Why do I have to listen to endless droning about Hillary’s pantsuits and their colors and cut but nothing about Barack’s sartorial style?

I’m guessing that when I was in high school there were educational institutions where senior pranks occurred. After all, the tradition had to start somewhere. But I can tell you for sure where it stopped. It stopped at the front door of Holy Spirit High School. It was stopped there by the mere presence of the sisters and priests who ran the school. It was stopped there by the mere thought of parental reaction to anything that would damage the school. It was stopped there, ultimately, by sheer fear.

My parents had no problem using fear as a tool in raising their children. Neither did most of the parents in our neighborhood.  For us kids, it was a toss up what scared us most – God, his earthly staff, or our mothers and fathers. Bottom line was that no matter how you looked at it, you had someone nearby who scared you straight.
I’m not trying to rewrite history here. There were plenty of troubled kids in my neighborhood. (That’s what they were called in the quaint old fifties – troubled kids.) One of my sister’s classmates is currently serving a life sentence for killing people and stuffing their bodies in the trunks of their cars. Now there’s a troubled kid.  But even he stopped short of messing around with the school or church. Even a killer knew where the limit was when it came to crossing God and family.
Maybe we had a different attitude towards our schools because they only existed due to the dogged determination of the congregations that surrounded them.  Our parents wanted us to have a Catholic school education because they saw that as the ticket to college and a better life. So even though the schools were small and gym class consisted of walks on the Boardwalk because the gym was also the cafeteria and chapel for both the high school and grade school, it was considered a privilege to be able to attend. Our parents scrimped and saved to make the tuition for us.  Our parishes held bingo games, carnivals, and sold every overpriced candy bar known to man to keep the school open and able to accept kids whose parents couldn’t quite make the full tuition.
When your parents have that much of a stake in the school, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are going to make sure you appreciate it and treat it respectfully.  My dad and mom ran a store that was open six and a half days a week in order to make that tuition.  My brother and sister and I knew that.  Mom made sure her kids did. Because along with fear, she believed that guilt was the gift that keeps on giving.
In high school I was still too dependent on my parents to risk really making them mad. Guilt and fear still dominated any thoughts I might have had about going outside of their rules.  Even after I was in college and engaged in full blown counter culture protests, my mother’s face was always there in my mind’s eye. It took at least half the joy and triumph away from whatever act of civil disobedience I was engaged in.
My parents were much more concerned that I respect them and the rules they set than about being my friend. Friends were something they already had. Children were a task they’d been handed by God. My mother firmly believed her job was to form us into responsible adults by whatever means necessary so society would never find us a burden. This was how she defined loving us – making us the best adults we could be.
My mother died seven years ago. I am now a woman past her middle years, stumbling towards who knows what aging future. But no matter how long she’s been gone or how old I get, when my conscience rears up and kicks me in the butt for something I’m doing, it has my mother’s face. 
You might think that was a bad thing. But it’s not. She loved me enough risk my fearing her if that’s what it took to raise a responsible, respectful adult.  It’s not a risk many modern parents seem willing to take. I think we, as a society, suffer because of that.

I went out and did some grocery shopping. Came back, unpacked the car, had lunch, spoke with a friend. Then decided it was time to go get the clothes from the dryer. But the clothes weren’t in the dryer. I must have emptied them already and forgotten. So I went back upstairs. Only later, when I went to grab my freshly washed shirt, it wasn’t on the hanger. So I went back downstairs and stood there stupidly staring into the laundry room wondering where it went. Then, on a silly impulse, I opened the washer. And there were all my clothes, still wet, having never actually made it to the dryer.
Damn, this getting old is complicated.

One Wing died this weekend. He was the heart and soul of Bird TLC, the wild bird rehab center here in Anchorage. He came here from the Exxon Valdez oil spill with a grim diagnosis. He defied the odds and lived with us for almost twenty years. He was the kind of bald eagle that had all the dignity we would want to associate with out national bird, and quite a bit of the goofyness that we cannot escape as part of our national character. In my head, he is now soaring again, both wings in place as they should have been during his earthly sojourn, reaching for the heavens and finally touching them again.

Went down the hallway to the garage.  Pulled on the doorknob and it fell off in my hand. I stood there staring at it for a minute, then pushed it back it, twisted it a little, and then pulled it again. Surprise. It came out in my hand again. I did that at least four times before I was convinced that it wasn’t going to magically reattach. Why do we do these things when we already know the outcome? Oh wait. Oh god. Please don’t tell me I’m the only one who does....

Black or white, it doesn’t matter. Ministers who preach hate in the name of Jesus have clearly never met him.

I’m sitting here working on my column when a large brown bulk passes my office window. It’s the neighborhood moose come to pee and poop on my lawn and then eat the neighbor’s tree. I stop writing and run to the front to watch the moose nibble and wander in the circle until she is finally out of sight.  I will never tire of this. It just makes the whole day a little brighter.

Alaska finally makes history. Thanks to our lone congressman, Don Young, the US Senate has voted to ask the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into one of his myriad earmarks. This is the first time in US history that the Senate has voted to have a criminal investigation of a House member. Alaska and its congressman are now officially a footnote in US history. I could not be more proud.

Two of my favorite times of the year in Anchorage are spring before the mosquitoes come and fall after they’re gone.  I can daydream to my heart’s content while walking, knowing nothing is sucking my blood while I’m not paying attention.

So there I was recently, dogs in tow, wandering the back woods of South Anchorage, mentally singing about April showers bringing May flowers. I’ll grant you that in Anchorage April showers might be snow instead of rain, and the flowers come closer to July than May, but you get the picture.  I wandered and daydreamed and listened to the birds as they warbled their hearts out trying to find the right nest mate.  I marveled at the patches of snow that survived despite the warmth of the sun. 
Through it all, the dogs sniffed and scrambled to their hearts’ content, restricted only by the length of their leads.  At some point in this Disneyesque reverie, I noticed Blondie had a potato in her mouth that she was carefully guarding from Blue, who eyed it with open longing. I’m not sure where the potato came from. I know for sure that Blondie had not a clue what to do with it. She’s not a real big eater, but as a dog is compelled by dogdom dogma to pick up anything that resembles something that may be edible and protect it from all who would take it from her.
Blue, on the other hand, has a healthy appetite. Like my legendary Lovey of Barrow fame, nothing she puts in her system is returned to earth before its time.  Blondie doesn’t have that ability. If she ever actually eats any of the inedible nuggets she finds along the road, I can be assured I will be picking it up off my carpet in one form or another the next morning.
We walked on, Blondie proudly carrying her potato, Blue angling to get as close to it as possible without making Blondie growl because she knows that bring a yell from me.  Both continued to sharply scrutinize every inch of ground we covered, viewing the entire walk as one long stroll along a smorgasbord of wonderful smells and mysterious tastes.  And then Blondie saw the piece of moldy bread. Saw it before Blue did. And planted herself firmly in front of it as she tried to decide what to do with the potato that would allow her to also accommodate the bread. 
After much agonizing indecision, Blondie apparently concluded that the safest thing to do was bury the potato and bring the bread home. Maybe she thought a few days buried in the ground would make the potato softer and more savory. So she dropped the potato and started pushing dirt on it. Or, she would have pushed dirt had she actually had dirt to push. In fact, she made a little pile of pebbles right next to the potato.  She pushed once too often and the potato rolled down into a little gully.  Blondie looked at the potato’s final resting place, looked at the little pebble mound she’d created and decided the potato was safe from all comers. Then she turned back for the bread.
Unfortunately for her, Blue had not been idle all this time. In fact, Blue had carefully, silently and slowly been creeping up besides Blondie. While Blondie has been so carefully camouflaging the potato, Blue grabbed the bread. By the time Blondie looked for it, the bread was history and Blue was sitting there with a “What?” look on her face that proclaimed her innocence to all gullible enough to believe it.  Blondie continued to sniff around, sure it had to be somewhere. Eventually I explained to them that I did have a life and we’d have to go without locating the bread…which, if I were mean, I’d have pointed out to Blondie was already being digested in Blue’s stomach.
On returning home, I gazed in amazement at the pile of moose poop the melting snow had revealed on my lawn, thinking the moose must have saved up for months before depositing at my bank. Then two foot of snow fell.  April showers in Anchorage may not bring May flowers, but they do cover up the moose poop. And that’s a good thing.

Really, who in the hell was the first person to look at them and think that they might be edible once you got passed all the prickly parts? And what came first, melting butter or cooking artichokes? What would you use on them if you didn’t have melted butter? ...Assuming that in the past, Ranch dressing was not a staple of most primitive societies.

And Anchorage continues to look like a city in which the flood waters are just receding. It was beautiful when it fell. But having two foot of snow melt in a very short time leaves nothing behind but soggy, miserable citizens who long for spring...only to remember with horror that all this water will just encourage the mosquitoes, making spring even more miserable than our April showers did.

I slept through the night without putting a blog up for today. What? You thought I was awake when I did those blogs?  Do you not recognize the insanity of the dream state mind?

Anchorage has started a tentative and limited recycling program. Yeah, I know. Concepts take a while to get to Alaska because they have to make it up the AlCan. So, being a duly guilt ridden baby booming save the planet type, I immediately signed up for the program and had a huge green can delivered to my home.  I thought the size of the can was funny because I am simply not the type of person who uses that much recyclable material. I mean, for god’s sake, I bring cloth bags to every store I go to in order to avoid taking things home in plastic. Well, I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when I found that each day I was going down to the can to deposit some recyclable material into the can. No, I didn’t fill the can even though pick up is only every two weeks. But I sure filled it more than I’d expected. I guess I wasn’t as good a steward of the earth as I thought. Talk about eye opening.

I woke up yesterday, looked out the window and it was raining. And I started singing about April showers bringing May flowers. I got in the shower. When I got out, I looked out the window again. It was snowing. Shoot me. Shoot me now!

For those of you in the lower 48 who wonder about these things, people in Anchorage who have convertibles think that when it gets up to forty degrees, it’s time for them to take their car tops down.