Monday, March 26, 2012

"My Education in Five Chapters"


My Education in Five Chapters   




Chapter 1


My education begins.

I learn the faces of my parents,

and their moods.

I learn the basics: how to crawl, how to stand,

how to walk, how to speak.

I learn “please” and “thank you.”

I learn to ride a bike, smash a bug,

catch a fish, throw a ball.

I learn to make friends.

Chapter 2


Formal education takes control.

In public school,

I learn to read, to write, to do math.

I learn to fill out worksheets and take tests.

Teachers add rules

and expand my views.

Classmates add more rules.

I learn to share,

to show-and-tell, to put my things away.

I learn to stand in line, toe the line,

and cross the line.

I learn that good citizenship is hard work.

And I learn that I can get as much or as little

from my education as I desire.







Chapter 3


I follow the expected path: a college education.

Independent for the first time,

I learn to make my own rules,

to suffer my own consequences.

Class work guides me toward a career,

but life itself guides me toward adulthood.

I learn to balance my own checkbook,

do my own laundry, take care of my own car.

I learn to live away from home.

I also learn firsthand

that relationships can begin and end.

I learn that heartache hurts.





 


Chapter 4

An irony occurs:
The problem child becomes a teacher,
and he learns in the process
that no one escapes the need for education.

As an educator, I learn to teach others—
Some of whom
are as resistant to education
as I once was.
As an educator, I learn
that teaching is learning—
that, indeed,
learning may be the best part of teaching.





Chapter 5

The most recent revelation
in my education
arrives in the form of fatherhood.

I change diapers, feed hungry infants,
comfort them when they wake from bad dreams
or cannot sleep at all.
I sing them songs, read them stories,
build them snow forts,
hold the fenders of their bikes
as they try to learn to ride.

I discover
that my own parents were smarter
than I believed possible.
My children teach me
as much as I teach them.

I learn that the very cycle of life

keeps education alive.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

"Lightning out of Place"



LIGHTNING OUT OF PLACE

June 2003
When I was growing up here on the Kenai Peninsula, usually once a summer, we would be inside the house and hear a booming noise. Since we were in no normal jet path, the likelihood of a sonic boom was slight. So we knew—especially if we had previously spotted threatening black cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon on an otherwise sunny afternoon—that were probably hearing thunder. Typically, we would hurry outside to the front or back porch, hoping maybe to see some lightning and hear some more thunder. In this part of Alaska, thunder and lightning are rare, although less so in the mountains where the air pressure is more volatile than out here in lake-and-ocean country. If we were lucky, we might see three or four lightning strikes in 5-10 minutes before the show was over. Always it was a big deal. At times it seemed less common than earthquakes, certainly more unusual than the aurora borealis. On hike with two friends last week, however, I had a thunder-and-lightning experience different than at any time in my life. With me were Drew O’Brien, who has lived here about 40 years, and David, who has lived here nearly 45 years. All three of us have spent a great deal of time outdoors, much of it in the mountains. None of us had experienced anything like this in Southcentral Alaska. And what’s more: When it was all over, it appeared that no one else had even noticed.



The three of us had had a beautiful sunny hike up from the Sterling Highway to a mountain saddle on the Skyline Trail, and we had left the main trail behind to follow what is essentially an animal path down through a valley between a pair of prominent ridgelines. Our plan was to hike all the way around the peak and ridge on our left and then return to the highway via a different route. We knew that, at the end of the valley we were descending lay an illegal horse camp and a trail. As we approached the camp, however, we could see, over our right shoulders, huge dark clouds piling up over the ridgelines. We knew it was likely that we might get dumped on by a brief mountain downpour. But as we headed downhill from the horse camp, we heard thunder for the first time…. To make a long (and electrifying) story short, we heard perhaps 50 peals of thunder on our descent, and we saw maybe 30 flashes of lightning. In the beginning, the interval between lightning and thunder was nearly 10 seconds. Later on, lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous, the action so close to us that were ducking on the trail and cringing as the thunder boomed directly overhead—so loud it seemed as if the sky were breaking. Meanwhile, the rain started and quickly evolved from scattered drops to a light shower and on to a deluge.



We were scuttling along in one of the heaviest rains I’ve ever encountered. Puddles were forming on a sloped trail. I was soaked through, and everything in my knapsack that was not encased in plastic became saturated. My boots and socks bubbled with water as I walked. My bare legs were flecked with mud. And all we could was keep moving, and try to laugh despite being scared.



We had almost three miles to cover from the first sound of thunder until we reached Drew’s truck back out near the highway. Water was running over the blacktop as he drove us back to the original trailhead, where our other vehicles awaited. The thunder-and-lightning show had lasted 60-90 minutes. And—as we all suspected might be the case—the entire storm was very localized. In Anchorage to the north, we learned later, they had had a beautiful day; in fact, they set a record-high temperature (79 degrees) for that date. And here at home, they saw no lightning, heard no thunder, and had no rain. Here, the kids were so hot in the afternoon sunshine that they stripped naked and run in the sprinkler on the lawn. Here, when I arrived, Karen was feeding the kids dinner picnic-style outside on the porch. Here, everything was still sunny and bone dry.



I trudged sloppily into the garage, where I had to wring out the sopping-wet contents of my pack and actually dump out standing water from the bottom. Nothing I had worn or carried was remotely dry.




"Improper Contacts"


IMPROPER CONTACTS

June 2003
It was hot in my sister’s house, and my family was trying to sleep in one overly warm and decidedly arid back bedroom. The night began with Karen and I on a futon, and the kids on the wood floor, but after I grew tired of all the complaining, the shuffling began. Seven-year-old Kelty moved onto the bed with Karen, and I dropped to the hard floor with nine-year-old Olivia. Eventually, I was left alone on the floor, groaning silently about old bones on hard surfaces.



Sometime before that final transfer of bodies took place, I was awakened from a bout of bad sleep by the movement of Olivia, who had been lying up against my back. She was getting up. I asked her if she was all right, and she replied that she just had to go to the bathroom. She walked out, and I think that I slipped back into some sort of semi-stupor. The next thing I remember is Olivia returning to the bedroom and tapping Karen on the shoulder, saying, “Mom! Mom!” Karen muttered, “Wha--?” And Olivia said, “Mom, I need you to come to the bathroom with me RIGHT NOW.” Something in the tone of her voice told Karen not to argue; she got right up and followed Olivia out of the room.



I thought perhaps that Liv had crapped her pants, or done something else messy like that. Momentarily startled awake, I noted that it was about 1 a.m., according to the digital clock, and I began to listen, for the bathroom was just a short ways down the hall. I heard Karen ask Olivia what was wrong, and I heard Olivia say (with a sense of rising panic in her voice), “I went to the bathroom and I was washing my hands, and I tried on one of your contacts, and now I can’t get it out of my eye.” There was a long moment of silence, and then Karen said, “Where did you get my contacts?” “They’re right there,” Olivia said. I could visualize her pointing. And Karen said, “Honey, those aren’t MY contacts.”



Karen then –without the aid of her own contacts, which were still in her toiletries bag—began to work to get the contact out of Olivia’s eye, all the while she herself was bleary eyed with sleep. The process was not brief. Olivia cried and said her eye was itching or burning, or that Karen was poking her in the eye. Karen, meanwhile, vacillated between anger with Olivia for not cooperating and amusement for the ridiculousness of the entire situation. She was trying not to laugh while also trying to get Olivia to hold still and keep her eyelid open. Finally—and all the while I was sleepily smiling in the darkness—I heard Olivia say, “Mom, don’t tell Daddy about this, okay?” And in the darkness I laughed out loud and smiled some more.



Despite my desire not to humiliate my daughter, I simply couldn’t resist saying something when they returned to the room. I knew I could keep my comments to myself and just pretend I was asleep, but I didn’t. When Liv came through the door, I said, “So, did you get it out okay?” I could sense, by the hesitation in her reply, that she was deliberating on how much I knew and whether or not to lie to me. She said, “Yessss….” And then she started to cry in embarrassment, so I spent nearly the next half-hour holding her and telling her stories of “silly” (my code word for “stupid”) things that I had done, so that she would know that she wasn’t the only one who occasionally lapsed into idiocy.

Friday, March 2, 2012

"I Tried to Tell You"



I TRIED TO TELL YOU

(a reworked version of a Redoubt Reporter article from November 2009)



Sometimes people can be so certain they are right that they can be blind to evidence to the contrary, even when it is placed squarely in front of them. And sometimes, other people, who actually know the truth, can help sustain another person’s ignorance simply by playing dumb. Such was the case in the early 1960s when a young state game warden’s aide learned the hard way not to jump to conclusions--and a pair of peninsula hunting pals allowed him to “jump” to his heart’s content.

The pals in this story were my long-time neighbor, Dan France, and my father, Calvin Fair, who flew in Dan’s red-and-yellow Super Cub into the Tustumena benchlands a day before the opening of the Dall sheep season. Dan landed his plane on a reasonably flat hillside bordering a pond about four air miles west of the Harding Ice Field. There, they set up camp just north of Tustumena Glacier, east of Green Lake, and south of the south fork of Indian Creek. After pitching their tent and arranging their packs, they headed further up the hillside to scout for black bear because Dad was hoping to bring one home and smoke the hams. Bear or no bear, however, their plans called for a sheep hunt the following day.

Some distance away, they spotted the spike camp of another hunter. They wandered on in for a visit, and they learned that the other man, who had been flown in by Kenai pilot Bud Lofstedt, was also preparing to hunt sheep the next day. He had also spotted a black bear, which he said had been making regular nightly appearances to feed on berries just around the hill from where they were camped. Dan and Dad headed south toward the glacier, and, sure enough, the bear made an appearance. Dad took aim with his high-powered rifle, and fired. His shot struck the bear, but the bear didn’t drop. Instead, it bolted farther downhill and disappeared. They gave chase.

 “We could see blood here and there because the vegetation’s pretty scant,” Dan told me many years later. Dan had come to Alaska to serve as a federal game warden in 1954 and became a state game warden in 1964. “So we got down there, and here’s this bear laying there, dead.” As the afternoon wound down, they got to work. “We skinned it, and it was little,” Dan said. “It was an old bear because its teeth were all worn off.” Consequently, after the butchering was complete, they needed only their two packs and one trip to haul the hide and head and everything edible back to camp. One pack held all the meat, while the other held the hide and head, which Dad had made into a rug that eventually hung on the wall of my bedroom until I was almost 10 years old.

As they trudged uphill, they left behind only some blood on the ground, a small gut pile, and a tuft of coarse black hair from where they had cut off the hide from around the bear’s anus.

When they arrived at their camp, they were surprised to see another tent nearby. It was the shelter of a temporary officer—Dan called him a warden’s aide—who had been flown into Green Lake and had hiked the four or five miles into the hills, presumably to monitor sheep-hunting activity. Probably he had heard my dad’s rifle shot, but definitely he watched as the men approached with their heavy packs. And since it was the day before sheep season, he very likely believed that he was about to nail his first violators. He came to their tent to question them, and his very first line of inquiry got him in trouble. “He wanted to see the horns,” Dan recalled. “And I said, ‘She didn’t have any horns.’ And, see, this area was closed to ewes. You could only kill rams, so that means it’s illegal, right there.”

At this point, the warden’s aide surely believed that he had them dead to rights on a double-violation. He wanted to know who’d done the shooting. Dan pointed to my dad and said, “He did.” The officer asked Dad, “You shot it?” and Dad admitted that, indeed, he had. Then the officer said, “Come on. I want to go down to the kill.” Dad asked him if he might be interested in examining the hide first, but the officer insisted that he was interested only in the horns. So they donned their jackets and ventured back outside into the lightly falling rain.

Dad and Dan escorted the warden’s aide down the hillside to the kill site. As he looked around for damning evidence, Dan wandered over to the patch of black hair, picked it up, and held it out for the officer. “Here, will this do?” he said. “No,” said the officer. “I want the horns.”

“Well, she didn’t have any horns,” Dan insisted. “Oh, yes she did,” the officer replied.

“So he started making circles around and around the kill, maybe 30 feet away, looking in all the little bushes,” Dan said. Again, he held up the black hair and offered his assistance. Again, he was rebuffed. Amused but trying to keep their composure, Dan and Dad walked a short ways uphill and found a spot to sit. “We watched him as he made circles around and around and around, and finally he went over to the guts. And he looked at the guts, and the stomach was stained from eating blueberries. And he give that gut pile a kick and sent it rolling down the hill. Then he come up and he sat down beside us on the hill. And we laughed and laughed and laughed. And he said, ‘That was sure a good one.’”

But that is not the end of the story.

The next morning, Dad and Dan were up early and climbing into the headwaters of Indian Creek for sheep. By nightfall, they were returning to camp with two packs containing the horns, hide and meat of a full-curl ram. They arrived in the dark and loaded Dan’s plane with all of the meat and hides and heads so they could get an early start the next day. The warden’s aide did not come out to check on them. But when morning broke and Dan fired up the engine on the Super Cub, the officer hurriedly exited his tent, and yelled, “Did you get one?” Dan opened his window and yelled, “Yeah!” When the officer said that he wanted to see it, however, Dan merely waved, closed his window and flew away.

But even that is not the end of the story.

A month or so later, in two Volkswagen vans, Dad, Dan and a couple of their friends drove north of Palmer to go caribou hunting in a remote mountain area near the Susitna River. They were flown to a remote camp by pilot/guide Denny Thompson. After they were flown a few days later back to their vehicles, they carried meat bags containing four caribou and one Dall sheep. And as they drove south in the pouring rain, they encountered a check station, manned mostly by state game biologists trying to keep tabs on the annual harvest. When they stopped, a biologist hurried out with a clipboard to collect data. The hunters opened up the vans obligingly.

The biologist began by counting meat bags, and he determined aloud that the hunters had killed five caribou. Dan refuted that estimate. “We only got four caribou,” he said. So the biologist counted again, and he insisted that there had to have been five. The numbers were batted back and forth until the hunters themselves began pretending to argue over who had shot what. “He had a hell of a time with us,” Dan said.

Eventually, the biologist demanded to see Dan’s license, and, even though Dan knew precisely where it was, he feigned confusion, burrowing through bags of dirty, bloody clothing and stacking filthy pants and shirts atop the biologist’s clipboard as he looked. Finally, the frustrated official stalked inside to fetch a protection officer to help him. Even in the pouring rain, Dan and Dad recognized the officer as the temporary warden from the Tustumena benchlands.

He took one look at Dan and said, “Not you again.” And, to show that he had learned his lesson, he sent them immediately on their way.



"The Kindness"



THE KINDNESS



There it was again—the scratching.



In the gloom of the curtained living room, over the etching of the electrical fan, Lorna Horn detected the faint sound, and halted the progress of her embroidery. She angled her graying head to the left as if dialing in the noise to authenticate its source, and then, satisfied, she set her needlework on the lamp table to her right, and unhinged her great frame to rise from the ancient upholstered chair.



Angular and big boned, Mrs. Horn—as she had insisted her students call her throughout her nearly 40 years in the classroom, preferring even former students, some of them well past middle age, to address her with this appellation—stepped heavily off the room’s central oriental rug and onto the wooden floor. Draped in her customary black frock, her head barely clearing the low lintel separating the rooms, she trod heavily to the tiled surface of the immaculate old kitchen and the screened-in back door. She then glided past the carved oak table, over which she and Mr. Horn had shared countless meals and conversations, and peered through the screen onto the small porch in the back yard. Just as she had suspected, it was a dog—a black Labrador retriever, looking gaunt, its ribs showing beneath its patchy coat, whispers of grey streaking its muzzle.



Mrs. Horn eyed the animal. “Hello, boy,” she called gently, her usual huskiness evident in her voice. “What’re you looking for?” The Lab peered up at her shadowy form, wraith-like behind the screen. His tail began to wave enthusiastically, and he panted softly. Behind him was a large span of lawn, bordered by a thick stand of old walnut and oak trees. The light of the dying sun streamed over the trees, bathing the lawn and the back of the large house in final warmth, and leaving the forest in gloom, as if in a separate world. Mrs. Horn, her face aglow with patterned sunlight, smiled almost wearily at the dog. “You hungry?” she asked. Again, the tail wagged eagerly. She turned the handle of the door and cracked it open about a foot. “Well, come on in, then,” she said.



The Lab entered with only the slightest hesitation. Mrs. Horn gestured to a small, well-worn rug by the door. “Sit!” she said, with the air of someone accustomed to others heeding her commands.



THAT’S HOW IT BEGAN, IN MY IMAGINATION, BASED ON THE STORY MY FATHER TOLD ME ONE DAY NOT SO LONG AGO….



As my father’s health declined during the last year of his life—he died on New Year’s Day, 2007—he intensified two undertakings that he had begun after his retirement from dentistry in the mid-1990s: (1) organizing and labeling everything he considered valuable, in many cases in order to include them succinctly in his will, and (2) giving things away.



Such was the case on a summer’s day in 2006 when I was upstairs in my parents’ house, speaking with Dad in his den. He was in the mood to show me some of his guns and to tell me their histories. He knew that I was far more interested in the histories than in the guns themselves, but he also suspected that I would find more personal value in the guns if I knew the stories behind them.



With a twinkle in his eye, Dad dug into his elegant, dark-wood gun cabinet and extracted what I believed at first to be a toy rifle—only 33½ inches long, with a thin cherry-wood stock and a narrow, dull-grey barrel. Embedded into the right face of the stock was an Indian head nickel with the buffalo side facing outward. Dad handed the rifle to me, and I held it awkwardly, exaggerating its smallness as if I were handling a B.B. gun. “Is this real?” I asked.



“It’s a real gun,” he said. “It was my first rifle.”



In my hands I was holding a .22-caliber, thumb-operated rimfire long rifle, a Model 722, with a rolling block. It had been manufactured probably between 1902 and 1914 by the Hopkins & Allen Arms Company of Norwich, Connecticut. I turned it around several times, sighted down the barrel, and read the manufacturing data engraved in the metal. “Where did you get it?” I asked.



That was the opening that Dad had been waiting for. He took the rifle from me and held it up like a trophy. “One of my old teachers gave it to me when I was about seven,” he said, and then he regaled me with the story of Lorna Horn, a large, imposing woman who had lived in Logansport, Indiana, and had taught for decades in the tiny nearby town of Walton—my father’s hometown, and his father’s before that, and his father’s before that, and his father’s before that. Mrs. Horn had been teaching in Walton so long that she had taught my father’s father, who had been born in 1898. My own father was born in 1932.



By the time my dad was old enough to be a student in Mrs. Horn’s classroom, it was 1939. The Great Depression was still casting a pall over the economy of the nation, and across the Atlantic, Hitler’s forces had just overtaken Poland. Mrs. Horn lived alone on the outskirts of the city of Logansport, and, although her teaching income was meager, she lived well as a widow off the pension of her husband, who had died young. My grandfather had apparently been a favorite student of Mrs. Horn, and she had remained friendly with him as he grew up and became a dentist with an office in Logansport. Consequently, my father became a ready favorite almost just by showing up, and one day—late in the school year, I believe—Mrs. Horn approached my grandfather and asked him whether it would be all right for her to give an old family gun to my dad. My grandfather said that was just fine with him. And so Mrs. Horn presented the rifle to my father, who was delighted to have his own gun, and who personalized it by tracing an Indian head nickel on the gun stock, gouging out a hole in the dark wood, and then gluing in the coin, buffalo side out. For many years in the deep hardwood forests bordering the area cornfields, my dad hunted squirrels and other critters with that gun.



But there was more to the story, and my father didn’t learn the full truth for many more years....



When my father was in public school, one of his best friends was Ted Beckley, son of the local butcher. When the two of them were in Mrs. Horn’s class together, occasionally the teacher would stop Dad’s friend and say, “Ted, could you please tell your father that I’m all out of liver, and I need some more for my cats?” Sure, Ted said; he could do that, and the next day he’d arrive at school with several pounds of beef liver wrapped in white butcher paper. Mrs. Horn would voice her appreciation, and Ted would smile, knowing that he was doing his part to keep his teacher’s cats contented and well fed.



The truth, however, is that Mrs. Horn didn’t own any cats. And she didn’t own any dogs. And she wasn’t eating the liver herself. But she did need the meat.





NOW THINK BACK TO THE BLACK LABORADOR RETRIEVER FOR A MOMENT….



After the hungry hound entered Mrs. Horn’s kitchen, he was treated like a king. From her refrigerator Mrs. Horn pulled a thick beefsteak and dropped it into a cast-iron skillet already sizzling with vegetable oil. As the meat cooked, she filled a clean metal bowl with fresh water from her sink and set it on the floor for the dog, which was salivating already from the smells of browning beef. When the steak had been cooked through, Mrs. Horn used a large fork to lever it onto a cutting board and expertly sliced it into bite-sized pieces, which she then dumped into a second metal bowl and set on the floor beside the water. Ravenous, the dog made short work of the repast and soon was lying contentedly on the rug, quite logy from his feasting.



But the black Lab was not there to stay. After she had cleaned the dishes and wiped up the floor, Mrs. Horn opened her back door and gently ushered the dog outside. As she followed the animal out, she bent to grab the .22-caliber long rifle and moved with her canine companion out into the growing gloom of the backyard. Then, as she had done to countless unsuspecting felines and other unwary dogs, she dispatched her newfound friend with a single shot to the back of his head. Some quick shovel work later, and any trace of the dog had ceased to exist.



According to my father, Mrs. Horn’s actions, taken in the context of the times, amounted to nothing more than a mercy killing—a kindness. All around the country, people with barely the wherewithal to feed their own families, had abandoned their pets and left them to fend for themselves. Many, if not most, of these animals starved to death or became feral and were eventually killed. Mrs. Horn, he said, gave each of her pets one last good meal, and, like a skilled executioner, put them out of their misery quickly and humanely.



Dad told me this story with a smile for the irony behind the gift he’d received and with admiration for the woman who had been his teacher. Then he handed the rifle back to me and told me it was mine now.






Thursday, March 1, 2012

"Web of the Local Parades"



WEB OF THE LOCAL PARADES

August 2006


     When I was a little guy, my experiences of viewing people march


festively down city streets were limited to watching the Macy's Parade on


Thanksgiving Day or the Rose Bowl Parade at New Year's on our


black-and-white television with my parents. My mother, especially, wanted


to watch these parades, usually while enduring the tedium of preparing


large holiday meals, and usually instead of the cartoons I craved, or even


instead of the televised football games that I was beginning to enjoy. She


had about as much appreciation for the NFL and for Space Ghost and Secret


Squirrel, I suppose, as I did for the giant Snoopy balloon or the moving


floats garlanded with thousands of roses and carnations, and bedecked with


dozens of smiling, perfect young people, lively kings and queens, or even


gnarled, bent old grand marshals who had earned their place in the action


through good works and the long passage of time.


     I could never see the attraction, frankly, and my mother's interest in


these events filled me with wonder as to why, if she loved parades so


fervently, she didn't take me and my siblings to Kenai's Fourth of July


parade or to Soldotna's Progress Days parade. Mom claimed that she didn't


want to deal with the traffic; once you parked for one of those things,


she said, it might take forever to get out because they clogged up the


whole main street. Dad claimed he didn't like all of the press of humanity,


although he worked on people's mouths five days a week, and although the


entire population of Kenai and Soldotna (and all the outlying areas)


combined, in those early days, equaled maybe 2,000 souls. Still, local


parades were not something the Fair family partook of. In fact, if memory


serves me correctly, the first parade I ever personally attended was one


in Missoula, Montana. I went, camera in hand, to try to get some interesting shots


for my Advanced Photography class at the University of Montana. I remember that it was

cold and that it either rained during the parade or had rained just before it.


The participants and the parade watchers were dressed warmly. And I


remember thinking, Hmm. Is this IT? What's everybody so excited about?


     Then, once I became a reporter for the Peninsula Clarion newspaper here at


home, I got my first parade assignment: Go get some usable photos from the


Fourth of July parade in Kenai. As a photo-journalist that day, I actually


enjoyed the parade. Lots of happy people, sunshine, good expressions, nice


angles, weird costumes--my photographic options were many. I had a good


enough time that I could almost ignore the myriad politicians stumping for


my vote, the clusters of Shriners and Lions Club members and Elks Club


members and VFW men in uniform and ladies auxiliaries ... and the relative


brevity and the lack of grandeur when compared to those television


extravaganzas I had endured as a child.


     Parades, I came to realize over time, are celebrations of


ourselves--reflections of ourselves--the way the Academy Awards banquet is a


celebration by Hollywood, for Hollywood, and about Hollywood, a chance for


big celebrities to slap each other on the backs and say congratulations, while also

entertaining the world with their glamour and humor, and

boosting ticket sales. But since parades


are reflections as well as celebrations, small-town parades are not filled


with the same type of glitter and glitz that the Hollywood productions


are, with all of their red carpets, flashing photo bulbs, well-insured


smiles, and million-dollar gowns and jewelry. No, they're filled with real


people, doing the best they can, driving the cars and making the floats


and waving the waves that reflect themselves. If our parades turn out a


little hokey, fairly brief, and jam-packed with ordinary people, it's


because that's who we are--the residents of small towns doing the best we


know how.


     These days, we take our kids to both parades. Sometimes we both


go along. Other times just one of us goes, and we go mostly because our


kids want to go. And our kids want to go mostly because there's candy


involved. Sometimes LOTS of candy. And our children scramble after it by the


handful and tote it home by the bagful, like having Trick or Treat in the middle

of a sunny summer afternoon.


     But we also go because, in part, we actually want to be there, too--at


least a little bit. We know people in these things. The mayor of Soldotna


is a friend of mine; I taught with him for nearly 20 years. The Skyview


cheerleaders represent my school. Karen's been teaching kids in Kenai for


more than a decade. I used to work in Kenai. And on and on. The connections


are abundant. Last year's Grand Marshal of the Soldotna Days parade, for


instance, was Marge Mullen, who is in her mid-80s and is still spry, who


homesteaded here in 1947, and who worked as a receptionist for my father


for about a decade. I have spent a lot of money in her daughter Peggy's


stores. I have taught her son Frank's daughter, Ashley. My mother and I


used to wash and dry our clothes in her ex-husband's humid Laundromat. I


worked briefly with her youngest daughter, Mary, while I was employed at


the newspaper. My father has worked on the teeth of every member of


Marge's immediate family. But it doesn't stop there. My history in this


place is long enough to become entangled with almost any histories of similar or


longer duration.


     For example: The other day, I made an enlargement of a photograph that my


father took when he and Mom drove through Soldotna in 1959, when fewer than 300


people lived in the area. (I was a year old, and my dad was still


stationed at the Army base in Whittier on the eastern side of the Kenai


Peninsula. He and Mom were taking one of their numerous exploratory


Drives--and probably got off the main track. Less than two years later,


however, they would move to this place.) The photograph shows a wooden


structure, a post-and-wire fence (part of what appears to be a corral),


several cars of clearly 1950s vintage (two of which appear to be driving


away from the log structure), a man walking in the same direction as the


departing cars, a pole bearing the American flag, and a long Quonset-style


building in the background. The wooden structure had been Soldotna's first post office. The


Quonset was owned by a man named George Denison, whose then-wife,


Shirley, would much later become my high school chemistry teacher. The


Quonset itself became Soldotna's first movie theater (its only one ever,


really) and later its main drug store. A few years later, the Postal


Service set up shop in a newer, more central location, and the wood building


was purchased by Justin Maile, who was the town mayor when I worked at the


newspaper, whose wife, Zilla, opened The Yarn Shop in the front part of


their home, and whose son, Larry, was one of my best friends for most of


my childhood.


     And, yes, all of this (and plenty more) was brought to my mind recently by


the advent of another Soldotna Progress Days parade. "Progress," to be


sure, but not without strands of the great web that reach back and back


and back.