Having made it through the airport security, I took a deep sigh of relief as I carefully grabbed my personal belongings from the X-ray’s conveyor belt. I was concerned that the bento plates from our friend’s restaurant in Pearl City and the Chantilly cake from Golden Coin bakery would be confiscated upsetting our daughter who somehow has a palate for teriyaki beef and Golden Coin sweets. Just a few minutes earlier, I had to deal with a Department of Agriculture inspector who rummaged through my boxes of frozen goods looking for banned items. He meticulously inspected the frozen leafy vegetables that I carefully wrapped in tin foil.

    “Looks likes you’ve done this many times o’ready,” he quipped as he desperately tried to find signs of insects or plant disease from the ‘marunggi’ leaves, but ignoring the frozen blocks of greenish smelly stuff in Ziploc bags.

    “Sir, yes,” I politely replied appeasing him with the phrase that I have been accustomed to use in the military for many years hoping that I wouldn’t have to explain what were in the Ziploc bags. I had sensed curiosities from the other passengers around and it would have been a bit embarrassing to explain to the inspector with the tourists watching what the frozen bags actually were – frozen papait and bindunggo (how we call in Hawaii beef tripe rinsed only with cold running water to retain the smell and taste for authenticity) that my sisters had packed for me and the torched deer skin from my nephew in Moloka’i.

    I looked at my watch. We had almost two hours before we fly out. I grabbed a cup of coffee at the Starbucks nearby and found an empty bench at the open concourse leading to the crowded departure area. I’ve felt exhausted before I even started the 6-hour flight to Alaska. Flying has become burdensome since 911 and airlines had really taken advantage of passengers in the name of security. I leaned against the ledge feeling the warm tropical breeze for one more time.

On time, we all have our own many ways of marking it.  As a former soldier, I used to measure time by the number of tours of duty, which usually run from 2-3 years at a time and each tour reminds me of personal significant events.  My son was born towards the end of my first overseas assignment in 1988, as the cold war was winding down.  Our daughter, a generation from Desert Storm homecoming, came along four years later on my second tour of duty in Germany.  My wife seems to have programmed herself to lay her eggs in the same nest.

After 23+ years of counting military assignments, somehow I have lost track of time.  Time has caught me by surprise as I first realized it when Kevin left for college three years ago after he turned 18.  On April 11, he will be turning 21 and that I guess is another significant milestone in marking time.  It is the age when one attains all the legal rights attributed to adulthood. Time has gone by so fast and I struggle to reminisce how much Kevin has grown up.  

25 December 2008 - Alaska

Over the years, it seems like the traditions of Christmas has evolved from simple religious celebrations commemorating the birth of Christ to a much commercialized one. 

This observation has been amplified by my experience growing up in poverty where waking up finding a balloon inside a matchbox stuffed under my pillow on Christmas mornings was a big treat, and later witnessing other cultures celebrate Christmas with such fanfare and luxury, which seemed to have differed from the traditions that I have grown up with.

15 December 2008 - Sydney

“Give a man a fish and he will live for a day; teach a man in Alaska how to fish and he will drink beer and fish all day,”  a bumper sticker that makes a mockery of an old adage, done in humor but rings a bit of truth among diehard fishermen in Alaska.

In a place where more than half of the year is cold dark winter and spring and fall are just ephemeral intervals of the seasons, people eagerly yearn for the coming of the long days of a rather very short summer.  But summer seems to have skipped in 2008.  Marked with mostly wet and chilly days, this year’s summer maybe one of the coldest ever recorded.  Yet, for the diehard outdoorsmen ‘wannabees’ as we are, deprived of sunlight during the long winter, the weather nor the expensive gasoline did not prevent us from driving to our favorite fishing holes and camping grounds some 250 miles away.  Driving the dangerous but scenic Alaskan highway, weaving through the crowds at the sandy beach, we find the same spot where we camp out every year since arriving in Alaska a decade ago.  There, along with friends from our hometown, we fish, mine for onolicious clams, drive ATV’s (All-terrain vehicles) or simply sit around a campfire sharing a laugh over some mild spirits.