I try to limit the amount of caffeine in my system on any given day for the sake of those around me.  Given that one drop too much, I become intensely manic, and not at all in the good sense of the word.  I have the attention span of a gnat when over-caffeinated and can’t put two sentences together without thinking of something else that I need to absolutely do at just that moment.

That is why this column has been on my computer for three days now being painfully scratched out two to three sentences at a time. In between I’ve done laundry, changed bed sheets, called everyone in my phone book that I thought might be home, bathed my dog and watered my plants.  And that was just this morning.
Anchorage has a love affair with lattes that is surprising for a city that prides itself on being the gateway to the wilderness.  Of course, the wilderness is a little easier to bear when you are carrying a full caf, 16 oz. White Chocolate Wedding Cake latte into it.
You can’t drive down the street anywhere in this city without running into a dozen latte stands.  Most are individually owned. This makes shopping for the best latte a lot more fun than in those places where Starbucks is considered avant-garde in the field of caffeine renewal.  In Anchorage, you can spend a year going from stand to stand trying every strangely named latte known to man, all guaranteed to perk you up and keep you from blinking for the next 8 to 10 hours.
If I end up living a life of genteel poverty (and all evidence certainly seems to be pointing in that direction), it will be because of one particular coffee stand here in South Anchorage.  I consider it a good day when I can confine myself to one visit only.  I freely admit to being addicted to their lattes and know that someday my $4/cup habit will catch up with me and I’ll have to sell my ivory to keep paying for my coffee.
The rest of the country doesn’t seem to have caught on to this trend the way Alaska has.  I mean, seriously, I can drive from Anchorage to Homer and always have a fresh latte in my cup holder because on the loneliest stretch of road there will still always be a coffee stand. 
When I was on the East Coast this spring I went through serious latte withdrawal.  Not only do they not have little stands dotting their highways and byways, even their Starbucks puts out a questionable product.  The very nice people working in the Atlantic City one couldn’t figure out for the life of them how to make a blended latte. 
When I went to Port Authority in New York City to catch a bus back to Atlantic City, I stopped at a refreshment stand in the terminal for a cup of coffee.  It was like stepping back thirty years in time. I was handed a cup of dark brown liquid and directed towards the little powdered creamer containers when I asked for milk. I didn’t even try to explain a latte to them.  I was afraid I’d be mocked.
Starbucks does have outposts in New York City and I was able to find faint imitations of the coffee available at every corner here in Alaska.  But it just wasn’t the same as you get when you stop at a place where the owner is making the coffee and has a vested interest in having you like it enough to return.
I’m not sure why Anchorage is on what seems to be the cutting edge of this trend. It’s not like we are used to being on the cutting edge of anything.  And yet we definitely seem to lead the nation in this one very important area. We make better coffee in more creative ways than anywhere else in America.  It may not seem like much of an accomplishment to a tea drinker, but for us coffee fiends it’s an unsurpassed joy.
So if you are wondering where I get my sugar free White Chocolate Coffee Cake latte, well I’m tempted to keep that a secret so the line won’t be any longer than it already is when I pull in.  But to all my fellow coffee fiends let me just say, check out Café Loco.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

I took my dog for a walk the day the bombs hit in London.  I felt sadder than I had in a long time.  I’ve always been a bit of a fanatic about England.  Charles Dickens is my favorite author, closely followed by Jane Austin, Thackeray and all the Bronte’s. I am a charter subscriber to a magazine called British Heritage and I actually read each issue cover to cover.

One of the best afternoons of my life was spent at Old Bailey in London attending the murder trial of a man who was a British Hell’s Angel. I loved the absolute disconnect in the court between the wigs worn by the barristers, the gowns worn by the judge, the medieval attire of the guard and the leather and chains of the defendant.  Only in England could a Hell’s Angel murder suspect come across sounding so erudite.
If you travel at all in England off the beaten tourist paths, one of the things that strikes most forcibly is how so much of England still carries such a rural, 1800’s country feeling.  People still live in small villages and hamlets and town squares are still green grass that once was the communal feeding place for village livestock.  Tea is still taken in small shops and pets and gardens still dominate life. 
Despite its modern flavor in big cities, despite its abysmal ugliness in its industrial towns, England is still, as Shakespeare wrote in Richard II,
“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself”.
Unfortunately, that fortress is no protection against terrorists, just as our oceans no longer isolate us from their reach.  Each and every day that we get up, get on a bus or subway or get in our car and go to work we are making a leap of faith.  We are betting that this day we will come home again and our families and pets will be there to greet us and the worse thing we’ll have to deal with is whether or not to have take-out again.
That’s what terrorism has done to our world.  But what the terrorists apparently still don’t get is that each time they destroy a piece of our world, we just dig in and fortify ourselves even more for the long haul. Because ultimately, whether we agree we our politicians or not, whether we like the amount of taxes we pay or not, whether we are bitching and griping about the latest road closure that keeps us from a quick trip to the cabin, we like our lives and our world and we aren’t going to let anyone change it through a bomb.
So there I was on my walk with my dog.  I passed others walking and biking with and without pets.  Men and women and children, families and friends, enjoying the freedom we take for granted 99.9% of the time - the freedom to walk down a street without fear that the next car will contain a suicide bomber; the freedom to be a woman walking down the street without fear that men will beat you because you are out without a male relative; the freedom to just mow your lawn and water your flowers in peace and safety.
Part of the problem for the terrorists is that they have created a society that denies full humanity to over 50% of its population.  Women have always been, and will continue to be, the gentling force that helps move civilization to the next level. Without their yin to the male yang, you have a civilization totally out of balance, one that falls over into viciousness much too easily. Check out early medieval European history if you have any doubt about that.
England will survive this attack just like America survived Sept. 11. We will all survive because we will not give up the life we so treasure - a life not defined by big things but by the everyday little moments that make up all our lives.
As always in time of war, Churchill said it best, “Never give in - never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.  Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
We never will.

Under the general heading of “What Were They Thinking?” I offer you Purple Haze, Acapulco Gold and Rasta.  No, not pot. That would at least make some sense, as they are names familiar to many of my generation for various kinds of marijuana.  No, these are actually the names of pot-flavored lollipops apparently being offered for sale in some convenience stores in this country.

Now before I go any further with this, let me indulge in a little full disclosure. I’ve smoked pot.  Many times.  And to all of you out there looking shocked and acting so self-righteous, I can only say this.  If all the people of my generation who deny ever smoking pot actually didn’t smoke pot, then who the heck were all those other people in the room with me?
Now, back to the subject at hand.  According to a recent article in the June 22 Anchorage Daily News, “The confections are legal, because they are made with hemp oil, a common ingredient in health food, beauty supplies and other household products. The oil imparts marijuana’s grassy taste but not the high”.
There are so many things wrong with this concept that I don’t know where to start.  But l will.
No one, not even someone with overwhelming munchies, has ever been heard to say, “Oh, lets eat pot. I love the flavor.” Because, to be bluntly honest, pot tastes just like what it is, grass.  And there is a reason that humans do not graze in fields.  It’s because grass tastes gross.
How do I know this, you ask? Well, I used to bake brownies with pot in them. This was back in the day when pot was cheap enough to use that way. We brought the brownies to concerts and dances and thought we were way cool and fooling everyone around us as we ate the brownies and giggled uncontrollably.
But here’s the reality - the brownies made me gag.  The fudge part wasn’t bad. But I had to basically gag and swallow to get it down because pot tastes like dirty grass and that will never be one of my favorite flavors. No amount of chocolate from the brownies could disguise that taste.
Here’s another reality. After you eat pot, you tend to want to throw it right back up.  It takes some stamina, a strong stomach and an even stronger anti-gag reflex to keep it down.  And I know I’m not the only one who reacted that way.
So I’ve got to figure that the company making these lollipops either didn’t do any marketing research on flavor preferences or was upfront about the fact that their target audience was not going to be all that interested in good flavor. In fact, aside from some adults who will buy it as a novelty gift to remind their friend on his or her 50th birthday of times past, the only people these treats are really going to appeal to are kids. After all, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that kids, not adults, are the main lollipop audience.
Yep, kids. Kids who think that sucking a pot pop will make them look cool.  They maybe got the message about smoking cigarettes and so that no longer registers on the cool meter. But a pot pop?  For the teenybopper who can’t score a lid yet, here’s a way to still be the baddest kid on the block.
The manufacturers say that they discourage sales to kids and advise merchants to not sell to someone under 18. Right.  Let’s put these things next to the check out counter at a convenience store with a register manned by someone who is probably barely 18 and see what happens.  You’d have to have been smoking the real thing to believe that it would never be sold to someone under 18. Especially since the slogan for Chronic Candy that makes these pops is, “Every lick is like taking a hit.”
I realize these lollipops are legal. I also realize that many, many hemp products are good products that are actually earth friendly substitutes for chemicals that harm our world and us.  But pot pops don’t fall into that category.  Pop pots fall into the same category as dealers who hang around middle schools. 
On the other hand, if these lollipops taste anywhere near as nasty as the pot I once ate, it might turn out to be a great deterrent to kids who might want to try pot. After all, they may think, nothing that tastes that nasty can actually be fun.
Hmmm… could this actually be a new front in the war on drugs?

I am usually a peace loving person. Call it a throwback to my youth in the sixties. Yet if the carnage of last week didn’t prove it to me, the carnage from this week did. I have changed.  In fact, I will have to repaint my whole house this fall to get rid of the evidence of this summer’s mass slaughter of mosquitoes on its walls. Red streaks are everywhere. Tiny screams of death can be heard echoing throughout the universe.

Each night before I go to bed, I do battle with these mighty warriors. I wander through my house looking for the telltale dark speck on the wall.  When I see it, my heart races, my pupils dilate, every nerve goes on alert.  I nonchalantly approach the target. Let the speck think, for just a moment longer, that it has the upper hand.  Then, just when it settles into complacency, thinking of all the fun it will have with me while I sleep, I pounce.  I slap it so hard I’m surprised there aren’t holes in my walls near each blood splatter.
Of course, the fact that the walls are blood splattered means I may be losing some of the battles since I’m figuring most of that blood is mine.  But at least they are made to pay the ultimate price for their small moment of glory.
This is the first time I’ve ever had to wear mosquito netting as well as Deet inside my house.  Anchorage has turned into a city under siege.  Every time I open the door to let my dog in or out, a mosquito squadron swarms in under my radar. I don’t know they’re there until I look around at the walls and see that they look like I painted them with black polka dots.
Since my dog is 15, he doesn’t exactly move quickly in or out of the door. I’ll get him right up to the doorway and make sure he’s actually bothered to wake up from his nap and isn’t sleep walking before I open the door. And still he stands there staring stupidly at the open doorway till I give him a gentle nudge in his butt with my foot to remind him what he’s doing there.
Coming in presents the same problem. I’ll open the door and call him. He’ll give me that blank stare I’ve grown to dread. It either means his eyes are so bad he’s not sure where the voice is coming from or his hearing is so bad he’s not sure he heard anything.  Or, more likely, he heard and saw but chooses not to respond right at that moment.
Either way, my house fills with mosquitoes that think they’ve won the jackpot. A warm house and a juicy human all in one place.  What more could a mosquito ask for?
I knew the battle had reached a whole new level of intensity one day when I was on my daily dog walk. I found four mosquitoes on my arms watching intently as I swung my arms wildly about my head to beat off the ones buzzing around my ears.  They seemed very interested in the demonstration of insanity by the woman whose blood they were ingesting. I wonder if they were worried that maybe I wasn’t the best genetic bet they could have made in choosing a suckee.
I don’t know what we did as a city to so anger the mosquito gods this year but I think our leaders need to take some action before we see small children being carried off by organized squadrons of these blood suckers.  If that means that Mark Begich has to dance around a fire in a loincloth while chanting and baying at the sun, then so be it.  No one said being the mayor of Anchorage was an easy job and no one ever promised him it might not include a little voodoo if that’s what it takes to lift the siege.
In Barrow, the sun would come back in the spring and the temperature would drop even lower than it had been in winter. You walked out into it and froze your tushie off after just five steps.  You quickly learned that the sun, while fun to look at, did not bring warmth and joy.
Here in Anchorage, the sun comes back and we all throw off our winter layers and race out the door, ready to raise our faces to its life giving warmth.  Only it turns out we can’t see the sun through the swarm of mosquitoes that have attached themselves to every exposed part of our bodies.
Either way, it seems that Alaskans are doomed to view their sunny world from inside their bloodied bunkers.  Courage, my friends.  Winter can’t be far away.

I come from a long line of frugal people.  Actually, by the time the family genes from my parents mingled, some would say frugal is a mild term for what resulted.  So, despite what I recently paid for a pair of original Beatles-styled sunglasses from the sixties in almost mint condition for my sister’s 50th birthday present, I usually am on the side of caution in spending.  I pay off my credit card every month and spend a lot of time reassuring myself that I do not have more debt than I could pay off instantly if required.

So when Governor Murkowski started agitating for a new jet, I came down solidly on the side of those citizens who thought he should be able schlep around in the plane he has and not try to be some jet-setting super star.  After all, these were our tax dollars he wanted to use to make himself comfortable.  How dare he!
Ok, being Alaskan means that he isn’t actually using “our” tax dollars since we don’t pay an income tax.  But the self-righteous indignation I felt at his request was there nonetheless.
And then I had the opportunity of chatting with Nancy Murkowski while I was in Barrow this winter. The governor was at Barrow’s public radio station for an interview and I happened to be there visiting with old friends.  Mrs. Murkowski was offered a cup of coffee. I saw her hesitate. I hastened to assure her that the coffee served on the North Slope was harmless but that wasn’t why she hesitated. 
Her hesitation was that she was about to get back on the state plane to return to Fairbanks and it was about a three or four hour flight.  The only bathroom that would be available to her during that flight was a funnel behind a curtain at the back of the plane.  She instantly won me over to the need to upgrade the plane she flies in as our First Lady.
I spent a lot of years flying in the Bush in planes with no amenities for women.  Men can get away with any old bottle or container available. A woman’s anatomy is such that it is physically impossible to accurately use such a system. And so I spent a lot of years risking kidney failure when I knew I had to fly somewhere in a plane with no restroom.
I’d stop drinking fluids about 4 PM the day before I had to get on the plane on the assumption that if nothing went in, then nothing would have to come out.  My skin would start shriveling but still I would refuse anything but the smallest sips of coffee or water - just enough to keep me this side of an emergency room.
Then, after the trip was completed, I’d sit in my house and suck down enough liquid to sink the Titanic all over again in the hope of avoiding severe urinary track problems. Since this was a pattern I repeated for over 27 years, the wonder is that I haven’t had to have my bladder replaced yet with a plastic one.
I didn’t agree with Governor Murkowski’s attempt to buy a jet using Homeland Security funds.  And apparently neither did the Feds. But I think we need to put aside the Puritan impulse that sometimes seems so rife in American life - the impulse that says any pleasure or easing of life’s passage is somehow vaguely suspect or sinful - and view the need for a new plane as what it really is.  Simply put, it is a humanitarian gesture.  It is something that we should do because asking our First Lady to use a funnel behind a curtain to answer nature’s call is just rude and mean.
If you think the governor misuses the privilege of having a state plane at his disposal, than tell him that in the most powerful terms you have at hand - with your vote at the ballot box.  Because the issue of misuse of the plane is totally separate from the simple humanitarian gesture of providing a plane for use by our governor and his wife that admits to the need for some basic creature comforts.
We are trying to replace all the honey buckets in our villages as vestiges of a frontier past that no longer represent what we want for Alaska in the future. I think we should try to do the same with the plane our governor uses. Funnels, curtains behind a back seat - let’s put them to rest and give our First Lady a modicum of comfort and ease.  She deserves it.

There’s a new picture with my column today.  After resisting for years the idea of seeing how much I’d actually aged, I felt like my life was starting to imitate “The Picture of Dorian Grey” in some perverse, reverse way. Ergo, the new picture.

One thing that you will notice missing in the picture is any teeth. My mouth is firmly clamped shut.  That’s because I don’t have the Chicklet teeth of movie stars.  I have the rather normal, somewhat yellow teeth that most of us end up with even after years of good dental care.
What we look like is very important to most of us.  And what our teeth look like is central to how we view ourselves and how the world views us.  Someone with a few teeth missing in the front of their mouth can be the most intelligent person in the world but our first impression will be dumb hillbilly.  Because, let’s face it, when someone wants to illustrate a dumb person having a dumb idea, they print a cartoon or picture of someone smiling who has gaps where their teeth should be.
Which is why the Alaska Dental Society should be absolutely ashamed of their actions last week in asking Governor Murkowski to challenge in court a new dental aide program operating in Bush Alaska.
I lived on the North Slope for over 25 years. I once ran the North Slope Borough’s Health Department. I was the head of the department when we took over the contract for dental services from Indian Health Services.  We did it because dental services had been spotty to non-existent under Indian Health Service. 
When an IHS dentist was available, he was stationed in a hub town like Barrow or Kotzebue and periodically traveled to the smaller villages. But if your toothache started three days after the dentist left, and he wasn’t going to be back for more than a year, you ended up with a rotted tooth in your mouth that you pulled yourself or the dentist pulled the next time he was in town. Either way, you now had a hole in your mouth where a tooth should have been.
And so I met many, many people across the North Slope who were younger than me but looked years older because they had no teeth or only a few scraggly ones left. They talked and laughed with their hand over their mouth.
When the borough took over the dental program, it offered highly competitive salaries. Even with that, we had trouble recruiting and retaining dentists.  We got out to the villages more often than in the past but still not often enough. What was missing then, and is still missing now, are people who live in the Bush who will provide continuity of care, the kind available in the medical field through the Community Health Aide Program.
Dentists who go to the Bush usually go for a very specific amount of time. They are either banking money to get their practice started or working off a federal student loan. Those making a long-term commitment are few and far between.
As for the dentists the society claims they have waiting in the wings from the lower 48 who want to do short stints to help out, no offense, but no thanks. People need ongoing treatment to take care of long and short-term problems. A dentist in a village for a couple of weeks doesn’t meet that need. And when he or she leaves, they leave behind unresolved problems that get to deteriorate till another dentist wants a free vacation in Alaska.
The Alaska Dental Society objects to what they call second class dental care for Alaska Natives. Well, guess what? It’s not second-class and it certainly beats hell out of no care at all.
The dental health care aides who work this program will provide continuing treatment under dental supervision that will allow people to have access to routine dental care, the same type of care provided by community health aides in the medical field. This dental program can be the beginning of regular dental care for people in small, remote villages.
This is something that the bush has never had. This is something the Alaska Dental Society cannot provide.  So they should get out of the way and let the people who live there get on with solving their dental health problems in the best way possible.

Summer has arrived at my house with the first contingent of friends and relatives up to fish Alaska’s rivers and streams.  In this case, it was two young cousins and four of their friends - in all, six young men in their mid twenties who kept me laughing and shaking my head in wonder for four days.

When they took over an hour to cook steaks that were still raw in the middle despite catching fire, I found myself hoping they’d end up with good and patient women who will see the bright interior under the strange exterior. Otherwise, those women may not view the sight of these young men running through the kitchen towards the deck while blowing frantically on blazing slabs of meat with quite the sentimental eyes that I did.
But I should start at the beginning.  Despite having over three months to prepare for this trip, the young man in charge of transportation for the group - and wouldn’t you know it, one of the two related to me - had somehow come down on the side of renting a Camry to transport the six of them and their gear to fish camp.
Once it became evident even to them that this was untenable, the entire first morning of their four days in Alaska was spent trying to figure out the cheapest way to rent a vehicle that would suffice for their needs.  They eventually came up with one but since I’m still not sure it was an entirely legal venture, I’ll not go into the details here.
Then we had to figure out fishing licenses and boxes to transport their catch home.  My two cousins had fished in Alaska last year and apparently did not want to face the sarcasm of their family as the actual cost of the fish - including airfare and shipping - was totaled up during dinner.  So this year, all the young men came with only carry on luggage and planned to use their two checked bags to ship their fish home. This would apparently bring the actual cost of each salmon steak down to something closer to $50/pound as opposed to $75.
So off we went to Wal Mart in what I can only describe as the kind of group outing last seen during the inmates’ bus trip in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Some of us looked for boxes to transport the fish. Others filled up the licensing counter while looking for ID they may or may not have remembered to bring. The one married member of the group wandered around the store with a toy moose in his hand telling everyone who would listen that it would make a great gift for his wife.
By the time all chores were accomplished, it was too late to go out to dinner. So we ate at home.  The guys told me they wanted to cook it as my treat for being so patient.  Heck, patience had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t laughed this much since my last outing to the Fly By Night Club.
And that’s how we ended up in the kitchen with the steaks on fire. One of the guys insisted that the best way to cook the steaks was not on the grill - that was for hot dogs and hamburgers only - but very slowly in a frying pan.  I don’t know why I listened to him. An hour later, the outsides of the steaks were slightly tan and the insides were still raw. It was now 11:30 PM. I suggested that we put them under the broiler for those who wanted them slightly more done than steak tartar. 
And it would have worked, too, had we not been laughing so much we forget they were there until the stove started sounding an alarm and the smoke was pouring out of the oven.
When they returned from the river, they had only caught five salmon among them.  So the cost per salmon steak was probably up to $100/lb.  But it didn’t matter because they’d also caught Alaska fever. I could see it in their eyes as they spoke of seeing moose and eagles and bears on the river.
I think they’ll be back and I’ll be happy to welcome them again - so long as they understand that I’m in charge of the steaks.

My cousin Therese recently adopted a pound puppy she named Stella after losing her first pound puppy Jerusalem at the ripe old age of 16. Well, we think Jerusalem was real.  No one could be sure.  Whatever had happened to him in his previous life had apparently left him very nervous about people - all people, all the time.

So most of us never saw much more of Jerusalem than two eyes staring at us from under whatever piece of furniture Therese was either standing by or sitting on at the time. 
This meant that Jerusalem needed little more than peace, quiet and nobody other than Therese around to make his day full and complete.
Stella is different. For whatever reason she became a pound puppy, she either was never mistreated or learned to get over it pretty quickly. That, compounded by the fact that Labrador Retriever probably is a large part of her genetic make-up, created a dog longing for a little more excitement than Jerusalem ever wanted.  So Therese, ever the maternal caregiver, enrolled Stella in doggy day care.
Considering we came from a group of Italians who barely believed in sending children to summer camp, doggy day care was quite a concept for the family to get their heads around.  This was especially true when Stella showed up at home after her first week of day care with a report card.  The report card said that, among other things, Stella used her time well.
As my cousin Therese said in the e-mail she sent to everyone to let them know how well Stella was doing. “Thank god she uses her time well. I don’t know what I’d have done with a dog that didn’t know how to do that.”
Well, Stella apparently is one up on our current Alaska legislature. Somehow she has learned to use her time wisely while they use their time in ways mysterious to most of us.
You see, in the real world, where you actually have to work for a living, if you’re given a deadline and you blow it time and time again, your company loses money and you stand to lose your job. But here in Alaska, even though the vast majority of our legislatures have been called into special session to finish their work, we still keep sending mostly the same faces back to Juneau in the misbegotten hope that this time they’ll get it right.  How dumb are we?
The legislature gets 120 days to finish its business. If you’re like me and follow what they do during those 120 days - and I admit upfront that I have no life so this is what passes for amusement during my day - you might have noticed that precious little gets done for most of those 120 days.  Then, we are suddenly faced with the looming deadline of adjournment and everyone is scurrying around doing whatever it takes to get out of Juneau so they don’t miss fishing season back home. 
Remember when you were young and used to wait till the last minute to do school assignments like science projects, book reports, etc.  Think back about the quality of that final product created in a last minute rush.  Not very good, was it?
Well, your legislature is doing basically the same thing.  The deadline hits and they are suddenly voting on bills they haven’t really read or fully understand or wouldn’t pass earlier.  Better yet, they use up $30,000 a day in special session to continue to stare at each other across some unbridgeable divide and still get nothing done.
Maybe I don’t understand how the legislative world operates.  But from my humble perspective, we send these people to Juneau every year to pass a budget and enact other laws as needed for our benefit. I think it is not unreasonable to expect that they will actually work on those issues the entire time they are getting paid to be there. And I think it is not unreasonable to expect them to finish their work on time and in good order just like our employers in the real world expect us to do.
I mean, really, shouldn’t our legislature know how to use their time at least as well as Stella?

It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this column even semi-regularly that I am a bit of a bird nut.  OK, perhaps I zoomed by “bit of” and went right to “totally crazed” about twenty years ago. Either way, the reality is that birds are a passion of mine.

That’s why I’m so excited about some events coming to Anchorage the week of May 16th.  It’s a chance for people who aren’t bird crazy to mingle with those of us who are and learn why we have the passion we do.  These events may never convert you to someone who happily walks around with band-aids on most fingers because of a disagreement over bedtime with your favorite avian companion, but it will go a long way to explaining why some of us do.
The week starts off at the Bear Tooth Theater on Monday, May 16th with the Alaska premier of a documentary entitled “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”. If that title sounds familiar, it’s because it was the name of a best selling book before it became a film.  Not only will the film air twice that Monday, but the author of the book, Mark Bittner, will be there to make a presentation before each showing.
According to the website for this movie, it is “the true story of a Bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild red-and-green parrots. Mark Bittner, a dharma bum*, and former street musician in San Francisco, falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the wild parrots will bring him everything he needs.”
*Dharma bum (per Gary Snyder): “A homeless seeker of truth”
The movie is directed by Judy Irving and stars Mark Bittner and avian superstars Mingus, Connor, Picasso, Sophie, Olive, Pushkin and Tupelo.
Of course, the Alaska Parrot Education and Adoption Center (AkPEAC) could not pass up this opportunity to hold a fundraiser at the same time at the Bear Tooth. So people attending not only get to meet a real live author, they not only get to be at the Alaska premier of a new movie, they also get to mingle with a group of crazed bird people who will be happy to occupy you for hours with tales of their wonderful companions.  Of course, if you don’t have hours to spend listening, you can make a donation and sneak away when they take a deep breath before going into their next story.
On Thursday, May 19, Bittner will be at the Cook Inlet Book Store signing copies of his best seller.  According to James D. Gilardi, Ph. D., Director, World Parrot Trust, “By falling in with a flock of wild parrots, Bittner has learned more about a real parrot society than those of us studying wild or captive parrots could ever hope to learn. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill makes essential and delightful reading for anyone with an interest in the complex lives of intelligent and engaging wild animals. By interweaving the parrots’ struggle to thrive in San Francisco with his own personal and spiritual challenges, Bittner’s work ventures beyond a great becoming-one-with-the-animals tale; he successfully inspires readers to find nature and peace in whatever place on the planet they happen to occupy.”
Now if that doesn’t get you reading the book and longing to see the movie, I don’t know what will.
Finally, the week ends on Saturday at the B/P Energy Center with AkPEAC’s annual conference.  Bonnie Kenk, found and executive director of PEAC, will present a program on the wild parrots of Southern California, followed by a presentation by Mark Bittner. For those of us who love companion birds, and for anyone who has ever just enjoyed their wonderfully funny antics and conversation, it’s a conference not to be missed.
It’s like I said, I’m a little crazy about birds.  I have six in my home. Three are waiting for adoption.  You can go to the AkPEAC website at http://www.akpeac.org and find out how to qualify as an adoptive parent.  You can also go there to find a schedule of two-hour training sessions that are offered year round and will help you whether you already have a companion bird (and are constantly being outwitted by it and want to win at least some of the time) or think you might be interested and want to learn more.
So come one, come all.  The week of May 16th looks like a great one for anyone who has ever watched a bird soar in the air and felt their heart soar with it.

I grew up a reader.  It’s not that my parents pushed me into it.  I was raised way before the concept of reading to your child to make your child a reader came into vogue.  No, what worked in my family was the idea that books were part of the very special privileges enjoyed by adults and that the only way I’d be able to enjoy those privileges was to grow up and learn how to read.

This was perhaps even more special in my home because my parents were the first literate generation on either side of my family. All my grandparents were immigrants and it’s clear from the yellowing signatures I have from their immigration papers that just writing their name was quite a chore. 
The family always used to blame immigration officials for the confusion in the spelling of my mother’s maiden name. Growing up I was told that the name had different spellings because each person took the spelling given to them when they passed through immigration and that spelling depended on what the immigration official heard, or thought they heard, the person say.
But looking at Nono’s old passport, I realized the confusion started way before the family hit American shores.  My grandfather spelled his name one way and the Italian government worker formally issuing the paperwork spelled it another way.  The question remains as to who was right - the illiterate immigrant or the government official.
When I was in first grade, Sister Beatrice gave out candy to the student who could puzzle out new words in our readers. The day I figured out the word “counter” in our reading book I got a while milk bottle candy. It was obviously a turning point in my life or I wouldn’t remember it so well fifty years later. It might also explain the urge I have to eat while I read.
As I flip through the unbelievable number of channels available to me on TV today, I find myself more and more grateful that my parents made reading such a special pleasure for me.  Because I am finding that despite the fact that I can flip to over a hundred channels at any given moment, I often find absolutely nothing that captures my interest on any of them. I mean seriously, how many reruns of the Cosby Show can any one person watch.
My idea of hell would be a place where there was nothing to read. This is why I always carry reading material with me. Whether it’s a doctor’s visit or on a plane trip, I always have enough reading material to last me through a stint on a deserted island.
I remember once finding myself in my car waiting for a friend with nothing to read.  So I read my car’s manual.  Five years after I bought it, I finally found out how to change the clock.
There are a lot of things in our world today that didn’t exist when I was growing up - things that vie for our attention and, most importantly, vie for our children’s attention.  Video games, movies, DVD’s and the Internet with its chat rooms and instant messaging are just some.  It’s not surprising that many children view reading for pleasure as archaic as a rotary dial phone or a percolating coffee pot.
But now that summer is approaching and the requirement to read placed on kids by their schools will ease up, I’d like to make a plea to all parents to consider reading as important a part of your children’s summer as camp or a job.
When I was growing up, my mother had her books stashed away on shelves and there was no doubt that they were very precious indeed. No child was allowed near them until they were old enough to appreciate them, value them and use them wisely.  I longed to prove myself adult enough for that responsibility and so became an avid reader. 
It is the one gift my mother gave me that has never tarnished or faded with age.  May 2 will be the fourth anniversary of her death.  I think of her every time I curl up in my easy chair with a book and realize once again that I’m finally responsible enough to have earned the right to hold a book in my hands and plunge into the depths of its wonders.
My grandparents never knew that privilege.  What a waste it would be if our children didn’t either.

In most small towns in America, two professions stand out as receiving the most respect and admiration - preachers and teachers.  While there are obvious exceptions to this rule, for the most part people rely on these professions to maintain certain ethical and moral standards.

After all, you trust one of these professions with your immortal soul and the other with the development of your children’s minds.  What could be more important?
Teachers and preachers in Bush Alaska definitely fall under this mantle of respect.  In fact, in many Native villages they have historically been exalted to a pedestal they perhaps never really deserved. This is because the first sustained contact most Alaska Natives had with the outside world was through these professionals.
When America first appeared in Alaska Native communities to announce that they were now Americans and subject to the American rule of law, the most obvious example of the new rules being imposed on them was that their children had to go to school.  In many villages these two professions intermingled, with the preacher or preacher’s wife being the teacher.  However it worked, the people who filled those roles became the role models for Alaska Natives in learning what this new world was all about.
History shows that most of the people who traveled to remote Alaskan villages to work in these fields were good people with good intentions.  They did the best they could within the confines of the world as they knew it, a world in which all things Native were viewed through the very myopic vision of a Eurocentric culture that felt it was the pinnacle of civilization.
And so, despite the best of intentions, horror stories from those early days abound - stories of Native children being hit for speaking their Native tongue; stories of Native children used as servants and slaves by those who supposedly came to save and teach them; stories of sexual abuse, cultural abuse and physical abuse.
Yet through it all, so many good people filled these roles that the basic respect and honor in which the preachers and teachers were held never totally dissipated.  When I first arrived in Barrow, I was astounded at the timidity of so many of the parents in confronting the school when their children were having problems. The teachers represented figures of authority and even though these parents had long since left the schoolrooms, they were still unable to feel comfortable approaching the teachers who remained in them.
All of which makes the arrest of two teachers in Barrow a few weeks ago for selling crystal meth all the more amazing. What would make any teacher in any Bush village in this state think that they could get away with distributing crystal meth and not have it be known all over town almost before their first customer could use up his buy?
Make no mistake about it. The tundra drums are alive and well in all Alaska villages.  The CB radios crackle every night with the latest in information on hunting conditions, weather conditions and the varying conditions of anyone who did anything that day to come within the radar of the community’s eyes and ears.  When I lived in Barrow, I knew that if I rolled over in bed the morning after the night before and found myself facing the wrong person, everyone in town would know about it before I had my morning coffee.  Welcome to small town America.
But what is most heartbreaking about the recent bust in Barrow is how it affects the kids.  Let’s face it, this has not been a great school year in Barrow. First the star basketball player gets jailed on charges of second degree murder; then the basketball coach gets fired for late night partying while on a road trip with the team; and now two teachers get busted for selling drugs. 
I guess its silly to want certain professions to somehow leave their very flawed humanity behind, the humanity we all share, and maintain a higher standard than the one to which we usually hold ourselves.  But darn it, if you are teaching our children, we have a right to expect you to at least try.

I find the proposed new law on children’s issues currently being debated in the state legislature to be very interesting.  The law calls for more openness in these cases and allows either the state or the parents to request a jury trial in a termination of parental rights case.

While I still find myself concerned about the reaction of children to the sordid stories of their family life becoming public, I also find myself thinking that it could have some very interesting, if unexpected, consequences.
Those of us who work in this field are used to a certain level of horror with every case we get.  While we may never get totally immune to the shudder we feel as yet another story of abuse hits our desks, we know it comes with the territory.  And so we go in to each case knowing that the details are going to be minimally sad, sometimes horrifying.
The thing is that the general public is not generally hardened to the tales we see so routinely. The only time the public becomes aware of a child’s specific story is when something truly horrible happens like the recent case in the Valley where foster children were allegedly abused and tortured or cases where a child dies from the abuse.
When those stories hit the headlines, the people usually react with revulsion and horror.  So I have to wonder if this bill passes and courts can be petitioned for jury trials in cases of termination of parental rights, just how much of an advantage this really gives to the parents involved.
Termination trials are long, involved and hard.  No one in this state takes children permanently away from their parents unless there is overwhelming evidence that the parents are unwilling or unable to correct the behavior that brought the children into custody in the first place.  These reasons can be as simple as a mom refusing to leave a sexual abuser who has preyed on her child to parents who see nothing wrong in drunken, abusive behavior because these are their kids and, damn it, they’ll raise them any way they like.
In between these extremes are many parents who are simply unable to walk away from the addictions that destroyed their ability to safely parent their children.  Many have gone through numerous sobriety programs only to relapse again and again until the state must make the decision that the children cannot and will not be raised in foster care.
Now imagine you or a co-worker or friend getting called to sit on this kind of jury. Imagine hearing tales of children left alone for days on end, children with no food because the money was spent on drugs, children sexually abused while mom dragged them from “boyfriend” to “boyfriend” as she looked for her next hit of drugs or booze.  Imagine seeing pictures of beaten children, pictures of children with sores on their bodies from the filth they were left to sit in, graphic pictures of little girls and boys who at three are no longer virgins.
How neutral could you really stay?  No matter what instructions you are given by the judge about the law, the emotions those tales and images raised in your mind would never completely go away. They’d linger as you thought of your child at home surrounded by love and safety.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying a judge hearing this case would be inured to these feelings, or that a jury couldn’t come to a reasoned conclusion based on the law. But a judge is trained to dispassionately apply the law based on the evidence presented in court and has perhaps a better frame of reference as to where any given case falls on the spectrum of horror.
Yep, I see this new law as a very interesting one. And a very educational one. Perhaps we really do need jury trials. Perhaps they should absolutely be required.  Perhaps it’s time the general public gets a good bellyful of what is done to children in this state, what social workers, lawyers, judges and GALs deal with on a daily basis.  Maybe then we would finally start seeing a push to put some real teeth in our child protection laws and get children out of these homes before the damage becomes permanent.

Terry Schiavo is dead and all of us who participated in making her death a public spectacle worthy of the Roman Empire at its most disgusting should be ashamed. And I do mean everybody.

For starts, the politicians from both sides of the aisle who abandoned all pretenses of high moral ground and fed into the howling mob on the hope of banking political capital for the future. Will any of us soon forget Senator Dr. Bill Frist contradicting overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary and making his own diagnosis based on a few minutes of video footage?
How easily the Republicans seemingly have forgotten their devotion to the ideal of state’s rights.  How quickly the Democrats have forgotten any principles they may have ever held about the right of an individual to a modicum of privacy in their lives as they raced to score points with the Christian right.
And then there’s President Bush who signed a bill in Texas that allows doctors to remove life support from a person against the family’s wishes if that person’s existence is dependent on public financing.  Is life only sacred if you can afford to pay the price for it? Do those people in Texas whose plugs are being pulled because of this law have less of a right to life than Mrs. Schiavo did?
And let’s not forget the family’s “religious advisers” who took a painful, private battle into the public arena by posturing for the cameras every chance they got.  They claim to represent a god who promises a heaven in the afterlife but were not willing to let this poor woman pass peacefully to that reward for so long as they thought they could get another 5 minutes on the national news.
And who can forget Jesse Jackson, who suddenly and opportunistically showed up on Easter to try and participate in a communion service for Mrs. Schiavo. Is there a camera this man is not willing to pander to? Why, at the very end of this sad spectacle, was he trying to insinuate himself into it?  Did it suddenly occur to him that he was missing out on a lot of free press?
Of course, we could have had none of this pandering without the media’s relentless coverage of this personal family tragedy.  Had their coverage not been so overpowering, maybe Mrs. Schiavo would have had the chance of some dignity in her death.  Instead, the media helped turn it into a three ring circus by flogging the story so hard and relentlessly that it all but wiped the news of the war off the front page of newspapers and into the fourth or fifth story on national TV news.  You remember the war, don’t you? It’s that painful thing happening in Iraq that used to make headlines.
Finally, every single blessed one of us who read every article, listened to every news report, went on line regularly for the latest updates, share the blame.  Ask yourself, do you have any idea how many of our soldiers were killed or maimed in the Mid-east while you salaciously followed every dirty little detail of this family’s tragedy?
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting more than a little nervous over just how much control the federal government is trying to exert over the most personal decisions of my life. The current trend in government seems to be to get the feds out of the boardroom and into the bedroom.
Make no mistake about it, the right to life is a sacred one. The fact that modern medicine has led us into areas that beg for a clarification of the meaning of the word “life” tells me that we need to seriously examine this issue.  But that cannot be done as part of a three-ring media spectacle.
For myself, I’m not sure if there is any afterlife. But I am sure that I would never want to be denied the chance to find out because modern medicine had found a way to keep my body alive while my brain was dead. I don’t want my spirit tied to a useless organ when the possibility exists that it could be soaring aloft to join what so many of this world’s religions tell me is a merciful and good god.
The real question is, if all those people are so darn sure there is an afterlife and it’s wonderful, why are they so reluctant to let someone in Mrs. Schiavo’s condition reach it?

Usually kids assigned to me through my work as a Guardian Ad Litem stay on my caseload for two or three years at best.  Most are able to leave within that time to either be re-united with their families or to start life again with a new family.

But there is always a hardcore group of kids who end up being raised in the state system despite everyone’s best efforts.  Some of these kids come to me through Juvenile Probation (JPO) at 12 or 13. Some are as young as 7 or 8 when they enter the system through the Office of Children’s Services (OCS).  So the fact that they don‘t exit the system till they are 18 or 19 probably deserves some examination.
The easy way out, of course, is to blame the system itself for not having enough resources to deal with troubled kids.  While that may be part of the answer, it’s not the whole answer. I have children on my caseload who gobble up services like a starving person at a Thanksgiving feast.  They are evaluated 18 ways from Sunday. They receive myriad diagnoses.  They get “wrap-around” services so that their every move and thought is tracked and analyzed with an adult nearby to provide them whatever feedback and external control they need.
And still they never leave the state system. They never heal enough to be returned home, if they even have a home to return to.  The go through foster homes, even specialized ones, like a hot knife through butter. They never reach a point where they can function normally in society without the assistance of multiple resources.
These kids get a lot of labels attached to them.  There always seems to be a new name that’s the latest hot diagnosis.  There was a period where every problem kid had an attachment disorder.  Now they all have oppositional defiance disorder.  I’m sure a few years from now, there will be yet another name.
But whatever you call the problem, the question remains as to why some kids benefit from the treatments and services offered and some kids don’t, even when those treatments are specialized to accommodate the fact that the damage to their brains makes them think differently.
My own opinion is that kids born with brains damaged by parental drinking, and kids whose brains are severely damaged by the home life they endured before the state removed them, are possibly too organically damaged to really fix.  And that leaves us as a society in a terrible bind.
No one wants to give up on a kid.  No one wants to ever deny them a service because it just doesn’t seem worth it. And god knows no one in the field of children’s work ever wants to look at a child and say, “Sorry, but you have been so damaged by causes beyond your control that there is nothing we can do for you.”
And so we plow ahead with these kids and try again and again to somehow make a difference in their lives despite the odds against us.  I’m thinking of one young person I know who has tried and fallen so often that he/she should have kneepads permanently implanted to soften the fall. But this young person has never stopped trying and never stopped fighting to be healthy. So I feel I can do no less than to stand by his/her side for so long as he/she continues the battle towards health.
It’s just so heartbreaking when you see kids who try so hard to get it right but, through no fault of their own, are simply not capable of achieving that goal. They try and they fail, again and again. And no one is more bewildered by their failure than they are. Because each time they recommit to trying, they really mean it insofar as they are capable of holding that resolve. The problem is that they seem unable to overcome the impulsivity that inevitably leads to such dire consequences for them.
Life will always be a lot harder for these kids than it should be. And for some, normal life will prove beyond reach. On so many levels that’s just seems so unfair because it was really never their fault to begin with.

It’s springtime in Alaska and, thanks to global warming, it’s not 40 below. In fact, defying all conventional wisdom, I plan to have my studded snow tires removed this week. I’m going to take a walk on the wild side and live a little dangerously.  I’m going to drive in Anchorage in March on regular treads.

I realize that the last time I did this, we were visited with more than two foot of snow overnight.  But I couldn’t have gotten out of my garage to drive anywhere anyhow so what good would studded snow tires have done me? 
No, if that is god’s way of showing me why I shouldn’t have my tires changed out before mid-April, I say it’s not going to work. When there is two foot of snow outside, there should be no one out there who doesn’t have to be.  We should all be inside with fires roaring and a good book by our side.
In Barrow, springtime meant that you could now see the snow and ice because the sun was back. And even when the snow finally melted sometime in May and June, it only denoted the reappearance of an extraordinary amount of dust every time a car went by and a tundra that renewed itself without any help from me.
But here in Anchorage, once the sun is back and the snow has receded, I see the sad, bedraggled, seemingly lifeless plants that once grew so bravely in my yard.  And my maternal instincts kick in with a vengeance. I want to save them. I want them to be happy again. I want their little heads to be lifted up with bright color and vibrancy. But I’d like to do all that without actually having to go into the dirt and encountering any critters who call the outside home.
This poses somewhat of a problem since mosquitoes, bees, flies, worms and other creepy crawlers seem to have laid some claim to the outdoors.  I guess they feel if I can be so darn possessive of the indoors - never inviting them in and if they inadvertently invite themselves in, chasing them out while making high pitched squealing sounds - then they can claim the outdoors and treat me in the same way when I invade their territory.
And so spring and summer put me in a quandary.  I love to see the sun. I love to see the light. I adore it when my plants blossom and my shrubs and trees burst out in varying shades of green. I just don’t want to have to get up close and personal with Mother Nature to make it happen.
My garden is lucky in that it has found a fairy godmother in my friend Leslie’s mother Pat.  Pat is one of those wonder workers who wanders through a garden with a smile on her face, a rake in her hand and a whistle on her lips. She is able to encounter various flying and crawling critters without dropping everything and running screaming into the night.  She seems to know just what plant needs a little extra love and attention, which need a little more or less sunlight or water and which are terribly happy just as they are and so will bloom with amazing fertility.
Every garden should have someone like Pat who will not only love it but be willing to actually go into it and work.  Me, I spent too many years in Barrow to be comfortable doing that. I’m told that someday I will wake up and walk out into a warm, sunlit world and feel perfectly ok.  Perhaps.  But not in the immediate future.
For the immediate future, I am still a Barrowite at heart. When the sun comes out and shines its brightest, I feel it should be frigidly cold with nothing moving through the air except the early snowbirds and nothing crawling on the ground except lemmings. 
Oh yes, and fair warning to all my friends. Pat actually did something to my raspberry bushes last year that will make them even more prolific this year. So, just as in Barrow we emptied our ice cellars in spring in anticipation of fresh whale, I’d suggest you all dump the 18 pounds of raspberries I gave you last summer and get ready for fresh ones.
And there’s no use in hiding from me. I have no qualms about leaving the bag on your doorstep where the bears can find it.