Fighting sleep despite a full tummy and a fresh diaper, my one-month-old infant squirmed restlessly. I placed her against my shoulder and gently patted her back. I stood holding her this way, swaying, looking out at the night sky through the window in the back door of the mobile home we lived in. Above the northern horizon, I saw a ripple of pale green, blue, and white lights slowly dancing in the sky, reminding me of seaweed moved by an invisible ocean current. The little one burped and fell asleep. Her breaths were warm against my neck.

Some memories are like snapshots. Vivid, clear, but limited to just one frame. Like a memory I have of a very young me sitting on the steps at grandpa’s apartment, waiting for the grown-ups to finish rounding up cows that got loose. Other memories are like short, four or five frame videos, like the one I recounted of one night shortly after my daughter, Niki, was born.

Why do we carry around so many short memories that seem to have no point or connection to the main theme of our lives? I don’t know, but I do know that I love these short ‘clips’ and wouldn’t want to be without them!

I have several short memories from the Alaskan cruise my daughter and I took in September. I’m calling them Alaskan Bytes, because there are eight of them, just like the eight bits contained in a computer byte. Also, because Alaskan bytes rhymes with northern lights!

1) Tammie and I were in the World Stage auditorium. A handsome young man on the stage told us he belonged to the Tlingit Indian tribe, explaining, “When you say, ‘Tlingit’, if you don’t feel your breath under the tongue, you didn’t pronounce it correctly.” For many years Western laws made it unlawful for tribe members to hunt and gather as they did in the past.  While in high school, he was encouraged by a teacher to investigate the law forbidding his people to harvest sea gull eggs. His assignment led to a special permission for him to gather eggs. When he gave his mother a couple, he claimed she said, “This will be the first time in my life that I will eat sea gull eggs that weren’t poached twice!”

2) My daughter and I walked down a Juneau street near the docks on a balmy early September evening, marveling at how many of the stores sold jewelry. Missing my wristwatch, which broke shortly before leaving on vacation, I impulsively stopped at one of the stores and bought one.

3) At Hoonah in Icy Straights, Tammie and I rode gondolas to the top of the mountain. The view was beautiful. Later, as we came back down our gondola descended through clouds tinted orange by the sunset, making them look like cotton candy.

4) My daughter and I expected our ship to leave the dock shortly after we returned from a shore excursion in Sitka. Our ship was still at dock as we arrived in the dining room. As we dined, the Ship’s captain made an overhead announcement. His voice was gloomy as he apologized for the very bad news he had for us. Tammie and I looked at each other with concern, wondering if something terrible had happened to a member of the crew. Taking a long time to get to the point, the captain explained that routine maintenance had taken longer than usual.

5) Our delayed departure from Sitka impacted on the early morning shore excursion we had scheduled the next day in Ketchikan, Alaska. My daughter and I had planned to go on a crab fishing adventure. Adjusting to our two-hour delay in arrival, the crab boat waited for us and shortened the outing so we would get back in time for the ship to leave on schedule. This crab boat, the Aleutian Ballad, had once been featured on television’s show, “Deadliest Catch.”

6) While Tammie and I were on our way to the crab boat, we heard there had been a deadly accident in Ketchikan. Someone had a medical emergency and crashed her car into a walkway filled with tourists. Eventually we learned that one of them had died. We also realized that if our ship had docked on time, someone from our ship might have been on that walkway, too.

7) We had chosen the premium experience for our crab boat adventure, which included half a pound of crab legs and melted butter. As I ate my portion, I remembered that the last time I had crab legs, I was in Rochester, MN, with Tammie when she was three years old. After seeing a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, we stopped at a restaurant. My toddler gobbled up the sea creature’s tender white flesh as fast as I cracked the crab legs open.

8) After disembarking from the Eurodam at the end of our cruise, my daughter and I joined a long line of people waiting for a taxi to take them to the airport or hotel. An equally long line of taxi cars waited for us. Passengers were dispatched into the next vehicle in line as quickly as possible. A sign along the sidewalk said the cost of the taxi ride to downtown Seattle was twenty-five dollars.

When Tammie and I reached the head of the line, we were hustled off into the next vehicle. As we drove off, the driver stated that the fare would be thirty-five dollars because his car was larger than the others. Without hesitation, my daughter said, “The sign said the fare would be twenty-five dollars. We didn’t have a choice of which vehicle to get into.”

The driver grudgingly said, “Oh, okay.” I leaned back with a smile and thought to myself how much I like traveling with Tammie. She is fully capable of taking care of herself.

These small snapshot memories and small video memory clips are fun to recall and have been added to all my others, which includes my watching northern lights in the middle of the night with baby Niki sleeping on my shoulder.