Focus on the future

"Vision for your future is the road map of what God wants to accomplish in and through you." --Jim Williams. It's just that I got the idea to title my posts with Stan Toler's Minute Motivators. They aren't earth shattering, and some people, like my daughter, might think them hoakey. After all, Alicia said the slow 'movement' of the moon "reminds me of God's great patience," at barely five years old.

Genetics got to have a lot to do with it. Like the researcher who figured that six percent of the population is psycho and 12 percent willingly go along with them. On both ends of the spectrum, the individuals know they are different, even as children, and group with others accordingly. And for better or worse, I got the genes to not do nothing when injustice rears it's head. I was the one that beat up the kindergarden bully when I was in first grade. That may explain a lot to readers of my other blogs.

There are cultural norms, like not beating up on other people, for no good reason. If you don't get the term 'helping your fellow man' at least don't beat up on him. I think a lot of folks need to go back to basics and we'd all be better off. And maybe my kids will have a few fish to catch. Just had to get fish in there somewhere. But why not? After all this is Petersburg, Alaska.

The plot about who started the Pastime Cafe gets thicker. I've found so far that Swede and Evelyn Wasvick got the Pastime Cafe well before WWII, and that Ernie Haugen bought it after the war, in 1946. Swede and Evelyn could't have bought much, because they did most of the cooking at home and Swede would drive it down to the Cafe in his panel truck. Everyone liked this couple and I know very fondly by my parents, John and Carol Enge.

Berries, before I forget. My sweetie, Terry, found lingonberry jam and cloudberry jam at IKEA in Portland. (There's an old story that right before the world self-destructs, everyone will be running to and fro. We must be getting close, because Terry is going off on scrap-booking trips all the time and I'm starting to do projects in Alaska.)

Back to berrys: she bought some lingonberry concentrate too, which dilutes the jam in a double boiler nicely. Great on Swedish pancakes. And if you make 'em on Saturday mornings on a regular basis you'll get all the neighbor kids coming over all the time like my mother did. From the Sandvik's house on one side to the Strands house out the other way.

But looking around in the book 'Petersburg Profiles' on the pioneers of Petersburg, I found a different context to a picture of a seine crew in a rowing seine skiff from the thirties. The picture was labled, in my dad's handwriting, "Vernon," "John," "Arnold," "Dad." I don't know who the Vernon is, but Arnold was my dad's brother who died in a war-plane accident in Juneau during WWII. And Dad is Martin Enge, my grandfather. And my first skipper. Grandad Enge started to teach me to row in a gillnet skiff up the North Arm of the Stikine River.

Interestingly, I found the same picture in 'Petersburg Profiles' on the page on Bob and Pam Thorstensen. Bob, of course, was hired well after WWII by my father as a deckhand on one of the Kayler-Dahl tenders and didn't personally fish in Alaska. I guess I'm like the guy who would always disappear from some setting or other to correct an error on the Internet.