Good morning. Hello. How are you? #874
Marimba concerts, the genius of Raven Landing, old friends, nostalgia
Good morning! Hello there. Greetings once again from Raven Landing, Fairbanks, Alaska. Mom and I are hanging out in her living room. I really wasn’t sure how this trip was going to go, but upon visiting her yesterday I realized that how this trip was going to go was that I was going to sit in her house with her for 8-10 hours a day, and occasionally we’d chat, occasionally we’d hear a story, and a lot of the time I would sit around on my computer doing work. Yesterday we had a lot of company — my nephew and cousin were here all day, my brother-in-law passed through — but today it is just me and mom.
We went to a Marimba concert yesterday, which ruled. My mom was showing off her Photobucked calendar that her childhood best friend made her, and I noticed it had something scrawled on today’s (well, yesterday’s date): 1PM - M[unintelligeble]. So I ask mom what it is and she says “oh it’s the marimba concert.” So, yeah, we gotta go to that.
We get there and I am vehemently disappointed to learn that it was, in fact, a bell choir concert. Now, I was in bell choir at church when I was a kid. I like bell choir. And I am all for activities at the old folks’ home. But I wanted marimbas dammit. So we sit through maybe thirty minutes of an bell choir filled with more happiness than tempo. After that i think it’s over, but no! In fact, it is a marimba concert! The bells were just the JV, and now we get some bad-ass elderly marimba players. It ruled. These old people were marimba virtuosos.
I performed my sonly duties, getting her M1 laptop up to Mavericks and updating her printer’s firmware and buying new ink cartridges. Computer should be good for another year or two now.
This place, it has to be said, is amazing. I want to grow old in a place like this. Five buildings, connected with enclosed breezeways, all leading to a common building with food, a salon, a gym, mani-pedis, a community center, meeting rooms. Friends you’ve known for fifty years all around you. The hallways connecting the buildings have communal kitchens and movie and book lending libraries and table tennis tables and plants and game areas and it’s just so great. The library delivers her 25 books a month. There is an on-staff grocery delivery person. There is soup every day. Everyone has their own apartments and kitchens, or you can go eat with people in the communal dining hall. Just amazing. Sign me up. I don’t know of any other place like this for the elderly. They should be everywhere.
(N.B. My mother corrects me: “The soup is only five days a week.)
Here let me now spend too many minutes uploading this marimba video to Youtube so I can do an embed.
All right well that’s going to take ten minutes to upload. I forget the rest of the world doesn’t have 1000 Up/1000 Down. Leaving home is like entering a technology desert. How do people drive these cars with ICE engines in them, you take your foot of the gas and they keep moving what is up with that. And my hotel room’s wifi is down.
Still, though, look at this hotel room, it is ridiculous:
Went out to dinner and got a couple drinks with my high school friend Frank last night, which is always great. We ate at Lemongrass, one of Fairbanks’ many, many, world-class Thai restaurants, really the best Thai food in America in Fairbanks, it really is nuts. The rest of the country has slowly caught up, but Fairbanks’ Thai food really is peerless.
Frank lives in Portland most of the time these days, comes up when one of his cases needs him (he’s a defense attorney). I spent a lot of time grilling him about the nature of crime, the crime in this town. He said he thought Fairbanks had a pretty steady crime rate, that what changes is the policing, depending on whether they’re distracted by a big case. He’s also more into Fairbanks these days than he used to be, since, you know, he doesn’t live here anymore. We talked about love and marriage and the arc of our lives, it’s comforting knowing someone for almost 40 years. Spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince me to bring my family up here for a few months in the summer. We were sitting at a bar that my grandmother named (I need to send them a plaque), looking at the most amazing sunset, across the river with two inexplicable shells of DC-3s sitting by the river, and a bunch of birds flying around in a V-formation against the sunset and I have to admit the whole thing was really quite stunning. For a brief second there, I softened about Fairbanks. Again.
It really is a town filled with nostalgia. I drove around a bit, after meeting my sister and some friends for a pre-dinner gathering, before meeting Frank for dinner. Every building had weird memories, memories lodged in my subconscious as part of the scaffolding of a human being. The old music store where I would buy sheet music. The clinic where my girlfriend went into a coma. My church. The library. I haven’t even been trying to, like, “see the sites” or anything, I did that last time. It’s just every block of this town is the source of some memory lurking within. Very disconcerting but also very comforting.
Then back to the hotel, not too late, maybe 10:30 but late enough the entire East Coast is asleep, getting kinda late in California, that internet quiet that I only know from being in Alaska, where the whole internet is asleep except the English early birds. It’s calming. I miss that.
All right well I found a way to *sort of* get a playlist screenshot in here. Our regular programming of playlists with mostly new music is hereby suspended for the duration of the trip as I wallow in nostalgia for a few days. Here’s a bunch of songs from high school.
Again, sorry about the timing disruption. Till tomorrow!
I would be very into sitting at a bar, staring at two DC-3's. Also: "Friends you’ve known for fifty years all around you" - amazing.
I had no idea what Marimba was and must say that the 10 minutes it took you to upload the concert video was 1000% worth it for this reader! How special. Also that performance room has the craziest blind situation I have ever seen, vertical, horizontal, it has it all!
[As an aside - I love asides when I comment - ever since I started touring assisted living/nursing homes, I wondered if there was a better way to do it. I really like the place my mom is in now, but it's not the most innovative set-up. However, they do have dogs that live there full-time who wonder the halls in search of food and gentle petting, bird cages with happy chirping birds on every floor, several fish tanks and even guinea pigs. Animals seem like a step in the right direction....]