newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — I saw an old friend at the grocery store the other day. I knew her face right away, although it took a few moments for the details to catch up. We lived in the same village for a couple of years. While I worked at the public radio station, she taught at the local school.

Both of us came from other places, where Alaska was probably just a punch line, a looming character in a tall tale about rogue bears and a wilderness Mecca. We were newcomers together at an extended summer camp, destined to know each other because of our strangeness.

My friend has a daughter who was a little older than my son when we lived in the village. As we talked, her new grandson smiled and cooed from his perch in the front of the cart. We spent a few minutes catching up on the people we knew, marveling at the familiar cliches. The one about how fast time flies and the other one that says we never would have believed we’d actually be this old someday.

Then she looked at her watch, said she had to go, and turned the corner into the diary aisle. I thanked the grocery store fates for letting me see her again.

When I was little, people were always stopping to talk to my stepdad in the grocery store. On hot summer days with the cool of the produce aisle prickling my bare arms and legs, I wondered who all those people were. People I had never seen before, who obviously knew my dad much longer than me. They were evidence that he had a life before I came along.

My stepdad stayed in the same town where he grew up. He only left for a year when his military orders took him to Germany, then came right back to the place where he went to high school with some of the same people now calling out his name. He knew their sisters and their brothers. They’d married friends of his.

His whole life story was right there for anyone to see. He lives in the same house he bought with his first wife when it was still new, only one previous owner in the public file. His neighbors Larry and Harry lived on either side of my dad, whose name is Barry.

They stayed that way for years, all those “arries” in a row, until Harry sold his house to be closer to the kids. Larry and his wife don’t live on the other side either, although their son does. He gets the mail for my dad when he’s out of town.

I always wanted to live in a place where people would know my name, but I left my childhood home right after graduation. I wanted to see the world, too. I yearned to discover something different than what my family knew. Maybe even something better.

I didn’t know that I would find the same challenges no matter where I went, and that family and friends — a good support system — would make meeting them easier.

When I go to Pennsylvania, to the place where I learned to ride a bike and wrote my first stories, the place I once called home, no matter how hard I scan those faces in the grocery store, I never run into anyone I know.

Now that my husband and I have lived in our house in downtown Fairbanks for a few years, we’re starting to recognize the people around us. We’ve watched the first batch of kids leave the nest, like the young lady who grew up in a house down the street and cut my hair for a while. Maybe she’ll come back someday to marvel at my own grown child.

I have roots beyond my home, too. Sometimes I’ll stop on my walks with my son to chat with someone I haven’t seen in years. Someone I met on the Iditarod trail back when I was a public radio reporter. Or a friend I made in my first summer in Alaska, cleaning fish at a processing plant in Valdez.

When my sister and her husband came to visit a couple years ago, they were amazed at how friendly the people in Fairbanks are. I told them our town is just small enough to keep us that way, protecting us from the kind of numbers that we would have to avert our eyes from in order to avoid exhaustion.

I spend my days smiling at people I don't know and always expecting to run into someone I do. Which I did, a lot, when they were here. “You sure know a lot of people,” they said as they stood by in the grocery store aisle, trying to keep all the connections straight, telling me with their amazed smiles how lucky I am to live here.