I’m sorry I’m late again. Jan and I took a trip to Sitka, so that Jan could work in her old office sorting out some forty years of material and pinning down plans for her gajillion bits of data. I’m exaggerating there…I think.

I spent my time in Sitka, visiting with old friends and taking in the sights of town during it’s biggest tourist season in many many years. In Seattle I went to see and old eye doctor and celebrated with my four siblings.

The day we arrived in Sitka it had rained four and a half inches in twenty four hours. There were four ships in town and it seemed to rain hard for the entire week we were there. When there are four ships in on one day there are a potential of about forty thousand people walking the streets of town where there are about nine thousand summertime residents. Many of my old friends seemed depressed. Too much rain, too many people. People were discussing the possibility of passing a citizens initiative to put an upper limit on the numbers of people to off load a ship on certain days. This was bound to be controversial particularly when increased tax money is at stake. The schools are fully funded this year… would they remain so with the new limitations in place. But also a full week of hard rainfall did it’s part in making people feel grumpy.

I wasn’t grumpy. I had a good time walking in the cool rain, visiting old haunts and being with my old buddies. I signed a lot of new books at Old Harbor Books in Sitka which has the largest stockpile of old John Straley books and signing books always makes me happy.

I spent a lot of time reading: I read Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut and Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1967 and Lapvona in 2022, both purport be comic satires on the human condition, but I have to say that I thought Slaughterhouse Five is much more comic than Lapvona. I will think more about the comparison between the two books and perhaps write about that some other time. Finn is reading Lapvona now and he is really enjoying it. I found it grim to the point of being nihilistically bleak. But I have to think about it some more. I don’t like to flat out dismiss a book unless I’m sure I understand what the writer was trying to do. I loved Moshfegh’s book, “My Year of Rest And Relaxation”which makes me that much more cautious.

Seattle was a reunion with all my siblings. I’m the youngest for five children. My siblings all gathered in Seattle and we had a wonderful time: eating, teasing, and joking with each other. I’m well aware when we are together how lucky we are. Well into our eighties we seem healthy and happy, My brother has lost a wife to cancer and his current wife is coming through a train wreck of an operations. My oldest sister has lost a wife and she continues to grieve her great loss. But that being said of the five of us and our mates we have dodged our share of bullets, enough so that to sit down at a dinner table and laugh seems miraculous. And laugh we do.

Booster the Sitka office dog with Jan’s Alaska walker.

But with all the joy of reconnecting it is good to be home, to catch up on work and to be home with Jan, Dot, Finn, Arthur and Emily. The weather is clear and warm which is hard to complain about.

I’ve been working on the new Cecil Book and even got permission for a title from a pop song. The stage I am is big drafting, list making and thinking about just what these characters would do when I back them into a corner and what corners are available. I honestly do love writing these things.

Jan making pudding with Arthur back home.

Here is an old Sitka Poem.