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!”
Life Lines 