Gail Stolz: Dinner, Thursday Nights: My Chosen Family

We each are lucky in some particular way. My friend Joanie finds lost rings, including a ring she’d lost in a road median. She once found my wedding band that had slipped off my finger into her driveway snow. I am lucky in my friends. Joanie and I are part of a group of women who have shared potluck dinner every Thursday since 1981. We named ourselves the WAWAs back when Joanie still lived in Fairview. The acronym is secret and now almost forgotten; it has a hint of mental health work with a nod to self-help groups. I have spent my adult life within this group, and they are my family.

I come from strong women. I grew up in California as part of a female-headed household and regularly visited my grandmother—our matriarch—who lived independently into her 90s. In 1981, I had just graduated college and was spending the summer with Mom in California when my Alaska aunt came down for a family reunion. Knowing I was considering my next move, she invited me to Alaska. “You could get a job in Anchorage,” she said.

Soon after I landed here, I heard about the nascent women’s group whose instigators worked in a little building on Cordova Street that housed the Open Door Clinic and Family Connection, health and social services non-profits that are now long gone. These women, recent arrivals to Alaska, reached out through Anchorage’s network of friends and colleagues for other women to join them for potluck dinner. Given our health and social services wellspring, it’s no surprise that past and present WAWAs include seven social workers, three nurses, and two attorneys.

In our early years, the WAWAs defined ourselves in the negative. We were not a book group. Nor, in that era of woman’s lib, did we gather for consciousness-raising. We had no rules, except for unwritten ones. One unstated and rarely broken rule was that we bring food dishes that we prepared ourselves. Over the years, we’ve had some clear winners: I think of Nancy whenever someone serves Chicken Marbella; chocolate anything brings Joanie to mind, and Marilyn owns Green Chile Pie. When Donna joined, she brought us to an entirely new level of dining pleasure.

Among the most memorable cooking failures in our early days was Kathy’s attempt at sausage soup. We assembled at Martha’s house, a two-story zero-lot line on the outside of the Tudor-Muldoon curve. That evening, we drank wine and nibbled appetizers for a very long time. Eventually, Nancy exited the kitchen and announced, “Despite heroic rescue attempts, Kathy’s sausage soup doesn’t taste like anything at all.”

The “bad holiday gift” exchange is my favorite WAWA tradition, one that began a collective response to unwanted gifts we had received from misguided friends and relatives in the Lower 48. This year, we brought our garish holiday-wrapped gifts to Donna’s house after Valentine’s Day. The first opened gift looked like an endless one-sided zipper but turned into a cool little bag. I won a 1970s-era three-by-five-inch gold pendant emblazoned with horoscope symbols. Donna opened my prize, a much re-gifted and truly ugly haunted tree trunk with eyes that glowed when its hard-to-place candle is alight. I had found it in a cupboard and remembered receiving it years earlier from Kathy at another gift exchange. I wonder who will take it home next time.

Like family, the WAWAs support each other beyond the dining table. In the mid-90s, for example, we celebrated Nancy’s birthday at one Thursday dinner. Over appetizers, she said, “I went to see the doctor because this place near my throat hurts, but he didn’t find anything.” After talking with Nancy in the kitchen between courses, Marilyn, who can be fiercely protective, said, “Nancy should go to the E.R.”

We all went along and brought the cake. We took turns with Nancy while she waited for an exam. Eventually, her lung cancer was diagnosed. Many of us spent time with her in Seattle during her treatment. When Nancy died two years after her birthday celebration, the WAWAs lost one of our own.

I am lucky to have followed my aunt’s path to Anchorage and fortunate to have arrived when so many other recent arrivals were looking for a connection to replace the family they had left behind in their move to Alaska. For more than 30 years, the WAWAs have eaten together, sharing meals with prosaic events on the menu next to the food and wine. These shared ordinary times and occasional profound experiences have transformed us from a group of friends to a family. The WAWAs are my reference points for understanding my world. Our shared good times and sorrows, frustration and success, and our unique personal histories are now interwoven, providing warmth and comfort, like a hug.

 

 

 

Gail Stolz has lived her entire adult life in Anchorage. Both she and her husband arrived in 1980, although they didn’t meet for a decade. They have the pleasure of raising a daughter. Stolz loves Anchorage’s combination of urban comfort and being able to get out and away quickly and easily. She treasures regularly sighting moose and migratory birds and that the world here looks so different from season to season. She depends on friends and family and can’t imagine progressing through life’s passages without having them at her side.