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.

Joe and Mikayla in a tree

I am too exhausted to blog right now. And in just eight hours, I must get up, drive away from this house, head to Phoenix and board a plane that will take me to Los Angeles, from where I will fly to Dubai and then Bangalore. I will set this to post at 10:00 AM tomorrow, Alaska time.

It might be awhile before I blog again, because I am going to be traveling for a long time and then I hope to do some sleeping. I do have at least three picture stories I shot here within my wife's White Mountain Apache Reservation that I plan to post - maybe when I am in India. Maybe not until I get back. 

This is Joe and Mikayla at the beginning of the cookout we had up Carrizo Canyon today. I am still downloading the disk, I'm too tired to edit it, but this was right up front, so I grabbed it.

CUL8R!

I take another delay to allow Cooper, the son of Janis Joplin, to blow out his candles

I was certain that I would have my second-to-last gray whale rescue segment posted and my last ready to post well before it was time to go to Cooper's birthday party. Before I started to write it, I took a three-mile walk along the Rim Road through the tall Ponderosa Pine and went through each segment in my head, cutting them all down to a sentence or few so that when I sat down, I could just zip through it and bring the series to a close.

But I didn't just zip through it. Some of those singles sentences expanded into multiple paragraphs. I wrote and wrote and wrote. And then, just as I was nearing the end, Margie and her sister, LeeAnn, returned from shopping and told me it was time to go to Cooper's party at El Rancho Mexican Restaurant in Pinetop.

So here I am at Cooper's birthday party, photographing his beautiful younger sister, Katelyn Joplin, as she gives her big brother a toast.

And here is someone from El Rancho placing the birthday sombrero on Cooper's head.

And here is a waitress, bring his cake to Cooper.

And here is Cooper himself, blowing out the two candles that say he is 21 - Cooper Joplin, son of Janis Joplin and her husband, Glenn Joplin. That makes him my nephew, because Janis is Margie's first cousin - which in Apache ways, makes them like sisters. Janis is better known as "Buffy." The first time I met Buffy, she was a little girl sitting in the back of a pickup truck with puppies crawling all over her.

I believe I mentioned this in my original blog when Buffy appeared there, but I might as well mention it here, too.

When I first met Cooper, he was a boy, playing basketball in the living room of his parents home. He was all over the place.

The elder lady to the left is Margie's Aunt Dolly Guy, the only surviving sibling of Margie's late father, Randy Roosevelt.

And on the floor, just awakening from a nap, was little Elliot, the youngest member of the Joplin family.

Among the guests was a baby and dad. I got their names, but I forgot.

Most of those who came to the party, including me, on the opposite side of the camera.

In theory, I don't have much left to write to finish up the gray whale series, but I wrote enough today that I am certain I made at least 500 typos, misspellings and such (it would sure help if the program I use to do this blog would upgrade with a spell-checker). I need to spend some time to see I can winnow it down to just 50 or 60 typos so that I do not drive Albert Lewis of MA, who, sooner or later just about every day, reads this blog and then sends me a list of the typos and such that he finds.

It will all be up fairly early tomorrow - I just about promise.

Final two gray whale rescue posts should be up Friday - in the meantime, here is Margie and her mom, Rose

I have two gray whale rescue posts left to go. I have uploaded and placed the pictures for both in draft mode on this blog, but have run out of time to write the stories today. I believe I will have both up tomorrow, Friday, although when you are visiting family in Arizona it is a little hard to find the time. Sometimes, I wonder how it is that I put myself in such situations. Still, I'm pretty sure - those posts should both be up tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is Margie and her mom, Rose. We have a big Carrizo Canyon cookout planned Sunday. I will tell you more after that.