I grew up in a time when all parents felt very safe in telling their children to always look for a policeman if they were scared or lost.  A policeman, we were told, would always be our friend.

This was never necessarily true in Bush Alaska.  The police that were there - whether state troopers or city police - were usually outsiders brought in to enforce state and federal laws that may or may not have made a lot of sense to the local population within their cultural parameters.
A great example of this was an incident that occurred many years ago in Barrow called Sadie’s Duck Rebellion. Sadie Neakok was the magistrate in Barrow at the time. The federal government passed a law that said you could not take any migratory birds during certain times of the year. The problem was that the only time these birds were in the Barrow area was when the law said no one could hunt them.
Hunters with families to feed were torn between following a law passed thousands of miles away by people with no understanding of them and their need to feed their families through a long, cold dark winter.  Not surprisingly, they chose to feed their families.
When the feds showed up to enforce the law, just about every man, woman and child in Barrow showed up at Sadie’s house with a duck in their hand. The feds made no arrests, the law was eventually modified, and duck soup is still some of the best eating in Barrow.
Unfortunately, the relationship between law enforcement officers and the people of the Bush towns they serve has almost always had this disconnect.  Not being part of the culture in the town where you are enforcing the law makes enforcement that much harder.
The ideal answer would be to have local people take the law enforcement jobs but that’s not as easy as it sounds.  If they were born and raised in that community, they are part of the extended family that is at its core. Pretty much anyone they have to arrest is in some way related.  How do you go have a cup of coffee with your uncle when your actions on the job have put his son in jail for ten years?
So the rough time the state troopers have recently had with a few of their employees is all the sadder because of the effect it will have on every trooper and cop in the Bush trying to establish a sense of trust with the people living there.
In particular, the trooper charged with raping women in the community he was supposed to be serving is a horrible blow to that trust.  Recent studies show that Alaska continues to lead this nation in just the type of statistics for which we should hope to be in dead last place. Women are beaten, raped and murdered here with astounding, mind numbing repetitiveness.
Women, children, the elderly, the handicapped - these are among our most vulnerable populations.  These are the people who most need to be able to trust that when they dial 911 or scream for help, the person who responds is someone willing to protect their lives even at risk of his/her own - not someone who will take advantage of their vulnerability.
We give police and troopers guns and the right to use them to protect us.  In return, we expect them to treat this power with respect and restraint so that the unwritten social contract that holds us all together does not break down. We want to trust them, not fear them.
What these few bad examples have done is cause many people, especially in Bush Alaska, to once again wonder who they can trust.  And that’s sad because I’ve known a lot of troopers and cops during my 28 years in the Bush and most of them were fine, honorable men and women doing a job they felt was important and very aware of the trust people put in them to do that job well. They don’t deserve to be smeared because of the actions of a few.
I hope the people in the Bush give their troopers and cops the benefit of the doubt because the reality is that 99.9% of them deserve it.

So I see from the paper that Barrow Cable TV is about to be purchased by GCI. That means that Barrow will be wired to the world at an even quicker rate than it already is.  Instead of listening to my Barrow friends complaining about slow dial up to the Internet and endless waits while downloading pictures of the latest cute things my animals did, they will have access to cable modem.  Now they won’t have an excuse to not comment on how wonderful my little flock looks.

When I first arrived in Barrow in 1972, they didn’t even have TV on a regular basis yet. It had been there for a while and then closed down. When the next incarnation of what was to become Barrow Cable TV opened a few months after I arrived, it consisted of six-week old tapes shown out of an old garage in Browerville. 
The rhythm of life was different in the Bush back then. The fact that we were watching the Olympics six weeks after they happened didn’t bother anyone. The fact that we already knew the results was not a problem. We were just happy to eventually be able to share the experience. And if those tapes didn’t make it for some reason, no big loss.  Life went on and we hardly noticed the absence.
Then the world sped up and the Bush sped up with it. In the mid 1970’s, public radio arrived with a bang in Bush Alaska.  Those first operations were shaky and amateurish to say the least, but they were live and they were local.  Within a few years there was instant access to news. And events such as the World Series didn’t have to wait for the tapes.  They could be heard live on the radio.
Then came cable TV and we were able to watch the news that happened the day it happened, even if the evening news showed up at 3 PM in Barrow because the networks were coming from Chicago and points east.  The Anchorage Daily News and the Anchorage Times started showing up in our local store on a daily basis. Public broadcasting continued to grow in importance and soon many stations had their own local news and weather reports.  To say nothing of their saturation coverage of local sporting events. 
Basketball, which has always reigned supreme in the Bush, was suddenly elevated to something just this side of a religious experience.  Listening to the local teams battle it out on any level from JV to varsity to state tournaments became a requirement of good citizenship.
Opening the Bush up to the world changed a lot of things.  Kids became more sophisticated. Wearing mom’s Sunday dress to the prom was no longer acceptable.  Girls wanted real prom dresses.  They wanted their dates to have a suit and a corsage for them, just like they saw on TV commercials.
And gang language showed up among our youth.  Suddenly we heard words and phrases straight from some really bad TV shows coming out of the mouths of our young men.  I sometimes wondered if they even knew the meaning of the language they were using.
I will never forget the sight of some local young men in Barrow chasing a young African American down the street after a party gone bad in which they were yelling, among other things, “We’ll get you, you honky.” As that young man told me later, he didn’t know whether to run or to laugh because he never ever imagined anyone calling him a honky.
Now Barrow will have not only over 50 channels of TV - which means possibly four hours of something worth watching per week - but also cable modem access to the Internet and all the good and bad things it brings into your home.  I hope for the sake of their children that Barrow parents prepare themselves for what this can mean and take any precautions needed to make sure that their teens especially are watching channels and using sites acceptable to their age and maturity.
Bringing this kind of access into your home is like inviting a whole group of strangers to live with you. Some might be nice but some might lead your children down paths best not taken.  Make sure you know who these strangers are that your children are visiting.  Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Sometime back two decades or so ago when I stilled lived in Barrow, I made a great ceremony out of tossing my last pair of pantyhose into the trash and declaring my body pantyhose free for the rest of my life. I did this out of a sense of duty to every woman who has ever walked down the street with her pantyhose twisting around her knees, the crotch sagging lower than a teenager’s levis.

Along with the pantyhose went the idea of ever again wearing a heel that in any way came to a point or a pair of shoes whose shape bore no resemblance to the female foot.  My motto is that if god did not make our toes come to a point, then she clearly did not mean us to wear shoes that did.
For over twenty years I was able to stick to my resolve. But recently something terrible happened. I had to attend a huge 100th anniversary party for my old childhood parish.  Since I have been losing weight rather rapidly as of late, I had nothing to wear that still fit. Which meant I had to go shopping. And as anyone who knows me knows, that is something I will put off as long as possible in the hope that eventually the need for it will go away. 
Only this time I lost on that gamble and found myself on the East Coast in a car with my sister heading towards a store where I was going to be forced to try clothes on till I found something she liked that didn’t make me want to run into the night screaming.  My sister, I should add, inherited all the clothes and shopping genes my mother accidentally left out of my makeup.  She actually wears high pointed heels to work every day. 
I am proud to say we accomplished our mission with a minimum of bad feelings and bloodshed.  She brought in blazers that cost $250, I laughed.  She brought in blouses that cost $95, I laughed even harder. She finally took the hint and went to the sales rack where we agreed on a skirt and sweater whose total price did not equal my monthly mortgage payment.  I thought that was a reasonable standard.
It wasn’t till we left the store that it occurred to me that I’d just bought a skirt, which meant the possibility of pantyhose now loomed large in my life. I tried to convince my sister that since this was a mostly Italian affair, I could just wear an old pair of nylons rolled down below my knees and get away with it by calling it a tribute to nostalgia.  After all, it was good enough for our grandmothers, so I figured it should be good enough for me. She neither saw the humor, the nostalgia or the remotest chance that she’d let me get away with it.
And so a few days later I found myself struggling into a pair of her pantyhose and wondering how, in the twenty years since I’d last worn them, manufacturers still had not figured out how to make them fit my figure.  Worse yet, I found myself struggling into a pair of my sister’s shoes - the kind with pointy heels.
I had considered buying a pair of shoes till I saw the price on the limited selection she would let me consider.  I figured for that much money, the shoes should come with someone to carry me around so my toes didn’t hurt.  The compromise was to wear a pair of her shoes.
I picked the lowest heel possible. Since all her shoes were pointy, I resigned myself to pain for the night. Everything seemed to be going well till I tried to stand up. Apparently if you don’t wear these stiletto heels with any regularity, when you attempt to stand in them for the first time you tend to wobble.  Then you wobble some more, your ankle gives out and you fall.
This is why I entered the ballroom the night of the gala holding on to my friend’s arm for dear life.  I was tempted to tell people I was suffering from a neurological problem that precluded my standing on tiny spokes.  But my explanation was consistently drowned out by the sound of my friends laughing every time I took a step.
The pantyhose are back in my sister’s drawer; the shoes are in her closet. I am back in Alaska where people understand that our toes aren’t pointed and stilettos are knives that should not be associated with shoes.  And once again I am reminded of why I love this state so damned much.
Long live mukluks!

I don’t know if words could ever do justice to the scene at Bally’s Park Place Casino and Hotel where St. Michael’s Church of Atlantic City held it’s 100th Anniversary gala.  How do you describe 1000 people in a ballroom, almost all Italian, screaming and laughing with joy and tears as they run into classmates from grade school they hadn’t seen in 50 years?  Or old boyfriends who brought back the memory of being very young and innocent in a time when the young had the privilege of being innocent? Or the girlfriend who had a wall of Ricky Nelson pictures in her room under whose watchful gaze you schemed to create the most wonderful Ricky Nelson fan club that ever was?

The sound level in the ballroom probably would have drowned out the roar of a 747 heading for lift off.  It was a sound interspersed with the lilting vowels of immigrant Italian English. All words ended in a, e, i, o or u - music to my ears.
I’d already spent a day with two old friends - the girls who’d lived next door to my childhood home, who went to school with me through high school, who discovered womanhood, acne and boys with me.  We hadn’t been together for over 30 years but it seemed like just seconds had past.  One minute I was a 57-year-old woman slowly unfolding from a car and then I was with Grace and Lea and we were all 12 years old again.
Lea had been away the longest so we took her on a nostalgia tour of the old neighborhood. We stopped by the steps in the alley that led up to her house and remembered playing cut out dolls together on them, making paper dresses from wall paper sample books we would beg from the store down the street. She marveled at the renovations of the church. We checked each other’s memories for the exact location of some missing buildings and tested each other’s knowledge of the names of the nuns who had taught us in grade school.
And then, as we’d done so many times in that far away past, we headed to the boardwalk.  The boardwalk has both changed and remained the same since we last walked it together.  The old hotels have been replaced by the gaudy fronts of casinos, the beach now has man made dunes protecting it that hide the ocean from view, the Million Dollar Pier where we spent so many afternoons on the roller coaster and Merry Go Round is an empty shell of metal girders waiting for the new shopping center to fill it.
But the smell is the same, the boards are the same and every once in a while you hit a block not yet taken over by a casino where the old stores live on - places to buy souvenirs, pizza, orange drinks, soft ice cream and salt water taffy, while having your future told by a real psychic. We stopped at a display celebrating Atlantic City’s 150 anniversary and signed our names to the big card, taking care to use our maiden names so people know who we were.
When we arrive at the ballroom for the cocktail hour, we are met with pictures from St. Michael’s past.  Coordinated by year, each display is surrounded by people pointing and shrieking as they find their 8th grade class picture or their May queen crowning.  I find pictures of my father on the Knights of Columbus bowling team from the year they won the New Jersey bowling championship. That trophy adorned a wall in our grocery store for years.
By the time we go in to dinner, the party is in full roar. No one sits down for longer than a few seconds.  Between wandering the aisles looking for familiar faces, hugging and crying when finding one, dancing the tarantella and misting up as O Solo Mio is sung, dinner itself becomes secondary. I realized I’d never before been to a party full of Italians where food has taken such a back seat. The only moment of silence in the evening is when Father D’Amico says grace before dinner.
I don’t know if it’s possible to ever again produce the type of neighborhood created by St. Michael’s. I don’t know how you explain what it meant to successive waves of Italian immigrants throughout the 1900s. But I know I’ve always felt privileged to have been a part of it.  And from the turn out at this anniversary party, I’m clearly not alone in feeling that way.

Having made the decision to have gastric bypass surgery, gotten the support of all the health care providers who kept me alive all these years, and passed the innumerable tests required before the surgery, I felt as though anything else I had to do for the surgery would be easy by comparison.  It had taken me over a year to traverse the pre-op road and now I was finally at surgery’s door - good health awaited me on the other side.  The only issue left to resolve was insurance pre-approval.

Ah how innocent we so often are when we find ourselves about to enter the door marked Insurance Hell.  After all, we tend to reason, we’ve done everything required and the surgery being requested is listed right there in the benefits book as one to which we are entitled.
Step through that door, though, and all innocence and rational thought is completely and irrevocably lost.  Because you have entered the world of professional nay saying, a world of corporate negativity where I can only assume the philosophy is that if they deny you the benefit long enough, you will die and they will have saved themselves a few thousand dollars.
Now, if I’m sounding a bit harsh about health insurance providers - why, that’s exactly how I mean to sound.  Considering the wide palette of health problems I suffered from pre-operatively, I’ve had a lot of experience with them. Little if any of it was positive.
For instance, there are the diabetic supplies that I’ve ordered about once every three months for the past gazillion years. I order from a diabetic supply company. I order strips to test my blood sugar and little lancets to prick my finger.  The order never varies, never changes - four boxes of strips, two canisters to the box, and one box of lancets. And the price rarely changes.  Which is why I am always amazed when the reimbursement check arrives and is always different.
I can only assume the insurance companies are outsourcing these clerical jobs to a place where English is a third or fourth language.  Or maybe literacy is not required to be a claims clerk.  Each time I call to question why they paid me $150 last time but only $25 this time for the same order with the same cost, the explanation gets progressively more creative.
One time I’m told they forgot to look at the line, which says I got four boxes instead of just one. Another time I’m told that they forgot to notice that the boxes contained 100 strips, not 50.  Another time I’m told quite indignantly by the gentleman I’m complaining to that they will not pay $100 for a box of lancets. Well, duh!  On checking, he notes that I was not charged $100 for the lancets. The clerk read the paperwork wrong.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they turned me down for the surgery.  The reasons given ignored all the proof presented that this surgery could potentially not only save my life, but save the insurance company thousands of dollars down the road as I gained better health and stopped using so many of the system’s resources. 
They didn’t care. Didn’t care what my doctors said. Didn’t care about what the medical tests said. Didn’t care what every health professional I saw recommended.  In fact, the rather low-level clerk who kept rejecting the claim didn’t care for any level of argument or reason until he got a letter from my attorney.
Suddenly, all the paperwork that had not been adequate to justify my receiving this benefit became more than adequate.  Two letters from my lawyers, accompanied by no further medical paperwork, and I had my approval. 
As one of the staff at the surgeon’s office commented to me in the midst of this craziness - insurance companies live a culture of corporate denial.  If they deny you long enough, you’ll go away.  Sadly, many people who could benefit from this surgery do just that.  They go away.  And then they die from complications of diseases that could be controlled or arrested through this surgery. How very, very sad.
Next time, the surgery itself.  Also known as the “you can live by broth alone” period.

When I was a young girl, my world was fairly small and tightly controlled.  Nothing was done without the express written consent of parents, priests and nuns.  This led to some very interesting situations in my childhood for both me and some of my neighborhood companions.

For instance, there was the time my friend Grace got appendicitis while we were still in grade school. She wasn’t about to tell our nun that she had this pain because she didn’t want to miss school. By the time we got out that day, I literally had to help her down the stairs and walk her to her home because the pain had gotten so intense.
A doctor was called, the diagnosis was made, and Grace was told she would have to go into surgery. Except Grace refused to allow anyone to move her out of her house until she saw a priest. And no amount of threats by her parents about the consequences of waiting even five minutes to get to surgery would dissuade her.  Finally, her parents had to send for the parish priest to give her a blessing before she’d leave for the hospital.
Then there was the time I won an award from the VFW for a Voice Of Democracy broadcast speech writing contest.  I know the exact title of the competition because the award still hangs on a wall in my home.  I was thrilled to win until I found out that in order to accept the award I would have to go to a - gasp, horror - Protestant Church for the ceremony.  I wasn’t sure I could do that without risking my immortal soul. And nothing my parents said alleviated my concern. 
In total frustration they sent me to our parish priest who assured me I could enter the church and enjoy the dinner without risk.  I can’t tell you how relieved I was though there was a part of me that still thought the question should have been booted upstairs to the bishop just to be sure.
Needless to say, with this type of background, the YWCA was hardly a part of my everyday world when I was young. In fact, I don’t think I’d even heard of it prior to going to high school where my world widened to include non-Italians.
I can look back at that limited little girl I once was and laugh now.  Especially since I’ve grown up enough to know I can be friendly with all religions without fear of eternal damnation and that the work of the YWCA is in the best tradition of what Christianity should stand for.
Here in Anchorage, the YWCA sponsors programs that run the gamut from helping women deal with their finances to helping mothers and daughters communicate well and avoid the trap of substance abuse.  It sponsors programs on women’s health and programs that encourage young girls to get into the thick of the technology revolution.
One of the activities I love best is its annual program at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art entitled Alaska Women Writers: Reading from Their Work.  This year that program is happening on September 23 at 7 PM.  And even though I’m not reading this year, I’m excited about the program because each year I’ve attended I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the depth of talent Alaskan women writers possess.
Last year, I heard a young lady, a SLAM poet name Corinna Delgado, do a reading and it was enough to make me want to pack up my computer and sell it cheap.  Being faced with that level of talent certainly puts my little scribblings into stark perspective.
So if this year’s TV season strikes you as being as pathetically bankrupt as it strikes me, and you are looking for entertainment that will really entertain you, I highly recommend that you head to the museum this Thursday.  Not only do you get to hear some of Alaska’s best women writers strutting their stuff, but you get wine and cheese afterwards and a chance to meet these ladies and find out what makes them tick.  All this for a very low price that helps to support the other great programs the YWCA offers. 
Now how can you sit in your house watching Donald Trump’s hair try to flee from his scalp when there is something this wonderful happening outside your door?

When I was a young girl, my world was fairly small and tightly controlled.  Nothing was done without the express written consent of parents, priests and nuns.  This led to some very interesting situations in my childhood for both me and some of my neighborhood companions.

For instance, there was the time my friend Grace got appendicitis while we were still in grade school. She wasn’t about to tell our nun that she had this pain because she didn’t want to miss school. By the time we got out that day, I literally had to help her down the stairs and walk her to her home because the pain had gotten so intense.
A doctor was called, the diagnosis was made, and Grace was told she would have to go into surgery. Except Grace refused to allow anyone to move her out of her house until she saw a priest. And no amount of threats by her parents about the consequences of waiting even five minutes to get to surgery would dissuade her.  Finally, her parents had to send for the parish priest to give her a blessing before she’d leave for the hospital.
Then there was the time I won an award from the VFW for a Voice Of Democracy broadcast speech writing contest.  I know the exact title of the competition because the award still hangs on a wall in my home.  I was thrilled to win until I found out that in order to accept the award I would have to go to a - gasp, horror - Protestant Church for the ceremony.  I wasn’t sure I could do that without risking my immortal soul. And nothing my parents said alleviated my concern. 
In total frustration they sent me to our parish priest who assured me I could enter the church and enjoy the dinner without risk.  I can’t tell you how relieved I was though there was a part of me that still thought the question should have been booted upstairs to the bishop just to be sure.
Needless to say, with this type of background, the YWCA was hardly a part of my everyday world when I was young. In fact, I don’t think I’d even heard of it prior to going to high school where my world widened to include non-Italians.
I can look back at that limited little girl I once was and laugh now.  Especially since I’ve grown up enough to know I can be friendly with all religions without fear of eternal damnation and that the work of the YWCA is in the best tradition of what Christianity should stand for.
Here in Anchorage, the YWCA sponsors programs that run the gamut from helping women deal with their finances to helping mothers and daughters communicate well and avoid the trap of substance abuse.  It sponsors programs on women’s health and programs that encourage young girls to get into the thick of the technology revolution.
One of the activities I love best is its annual program at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art entitled Alaska Women Writers: Reading from Their Work.  This year that program is happening on September 23 at 7 PM.  And even though I’m not reading this year, I’m excited about the program because each year I’ve attended I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the depth of talent Alaskan women writers possess.
Last year, I heard a young lady, a SLAM poet name Corinna Delgado, do a reading and it was enough to make me want to pack up my computer and sell it cheap.  Being faced with that level of talent certainly puts my little scribblings into stark perspective.
So if this year’s TV season strikes you as being as pathetically bankrupt as it strikes me, and you are looking for entertainment that will really entertain you, I highly recommend that you head to the museum this Thursday.  Not only do you get to hear some of Alaska’s best women writers strutting their stuff, but you get wine and cheese afterwards and a chance to meet these ladies and find out what makes them tick.  All this for a very low price that helps to support the other great programs the YWCA offers. 
Now how can you sit in your house watching Donald Trump’s hair try to flee from his scalp when there is something this wonderful happening outside your door?

Someone recently asked me if I felt that the work I do as a Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) actually “saved” any children.  I asked them to define “saved”.  They responded that they would define it as taking children out of a bad situation and returning them to a healthy one, either with their healed family or a new family.  Then they added, “And these kids grow up ok and become productive, healthy members of society.”

They had me nodding yes until we got to that last part.  Children in state custody often don’t arrive there until an awful lot of damage has been done to them.  Sometimes this damage started before they were even born, with mom drinking during her pregnancy.  Oft times the problem is exacerbated by substance abuse and domestic violence during their youngest and most important years - years when the ability to trust and love and have healthy future relationships is either created or not; years that if lost, cannot be regained.
So my response to the question of whether I feel that I’ve actually helped “save” any kids is yes, but within this limited context.  I feel my work has helped take children out of unsafe, often abusive and violent situations, and gotten them into a place where they can grow up safely.  What happens after that is pretty much anyone’s guess. 
Sometimes these kids have already been so damaged that they immediately revert to the world they first knew and have drunken, often violent lives. Sometimes they get in trouble one time and that’s enough for them to figure out that they don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their past. Sometimes they go from the state social services or juvenile justice system straight to the adult penal system with barely a break from one to the other. And sometimes, despite all odds, they turn out just fine.
If continuing to work as a GAL was contingent on creating productive adults out of damaged kids, I would have given up a long time ago.  Satisfaction for me is knowing that while they are kids, they have someplace safe to sleep at night, food on the table at meal times and sober adults who care where they are and how they are spending their childhood.
This can be hard for a layperson to understand.  Most people want a better return on their tax dollar. They want to know that money spent on social service programs will have some really positive outcome when the truth is that keeping children safe is often the best outcome we can hope for.  A child with signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and a low IQ who experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence before he or she was 5 years old, is not someone that the best system in the world can always fix.
That doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying. And it doesn’t mean as a society we should not be responsible for giving these children a safe place to be children.  But it does mean understanding the limits of what you can do with a child who starts out with so many strikes against them.
Most Alaskans have heard about a recent case in Wasilla where children taken from a home in which substance abuse was apparently a problem were adopted by the state into a home in which physical torture and abuse seemed to be the norm. One of the reasons this case has struck such a chord with me is that it violates the minimum standard I feel we owe these children - a safe place in which to grow.
If anyone thinks these children have much of a chance at a “normal” life in the future, they are sadly mistaken.  These kids have no idea what normal is. Maybe, with lots of love and determined effort, they can achieve some quality of life in the future.  Maybe not.  But by taking them from one abusive situation and placing them in another, the state has condemned these children to a life of emotional and spiritual pain that they may not ever be able to overcome.
The one thing the state owed these kids when it got involved in their lives was a safe place to grow up.  They didn’t get that.  We will all be paying the price for that mistake for years to come. But the greatest price of all has been, and will continue to be paid by these children.

When I moved from Barrow to Anchorage, one of the first things I did was become a volunteer at the Bird Treatment and Learning Center (Bird TLC). I did it because all my life I have felt a special love and affinity towards birds.

I remember as a child dreaming that I was Supergirl. After my mother would put the lights out in my room at night, I would lull myself to sleep dreaming that I was leaping out of the little window in my bedroom. My super powers allowed me to zoom straight up thereby missing the wall that was three foot on the other side of that window. I would spend the night flying through the sky, never touching ground.  It wasn’t necessary in my dream for me to do any great deeds.  The whole point of the dream was the flying.
I’ve spent a good deal of my life envying birds their ability to shake the bonds of earth and gravity and soar above us.  I love watching them fly and seeing the sheer joy of their flight.  And so I knew that volunteering at Bird TLC was for me because I would be helping sick and injured birds return to the heavens where they belonged.
Recently, as if to make this whole experience even more joyful, I was given the privilege of releasing a healed eagle to the wild.  There is no way to describe the feeling of holding an eagle that you once cared for when it was too sick to care for itself and then throwing your arms up and letting it go and watching it climb to the top of the trees to once again become lord of all it surveys.  It was probably as close to flying as I will ever get because my soul soared with that eagle.
If I had one sadness on the day I released the eagle, it was that the man who had come to represent for me the heart and soul of Bird TLC was not there to share it.
I met him on one of my first days at the Center.  He was standing at a large tub washing eagle mats.  This is probably the least fun job there.  Eagles confined to a small space still answer nature’s call as often as they would otherwise except it’s all contained in that small space. Washing those mats takes love.
This man caught my attention because he was so tall that he had moved the platform that we all used to get up to the tub and was just standing there able to reach in with no trouble.  I asked who he was and was told his name was Ferg. He came in whenever he was needed to help, whether it was picking up birds, transporting birds, caring for birds or cleaning their messes.
For many people, I imagine the first sight of Ferg would give pause for thought.  At about 6’5” and as solid as they come, he would certainly make you think twice about being anything but extremely polite and courteous to him at all times.  He was the only man I ever saw who actually intimidated the eagles.  Whereas the rest of us would have to carefully enter the holding pens to pick them up, carefully put a blanket over them and ever so carefully grab for their legs, all the time making sure we had a quick exit available if needed, Ferg just walked into the pen. The eagle would look up, know he’d met his match and not struggle at all.
I watched this giant of a man handle the biggest eagles and the smallest chickadees with tenderness and care.  I looked forward to the days he’d show up during my shift to sing a silly Christmas carol to me, his way of teasing me for my bah humbug attitude towards the holidays.  In talking to other volunteers, I’ve come to find out that I wasn’t the only one who would occasionally wander by the Center in the hope he’d be there so we could just chat a bit.  A chat with Ferg just made the day seem lighter.
For a variety of reasons, Ferg isn’t at the center anymore. I’m not sure this column makes clear just how impressed I always was by his tenderness and kindness to god’s smallest and most helpless creatures while he was there.  I hope it does because I didn’t get to say goodbye to Ferg before he left. If I had, I would have told him he was the gentlest giant in body, soul and spirit I’d ever met.

About a month ago, I wrote a column in which I detailed my growing realization that I either needed to get control over my weight or I would not be able to fulfill my late life goal of spending all of my niece’s inheritance before I die.  After much thought, a lot of Internet research, and a couple of bags of potato chips, I finally decided that a gastric bypass was the only solution left to me.

Armed with the support of the many doctors in this community who helped to keep me alive until I reached this decision, I started on the long path to surgery.
Once you’ve been accepted for this surgery, you have to undergo a whole battery of tests to determine that you will probably not die during the operation thereby ruining the doctor’s track record. You also, for some reason, need to prove you are relatively sane.
I figured unless you knew my relatives, you would not be able to determine that I was, in fact, sane compared to them.  I wasn’t sure my insurance company would pay for me to bring a psychiatrist to the East Coast to observe a family dinner in order to verify this information. Luckily, the person evaluating my sanity thought that my little menagerie of four parrots, a cockatoo and a nervous little dog was a positive moment in my life and provided me with a reason to live.  Which is true insofar as I am afraid to die and leave them behind with the house because the birds for sure won’t take the dog for the walks he likes.  So, I edged by on the sanity thing.
Little did I know that would be the least of the tests I would have to endure.  Prior to this surgery, the doctors apparently have determined that they want to inspect every inch of a person’ s body, both inside and out.  The outside part isn’t too onerous.  But let me tell you that they wanted to inspect inside parts of me that are I had no idea were accessible short of an autopsy. And then, when I found out how they were accessible, I thought an autopsy was the easier way to go.
So I drank chalk for an upper GI. series. And I had an echocardiogram which involved lying on my side watching as my heart beat on a monitor nearby. It seemed like such a small muscle for such a big task. On a day-to-day basis you don’t think of each beat your heart has to take to keep you going. When you’re lying on a bed watching it beat, you find yourself becoming a silent if nervous cheerleader.  “C’mon heart!  C’mon heart! Beat again, beat again!  Yea heart!”
But perhaps the most discomfiting moment in the whole pre-op process occurred when the pulmonary specialist informed me that I had, and I quote, “inadequate sleep hygiene.” It was enough to make me want to crawl into a hole somewhere and thank god my mother was no longer around to hear those words.  Inadequate sleep hygiene.  How horrible.  Except for the fact that I didn’t have a clue what that was.
Turns out it means I don’t go to sleep and get up the same time every day and therefore I throw my biorhythms off kilter.  To be honest, if biorhythms were the only thing off kilter in my life, I wouldn’t have been in his office in the first place.
So I slunk back to the surgeon to confirm that, in fact, I was a candidate for surgery as soon as I got that little sleep problem in hand. I thought I’d been through the worse the process had to offer at this point. I’d been probed, prodded, stuck, thumped and turned upside down and shook to see if any last shred of dignity had been somehow overlooked in the testing. What could possible be harder.
Well, the next step was to work with my insurance company to get approval for the surgery that was listed right in my little booklet as an accepted procedure.  I laugh now at the naiveté of the person I was back then. A person not yet battle hardened from traversing the road to getting my insurance to actually approve a procedure I qualified for and which they specifically included as a benefit.
Next time - insurance companies...are they really Darth Vader’s last stronghold?

School started this week in Anchorage.  The yellow buses are back.  The blinking yellow lights are back.  Parents all over town are congratulating themselves on having survived another summer vacation.  Meanwhile, parents in Beslan bury their children and try to get on with their lives in a town where the first day of school went horribly awry.

You shouldn’t have to worry about dying from the simple act of going to school.  You shouldn’t have to worry about terrorists taking over your school and holding you for two days in torturous heat with no food or water. The only thing you should worry about is whether you’ll find someone you like to sit with at lunch or whether you’ll get the math teacher from hell.
School should be a place your parents can send you with some modicum of peace of mind that you will be returned to them six to eight hours later in one piece.
Apparently, the first day of school in Russia is a day where parents accompany students to greet their teachers with flowers and a celebratory attitude is maintained to highlight the happiness of knowing that your child lives in a world where he or she has a right to an education no matter what social class their family belongs to.
Now I realize that for some people in many places of Russia that’s not entirely true. There are minorities in Russia who don’t enjoy the same privileges as other Russian citizens. And there are minorities here in America who can make that same claim.  But the important thing is that despite the disparities, the goal is for equal education and just having that goal is a step further in civilization than we, as humans, have ever gone before.
Why did the militants seize the school? Well, that’s easy.  Helpless victims.  That most horrifying of scenarios for any nation - children held captive, their lives threatened.  Blow up a plane and it’s over in an instant.  Kidnap a school full of children and you get 24 hour coverage for days.
Here’s what amazes me. Did these terrorists really think that the Russian government was going to give Chechenya its freedom in return for the freedom of the hostages?  Has this ever really worked anywhere?  And how can people who call themselves human sit for two days in a sweltering school watching little children suffer and think this will in any way help further their goal?  As far as I can tell, it has only caused the world to shudder with revulsion at them and, by association, their cause.
When I was going to school, back in what now seems like some prehistorically quaint time, school was where your parents sent you to be educated and where they knew you’d be safe. In my case in particular, the only thing we usually had to fear was Sr. Josephine catching us making a crooked line into church. 
I lived next to the school and so hung there through all four seasons. The halls were safe whether filled with kids or just filled with nuns trying to get things cleaned up from the last school year or ready for the next.  Either way, a kid caught in the hall was considered fair game for helping haul desks and books and generally making themselves useful.
The terrorists who created the tragedy in Beslan took away more than just the lives of their victims. They took away the security of the surviving parents and children that there was anywhere truly safe in their world.  And for parents all over the globe, they made that first day of school a little harder.  A little harder to let their child go into the building without them, a little harder to drive away trusting all would be well.  Beslan has reinforced the frightening lesson of Columbine in our national psyche.
It’s hard to have sympathy for causes that use children as human shields and human bombs.  Even if they had a point to begin with, even if I initially wanted to try to understand their complaints, it’s hard to divorce their cause from the pictures of little children leaving their first day of school dead.
Call me crazy, but to my mind, that’s not the way to get the world’s sympathy to your cause.  It will get the world’s attention, but with it will come the world’s revulsion. And then you just have to wonder, what did they really think they were achieving?

The street leading to my little part of the world has been in bad shape for some time now.  Heaves in the road left parts of it three foot higher than other parts.  Those of us without monster trucks quickly found that negotiating down the street was always more exciting than one would imagine a trip down a 20 mph residential road should be.

But after a while, you can get use to anything.  So most of us reached the point where we knew when to swerve left, when to swerve right, and which puddles to avoid during breakup because they were so deep that they threatened to rip the bottom of your car out unless you were an SUV.
I had reached the point where I figured no one at City Hall would ever notice the problems of my little street and had resigned myself to living with it.  But I had neglected to figure into the equation the fact that down the street from my modest little home is an enclave of not so modest little homes. I guess when your home is worth that much money, you have the ear of people whose names I don’t even know.
So lo and behold one day affixed to my door is a notice that the city has contracted to rip up the current street and replace it, complete with actual sidewalks.  The suburbanization of South Anchorage drum rolls a step closer to completion.  The letter announcing this was filled with useful information about how long the project was estimated to take, the inconveniences we might be expected to endure and the fact that at all times access for emergency vehicles would be maintained.
I have to say that the men in hard hats and those darling orange vests who wander the street amidst the humungous machines are certainly some of the politest people I have ever met.  It’s just that on some days they seem as puzzled as I am at how I’m supposed to actually get to my little turn off.  One day, I returned from the Bird Center to find that the road itself was six foot below the entrance to my circle with no ramp accessing it.  This caused me to wonder just how high fire engines can jump.
After waiting about an hour while those very nice men scurried around building a ramp for me to use, I was finally able to get home. Unfortunately, the heat had already melted my frozen ice pops and some of my veggies looked very sad with sugar free cherry liquid running down them.
I think the most frightening part of this whole experience so far has been getting caught between two huge dump trucks. When you are driving a little Subaru, you worry that they won’t see you and may accidentally crush you - though if they did, I’m sure they would be as gracious as possible in apologizing for it.  I have a flag on a long pole that I bought but never put on my tricycle. I’m thinking of mounting it on the back of the Subaru so that the next time I’m sandwiched in between them I’ll feel a little more assured that they can see me.
Walking my dog has also taken on a distinctly more challenging tone.  To get to a walking path, I have to traverse the entire road of construction.  If I feel small in my Subaru, I feel minuscule when it’s just me and my very little dog walking along on a roadway mostly inhabited by three story vehicles with scary devices hanging off their front ends.  I’ve never been known as a runner but I must say I make it up the hill and out of the construction area at a jogger’s pace.
This construction is supposed to go on into the fall.  Periodically there will be other little inconvenience such as the water being turned off.  But the result should be a beautiful street with a sidewalk to match.  The fact that the sidewalk has come at the expense of some neighbors’ lawns is regretful but I think I’ll be able to enjoy it anyway.
Meanwhile, to all those hard hats in those cute orange vests, I’m the old lady with the arthritic dog trying to beat the road grader up the hill to the safety of a sidewalk.  You all seem like very nice people.  You have all been unfailingly polite to me when I’ve panicked and had to be talked through driving down what you euphemistically refer to as the path to my house.  Please don’t scare me with your big machines while I’m walking or my dog might not be the only one needing the plastic bag.

I have to confess. I am responsible for Paul Hamm’s gold medal at the Olympics in the all around gymnastics competition. And just to completely ease my conscience, I probably should admit I had a lot to do with Carly Patterson’s win in the women’s all around gymnastics competition also.

Why, you ask, would an aging baby boomer sitting on a couch in Anchorage who finds running up a short flight of stairs a physical challenge think that she had ANY connection whatsoever to the world of Olympic gymnastics?  Well, the ugly truth is that I was the one who sent the bad vibes out to the other competitors urging them to falter, to fall, to take that extra step on landing.
What you need to understand here is that I am not ordinarily very interested in sports or athletics.  In my own life, I tried softball once and quickly found out who the far back in right field position was for.  We won’t even talk about my attempts to connect a thin piece of wood with a small, round moving object.  Suffice to say, I never got close enough to first base to even catch sight of the opposing team’s right fielder.
I had a roommate for many years to whom the word seasons meant baseball, basketball or football.  Any other concept of the passing of time just flew over his head.  Once ESPN became available in Barrow, I was afraid he’d lose all ability to walk or be in sunlight.
But I never quite got caught up in the fascination of watching sports. So I never really followed them except for every two to four years when the Olympics were held. Then I became a blubbering captive of every sappy story put together by the networks to drag me into the personal life of some young person who had sacrificed their entire existence in order to be the best in the world at some obscure sport that would ultimately lead them to a chiropractor’s office very early in life.  I mean, seriously, how many sports get covered at the Olympics that cause you to sit up, scratch you head and exclaim, “Huh!?” You’ve never heard of it and aren’t sure but what Bob Costas might not be pulling your leg in describing it.
The obvious exception to all this is gymnastics in the summer Olympics and ice-skating in the winter Olympics.  Once every four years everyone becomes an expert in these fields and cheers on our American favorites as though we’d been there all along and knew exactly what we were cheering for.
In my life, my fascination with gymnastics comes from the fact that I still can’t believe anyone can voluntarily bend their bodies that way and then nonchalantly straighten up and keep going. I get absolutely wrapped up in watching for the moment when one of the gymnasts bends over into an impossible pose, suddenly gets a look of consternation on his/her face, and has to be carried from the gym twisted round like a pretzel.
But that never happens and so I find myself mesmerized by the battle of the perfect bodies unfolding on my TV. And as the competition progressed this year for the men and women’s All Around, I realized that in order to win, Carly and Paul needed someone else to falter.  And as mean as it sounds, I found myself sitting there as the other gymnasts took to an apparatus thinking “Fall!  Fall!  Fall!”. 
Now I’m sure each of those gymnasts - many from poor countries whose only hope for a future was to win the gold medal - deserved victory.  But they weren’t American. And suddenly I was SO American that only an American win seemed a fair result.
The scary thing is that each time I thought “fall”, some gymnast stumbled and fell. Soon I was drunk on my own power and within minutes Paul and Carly were being crowned with olive wreaths as our new champions. 
Victory was mine.  And it tasted sweet.  Now, I have to go rest up for the winter Olympics.  Getting those other ice skaters to stumble at the right time will take all my energy and I need to start preparing now.

I’ve reached an age when I scan the obituaries every day to see how many people my age have died and what they died from.  I feel horribly cheated if the cause of death is left out because then I can’t take any comfort in the fact that I don’t have that disease or don’t engage in that activity which somehow translates into my mind as a reason why I won’t die soon.

I am buoyed when the majority of the people in the obituaries are over 70. I have a distance to go before I get there - though not such a distance that I can feel complacent. When the majority of obituaries are people in my age bracket, I get nervous.  Those who have died after a long illness allay the nervousness somewhat but those who died of “natural causes in their sleep” cause my anxiety level to soar. 
I wonder how long it would take someone to find me if that happened.  I wonder how my birds and dog would fare till I was found.  I find myself sleeping with one eye open for the next few nights as though I could see death coming and somehow avoid it till I called someone to let the dog out in the morning.
But the worse obituaries to read are those of the young - babies who never reached their first birthday, young children who are visited by god with some horrible illness that cuts them down before they’ve had a chance to conquer a two wheel bike, young adults with their whole lives left to plan who suddenly have no life left.
I don’t read obituaries from other states.  I’m not that crazy yet.  So I don’t really know how we actually compare to other places when it comes to the death of our youth.  It seems to me that I’ve read enough statistics to know that Alaska is a pretty rough place to live in if you want to live out your allotted life span. Accidents, whether from guns, cars or boats, seem to take a heavy toll on our population, especially our young population.
Some of those accidents are an inevitable part of the lifestyle lived in Alaska.  We are still, in the end, a frontier.  Once you leave the environs of the three or four urban areas of the state, you are in wilderness where survival often means engaging in activities that can be very dangerous no matter how many safety precautions are used.  To the extent that we love this state and the variety of lifestyles it allows us, we accept a certain amount of death and carnage as the inevitable byproduct.
But here’s what I can’t accept.  I can’t accept the death of anyone, and especially a young person, due to an accident in which alcohol is a factor. 
It’s not as though there is anyone left in this entire country who hasn’t been exposed to the fact that drinking and guns, drinking and boats, drinking and cars, drinking and snowmobiles, drinking and ATV’s, do not make for a healthy mix. Put them in any sort of proximity and they are invariably grounds for a tragic explosion of some kind.
Since I deal with people in my work as a Guardian Ad Litem who have severe substance abuse problems, I try very hard to be understanding of just how overwhelming those addictions can be.  Walking away from them, taking control of your life back from them, is a Herculean task that you have to wake up and repeat every day of your life.  Relapses happen and, as we so often tell people, the most important thing is to get back on the wagon again immediately.
I truly believe all of that right up until I get a call that a young man in Barrow is dead and the driver of the truck that hit his motorcycle was arrested for drunk driving.  And I hear the anguish in his aunt’s voice at the lost and know I don’t even want to talk to the parents yet because of the intense pain I will hear in theirs.  Then I find myself not caring too much about rehabilitation.  I find myself wanting justice.  I find myself wanting this drunken driver to never be allowed on a public road again unless he is handcuffed and in the back of a locked police van.  I don’t want to know about the driver’s potential for the future if he sobers up.  I can only focus on the potential future that has been lost.
Drinking and driving don’t mix.  Five simple words.  None of them more than two syllables.  How hard can they possibly be to understand?

The eventual upshot of some columns you’ll be reading here over the next few months will be a new picture accompanying the column.  Up till now, I have resisted having a new picture taken not because I have aged but because I’d become extremely overweight.

So I’ve spent the past ten years or so ducking from cameras. If family or business obligations forced me to be in a picture, I made sure I was standing behind someone, anyone, who could hide my ever spreading girth.
A little over a year ago I decided that I could no longer hide behind anything but had to admit that I had quite a problem.  I imagine I was going through the same process an alcoholic or drug addict goes through the first time they finally acknowledge out loud that they have a problem.  It’s scary, it’s exhilarating and ultimately very, very freeing.
Having finally admitted the problem, the next step was to come up with a workable solution.  I reviewed the diet history of my life only to find it strewn with every diet fad, exercise fad and miracle pill ever marketed anywhere on this earth. 
I first tried Weight Watchers when I was still in my teens. I’d been through hypnotherapy for weight loss in my early twenties. In my thirties a friend and I took to fasting a month at a time, ingesting nothing but watered down juice.  I’d tried aerobics, walking, racquetball, biking and praying. 
I had about ten pounds of extra weight per fad to show for my efforts.  Clearly my methods were failing.
When you’re young and overweight, you can get away with a lot.  Your body can bounce back from just about anything and you think you’re invincible.  Then, as you age, problems creep up slowly.  So slowly that you don’t realize just how unhealthy you are till one day you stop and take stock of how many pills it takes to keep you alive each day. When I realized it took me over five minutes of steady swallowing to get all my daily pills down every morning, it occurred to me that change was needed if I was to achieve my goal of living long enough to spend my niece’s inheritance.
Deciding to have gastric bypass surgery is not something that came easily.  Let’s face it, gastric bypass surgery alters the most fundamental of drives in the human organism - the drive to McDonald’s, and Burger King, and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and...well, you get the picture.  Once you’ve had this surgery, you are committing to changing you life in a way that is hard to imagine.
So I sat on the thought for a long time while trying every other diet I could find that I hadn’t already gained weight using.  My favorite was the Atkins diet.  I’d faithfully stay on that for weeks at a time. I would not lose a lot but would console myself with the idea that at least I wasn’t gaining. And then it would strike.  The urge to have carbohydrates would become so overwhelming that it was as though my mind had been captured by alien beings intent on snarfing up any and all things related to bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.
For two weeks I would inhale carbohydrates like a junkie on a binge. When the binge ended, I would sit amidst the debris of my yet again broken resolve and wonder if there was truly any hope for as hopeless a case as I was.
It turns out there was hope.  I had to be dragged rather reluctantly to it but once there I realized it was the only chance I had of living out my allotted life span and thus annoying all those who wished otherwise for me.  A gastric bypass operation would change my entire life and in doing so give me a future that was looking pretty dim right then.
So I took long rides on my bike as I debated the pros and cons of the surgery.  I periodically panicked at the decision I was about to make.  On those days, I would cook lots of pasta.  But eventually I came to an acceptance of the inevitable, even if my insurance company didn’t initially see it the same way.
Next month we’ll talk about insurance companies - or as I like to refer to them, corporate cultures of denial - and just how hard it is to prove you’re sane enough for this surgery.