When I went to Kyrgyzstan last summer to help initiate a research survey, I initially planned to spend a few days in each town and city where Kyrgyz research assistants already had been hired by the project leader to do the surveying. My purpose would be to help each researcher begin her survey work, and to help her solve any difficulties she might encounter.

But as I learned more about the country, I realized that I had to decide whether it would be safe to travel to Osh, where E, one of the researchers, lives. Osh once was a stopping point on the Silk Road. Now it's a provincial capital in an unsettled region near the Uzbekistan border, where there have been recent ethnic clashes and one incident in which U.S. tourists were briefly captured. Getting there would require a flight over the gigantic Tien Shan mountain range in an aging, Soviet-built airplane. And Kyrgyzstan itself is not so far from Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq. Though it's relatively calm, it seemed a place to avoid taking chances. I researched news reports and U.S. State Department advisories, and consulted with a friend who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan. By the time I flew to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's capital, for a planned kick-off meeting with the research team, I had decided not to travel to Osh.

E, though, had a different idea. Soon after meeting her in Bishkek, I realized how much she would love to show her town to a visiting American. Her hope--were I to agree to come to Osh--was to take me to the mountains for a short stay in her family's yurts and a little horseback riding. That idea was tantalizing, I enjoyed E's company and trusted her, my friends in Bishkek all judged that the trip would be safe enough, and so I soon agreed to fly to Osh.

Some of my confidence evaporated when I boarded the tiny, very stale-smelling Yaak jet, and little of it was left after mechanics spent the next two hours hammering on the engine to fix a problem of unclear magnitude. No one else seemed a bit perturbed, though, so I stayed in my seat, the plane eventually lifted off, I had a few glimpses through clouds of snowy Tien Shan ridges and valleys, and then we landed at Osh's airport, where E and her husband were waiting to greet me.

I had a fine time in Osh, after all, though unseasonable rains prevented our expedition to the mountain yurts. Most days, E and I worked on project tasks, but we also fit in some memorable sightseeing and socializing. We hiked up Solomon's Throne, a small peak above town, to see the cave where Babar, an great spiritual leader, had lived many centuries ago. We saw Silk Road artifacts and a rare two-story yurt built specially for Osh's 3,000th anniversary celebration. One evening, we drove out to a country village for a traditional dinner with E's inlaws. We spent another evening in a lovely outdoor cafe set in a wooded park, drinking kummus (mare's milk), eating traditional foods, and enjoying Kyrgyz music performed by a family of musicians who are friends of E's family. Afterwards, we posed for pictures together and I took photos of the family's two children: a slim, handsome teenaged girl with beautiful dark braids and her wide-eyed younger brother. He stood tall and bravely in his felt Kyrgyz man's hat, but was obviously daunted by the tall foreigner.

Then I flew safely back to Bishkek, and eventually home to Seattle, where my Kyrgyz friends and travels have been fading in my mind. But the memories came back a couple of days ago when I found a note from E in my morning email. She thought I might remember the musicians' little boy. He has just died, she told me, and she asked whether I could send copies of my photos for his mother.

I did remember the boy, and of course I sent the photos. Now I'm at my desk, reflecting that, after all my concern about going to Osh, it's I who sits comfortably, warm and breathing, and the little boy who is gone.

Aesop didn't append moral lessons to his fables. They were added much later by some ancient scribe. If I were that scribe, perhaps I would add just a few words to my little tale:

You can never tell. You just can never tell.

Dad has been home from the hospital for nearly 2 weeks now, and has left the ladybug to her own devices. It eventually turned out that he had to have a somewhat scary procedure, so I hurried to join him and Mom to, well, mill around and appear reasonably competent, just in case something useful to do turned up.

My role proved to be essentially moral support, but in the course of events, Mom performed a rescue. They are a sort of habit of hers. One of her rescues at sea is prominent among our family stories. In that one, though she had no experience with boat engines, she was able to fire up a sailboat's engine in time to rescue Dad and E from a leaking rubber dinghy, and what would have been a dangerously cold bath in Prince William Sound.

Her latest rescue was medical in nature. Dad was sent home from the hospital with five new prescriptions. As soon as he was comfortably settled at home, Mom hustled off to the pharmacy to fill the new prescriptions. We had been told that Dad must not wait a day before beginning all of them. When she returned, we were all dismayed by the array of new pill bottles that were to be added to Dad's existing collection. It seemed like an awful lot of medicine. But as Mom read off what each was supposed to do, the verbage seemed pretty convincing. The doctors knew best, we supposed...

I went home later that day, and called the following day. In the meantime, Mom had pulled out and carefully compared the documentation for each of Dad's existing prescriptions with the documentation for the five new ones. Her careful analysis showed that two of the new prescriptions were actually the same as ones Dad was already taking. For those two cases, one prescription was under a generic name, and the other under a trade name. A third prescription was for high blood pressure, but Dad actually has somewhat low blood pressure these days. They consulted with Dad's regular doctor, who agreed that Dad should not be taking either the duplicate doses or the high blood pressure medicine.

Mom rocks!

It's morning on a day of high broken clouds that seem to promise a dry day. But my wildlife biologist father woke up to this sky this morning in a hospital bed, where he has found himself for something that we hope is relatively minor.

We talked by phone last night. He would rather come home, but has made a reasonable peace with his circumstances. It's a fine hospital with a kind, competent staff, and Mom had reported that he has a room with a view out across evergreen forests to the Olympic Mountains. "Are you by yourself?" I asked. "No," he answered, "there are the bugs."

I thought that might have been his own funny name for other patients, but he meant a ladybug and two other round-bodied bugs. "So it's spring here in this room," he reported. He has been enjoying watching them moving about the room.

Steve McQueen once said that he would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth, and I bet Dad would agree with him. Dad spent his career as a pilot-biologist in Alaska. On a January day such as this one, he might have found himself flying to Kodiak ferrying supplies to a field camp, or perhaps over Arctic Ocean ice floes surveying polar bears. Or he might have been skiing with me up a mountain valley in the Chugach Range above Anchorage, reading the animal prints in the snow to decode the recent activities of moose and coyotes.

Part of the art of Being Here Now, I suspect, is that if one day, you find yourself no longer a young biologist in a parka and mukluks, but an 84-year-old man in a hospital bed, you just enjoy the ladybug that you find in the room with you.

During a 1980 trip down Baja California, I camped for a few days on the beach near Cabo San Lucas with R, J, and some friends. One calm, sunny afternoon, I learned to body surf. I soon had the hang of it and was enjoying the relaxing feeling of being carried along on the gentle swell. But I hadn't noticed that a tanker had passed by behind me. Suddenly--too soon to take a breath--the bow wave folded over me, the air and sky vanished, and I found myself whirling through the water, uncomprehending, propelled by a force so strong that I could not hope to fight it. Then I was slammed down onto the beach, and the receding wave began to pull me back out to sea. I dug my fingers and toes into the sand to resist the powerful suction force, finally broke loose, and scrambled up the beach with dignity lost and swimsuit full of sand.

That episode must have lasted only a few seconds, but it terminated my body-surfing career. Of course, I remembered it as I began to take in the enormity of last week's tsunami. The wave that caught me must have been tiny compared to the tsunami, but it gave me some small idea of the immense force that struck the Indian Ocean coasts-- just enough personal experience to create the beginnings of empathy.

When something terrible happens in some faraway place, I often think that somewhere in that place there must be a woman like me. I try to imagine what she is experiencing. For the dead, the pain is over, of course, but for the living it has just started. We hear stories of people who have lost their entire families, and who perhaps saw it happen, or found familiar bodies on the beaches, or will never find the bodies. How will they go on living? How will they find any meaning or comfort in this?

This line of thinking brings me to B, whom I knew when I lived for half a year in Iliamna, a village in the Alaskan bush. At that time, B constantly emoted a sort of happy maternal force, so that you felt warmed any time you were in her presence. She and her Athabaskan husband A were central and favorite figures in Iliamna, and I never saw either of them sad. B and I worked together in a fishing lodge, she as chief cook and me as waitress. She taught me to polka; we once danced together on the bar when the owner was away; and from time to time she rescued me from hunting guides who had gotten too fresh.

B originally came from the Seattle area. She had been living a happy life down here until she lost her husband and children in a car accident. I don't remember how much time passed between that day and the day she arrived in Iliamna, or how she managed to get through that time. When I knew her, I was too young and inexperienced to comprehend what she must have gone through. I don't remember just what circumstances brought her from Seattle to Iliamna. But I remember her now as an example of someone who could not be kept down.

For the Indian Ocean dead, may they find auspicious rebirths in some fortunate country. For the living, may they find the resolute courage that B found in herself and, in some future time and place, her unextinguishable joie de vivre.

Today I encountered some behavior worth emulating...

This gray Seattle morning, I stayed in bed as long as I could before needing to get up for yoga class. At the last possible minute, I climbed unwillingly out of bed, and shuffled out to the kitchen to start coffee water heating. On the way, I noticed that about a quarter-inch of snow had accumulated overnight. "Huh, snow--nice," I thought dimly, and began searching for the coffee press.

A few minutes later, my housemate C emerged from her room, and shuffled out towards the kitchen. But the sight of the snow stopped her in her tracks. "Oh! SNOW!" she exclaimed, and bounced across the living room to the window. "Oh!" More appreciative bounces.

I realized that I was seeing a fine example of Being Here Now, and began to feel excited about the snow, too. I thought that perhaps I would have time to take a walk after class.

Our coffee was ready. "So why do you think snow makes people feel excited?" I asked, as we sat at the breakfast table and looked out over the backyard. It's a break in the routine, she said--something different that makes a familiar landscape seem new and dramatic. I thought it perhaps also had to do with happy childhood memories. I described how my brothers and I used to tramp out giant "Merry Christmas" greetings in the snow for pilots. She likes that there are a lot of kinds of snow, and we both like the way that a blanket of snow makes everything look clean. Besides snow, she also loves the ice storms in her native Iowa, and the way that the ice-coated trees sparkle in the sun.

And then our coffee was drunk and it was time to head off to class.

My brother E is warm-hearted and empathetic--good qualities for the IT support specialist that he is. He often teaches me new things about my field of technical communication, though I don't think he knows that.

For example:

Just as Dad has been trying to put the final refinements on his memoir of his years as a WWII fighter pilot, his copy of Word had begun to act more and more strangely. First, it would simply die from time to time. Later, it refused to show some of its menus, and instead took to displaying cryptic error messages accusing Dad of things he was pretty sure he had not done. I checked to see what I could do. I can often fix Mom and Dad's minor computer problems, but I had no clue. The Big Gun was needed for this baffling problem. E arrived, took one look, and fixed the problem in about 30 seconds, max, as Dad and I watched. E knew what I had forgotten: Dad uses System 9 on his iMac. To fix his problem, you simply need to delete the corrupted settings file for the offending program.

Dad was curious about this instant fix to a problem that had been pestering him for weeks, so E explained about settings files: "Say you wanted to change the defaults for your program--maybe you wanted to use a 14-point font instead of the default 12-point. So you'd change the default font size. If something goes wrong with the settings file, you delete it from your system, and the problem is fixed, but the default program settings are restored."

This explanation was nearly meaningless to Dad. So E explained a different way: "Say that on your P-40, the guns were toed in a certain amount according to the factory specs. But you wanted to change that, so you adjusted the settings to toe the guns in a little differently..."

This explanation connected with Dad. What I especially like about it are two things: First, E used language and concepts familiar to his audience--something technical communicators are taught to do, but he gets extra points for so creatively transferring concepts between domains. Second, E's choice of explanation was respectful of Dad's expertise and knowledge. It put attention on Dad's knowledge rather than the technical details of his computer. It's so easy for someone who has wonderful expertise in other domains to feel like a dumb novice when faced with a disobedient computer. E gracefully prevented that from happening.

I'm just back from our New Year's family gathering, where there has been an outbreak of knitting.

After many months of waiting, K was recently approved to begin hospital corpsman training, and soon will head for the Navy's Great Lakes training center near Chicago. Knowing of the cold winter weather in that part of the country, J got some good, warm yarn and started work on a birthday scarf for K (today is his birthday). Watching her work, O became intrigued, and asked for a lesson. He quickly learned the basic stitches, and soon was snuggled next to J on my parents' couch, both of them working together on K's scarf and making rapid progress. How nice for K to get a scarf knit by both his mom and kid brother!

Meanwhile, J's mom S had joined us for our gathering, bringing her own knitting bag and pattern books. She got her first chance to hear a bagpiping concert by my brother E, and was most impressed. Not only is he remarkably good for a novice, but he looks the part, with his full red beard and piper's wardrobe of kilt, sporren, glengarrie, and so on. There was just one thing: to S's knitter's eyes, his kneesocks didn't quite make the fashion cut. So she and O were soon on the floor with tape measure in hand, measuring E's feet and calves. She will knit him a proper pair of socks, with O helping.

My housemate C tells me that knitting is the new rage among young college women. Who knew? But I think my family must be in the forefront of the Collaborative Knitting Movement.