Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Perhaps it took the passing of my brother to see what so many have already seen, that much of what we consider valuable is pretty much worthless overall.  Not the financial stuff, those pensions or savings or condo or whatever, tangible items that can be transferred or sold for actual green paper, which was how the recent movie, To Catch A Killer  put it, the killer being a loner who confronts a detective and "explains" how mixed up the world is, how we have others clean our homes and our toilets so that they can collect a small bit of green paper in the end; and how we blind ourselves with fireworks and noise while missing out on all the stars and the silence that is always above us.  In the movie, he tells the detective that he's messed up partly from working in a slaughterhouse, but that he followed those cows backwards in their lives, back from the McDonald's and the saws and the bolt guns and the trucks that rounded them up, back over the wire fen...

      That word "civil" has so many variations (think civil ization), perhaps reflecting the zig-zag course of our current times, each of us trying to find our path.  Being civil was once the norm; politeness was everywhere, and doors were always opened for women by men (or so my parents taught me).  To say thank you, whether it was with a letter or a call, was not only done right away but was done without a second thought.  People acknowledged each other, or so it seemed.  It was people being civil and a person was expected to treat another as he or she would also care to be treated.  But looking back, I realize that much of that depended on where you lived, the color of your skin, and perhaps even where you worked or what you did at work.  The janitor at my school was certainly viewed differently than the teacher, but I don't remember thinking that he was any less a person by any means.  I washed dishes and bussed tables while in high ...

     There are several ways I know when I am not up to par, or to be honest about it, when I am sick.  My taste for coffee in the morning or maybe a beer in the evening, and my urge to both read and to write, doesn't just  fade into the sunset but sinks as quickly as the Titanic.  I had gone to bed saying that I felt my throat was a bit scratchy, and by the morning I was sick.  The bug had hit, and not the bug known in Fairbanks and Denali as the mosquito (and trust me, mosquitoes are big, as in large in size, up here); nay this was a knock-out of a bug that came out of nowhere.  One moment I was fine but by the next morning, I was out, totally zonked.  I could barely get out of bed.  As with all such flu-like bugs, my urge was only to sleep.  Drink plenty of liquids (which I knew to do), out the window.  Hot tea or something as simple as a cup of soup or a hot chocolate?  Not a prayer.  Which begged the questio...

      From Africa to Alaska.  It almost sounds like a cover story for a magazine.  Instead here we were, doing the unthinkable (for us, anyway) and finding ourselves traveling way more than we normally do.  But actually, this cruise doing the upper half of the Alaskan coast was the first thing we had planned long, long ago.  We had cruised the lower half of Alaska some years ago, even flying in our  first float plane  where we managed to catch a rare sunny day, or so said our pilot (he ended up flying for an extra 40 minutes or so since he said that he hadn't experienced such good weather over the past few months).  On that earlier cruise, it was a larger ship, one which carried some 950 passengers (although several of the newer 2024 ships will each carry nearly 8 times that amount of people); the boat we were getting on this time would be a bit smaller, topping out at around 700.  Fares had dropped since we had booked this current...