REUNIONS, LARGE AND SMALL

We arrived in Alaska in late January 1983 to begin a stint in the US Air Force stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base outside of Anchorage. Of all the amazing things about living in Alaska, one of the most amazing was that through friends of mine for two different parts of my life worth living there with their families. I have mentioned this previously when I have written about our time in Alaska, but thought about our time there in a new way this evening.

While posting on Facebook tonight, I saw that one of those friends "liked" several posts. One of them was a beautiful photograph of almost uncountable numbers of eagles in tress decorated with hoar frost along a shimmering ice-glazed river with snow-covered Alaska mountains in the background. My kids tonight so I just talk to side north of general when we were coming out of the Air Force in January of 1986, near the Mendenhall glacier north of Juneau.

I first met two of the friends and their families who were in Alaska waiting for us when we lived in Urbana at the Orchard Apartments, University of Illinois Married Student Housing. The friend who "liked" the photo of the eagles in Alaska lived near us in the fall of '79 and the spring of '80, when both of our families lived on Keesler Air Force Base near Biloxi, Mississippi. Our husbands were at first in the same Communications Officer Training Class.

Soon after starting to live there, our custom was to invite all the class members, and their families if they had dependents, to a touch football game on the Biloxi Beach on Saturday afternoons, followed by a potluck turkey dinner. We had developed a way to roast an in-stuffed 18-20 pound turkey in a kettle grill over charcoal for four hours or so. You might want to try it sometime.

We would put the turkey in, and tell our friends that we would supply the turkey and bread. Invited to bring supplemental dishes and whatever they wanted to drink, the classmates, their spouses and kids came through every time with delicious dishes and stellar spirits, beers and drinks for the kids.

In December, in the middle of the week, I also managed to pull off a surprise party for my husband at the time. He liked apple pie more than birthday cake, so I backed about five, and asked some of the other wives if they would also bake some. I think we had 27, altogether.

Then, on the last Saturday before I left for officer training school, we had a cookout potluck and party that lasted all the way until the next morning. That was on April 24 of 1980, so we all knew each other very well by then.

Now that I remember it, all of the participating families were not necessarily headed by officers in exactly the same class that my husband was in at the time. I met the wife and kids of one of the families who came to the get-togethers when my children and I were in San Antonio Texas for the last six weeks of their dad's time on Medina Annex of Lackland Air Force Base.

The first time we went to the Commissary on Keesler, I saw a familiar car in the parking lot. After going in to get our groceries, I quickly perused each aisle and, sure enough, found my friend who had been with us in Texas. Her husband had started his training in Mississippi several weeks before my kids' dad's class began, although they had been commissioned on the same in September of '79.

Coincidentally, that day was also our son Tom's fifth birthday. Beyond the friend and her kids who were in Texas with us, there were seven or eight other families who were waiting for their spouses/dads to graduate. So in addition to the commissioning parties, we had a birthday party for Tommy. One of the mom's we knew was deeply involved in baking decorative cakes. The one she made for our son had R2D2 and C3PO on it. We were all delighted.

There's more to tell you, Beloved. Will leave it there for tonight.

As ever, I pray for you and yours that you all have a peaceful night's rest. Why don't you whisper a, "Good night. . . " to the angels who will be guarding your rest?