2019 Life Logs, Day 255: Wonderful Dinner Honoring Granddad
2019 Life Logs, Day 255: Wonderful Dinner Honoring Granddad
Date: Thursday, September 12, 2019
Weather: Overcast with Rain in the AM; High 73, Low 54 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
I attended the first Newcomers meeting of the year this morning and signed up for way too many activities—a walking group, a hiking group, a biking group, a health-issues group, a tech-issues group, a gardening group, a book club, a wine explorers group, a women’s dining group, a singles group, and I think a few more. So, I should have no problem keeping busy this year! But the highlight of my day with dinner with Heather, Jed, Sam, Jonah, and Ollie. The first year after Mark’s death, in September of 2017, we had dinner at the Flying Bridge on Falmouth Harbor in honor of Granddad. Last year I was traveling and had dinner in Philadelphia with Kevin and Claire and Claire’s parents who were visiting from Canada. And this year I invited the Goldstones to have dinner at the Chart Room at Kingman Marina. It is a little north of here, but still on the Cape. Back in the 1990’s we kept our then sailboat, Skybreaker, at Kingman even though we lived in New Hampshire. And during graduate school, Heather lived aboard Skybreaker there for a year. The boys had never been there, so it seemed like a good choice for dinner.
Heather was in Boston today, so she was going to meet us there. I went a little early to pick up Jed and the boys, played basketball with Jonah, and then waited for the boys to get dressed. Jed just asked them to wear a collared shirt, but they all looked really spiffy.
I was honored to take such handsome young men to dinner. We all had wonderful meals and the boys enjoyed sitting at the piano bar and listening to the music. And I think the piano player enjoyed their attention. We had a fantastic waitress who asked each of the boys where they go to school. When Jonah said that he goes to Morse Pond, she asked him if he knew a particular teacher. Just so happens the teacher she asked about is his homeroom teacher and he is also the weekend bartender at the Chart Room. And his children work there as well. I think Jonah began to feel like a part of the Chart Room family. Sam was delighted that he could make requests at the piano bar and Ollie looked absolutely love struck watching the piano player. Jonah pointed out that we had to have dessert in Granddad’s honor as that was his favorite part of any meal, and Jonah’s as well. So we did. After dessert, the boys went out to take photos of the boats on the dock and in the anchorage. 
The moon was beautiful, just a little shy of full. It was chilly tonight, but otherwise, I don’t think it could have been a more perfect evening . . . certainly an evening Mark would have enjoyed.
So, I walked along the water and then down Falmouth Heights Road to where Mark and I lived once we moved off the boat. I followed the path we often walked together which took me along the harbor and through MacDougalls’ marine where the wind was whistling through the masts of the sailboats at the dock and on moorings. It was a very familiar sound. But somehow today my thoughts weren’t focused on our sailing years. I kept going back to when Mark and I first met and made the decision to head to Alaska in hopes of buying land and building a life there. We were to become part of the 70’s ‘back to the land’ movement. My mind probably went in this direction because I am reading a non-fiction book by Mark Adams called Tip of the Iceberg. It is a story about the author’s contemporary travels through Alaska retracing the 1899 Harriman Expedition. Harriman, a railroad magnate, gathered a large group of America’s best scientists, naturalists, and writers and put them all aboard a steamship that took them to the far reaches of Alaska. Reading this book has reminded me of places Mark and I visited in 1974 and today’s ‘remembrance’ gave me the chance to relive that adventure. 
I think I would have to write a book to tell the whole story, but the bottom line is that in March of 1974 we drove our white Ford truck, with everything we owned in or on top of it, about 1,800 miles from Bloomington, Indiana, to the Canadian border in Montana, and then another 1,600 miles through Alberta, British Columbia, and the Yukon in Canada to reach Haines, Alaska. This whole time, we slept in the back of the truck in the freezing weather and I learned to cook frozen food on the camp stove. It was March, but it was not yet spring in the north lands. The trip was not what I would call fun, although it certainly was an adventure. But the further north we got, the harder it got. 
The snow-covered gravel Alcan Highway (the Alcan in Canada was not paved back then) stretched out in front of us for what seemed like forever. The days were dreary making our photos look like they were taken in black and white, not color. There was just white snow and what looked like black trees. Nothing looked green. Our first stop in Alaska was Haines as it was first on our list as a place to live in Alaska. Everything we had read indicated that the beauty there was overwhelming, but all we saw was more white and black. There were a few eagles and huge mosquitoes sitting on the snow, and we immediately found that the people who lived there were just not our cup of tea. We just didn’t fit in. We left our truck near Haines and hopped on a ferry to Juneau. Still not our kind of place. We drove to Anchorage and all the way down to Homer on the Kenai Peninsula, again supposed to be drop-dead beautiful, but it just didn’t look like that to us. 
Then we headed north of anchorage to the Matanuska Valley where we finally saw a little bit of sunshine, but by this time, we were pretty certain that Alaska was not the right fit for us. We drove through the state park part of Denali, through McKinley Park, and on to Fairbanks. By this time the snow was melting and this part of Alaska looked like a desert. I’m not even sure we stopped in Fairbanks. We headed southward as fast as we could to get back to the Lower 48. The book I am reading makes we want to return to Alaska during the late spring or summer months so I can see some of the beauty I hear others rave about. But until I do that, I will continue to think of Alaska in the black and white and rough and tumble terms that Mark and I saw in the spring of 1974.
Why didn’t I think of that sooner? It was our home on the water for three summers and the inner harbor beach is protected from southwest winds. As soon as I thought of this, the sun came out. Perfect. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach at Quissett and finally got to relax, read, and reminisce some more. But even though I was looking at our old anchorage, I continued on with the Alaska theme. It was ironic that I got a text from Justin and Jo during this time. They had just arrived in New Mexico for a visit and had gone directly to their converted Greyhound bus that is still there in storage. They had found Mark’s old felt hat. It was fairly new when I met him and he wore it all time. 
Justin sent a photo of Jo wearing the more than well-worn hat with the peace sign and broken gun pins still in place. That brought back more memories and when I got home I searched for a picture of Mark wearing that hat. I found it hard to believe that I could find only one picture. Surely there are more, but I’ll have to dig a little deeper to continue that search. And that is for another day. I didn’t get to see the Goldstones today, but I just got a beautiful email from Heather telling me about her bedtime discussion with the boys about Granddad. As Sam said, “Sad but okay.” We will be together for dinner tomorrow night at a restaurant on the water in honor of Granddad.
Today was a special day. I drove all the way to New Hampshire just to give my friend Leslie a big hug and it was worth every minute of the drive there and back. Leslie lost her husband Rich last Wednesday. It was totally unexpected, and I think Leslie is still in shock, as are all of us who knew and loved him. Leslie and I took a 4-mile walk along the seashore and then went out to lunch. I returned home tonight as tomorrow is the third anniversary of Mark’s death. I plan to spend most of my day on Falmouth Heights Beach just thinking happy thoughts about him.
