Intermission: Wasilla: At Abby's, every stool had a butt on it; a cup of eyes

When Abby's Home Cooking first opened, I took a picture of all the stools at the counter - empty. Then I set a goal to take a photograph on the day when I would find a butt on every stool. That day happened today. Unfortunately, I broke my 16-35 wide angle lens in India. I had my 24-105 with me, and if I had brought my Canon 5D Mark II or my 1DS Mark III - both full frame cameras, that lens would have been wide enough to have captured every butt.

But I had sent the 5D to the Canon Service Center for repairs a few weeks before I left for India, but they had wanted $500 to repair and I couldn't spare it. Despite having hit a hard, stone, floor in the same mishap that sheared my 16-35 into two pieces, the 1Ds is like a tank and seemed to come out of the accident unscathed.

But I do not like to carry it around if I don't have to - because it is like a tank.

So I had fallen back on the Canon 7D, which has a cropped sensor and on it the 24 was not wide enough to take in all the butts. So I went outside to see if I could get them all through the window, but there was so much glare and reflection on the window I could not see anything through it unless I came right up to it and blocked the glare and reflection with my head.

Maybe you think I am making all this up, that there really was not a butt on every stool and this is story I concocted.

If you think that, you are wrong. See? From a angle, I could get all the butts. I wanted to keep the same angle as the original, but when one goes about breaking lenses and ruining camera bodies, he has to make adjustments to how he shoots things.

These are the heads and faces that rise above the butts on the stool.

Tim and his grandson Wesley did not sit at the counter. We shared a table. There were diners at most of the other tables, too. People are discovering Abby's.

This is not what I had planned today. I had planned to launch my store and then make another post from India - Suji Niece doing her wedding shopping. But I had a big struggle with the store. What seemed to be simple tasks kept going wrong. I got it started yesterday evening and worked on it off and on throughout today and just didn't get anywhere.

I think its because my last post drained me. It did. It drained me. I could not make my mind bear down on what it needed to bear down on to solve all the problems. So, late tonight, I just gave up and retreated to this glimpse at life in Wasilla, this morning.

I will finish the store tomorrow, though - at least a preliminary version of it. Something to establish the idea.

And, if everything goes well, I will take readers back to India to go wedding shopping in Bangalore with Suji. It was great fun when it happened. I think it will be fun in the blog, too.

Just before I jump back into and complete the Master Chef piece, here is a local, near-present, update: Grandkid and mom; Pioneer Peak; bunny rabbit; Allie pours coffee

I promised that even as I blog my Arizona/India trip, I would keep posting little local blurbs, just to keep this blog in the near present. On Monday morning, I drove Margie into Anchorage so that she could spend the week babysitting Lynxton. Jobe and Kalib are both enrolled in Day Care now.

When we arrived, this was the scene at the top of the stairs.

The view as I sipped Metro Cafe coffee from my car, Monday afternoon.

This was a tough winter and it killed hundreds of moose. I don't know how any of the dozens of bunny rabbits that proliferated last summer got through it, but, as already noted, from what I can learn, at least three did and now there are four - yesterday.

This morning, Allie, the poet who waitresses at Abby's, served me sourdough pancakes, eggs over easy, bacon and coffee. She said I looked sleepy. I said I was sleepy - always sleepy in the morning, I said sleep doesn't come easy for me. She said she loves to sleep, but thought maybe that was just because she is a teenager and teenagers love to sleep but maybe when you get older, you don't love to sleep so much.

No, I said, you always love to sleep, it's just that sleep doesn't always come easy.

She said she thought if I got a certain kind of pillow, then I would sleep good every night.

No, I said, I am just a person that sleep comes hard for - it's genetic, I told her. I sure do enjoy it when it comes, though.

She said she just got a new bed, a queen bed, and now she sleeps better than ever because she can spread out any old way she pleases. She can sleep on one part of the bed for awhile, then shift to another part. That way, she said, the bed will never sag in the middle.

Abby cooked the sourdough pancakes, eggs and bacon. Very good of course.

Within ten seconds after this posts, I will pull up my Master Chef Nephi Craig draft post and interview notes and get back to work on the story. Right now, I have about 45 pictures processed and placed in the draft post, but even though I think they all work, that is way too many so I must remove at least half of them. I have yet to write the first word. It will take me awhile yet to figure this all out, but, barring calamity, it will be up today.

Debby, just for you - the words on the back of the cup; Nephi expects to be able to talk maybe by Tuesday, so I will wait

Debby left a comment on my Tim and Wesley post chiding me for not letting her know what the words say on Tim's cowboy cup. Debby, just for you, I took a three-mile walk to Abby's and back this morning and took this snap. Now you know.

As for my pending piece on Master Chef Nephi Craig, he sent me a message to tell me he will be able to talk soon, perhaps Tuesday. I wrestled with the idea of whether I should wait a bit longer or not, because even without talking further to Nephi I think I can put up a pretty good post - but I believe it can be a better post if I talk to him first. I want to get the story right. So I am going to wait until after we talk.

In the meantime, I will now take this blog back to India. I don't think I will post again until tomorrow. I have a huge amount of photos and information to try to get a handle on and I will start doing so today. Once I start back on India, I may not be able to make mysef to break away from India, other than to insert a quick daily frame or two from Wasilla or Anchorage, until I finish this round of India coverage.

If that's how it works, I will then post the Chef Nephi story immediately after I complete the India series -followed by one more White Mountain Apache story from this last trip that I still must tell.

Tim and Wesley go to Abby's; Wesley's truck gets away from him; Wesley launches a recovery mission

As has been happening every night since my return from India, I dozed off maybe a few minutes before midnight, slept pretty good for awhile and then woke up at about 1:30 AM, unable to really sleep any more, although I stayed in bed and tried pretty hard and did manage to pass in and out of a state of semi-sleep. Before I went to bed, I had already determined that no matter what, I would have breakfast at Abby's today.

I came out of one of those semi-sleeps at 5:45. I thought I might as well get up and instead of Abby's, go to Mat-Su Family Restaurant, because they open at 6:00 and Abby does not open until 9:00. I hadn't seen any of my Family Restaurant breakfast acquaintances since before I left for Arizona and India, so maybe it was time.

But no, my stomach was set on Abby's. Plus, things are pretty tight right now and I couldn't really afford to go to Family, but Chris and Arlene Warrior are still buying me breakfast at Abby's once or twice a week as their thank you to me for photographing the wedding of their daughter, Aurora, to Robert Standifer.

So I did not get up until about 7:30, then, feeling groggy, headed to Abby's.

Shortly after I set down, Tim Mahoney walked through the door. "Hi Bill!" he said, then sat down at my table. Abby brought him the cowboy cup she keeps just for him and filled it up with coffee.

Tim had come with his grandson, Wesley, who just turned six. Wesley ordered pancakes and eggs. Grandpa, who dotes on his grandson, cut them up for him.

Tim asked me a bit about the Arizona part of my trip and where Margie was from. The words "Apache" and "Arizona" inspired two stories in him. The first was about a time when he drove through the Mescalero Apache reservation in South Central New Mexico. Like the White Mountain Apache, the Mescalero live in high country where elevations ranging from 5400 to 12,000 feet.

Tim was so impressed by the beauty of Mescalero country that he felt like he just wanted to stop his car, get out and go lay down on the earth - "lay down on my Mother's breasts," was how he put it.

Once again, I was reminded of the painful fact that this life is just too short, for I, too, felt the sudden desire to go back to my wife's country during certain times of the year when the sky above the highlands is so deep and blue, the air cool but not cold and to just lie down upon the breasts of Mother Earth. So many places I want to go, want to see, want to spend time in - including every place that I have ever been. I want to linger in those places, to know them intimately as a baby upon his mother's breast knows his mother intimately - and all the while to better get to know Alaska, top to bottom.

But there just isn't time. Life zips by so damn fast. Inside me, I still feel that I am a young man; I believe I am a young man; I picture myself as young man, I have the goals, desires and ambitions of a young man, but I am on the very cusp of becoming an old man. There is so much I still want to do, so many places to spend time in. It can't be done.

Thw other story was about a man, a finisher, half-Apache, half-African American who Tim worked with on a construction job in Kasilof. The man was the fastest finisher Tim had ever seen. After the concrete had been poured into the form, he strapped trowels to each of his knees, took two more trowels, one in each hand, then got down on the unset concrete on all fours and smoothed it out with such speed and finese that Tim and the other workers could only gape in amazement.

He also had a story about Wesley, who he told me has an innate sense of direction unlike anything Tim has seen in anyone else - kind of like his own internal gps system. Tim told me how they had driven down to a place in Kasilof over a year ago. Then, a year later, they drove back to that place. As they drove, Wesley would tell them to turn this way here, that way there, right to the place.

As for this valley, he knows the way back to any place where he has ever been, Tim said.

"If I took him up north," he spoke of the Arctic Slope, where he has done much village work, "I would never get him back." He explained that the people would love him because no matter where he would go, be it sea ice or tundra, he would always know where he was, where he had been and where he was going.

Abby took a look at the teeth that chomp through her pancakes.

Wesley got up and roamed around for a bit as I listened to more of Tim's stories. The stories were interesting, so I was not really paying much attention to Wesley. Then I noticed that he was very interested in something beneath the next table.

What could it be?

It was Wesley's toy truck. It had gotten away from him and disappeared beneath the table. Wesley crawled under to retrieve it.

Wesley recovered his truck. Abby's Home Cooking. She named her restaurant well. Abby's HOME Cooking. 

Soon it came time to leave. Tim helped Wesley into his jacket.

Then Abby gestured for a hug. She got it, too - but one thing that is really aggravating about this camera I am using most of the time is that the knob that controls the shutter speed continually changes it when I move around and it rubs against something - me mostly. For some reason, it most often changes the speed downward.

Then I shoot without realizing and get motion blue, because my shutter speed is at some ridiculously slow number for fast, hand-held, shooting - like 1/15 of second. Despite the blur, I use a lot of those pictures, anyway, if I think they still tell the story, but sometimes they are blurred beyond hope.

The hug was blurred beyond hope, but be assured, Abby got her hug.

Now, I know that there are some people in India who must be growing very impatient with me. They wait to see my pictures of Sujitha and Manoj's wedding, and of the other stories I shot there. And there is a master chef on the White Mountain Apache Reservation who is probably also getting a bit impatient with me.

So, beginning with the master chef, whose story I plan to post before this day ends, and then moving straight back into India, I will return to my travels. I am struggling with this a bit, because I shot a lot. I had hoped to have done a preliminary edit of the entire take by now, but I have taken a first, quick, look at less than five percent of the India take; maybe 60 percent of the Arizona take.

It is a monstrous task. I shot over 500 gigabytes. How the hell do I deal with that? Especially when it is a struggle to keep my eyes open. For example, it is 6:21 PM right now. I actually started to edit the pictures for this little story at about 1:45 PM. By 2:00 PM, I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, so I went and laid down on the couch, where Chicago joined me for a nap. I didn't want to take a nap. I wanted to keep working, but I had no choice. I HAD to lay down and if not to really nap, to at least close my eyes. My body refused to let me do anything else.

Then I had to struggle to get up and go get my afternoon coffee at Metro before Carmen closed at 4:00. So this is the kind of thing I face. But I have many things to do and must get it all done, so that is what I am going to do.

Master Chef Nephi Craig, son of Vincent Craig - you are up next - before I go to bed tonight.* After that - back to India. I will try to make at least two posts every day, one from here in Wasilla, one or two from India/Arizona, until I am done.

And I've got to launch my store. I don't know how to do it, but I've got to do it, if I am ever to begin to figure out how to make this blog the foundation of my livelihood - a seemingly impossible task that I must do.

Lazy mode in three locations: WM Apache - Blue Bird, jet, fire, dog gets teeth brushed; Wasilla - Allie's poem; Carmen and guests; India - girl in temple

Boy! This is the worst case of jet lag ever. It should be all gone by now, but this is the hardest day yet. I can barely function. I went to sleep fast last night and slept soundly for about two hours, then came wide and desperately awake about 2:00 AM and that was it. I stayed in bed, hoping to go back to sleep for another six hours or so, but just stayed awake. This is not how one gets over jet lag.

So I continue in lazy mode, but I exercise just enough ambition to remind readers that I now have three story locations to thread together: White Mountain Apache, India and Wasilla.

So here is a picture I took in Carrizo, Arizona, the Apache community where Margie was born and her mom and several siblings still live, along with other relatives.

People make a lot of bread here, from fry bread to tennis racket bread to tortillas and some other kinds, too. Blue Bird flour is very popular and Blue Bird flour bags are most useful.

Margie stands behind the bag.

A jet, passing over the White Mountain Apache Reservation community of Hon Dah, where Margie's sister LeeAnn hosted us.

White Mountain Apache fire crew truck, Hon Dah. 

LeeAnn brushes Alfie's teeth.

OK - Wasilla: Today I had breakfast at Abby's again. Margie was in town, babysitting.

Allie poured me a cup of coffee...

This is the picture of her poem that I did not run two days ago because I did not want to publish her poem without her permission. Today, she gave me her permission. Allie just won a local poetry slam. Abby's niece Amber did the art work. 

In the afternoon, I pulled up to the drive-through at Metro Cafe. Carmen posed with her brother-in-law, Ron, and Carol, a very good customer. Barista Elizabeth politely tried to get out of the way, but didn't quite make it in time. I took some more after she did, but I like the picture better with Elizabeth in it than out of it.

Girl in a temple at Chittaurgarh Fort, Rajasthan, India. I was not going to post any more of my India photos until I had made a decent edit of them all, but I still have not begun to edit and I want to keep India present in this blog until I can edit and figure out my stories. I don't think this picture crucial to any of the stories I most want to tell, so here it is, in lazy mode, just to remind readers that I was just in India and have some India stories coming.

If I decide later that this picture should be part of one of my stories, then I reserve the right to include it, anyway, but I don't think that will happen.