Grandsons: after an absence of more than five weeks, they reappear in the blog to play in the snow, pet Jim the cat, sit on Carmen's lap and don an India Indian suit

Margie informed me that Jobe was standing outside the door, so I opened it up to see if it was true. Sure enough, it was. More than five weeks had past since we had last seen each other. He looked at me with an expression of disbelief, a slight smile upon his face.

He held this expression for a very long time. Then I picked him up and carried him around for a bit.

I actually saw Lynxton and Kalib before I saw Jobe. I had stopped in at Metro Cafe to say "hi" to Carmen and to down an Americano. As I was sitting there, Kalib and Lynxton burst through the door, along with their parents, Jacob and Lavina. Jobe had fallen asleep and so stayed in the car where he continued to doze.

Carmen quickly scooped Lynxton from Lavina's arms and pretty much kept him for herself for the remainder of our visit. Although she had smiled and pleasantly entertained her customers throughout, this had been a bit of a trying day for her. Lynxton gave her spirit a boost.

It remains difficult for me to believe that Pistol-Yero is not going to appear at any instant and leap onto my lap, or my keyboard, or sleep by my head at night. I know he is wrapped up and in a box waiting to be buried, but still I keep expecting him to show himself.

He is not here anymore, but Jimmy is and so is Chicago.

We were going to try to bury Pistol-Yero today, but the truth is it was going to be too much of an ordeal, given the frozen earth and the depth of the snow in the cemetery where the fur-clad animal members of the family lie.

There are many places in Alaska where communities wait to bury their winter dead until after breakup. I am told that March has been a very cold month here, with sub-zero F weather (0F = -18 C) on an almost daily or at least nightly and morning basis, but it appears that the thaw is about to begin in earnest.

So we are going to wait for two or three weeks and see if it will be a little easier then.

Melanie is doing a job on the Arctic Slope and won't be home for three weeks. Hopefully, by then, it will be a little easier to make a grave out back.

A little after noon, I took a walk and Jacob, Kalib and Muzzy followed. The air was brisk when we left, the temperature still well below freezing although later in the afternoon it would go above. I did not wear a jacket, because after all my time in the heat of India and then Phoenix, I wanted to feel the cool air.

It felt wonderful!

Kalib plays in the snow.

After we returned home, Lynxton took a bath.

After he got all cleaned up, Lynx tried on his India Indian suit that his Aunt Sujitha bought for him. Everyone was quite pleased, because the colors were just right for him and he looked pretty damned handsome. Suji bought such a suit for me, too, and I wore it to her wedding... as you will see when I reach that part of my story.

So far, I have made no progress at all. 

I have some problems to solve and I am just flat-out jet-lagged and jet lag makes it difficult to solve such problems.

Jobe and Kalib are back in Anchorage and they should be going to sleep right about now. This is what they looked like when they dozed off here.

Rex came too, and so did his and Cortney's dogs.

Allie at Abby's writes a poem and takes my order

Saturday morning, I took Margie to breakfast at Abby's and was surprised to be waited on by a new waitress, just recently hired - Allie.

Allie of Abby's.

Allie is a poet and she is not only strikingly beautiful but quite bright. She is only 16, but has graduated from high school and is enrolling at the Mat-Su branch of the University of Alaska.

She is a writer and poet and plans to continue her studies until she herself is a college professor, teaching students who, for a couple of years, might not be much younger than she will be.

Although I brought my camera with me, I had forgotten to put a memory card in it and so I had to fall back on my iPhone 4s. I was a little worried, because there was a broad spread in dynamic range between the highlights and shadows and I knew that the iPhone could not handle that spread.

Even so, it did pretty good for a phone.

I took more pictures today and I really intended to include them in this post, but I shot them in my regular camera and it is just too late and I am just too tired and jetlagged to download, edit and process them. 

So I will save them for later.

And don't forget - there is still plenty left to come from the five-week trip I just completed, both from India and White Mountain Apache, Arizona. It will be at least a couple of days yet before I start again - maybe even a week.

Allie has a poem hanging on the wall at Abby's, decorated by her own art work. I took a picture of it and was going to run it, but then I suddenly realized I would be publishing her poem without her permission, so I held off.

Breakfast, by the way, was truly excellent - way better than the greasy spoon breakfast I had in Phoenix.

Logbook entry: I'm home...

Logbook entry: Mumbai - Dubai - LAX - Phoenix: An Arab Jet takes me farther north than I have ever been before, as far north as I will ever go

Yesterday, I wrote I would probably put this post up before the day ended and at about 8:00 PM, I decided to do just that. But I felt overwhelmed by sleepiness, so I decided to take a 15 minute nap first. That nap did not end until nearly midnight.

And, once again, even though I am in a major city in the US, the wireless internet connection that I have here in this hotel is exceedingly slow. I always place my pictures before I write and it took a long time to place these pictures.

Anyway, here I am, in a taxi cab in Mumbai, headed for the airport to board the first of three flights that will end with me getting off the plane in Phoenix.

I have several other potential logbook entries in this India take, as we traveled often and far and I will probably work at least a few of them into the series that I plan to develop after I arrive home. I could have saved this to end the series, but I know where I want the series to end - in India, where Sujitha and I put our feet into a warm river.

Here I am, waiting at the Mumbai airport to board the first of three flights.

And here I am, on the plane, as it lifts off Indian ground and heads west, over the Arabian Sea.

Now, here I am, debarking the Emirates Air jet that has brought me to Dubai.

The next leg of the flight would put us in the air for 16 hours straight. I would watch many movies.

Now we are flying over the Arctic Ocean, maybe 200 miles north of mid-Russia. When I look down, the terrain of broken ice looks very familiar. We are on a great circle path that will take us directly over the North Pole.

Now we are passing over the pole. This is the farthest north I have ever been or ever will be and it is an Arab jet that has brought me here. To fly over the pole - what a huge thrill I felt. I felt excited.

We had been flying due north, but in an instant, without changing directions, were suddenly flying due south. The stewardess did not let this distract her from her work.

My goodness, she was beautiful! Tall, too, Very tall. Way taller than me.

The pole is now far behind us. We are on approach to LAX, the Pacific Ocean before us, the US beneath and behind us.

Now I must go through customs. It made me proud to see this picture, not because he has done everything right, but because it is a picture that one could not have imagined ever being taken in the America that I grew up in. It just could not have happened. Of course, there are many who undoubtedly feel rage about being forced by their government to pass beneath this picture when they return to the US.

Many of them wish those old days, which were not the days they now imagine them to have been, had never left. Many of them imagine that a time when America was a place in which a person of color had absolutely no hope of ever becoming president and maybe of not even sitting with them in the same restaurant, was somehow a more moral, upright, just, place of higher, righteous, values than the America of today. They want to bring those days back. They can't. Those days are gone forever and for good.

Now here I am, on the third leg, the one that will take me to...

...Phoenix. Now here I am, driving away from the Phoenix airport, looking for a hamburger. And here are all these people, in a jet, leaving Phoenix, flying away to who knows where... the entire world, perhaps.

Greasy spoon, Mesa, Arizona, USA

It feels kind of strange to be back in the US, eating breakfast at a greasy spoon restaurant in Mesa, Arizona. I will not name the restaurant, because frankly, the food is not very good. The hashbrowns are overcooked, dessicated down to a hard, crunchy, flavorless, crisp. The omelette - it burns the tongue, not by spice, but by heat of having been overcooked. The toast is mostly air, trapped in thin filaments of scorched bread. The coffee is watery, weak and bland and cannot compare to Vasanthi's coffee - although it is better than the coffee in western India, where everyone seems to know how to prepare a superb cup of tea, but somehow the idea set in there that to make a cup of coffee, one should heat up a bit of milk and then stir in some instant powder, kind of like Folgers, but maybe not as strong as Folger's.

Maybe I should not eat breakfast again, until I can get home to Wasilla and go to Abby's Home Cooking. Then the breakfast will be good.

My mind is in a very strange, exhausted, state. About 11:30 PM last night, I became aware that I was falling asleep on the bed in my motel room fully clothed, except for my shoes and socks, and with all the lights on. I did not think this was a good idea, so I got up to undress for bed, turned out the lights and then, with the AC blowing strong, crawled under the covers.

I woke up about 3:30 AM only to discover that I was still fully clothed, lying under the covers. I was too tired to do anything about it, so I just stayed in bed, sleeping off and on, until about 7:30, then gradually wandered over here to this greasy spoon, where I took this picture with my iPhone. Unfortunately, I have not solved the dilemma I face in posting iPhone photos.

To post an iPhone photo, my blog host first cuts the resolution down to 500 pixels on the horizontal dimension, then expands them to match the 800 pixel column width, which leaves them looking blown out, pixelated and fuzzy - as you can see.

So this is a problem I must solve.

I have a number of friends in this area and I had thought I would try to contact a few during my recuperative layover here. But I am listless. All I want to do for the moment is to be alone, to retreat into my own head. Maybe I will go out into the desert somewhere, and just wander about looking for rattle snakes and scorpions, and try not to get myself stuck by the spines of cactus.

So if you are one of my friends here and I do not contact you during my short layover, please do not feel offended. I would not make very good company today, anyway. I will back again, before too long, I think.

I am glad to be back in the US - but damn, I am sad to be gone from India. I miss India! Amazing, chaotic, percolating, bubbling, boiling, roiling, crowded, ancient, modern, overflowing India.

So far, my posts contain only a small hint of what I saw, photographed, experienced and felt in India. I will never get it all down, but, I have three or four substantial stories to tell, plus a whole bunch of little ones. Over the next week or two, I will tell at least part of all the substantial stories - but perhaps not yet to the full depth that they seem to have manifest themselves to me. This was a trip of life and death, of love and loss, of reaching out to grasp that which cannot be grasped.

So I am not quite certain how I will proceed or how deep I should go into the raw material that now exists in my computer and in my mind.

I think I will try to put up one more post today - a logbook entry covering my flights from India to Phoenix. Then, I think maybe I will pull back and post no more from India until I can take the time to make an initial edit of my entire India take, so that I can better know what I am doing.