Going to Hawaii

I used to look down on people who left Fairbanks during the winter. How weak, I thought, to leave this conditioning tank of a character-building climate for a little sunshine. Staying here through the darkest, coldest months of the year felt like a badge of honor, a testament to the stamina of the people who call Alaska home.

Back then, it didn’t even seem that hard. I must have stored some extra melatonin in my twenty-something skin. Now I’m not so tough.

The change started when I got married. My husband and I went to Mexico for our honeymoon. In December. What a difference that extra dose of Vitamin D made. Was it possible winter didn’t seem as harsh? That spring came a little earlier that year?

Over the next few years, we made trips to the Southwest to see family and took my mom on a Caribbean Cruise. But we still hadn’t joined the folks who migrate annually, planning their next tropical trip as soon as they’ve returned from the one before like birds heading to their nesting grounds.

Then I was invited to spend a couple of weeks at a friend’s house in Kona, Hawaii. On the Big Island. I would be going there to work on a project.

Working in Hawaii. That second part cancels out the first, ensuring you no sympathy from people who are too busy envying you to admire your work ethic. The trip was just what I needed. Space to focus on my writing. A dose of steady 80 degree temperatures in the midst of a two-week deep freeze back here in Fairbanks. While I was there, I got a feel for the similarities between our two states. An openness in the people. A pride in their setting. A love and respect for the land. I began to see how a person might want to call both home.

I’m reading a book by one of the writers I interviewed on the trip, Leaving Resurrection by Eva Saulitis. She has a deep desire to see certain animals – whales and wolves especially – and goes to great lengths to seek them out. Standing for hours at a boat’s railing and scanning the ocean for a glimpse of dorsal fin. Hiking into Denali Park alone because “by myself, maybe I’ll have a better chance at seeing wolves.”

I understand this longing to connect with another being, to recognize and maybe even be recognized by a creature with the divine gift of being born, to admire from afar and treasure later the moment of interaction. In her book Saulitis says, “When I see a wolf, I call it grace. When I don’t, I wonder what I did wrong.”

That seems extreme to me, until I switch out the animal with a person; every opportunity to connect means a potential friend. When that doesn’t happen, I wonder what I’ve done wrong.

Meeting her family opened both old and new connections for me. Her husband has land near the homestead where I spent my first Alaskan winter. I remember watching his kids run along the bluff above Kachemak Bay, the low sun shining on their blonde hair.

And how it felt when I’d found this place called Alaska. Like I was home.

Later during my Hawaii respite, Peggy and her husband drove me around the island. We visited the active volcano Kilauea, being careful not to take any lava with us which might anger the Goddess Pele, who’s been known to sentence thieves to a string of bad luck for their audacity.

Driving up to the land where Eva and her husband are building a home, towards a bluff much like that one outside Homer, with horses in the pasture and a friendly dog in the driveway, I could see how it might be hard to choose between the two places.

But Eva talked about how much she missed Alaska. Even in a paradise like the one she got to live in when she was gone. I urged her to write about it, to look for the meaning behind the desire. "Oh, people will just think I’m whining,” she said. “I can’t complain when I’m so lucky to be here.”

Somehow, I don’t think so. I think Alaskans will recognize themselves in her longing for a place that has become a part of who she is.

Even when we’re away, soaking up some well-deserved rays, we yearn to be back in Alaska. Being gone can be a gift because it helps us remember how much we treasure the home we’ll return to. Even when it’s only the end of January, and the long winter is still stretching out ahead of us, offering weeks of potential 40 below weather, the sun acting all proud now that it’s showing up for a few more hours a day. We know we’ll be that much more grateful when summer finally returns.

Because we’ve earned it.

Books of my Childhood

The spine jumps out at me from the bookstore shelf. My hand hesitates for a second before pulling Caps for Sale from the stack. This can’t be the same book, I think. But as soon as I see the cover, the memories come flooding back.

The cheerful peddler dressed in a striped suit - he’s so hungry, yet still hopeful. The monkeys, laughing while they play the man like a marionette after he awakens from his nap to find that they’ve stolen his caps.

I remember being fascinated by that pile of caps, the way they perched so solidly on the peddler’s head in that precariously tall stack. Their perfect cap shapes.

I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I must have read it as a child. Every word seemed as familiar as my kindergarten classroom decorated with balloons featuring the Letter People, a phonics tool from the seventies. I had to change schools halfway through the year and was devastated that I wouldn’t get to see what letters P through Z looked liked. Mr. Zipping Zippers, I never knew you.

Author Esphyr Slobodkina was born in the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk. She was an artist who collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown (Good Night Moon, The Runaway Bunny) before writing her own children’s books. Even though Caps for Sale was her second, it was published first in 1940. But would it stand the test of time?

When I was growing up, Christmas wasn’t a success unless it ended with a pile of books under the tree. My mom made her limited budget stretch by finding all kinds of treasures in the local bookstores and used book nooks. Before Amazon stocked every title imaginable or the big box businesses arranged artful displays full of titles you never even knew you wanted to read, she found forever friends for me on her own, classics like Stuart Little and a spider named Charlotte.

She introduced me to some of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle and L. M. Montgomery. Now I’m hoping to do the same for my son. That’s why the titles I read as a child are starting to show up in Owen’s stocking and at his birthday parties.

This Christmas he was a little disappointed to see that the heaviest box under the tree was full of books. “Can I open a toy now,” he pleaded.

Still, it was those books he curled up on the couch with later that afternoon after the toys weren’t so new anymore. And I know it’s those stories he’ll savor and remember when he’s grown. We’ve pored through the Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and read Peter Pan so many times. I sometimes forget the lost boy’s not my second child.

He’s also got Blueberries for Sal. I can practically recite Robert McCloskey’s other classic Make Way for Ducklings, but I didn’t read this one when I was young.

This story came alive for me in Galena, where I produced a half-hour radio show featuring locals reading children’s stories. I remember Wanda Attla grinning as she snuggled up to the microphone, her daughter watching, rapt, at her feet, savoring every word.

I thought the book was about Alaska, with its berries and bears. I spent one of my first summer nights in the state camped out on our own Blueberry Hill near Valdez, hearing that song running through my head and thinking this new landscape looked like something out of a coffee table book about Ireland.

One late summer morning Owen and I followed our friend Oded and his sister Edit up a hill much like the one where Sal and Little Bear got their mothers mixed up. We were looking for the last of the season’s blueberries, but kept getting distracted by the abundant cranberries just beginning to ripen. Owen spent most of the time cramming the crisp, sour berries into his mouth and looking for bears, adamant that Little Sal and her mother were picking berries on that same hill.

When he grows up, will he be surprised to learn differently? And will he find his own beat up copy of Caps for Sale and remember laughing until he almost fell out of my lap to see those monkeys stamping both their feet and saying, “Tsz, Tsz, Tsz.”

The Creation Cycle

At the beginning of the year I made a resolution that I didn’t care if I kept. I had just begun to blog and was feeling that rosy glow of a fresh start, unafraid of failure and looking forward to the journey, so I decided to write something every day.

Those who don’t read or write blogs often belittle the practice. Call it a diary or a personal journal. That's not what blogs are, unless you blow up the pages of your diary and plaster them all over the outside of your house. What started as a way to index interesting and worthy sites on the Internet has evolved into something much more. When a blogger blogs, she wants people to read what she says, sometimes more than is healthy. Blogging can be very private. When it is, it’s more like a family newsletter, or maybe scrapbooking. You get to play around with layout, add pictures and insert clever captions, even write tag lines and dialogue. It’s up to the creator to decide how universal or personal they will be.

I posted stories and snippets on my blog, a litany of images and vignettes that influence me. I wanted to make my writing a practice, to find inspiration in the routine much as professional dancers and runners do. People who have a practice engage in the routine everyday, whether they want to or not. By pushing through that pain, they often reach new levels in their physical and emotional lives.

Some days the words just flew from my fingertips, longish essays and narratives that made connections I hadn’t consciously noticed. Others weren’t so easy, I had to struggle to come up with something coherent or settle for a funny quip. For six months, I persisted, though. And then I stopped.

Looking back I realize that while my commitment to the blog ended, my writing didn’t. Since the work sat around for awhile, I kept mucking about with it, pushing through my dashed expectations and the frustration. In some ways what I’ve created in that darker space resonates more fully.

The blog won’t go to waste, though. Many of the images will be mined for the book I hope to complete someday. Or maybe they’ll just be fodder for another decade of columns. Either way, I was taking a chance with my writing by offering it to an audience that is changing the way it finds art.

We are at the beginning of what I believe will be a new age of media. These days a blogger has as much of a chance to reach a reader on the Internet as the local newspaper. That doesn’t mean news-based publications are going away, but finally people are seeing what the media really is. Not an anonymous box of chattering masses, nor limited to corporate sponsors or celebrity journalists. I have met the media and it is us.

Artists have always been engaged in creating new media forms. Entire ages of civilization have been named after art traditions and musical styles. These days, the arts are under threat from the usual sources, a lack of funding and access. As unemployment rises and philanthropic giving shrinks, artists will find it even harder to get the in-kind support that exists completely off the books, whether it’s from spouses and partners with benefits or the help of generous patrons.

But even before the economic downturn, the media has been changing. Large scale layoffs in everything from public radio to the newspaper sector will have an impact, but out of this darkness will come something new. We are all constantly in the presence of cycles, whether it’s the same ladybug metamorphosis playing out in the humid climes of Southeastern Pennsylvania or the subarctic desert of Interior Alaska.

We find them in the underlying threads of human civilization, too. In religion, where the biblical stories of sin and redemption provide a base for its teachings. Even in science with its laws of entropy that say every system must fall apart only to be replaced by new ones that emerge to fill the void. It makes sense that the year ends at its darkest moment. With the sun barely making an appearance above the horizon, I yearn for the days when it will once again offer sustenance. At the same time I know I wouldn’t appreciate it, might not even notice it, if the sun were here all the time. Just as an artist must withdraw into an abyss of loneliness and despair for his greatest creation to emerge.

As the next New Year begins, I’m not making any resolutions. Instead I’m hoping that for each of us there will be at least a moment of gladness, a glimmer of belief in something larger than ourselves, something that can only emerge from the darkness.

Tree Top

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

Happy Holidays.

May your New Year be bright.

Rooting for the Nutcracker

The music blared from loudspeakers, classical and familiar. Since we’d arrived at the Hering Auditorium a half-hour early, we were up front and center, close enough to see the painted on smiles and fake snow flicked up by the dancers’ feet.

The children squirmed, a little tired now that we’d been in our seats for so long. As the curtain opened, I watched Owen closely for signs of restlessness. This was our second year of attending the North Star Ballet’s production of the Nutcracker, and I still wasn’t sure if the pre-schooler would last.

I didn’t even like the production as a child. When it came on the television, cleverly disguised as a holiday special, my heart sank. I lost interest as soon as the guests went away and the family went to bed. The dancing didn’t do much for me either. I preferred football or some other team sport. So I was surprised when my son became a fan.

After Thanksgiving last year, Owen discovered an illustrated version of the story at the library. He couldn't stop talking about the little wooden soldier. His sword. His cape. His funny mouth. His questions came at us like mosquitoes at a herd of caribou. Why was the Nutcracker ugly? Why did he fight the Mouse King? Why did he come alive?

I didn't know the answers, so we brought the original book along with us on a trip to Birch Lake outside Delta Junction. By the light of a dinky light bulb tucked away in a tiny cabin on a frozen lake, with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls, Owen and I devoured The Nutcracker and the King of Mice. Written by E.T.A. Hoffman in 1816, the tale is full of layers, rich characters and delicious connections. It’s as dark as Hans Christian Anderson and as delightful as Disney.

We learned about that fateful Christmas Eve when the Nutcracker appeared. As the Stahlbaum children waited for the Christ Child to bring them gifts, they peeked through the keyhole at the tree laden with candles, pink and yellow bonbons and even little toy people made of candy. The next day they discovered that the Nutcracker himself was once a real boy, put under a spell by Dame Mouserink, the Mouse King’s mother.

And spooky Godpapa Drosselmeyer was responsible for all of it. He was the one who invented the mouse traps that would enrage the Dame, and then led his own nephew in the path of a spell that turned him into the ugly creature. When the Nutcracker brought about the Queen of Mice’s death, her son with the seven-heads vowed to avenge it. Ever since, the Prince had been waiting for a chance to find someone to love him despite his looks, so he could be transformed back into a human.

Soon Owen was asking for only one thing of Santa. A Nutcracker. A real one that actually cracked nuts. Lucky for me, nutcrackers were the Christmas decoration of choice that shopping season. At the grocery story, he crouched down in front of an army of nutcrackers marked “For Display Only.” He inspected the ranks, dressed as actual Army soldiers, Santa Claus, German kings and bagpipers, slowly pulling up on the cape that moved the mouth. I explained that these didn’t really crack nuts, they were only for show.

Meanwhile, my evenings were spent scouring the internet for a sign of an old fashioned version. I found plenty of Hillary Nutcrackers – which my husband found hilarious, but creeped me out - and a gorgeous version make by company called Steinbach. I fretted about the expense to a friend. “Am I really going to indulge my four-year-old to the tune of $89.99?"

Finally my husband came home from work one day with a cheap decorative version bought at a local department store. I fretted about it’s lack of, um, teeth. When we attended the Nutcracker last year, cramming into the first empty seats we could find in the back, Owen sat on my lap transfixed. He laughed at the little mice scurrying around the stage and was happy as long as the Nutcracker Prince was in sight. There was a silent auction going on in the lobby as a fundraiser and a couple of Nutcracker prototypes were on the block. My husband sneaked over to make a bid.

So on Christmas morning, Owen found not just one, but two Nutcrackers under the tree. We keep one on the kitchen counter, for cracking nuts. The other one stands guard at his bedroom door, coming alive whenever there are children around to play with it.

And now when Owen and I see the Nutcracker together, we’re both spellbound. We root for the Nutcracker Prince to kill the Mouse King and sigh with pleasure as Clara travels with him to the Marzipan Palace, where they are entertained by a procession of dancers, lost in a story that’s survived for almost two hundred years, as timeless as boys and swords, kids and Christmas.

Moose in the Yard

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday


I looked in the yard and what did I see?
Two moose looking back at me.
The mother seemed wary, the child merely curious.
I knew not to bother them, lest they become furious.
Living in Fairbanks has parts that may hinder.
It's cold and bleak and dark each winter.
But this is one of my favorite things.
Moose in the yard and all the surprises nature brings.

Don't worry. I won't quit my day job.
I'm not a poet. Don't I know it.

The Sock Chase

This one's for Brownie:

It started the way so many of my obsessions do these days. Someone wrote about it on my wall. This wasn’t graffiti etched in metallic paint on the side of our house or a scrap of paper stuck to an office bulletin board. A friend wanted to tell me something, so she left me a note on my Facebook account.

For those of you not among the growing hordes of parents and baby boomers “friending” old classmates and looking up exes on the world’s largest social networking system - or those of you still in your adolescence who’ve reluctantly left the party now that all the old folks have crashed it - let me fill you in.

Facebook is an on-line site where you can create a page devoted to your posse, your profession or just talk about the things you like. It’s part resume and part blog. A hybrid of e-mail and holiday letters. It’s My-Space without the annoying background music and swirling graphics.

It’s a dorm room door where people can stop by and tell you they like your new haircut (thanks to a profile picture) or that the kids are growing up so fast (thanks to your photo albums) or that they cannot believe Alaska’s governor pardoned that turkey, only to complain in an interview about how “brutal” the campaign trail was while the rest of the flock got slaughtered in the background (thanks to an application that lets you post video and links to other websites).

I guess Palin’s crew of Outside public relations professionals have been laid off now that the governor’s back in Alaska. Unlike the weeks during the presidential election, though, this obsession had nothing to do with the former Vice Presidential candidate. A friend wrote to tell me about the Big Sock making a pass through Fairbanks as part of its world tour. She knew I liked to knit from my Facebook display, and she wanted to make sure I got a chance to see it.

I started knitting late last year because it just seemed like the right time. There are these moments when life sweeps you up in the latest trend, leaving you wondering how you ever lived without it, while simultaneously shaking your head at the absurdity of becoming another cliché, an almost-40, ex-boyfriend friending lady who knits socks.

It’s my obsession. I don’t go anywhere or do anything without dragging a set of double-pointed needles along with me. I’m not even the worst. Some of my friends spend their weekends combining two passions – hockey and knitting. (Or for their partners - it’s hockey and expensive cheap beer.) Their secret desire is to inspire a special addition to the camera that canvasses the crowd looking for couples kissing or kids crying. They call it the knitting cam.

So, I knit socks. Cabled socks, baby socks, socks made out of unwashable wool, socks made out of machine-safe blends. I don’t think I’ll be able to stop until every friend and acquaintance has a pair of wool stockings languishing in her dresser. Watch out Facebookers.

But the Big Sock is different. For one thing, it’s not fit for a human foot. How many knitters does it take to carry the big sock? At least five if you don’t want it to drag on the ground.

Reportedly the Big Sock was started a couple of years ago by a woman in the United Kingdom who designed it as a charity event for National Knitting Week, and it’s been growing ever since. Literally. The sock that visited Fairbanks over the weekend was 76-inches long, weighing 50 pounds and sporting a 21-inch circumference.

Knitters from all over town stopped by yarn shops and bars to add a few stitches on the circular needles strung out along its diameter. They talked about their passion for knitting and felt a communion with people from different cultures and religions who felt the same way. Our connections go beyond our basic needs for food, shelter, clean air and water.

I never did get to see the big sock. Something even better happened to me instead. I went over to a friend’s house for an impromptu knitting night. We brought desserts and our bags of yarn. She provided a big pot of soup and some homemade bread. And for me, the obsessive sock knitter, she had a pair of hand knit socks more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen.

They’re warm and machine washable, just the right shades of blue and red weaved into a pattern that looks like stars peeking out of a wintry night. They’re soft and cozy, and I’m never taking them off. Now if I can only get her to join Facebook, I’ll leave her the nicest thank you note one of those walls has ever seen.