Holding your great grandchild in your arms and knowing his smile, the sound of his gurgle, the joy he brings to your heart. 
Alzheimer’s is truly one of life’s cruelest diseases. I’m so glad it didn’t take my aunt too far away before she had this moment.

It was the evening feed time here at Animal House North. That means feeding six (soon to be seven) birds and two dogs, both of whom are also on medication. In order to do this without losing my mind on a regular basis - and yes, I still do have some of my mind left to lose! - I have a routine I try to stick to as closely as possible. First I feed the dogs so they stop standing directly in front of me so that I’ll trip over them every time I move. I think they do this for fear I will forget their meal. Then I feed the upstairs birds. Then I go to the downstairs birds.
Now you need to understand that in the evening, my upstairs birds get something called Avicakes that are covered in honey to hold the seeds together. Both of my dogs think this is akin to ambrosia falling from heaven so my African Gray Abdul nicely eats his portion in such a fashion as to have what he is shredding fall down to the newspapers below on his cage bottom where stand my two dogs, heads directly over the spot where the manna should hit.  And yes, this is why my dogs spend a lot of their lives walking around with birdseed in their fur.
Anyhow, the dogs were doing guard duty under Abdul’s cage when I headed downstairs to feed the other half of the family. A few minutes later, I heard a fight upstairs. Apparently they’d both gone for the same dropped seed and were now entangled in a snarling mass. Since the last time that happened and I didn’t arrive quickly enough to immediately break it up I ended up spending over $500 at the vet to repair the damage, I hauled ass upstairs faster than any old woman should be able to move.
I separated the snarling darlings and quickly looked for signs of blood. None was evident. But Blondie was sitting there trying to lick something in her mouth. Her tongue worked frantically while her head shook from side to side. I could see a big swelling on the left side of her face right at her jowl. But still, no blood.
I opened her mouth and my hands came out clean. I could see no injury and she wasn’t yelping. But she was frantically shaking her head and her tongue was clearly worrying that left side which remained swollen. I thought about ignoring her for a few minutes to see if she’d calm down and maybe all the movement was just adrenaline from the fight. But then I looked at the time and figured if she had to go to the vet, I wanted her to go to her vet and that office was closing in 30 minutes. I decided to bite the bullet and just head out.
As we got to the bottom of the stairs, I looked at Blondie again. Her head and tongue were still working frantically but she just didn’t seem in any pain or other distress. I decided to try and take one more look inside her mouth myself.
Gathering all my courage and remembering some of the grosser things I’d done when nursing, I opened her mouth and ran my finger around her upper left teeth. Only I couldn’t get all the way around because somehow, during the fight, her jowl had become stretched up over her upper teeth and there it remained. She literally had her lip caught on her teeth and couldn’t undo it.
I gently pushed on the jowl and felt it snap back into place on her face. She looked at me in stunned surprise and then turned and went back upstairs and got into another growling match with Blue who was still standing guard under the bird cage.
Yep, having pets means never ever being bored.

You know what the scariest words in the world are? They are your doctor’s office calling you after your mammogram and saying that you need to come back in because they need to “check on something”. From the time of that call until the time you find out what that something is are possibly the longest and most frightening hours of your life.

Did you ever have one of those ideas that seemed simple enough when conceived but turned into a mini-nightmare in execution? All I wanted from the start was a spare pair of glasses. I had one pair that worked for me since my cataract surgery significantly improved my prior vision causing me to give away the glasses I’d been hording for thirty years. I waited for the two years to pass so my insurance would pay for at least some of the cost of a spare pair. I apparently waited two days too long. When I tried to get another pair with the same prescription, I was told I’d have to have an eye exam because the current prescription had expired two days ago. I explained that my diabetic eye docs had just examined my eyes and all was fine and my vision was great in the glasses I had but it was all to no avail.
So I sat down and spent two hours getting a new prescription that was pretty much exactly my old prescription. But when I went to the optician shop right outside of the optometrist’s office, I was told that they would not bill my insurance. I’d have to pay and then bill my insurance myself.
Not wanting to carry that cost on my credit card, I came home and call around until I found a place that would bill my insurance directly. I went there, found some frames and put in my order. One week later, I had my spare glasses… except that they gave me a splitting headache whenever I wore them that would last into the next morning after a full night’s sleep.
So I went back to the optometrist. The front desk lady took my new glasses and brought them to the optician shop next door and asked that they check the prescription. I sat and waited half an hour. Then I was told the doctor would have to see me again to make sure the prescription was right. I waited another hour. Then the eye doctor told me the prescription was right but he wanted the optician to check the glasses yet again to make sure nothing was missed. Chalk up another wasted half hour in my life.
Finally I was told that the prescription was correct but the company that made the glasses had put a prism in that was not supposed to be there and made my eyes look in two different directions at once, ergo the headache.
So I took the glasses and returned them to the company that made them… another wasted 45 minutes in my ever shortening lifespan. Now I wait for them to remake my glasses.
And all I ever wanted was an exact replica of what I was wearing. For this, I wasted the better part of four hours or more.
If only I’d had this idea two days earlier.....
And yes, I’m well aware of the fact that simply having insurance to pay for these glasses makes me a lucky person. But there is no rule that says a lucky person can’t bitch.

So just after I thought I’d learned everything there was to learn about what I am now told is not TiVo but, in fact, DVR or something like that.... anyway, just when I thought I knew all about how to work it, a delightful young woman from Barrow shows up on my doorstep for a visit and introduces me to a whole new world of possibilities available to me if I hit one of those buttons on the remote that I was too frightened to touch because I didn’t know what it did.
Now I don’t have the end of my taped shows cut off because she showed me I could program it to go beyond the end time. She showed me how to tape and watch the same show at the same time. Wow. Isn’t technology amazing?
And now back to my book - low tech, no buttons to push, no batteries to insert and no rewind button to use if I want to reread a particularly stimulating paragraph. Sometimes simpler is still best.

There are some people who think Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for the phrase, “It takes a village”. They blame her for the whole touchy-feely, new age-ist concept that children are not raised in a nuclear family but in some hippie commune sixties environment. I’m sorry to inform them that this concept cannot be laid at Hillary’s feet. It should be laid at my mother’s feet.

Growing up I thought of this as being raised by committee. My mother did little with her children that didn’t start off with a phone call to her sisters and sisters-in-law.  Great discussions were had about “those rotten kids” and the responsibility of the collective we called our family to see that they grew up to be productive adults. We never complained about this group effort because we knew that if being disrespectful to a parent brought you one step closer to a painful death, being disrespectful to an aunt or uncle brought you right to death’s doorstep.
And yes, until I was about 16, I thought my first name was some variation of “you rotten kids”.  Since it was said as often with laughter and affection as exasperation, I wasn’t insulted. After all, I have a cousin in my family nicknamed Pumpkin. Who am I to complain?
So the concept of child rearing as a communal practice is one with a long history for me, and one with which I was immediately comfortable when I first arrived in Barrow. If you wanted to know what communal parenting meant in a small town, you only had to watch the Mother’s Club make their rounds at curfew to see that all children were home where they belonged. If a wayward child saw them coming and it was past curfew, they ran like they were being chased by the devil himself. In fact, if that mother caught up with them, the devil was going to look easy.
Then big money hit town with the boom and communal parenting stopped being so wonderful because way too many members of the community seemed to forget how to parent. Kids lost respect for adults who couldn’t control their drinking and drug use and parents were often too wasted to be bothered wondering where the kids were. The Mother’s Club quickly became inoperable.
When I saw the article in the paper the other day about the suspension of most of the starters on the Barrow Whaler girls’ basketball team, two things immediately struck me. One was dismay that in order to drink those girls had been foolish enough to risk what should have been their triumphal senior year as basketball players in a town that, like so many in Bush Alaska, all but worships basketball players. The other was joy that the community seemed to have found its way again and was doing the right thing in supporting the school district’s decision. Because, quite frankly, not all that long ago, the coach might have been hounded out of town for trying to do something like this and would have had little support from the community.
But Barrow is awake now to the damage done by alcohol and drugs in a way it hasn’t been in a long time. It’s awake to the fact that a sober future is more important that a basketball championship. Barrow seems aware of the need to make Inupiat values more central to everyday life than basketball scores. While I’m sure there are still some people who will grumble and growl about the decision, the fact that the school district made it and is getting support for it is a major step forward.
Hopefully these girls have learned that no matter who you are and what your skills, alcohol can and will destroy your dreams and your life, just as it destroyed their senior dreams of playing on a championship team. To be quite honest, if this is the worse thing that alcohol ever does to their lives, they will have learned a critical lesson at a very cheap price.
I think the women I remember from the Mother’s Club would applaud the idea of the community holding these children to a standard they will need to be successful in the rest of their lives.

Give it up, mom. There is no gate that can hold me. If I could just resist falling asleep halfway through....

Apparently our Juneau legislators are finding it difficult to get a good meal from a lobbyist for $15.  They want the lobbyist to be able to spend at least $50 per meal on them before it has to be reported or… gasp of horror… they might have to order the most boring thing on the menu.  Poor babies! Maybe they should have the lobbyists take them to Bean’s Cafe for lunch. Then they wouldn’t have to report anything and they might actually reconnect with the reality far too many of their constituents face on a daily basis.
And may I just add… because if I don’t, I will explode… WHAT ASSHOLES OUR LEGISLATORS CAN BE!

I went out the other night. Got back late… well, what passes for late now in my life which is about 11 PM. Had a piece of delicious sugar free cheese cake I’d picked up on my way home. Took two bites. It was delicious. Realized that if I ate the whole piece before going to bed that I’d never be able to sleep.  Yet another indignity in the pantheon of indignities that bedevil old age. 

Am I the only one horrified by the message that pervaded the Olympics about McDonald’s somehow being the official food of Olympians? Here we are worried about an obesity epidemic among out children and the message from the Olympics is that you can have an Olympian body AND regularly eat at McDonald’s because that was the Olympians “favorite” food. This is true only if you are cross country skiing ten miles a day at an Olympic race pace. And even then you’d be doing your arteries no good.
What a horrible message to send to our kids as we try to get them to eat healthier and exercise more.

I wake up from a sound sleep with two things foremost on my mind. One, I have to go to the bathroom immediately because apparently part of the aging process is the shrinking of your bladder until it is approximately the size of a pea. Two, I have a brilliant idea for a column. I pull out the pad of paper in the drawer next to my bed because I know by now that if I don’t write it down, tomorrow I won’t remember it. And at 3 AM, this idea definitely seems to be the one that will win me the Pulitzer.
The next morning I wake up, replicate my immediate trip to the bathroom and then grab that paper with excitement over the fact that I already have the best idea ever for my column and so I won’t have to spend the weekend mindlessly staring at a blank screen while weeping softly. Only I can’t read most of my writing and what I can read doesn’t seem to make any sense. And in thinking back on what I think I was trying to write, the thought occurs that it was a pretty stupid idea in the first place.
Maybe I should just get rid of the paper and pen next to the bed and then I won’t even remember I ever had these ideas.

The house rule is this - if I have to get up and go down the stairs to let the dogs out before we go to bed, then the dogs have to go out. Blue and Blondie are old enough that they now fall fairly soundly asleep by 10 PM.  And I do mean soundly. I have to practically stand over them screaming their name before an eye even twitches to indicate they are slowly realizing someone might be standing over them getting red in the face with effort. Why, you ask, don’t I shake them awake? Well, because I’m such a nice person that I don’t want to startle them. The few times I’ve put my hand on them to shake them awake, they have awaken with such a start that they fell off the couch.
Once I have their attention, I loudly announce that EVERYONE has to go out one last time. They both look at me like I’ve lost my mind. I go over to the stairs and go down a few. I stop, turn around and yell their names again. I wait. After a moment or so, I yell again. I hear them reluctantly partially get off the couch. Blondie especially has perfected the art of her feet on the ground while her butt is still on the couch as she looks towards the stairwell to see if I can possibly be serious about this.
Finally they come to the top of the stairs. I proceed to go down to the bottom landing. They stand at the top staring at me and thinking - I can only assume - that I called them over to watch me go downstairs and that I really didn’t expect them to go down also.
I order them down again in a sterner voice. They very slowly descend. We get to the backdoor. They go out. And they both pee for at least five minutes each, confirming in my mind that if I didn’t make them go out right before bedtime, I’d be getting up very soon after I fell asleep because they would suddenly have to go out immediately.
Once done, they slowly amble back to the door. Blue comes in and goes straight over to the bird cage to see if anything interesting has dropped since she started her evening nap that would make an appropriate midnight snack. Blondie follows behind Blue. As she walks past me, I close and lock the back door. I turn to go upstairs and find Blondie standing in front of me, head turned towards me with a look that says, “Are you finally happy? Did waking me up and making me get cold give you your jollies for the night? Because you can rest assured that for every night you wake me up to go out in the hope I will let you sleep late in the morning, I promise I will wake you up very early in the morning to go out again. You wake me up. I wake you up.”
Who would have ever thought that dogs had such a refined sense of tit for tat?

In 1961, then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow famously said, “When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

Minow was decrying the fact that for all its vast resources and potential, TV broadcasters all too often took the easy road by catering to the lowest common denominator in their audience. Instead of challenging viewers, broadcasters fed them pablum that kept them mindlessly happy.
There are those who might wonder where the harm in that is.  If TV is entertainment, then let it entertain.  But Minow’s point was that TV broadcasters had unprecedented access to American homes and with that access came some responsibility to appeal to our higher nature at least occasionally.
I have two TVs in my house. One is about twenty years old and its main purpose is to play cartoons and old rock and roll music for my parrots that live downstairs. The other TV is actually from this millennium and has HD capabilities. So when my cable company called to tell me I had to change out my box whether I wanted to or not, I figured I might as well get the HD box so I could see what all the fuss was about.
A very nice young man who is not scared by multitudinous wires extruding from the back of my TV, DVR player and cable box came over and made sense of the mess. And lo and behold, 30 minutes later I had HD TV in my living room.
My upstairs parrots that also mostly listen to rock and roll and watch cartoons on TV were totally unimpressed with the upgrade I’d just provided. Apparently they don’t care if Scooby Doo is in HD or not. But I was excited at the whole new world that seemed to be opening up to me. No longer would young people look at me strangely when I said I had to put in a cassette to tape the latest NCIS. Now I had not just HDTV, I had Tivo.
So I sat down and started scrolling through the almost 800 channels to which I now had access. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Then I started again and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Surely I had missed something. Because what I seemed to be finding was that I now had 800 channels of dreck instead of the original 100 I’d been living with over the years. Eventually I just gave up, turned off the TV and went back to my book.
I don’t want to sound like a snob here. I do watch TV. I am devoted to shows like Ugly Betty and 30 Rock and the Big Bang Theory. I live on the fantasies engendered by Mark Harmon and Nathan Fillion. But I had them before the 600 channels appeared. Now I had them in HD. It wasn’t as exciting as I’d anticipated.
As far as I can tell, what I’ve gained with the additional channels is a whole lot of stations whose programs have titles I’m embarrassed to even read while sitting alone in my living room. And I’m still too much of a Catholic schoolgirl to pause at any of them
It sometimes seems as though the only difference between 1961 and now is that the wasteland is much vaster.

Ah modern life. I was standing in my utility room getting dinner for the downstairs birds when the phone rang. Suddenly, a disembodied voice came from the phone after just one ring saying “bag lespee”. I thought it was odd that my answer machine was picking up in only one ring. I thought it was odder when I went in to the office to find no message. If no one had recorded a message on the answer machine, then where had the voice come from? I picked up the phone and there seemed to be nothing on the other end. I hung up. The phone rang again almost immediately. Once again a disembodied voice floated out of it insisting that “bag lespee” was calling. I picked up the phone and tentatively said hello. My friend Leslie Bagne was on the other end.
Apparently when I switched phone service recently, I got caller ID. They should tell people that. They should tell people their phone can talk to them. It’s simply not polite to scare old people. Now I wonder each day what else my phone can do - and will I be scared when I find out....
Ok god what I would give for a black phone with a rotary dial.

Turns out that having two hundred extra channels on TV doesn’t necessarily translate into having something worth watching. I now just have to scroll through more channels on the TV guide before turning the TV off and reading.