, little things and big things. She has asked me if I had read the book, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” the second time, and it was funny. The third time was an exercise in patience but the fourth time was heartbreaking. And when she overheard us talking about my daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, she clearly had no memory of being told that there was a fourth great grandchild in the making. I can understand the book thing, but great grandchildren, they are kind’a important.

Add to her forgetfulness, her severe hearing loss that forces me to yell at her to get my words inside her head. And you know… it is fucking nearly impossible to yell and yell at someone without some kind of irritation starting to show through. It is the flip side of “fake it ‘til you make it”. I have always found it true that if I am tired or down I can “fake” being energetic and/or cheerful and eventually, most times it will come true. Now, when I raise my voice… I feel the rage leaking in and as much as I try to control it… I see her flinch and look wounded. And I feel like shit.

Because, the one part of her that has faded the most is that part of her… the angry part. She no longer is irritable or impatient. She seems to have left all expectations and even a sense of the passage of time behind.

Dad does most of the cooking now… mom just sits with a book in her lap and dozes most of the time. The part of me that needs to laugh instead of cry wonders if perhaps that the book is not “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”… (though actually that book has been loaned out to some friend they talk about as if I somehow know him just as intimately as they do.) My father is just as irascible and funny and inflexible as he has been his entire life. He takes care of her and worries what will happen if he predeceases her. And men in my family generally do. His mind is pretty good, but his body is rapidly failing him. I carefully reassure him that I will be here, that I will make sure she will be safe and happy. And perhaps that is another merciful nature thing, if the dementia has progressed far enough, she may not remember so acutely his absence. I know if she were to go before him, he would nearly die of the agony.

So there it is… I know I am going to have to face this freight train, let it crush me and stand back up and try to hold the shattered bits of the surviving parent together. If it is my father, I will just help with the physical things, and defer to his wishes. He says he would not want to stay here in this house without her. And if it is her, I need to do it all… decide all. So that means, either way, 80 years of memories to sort, share, gift, sell or throw away. No matter how you look at it… it will be a herculean task. An almost literal Aegean Stable of stuff. Treasures to the people who loved them, objects to the rest of us.

I wander through this Alaskan museum of a house. Priceless Eskimo artifacts careless looted from a hundred walks on a hundred beaches gathering dust next to cheap souvenirs gifted to them from people long dead, reminders of places and experiences that are eloquent in their irrelevance. Furniture and art, tools and toys, stuffed salmon and bearskin rugs, frying pans I remember using 40 years ago when I was just learning to cook… the same old school house clock that my great grandfather looted from a school house after the San Francisco Earthquake and ticked and ticked through every night of my growing up life or the ancient rocking chair I determinedly scratched “Daddy” deep into the finish of when I was just barely older than Livie is now. It is archeology of their lives and because I was a part of that life, so much of it is my life too… so much is wrapped up and weighed down by my memory of it. How can I just let go of that rocking chair that still says “Daddy”?

What to Say?

What to say? Not a lot and a butt ton of things are going on. The usual work on the weekdays, come home kind'a wrecked and uninspired... bike rides and shower sex on the weekends with lots of naps, add in some good food, TV reruns of nature shows and writing stories and you have my life in a nutshell.

The same old, same old... but little things stand out. Us walking through the grocery store. Him asking me what's next, me looking at the list and announcing, "Meat". Him saying, "I know you are, but what's next on the list?" Picture me humping his leg in a busy grocery store. Picture an old man teasing us with a "Hold it down, there." Me deliberately misunderstanding and shooting back, "You have no idea how hard it is to hold me down!"

A few days later after a long chatty email exchange with one of my virtual friends, the topic wound round to verbal humiliation, how he sometimes will say the words but it rings hollow because I can tell he really doesn't "feel" it. He doesn't think of me of me as even a bitch, much less meat and I am not so sure he wants to believe those words are true. He doesn't want a bitch or meat. But still, even when they ring hollow, they trigger something in me, a thrill of fear... a rush of heat.

I am getting ready for my annual pilgrimage to the land of my genesis. Every August I go to Alaska to visit my aging parents and engage in the yearly ritual of fish sacrifice. Yes, I kill fish. I like to kill fish... no... I LOVE to kill fish. This year, Master is not going. Instead I am taking oldest son, my enigma of a daughter-in-law and the miracle that is my five year old granddaughter with me. It ought to be fun... and exhausting. My very wise Master decided to opt out of the circus.

Last night Master mentioned he was going to miss me. He said that he is going to totally fuck my brains out before I go... and then went on to describe all the depraved and disgusting things he is going to do. (More leg humping...) He even mentioned bondage and name calling... maybe the conversation about verbal humiliation is going to pay off?

Already my ass is decorated with a lovely constellation of little marks, bruises, speckles of little red marks, lines, dots.He beat me into a limp pile of whimpering "meat"... and when he asked me if I had had enough... for the first time in a very long time I nodded and sort of groaned out an mmmm, hmmm... and you know what... that reluctant sadist kept right on... clearly he needed more. And he is talking about another session soon... so he is planning on getting in some extra licks to tide me (and him?) over until my return in 9 days.

My yard is sort of getting away from me again... too many afternoons and weekends just sitting on my ass... I know I could beat it back to the place I had it before in just a few hours of easy hoeing and chopping. Just getting the "round-to-it" to come up to the top of the pile. But Livie's pumpkin plant is growing into the monster I knew it would and we already have a couple of pumpkins.

Yesterday I came home from work extra drained... I think it was the realization that today will most likely (99% sure) be the last day that my best ever, most awesome, (and secretly... don't tell him... sexiest) principal EVAR will be there. When I return to work this September for the new school year, he will be gone. I will miss him so much. He sings, he laughs, when he yells good morning down the hall you know he is happy to see you there at work. He does not hesitate even for a second to step in and deal with the shit that comes raining down every day. He can just walk into a room and the kids behave better... not because they are afraid... but because they just want to more when he is around. And he has such an amazing smile... like a light house. The hallways will be just a little darker next September. I told him I would not hate him for leaving... that I will reserve that for who ever they find to try and replace him.

Today there is no kids at work... just a day for teachers to do end of year grades and it is my day to do all the last bits of filing and enter the last data and print out my end of the year reports. And then I get to do my favorite thing... I get to put away all of the last years files... I get to put it all to bed... finally finished, neat, organized, done... finis... I look forward to doing this all year long.

And then I will celebrate by going and getting my nails done. I am thinking about blue sparkly.

And answer me this, why, oh why are my bowels in some kind of an uproar... why did my insides insist on complete evacuation... three times... count them THREE times this morning??? My poor bung hole is sorer this morning than it is after Master uses me unlubed in the shower. Pooping: the last forbidden subject. Why is it somehow more permissible to talk about someone sticking their dick up there than it is to talk about what comes out of it??? ...go figure.

Well I guess I should pack it up and finish getting ready for work.