I was visiting one of my kids at an institution here in town and brought him a taste of home – whale flipper. Staff came in to try it. They asked questions about the food and the customs surrounding it. My young friend knew little because his family had, to put it mildly, not been engaged in a subsistence lifestyle while he was growing up. I, on the other hand, was spewing out information like a frigging dictionary of whaling customs and habits. And I realized that I know more about Inupiaq whaling traditions and bowhead whales than I do about my grandmother’s Sunday spaghetti sauce. Wow.