Just a year ago our Aunt Sabina and friend Anna came to Fairbanks to visit us. Now, both are deceased from cancer. This column was about their visit. Enjoy
What an exciting and beautiful week for our two relatives from London and Gosia’s aunt from Warsaw to visit us. Their big dream was to see an Aurora, and the skies over Fairbanks late night Monday and early Tuesday morning were a shade of green I only have seen in the seas off Hawaii.
Eva, one of the London visitors, likes to smoke and is under orders to do it outside, because I am notorious for nagging folks to quit the habit. She struck up a friendship with a neighbor on our block, who tipped her off that this was likely to be an active time for Auroras.
Eva was ebullient after we all trooped back to the kitchen. “I now have my Alaska dream,” she said. “You see, Hank, you were wrong. Sometimes good things come from smoking.”
Eva, who has been stopped on the street by people who mistook her for Anjelica Houston, has never met a stranger she didn’t like. I, on the other hand, approach strangers only when it’s my job as a journalist.
Gosia and I took the relatives to one of our favorite Fairbanks haunts, the Museum of the North, on Saturday. Gosia and the visitors separated from me. They wanted to take in the entire museum. I, on the other hand, am the consummate fusspot at museums, savoring every morsel of every exhibit, memorizing all the great knowledge on placards.
At one point I had no idea where my wife and relatives were. I was in front of a glass case, totally smitten by Haida argillite carvings. I read that the number of Alaska Native craftsmen still immortalizing animals, mythical spirits, and persons in soft black stone is way down. I was in a trance, the way James Thurber’s Walter Mitty always spaced out, wondering how I could find one of these artists to observe their carving technique.
That’s when Gosia tapped me on the shoulder, accompanied by a tall man with striking features and a full head of mostly white hair, said “Hi, Hank, I’m Gary Schikora.”
It turns out Gary had been showing the museum to two Australian friends of his from his youth. Like Eva, Gary seemingly hasn’t a shy bone in his body, and he introduced himself and the ladies from Oz to Gosia, Eva, and Aunt Sabina. Gary and his friends wanted to know what language they were speaking.
“Polish,” they told him. His next question, of course, was “where are you from?” That led to Gosia telling him we were now Fairbanks residents and that I worked for the newspaper.
The encounter confirms my unshaken belief that in Fairbanks the degree of separation from one person to the next is very small indeed. If I tell a secret to a person on Steele Creek one day, the next day half of Ester knows what I said.
Anyhow, that conversation led to Gary and Gosia coming over to me to say that he was a friend of Daily News-Miner publisher Chuck Gray. “I helped Chuck’s father build a cabin when I was young,” Gary said. And just like that, we made a new friend.