Monthly Archives: April 2008

BRB

April 22, 2008

Today Milt (my husband) put up the first of what I hope will be many digital downloads of our recorded and filmed materials.  This one is particularly close to my own heart–Buddy Red Bow–The Lost Buffalo Tapes (www.oyate.com) During the nineties we produced an hour long show called The Buddy Red Bow Story.  For those of you who didn’t know BRB, he was one of the first (and greatest) contemporary Lakota musicians.  We produced a public radio program on his life to be aired on the anniversary of his death.  I remember when we were producing the show I was writing the script and I kept saying to Milt that it seemed pretty slim–not enough stuff.  He told me not to worry–Buddy’s music would carry the day.  When he finally finished the program, he dropped a tape in my lap on his way out the door and said, “Listen and see what you think now.” 

I put the tape on and listened to the whole show.  By the end, I was sitting on the couch crying and Buddy was singing “Don’t you worry–I’ll be back some day.”  Even having written the thing it touched my heart.  I hope you’ll take a listen.  The Buffalo Tapes and The Buddy Red Bow Show are two different things but all great. 

I am getting near the end of our semester and figure I won’t have much time to post for the next couple of weeks but will make an effort to flop something up now and then.  My blueberry plants are calling out to be planted (not that I have bought any yet).  I saw a patch of daffodils the other day and the prairie and Badlands are “going green.”

Peace,

Jamie Lee

By Jamie | Posted in Indian Country | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Finishing One Drum

April 20, 2008

I haven’t been posting much lately because I am hard at work doing final edits on my novel, ONE DRUM.  Just for fun, I’ll paste the first couple of pages in here.   I am excited because a long winter of revision is over and I finally have an agent to take it to the marketplace.  I love this book and have been behind it for too many years. 

 

ONE DRUM
Chapter I

 February 27, 2003

 Cuny Table, a tabletop mesa in the heart of Lakota country, is an unlikely place for a restaurant. The mesa itself is a survivor, having held its ground as thirty-five million years of wind and rain eroded the land into what is now the Badlands of South Dakota. On its high top are a few scattered ranches, fields of winter wheat, and a view so wide it feels like the floor of heaven. Sketched along the skyline to the west are the Black Hills; and, on the northeastern edge surrounded by a few rough buildings, is the Cuny Café.

Agnes Stands Alone, the owner of the café, has been there as long as anybody can remember. She is an old, square-bodied woman with short, coarse hair and eyes like dark marbles that seem to see straight through you. The regulars call her Unci, or Grandmother in Lakota.  Most of them wander in not so much for the food (although the food is good) but for her company and the unusual tea she brews from plants gathered down in the Cheyenne River breaks. The old ones, especially, find Agnes’s tea eases their aching bones and makes the blood flow more easily to the toes. Oh, she makes no claims about her tea, but everybody who walks in gets a steaming cup slapped down before them with a brisk command to, “Drink up.”

The café, an old thirty-foot trailer, has been gutted, insulated, and made into one open space except for a back bedroom which nobody but Agnes has ever been in. The front has a single booth, two tables, and a plywood counter top covered with blue-flowered contact paper. Some strangers think the poor old trailer looks like a dislocated train car hooked to nothing, going nowhere.

Agnes never hesitates to give advice-or a solid scolding-when needed.  But, more than the tea or Indian tacos or advice or whatever is on the menu that day (everybody eats the same daily special), the locals go to the café for Agnes’s stories. She knows all of the old Lakota stories.  She knows the creation stories, the stories of Iktomi the trickster and the Seven Sisters who can still be seen winking down from the sky on a clear night.  Her favorite is the story of the Second Cleansing when Unci Makah grew tired of the antics of her human children and tossed all but a few off her powerful body.  According to the story, those She sheltered later emerged from Wind Cave as The Lakota People.

Agnes, however, doesn’t just tell old stories.  Sometimes she tailor-makes the story especially for the person hearing it. For instance, once J.J. Runs At Night had a new colt so sick it couldn’t stand.  Agnes told him a story about how a grove of young willows withstood the mightiest of storms by forcing their roots further into Unci Makah, Grandmother Earth. “Such smart, young trees,” she said, “to know just what to do.” By the time J.J. got home, the colt was running across the corral on four sturdy legs.

Another time, June Player’s daughter tried to die by cutting her wrists with the top of a tuna can. The poor girl nearly bled out before they found her.  For this dangerous moment, Agnes told June about a small ant who had lost his place in line-until the wind blew a single grain of sand across his path, forcing him to turn another way. The next day, June’s daughter woke up from her deep, uneasy sleep talking about needing to find her place-before it was too late.

A while later, the girl began writing poetry and gave Agnes this poem written in a smooth, pretty hand:

In the greater scheme of things

Only she who sings,

And learns to play the wind,

Will ever grow wings.

Now I play the wind.

Agnes took a pineapple-shaped magnet, stuck the poem to her fridge and said, “Good.” After that the young girl began hanging around the café helping Agnes peel potatoes and wipe off countertops.

Of the nearly forty thousand residents of The Pine Ridge Reservation, at least half of them have been in the Cuny Café at one time or another, not to mention visitors from Japan, Switzerland, Germany and many other places. Agnes keeps a guest book and feeds them all tea and stories.

On slow days, Agnes sits in an old rocking chair on the rough-lumber porch the regulars had built for her five years earlier and lights her pipe. When it’s not in use, she keeps the pipe in a small, beaded bag hanging on a nail beside the screen door like a good luck charm. The bowl is carved red pipestone from a quarry in southern Minnesota.  This particular stone, Agnes says, was once part of the Black Hills until it broke away and floated off during some ancient upheaval.

Agnes fills the pipe with a dried version of her tea; and while she smokes, she prays. Sometimes the praying takes her far off to what she simply calls “the other place.” The first time she visited this other place she had been only seventeen and drunk. Her uncle, a medicine man, had found her puking her guts out beneath an old cottonwood tree and taken her home and made her pray for three days straight without food or water. That ornery old man-he’d cut straight through her young spirit to the old woman already living there, and Agnes had never again been able to return to her ordinary life.

Now, when the locals drive up Cuny Table to grab a bite to eat and find her sitting so still with the pipe in her lap and the spirit absent from her eyes, they know not to disturb her and simply tromp up the steps to help themselves in her kitchen. Occasionally, the praying is so complete, so pervasive, that they find it impossible to cross her threshold and simply get back into their trucks and leave.

Agnes sees many things in the smoke curling up from her pipe; she sees the land, she sees distant places, she sees the beating hearts of the people, the breaking hearts of the people, the loving hearts of the people; and, sometimes, in the hazy curl she sees the old ones who once walked the earth but now watch from other realms. The old ones have stories of their own to tell; but Agnes never tells these stories to anybody except Bill Elk Boy.

 

It was one of these days, on the edge of winter, when Agnes cast her inner eye outward toward the weathered lands north of Cuny Table and saw the change coming. There, on a single square foot of dry, deserted earth in the Badlands north and west of Wounded Knee Village, a thin line of dust rose up from a single needle-mark in the sand. Agnes watched the whorl of dust curl upward like the smoke of her pipe.  It had no discernible color unless she used the very edges of her peripheral vision and then she saw the palest of pink light rising from a dark horizon. As she watched, the pale, moving spiral seemed to take shape, as if Creator was conjuring something from nothing, dancing dust into form. When the dust settled, she saw the form of a woman asleep in the sand and Agnes knew she had returned at last, the little one . . . the lost one.

Two young boys were walking toward the sleeping woman.

When the glaze cleared from her eyes and she again entered this ordinary realm, Bill Elk Boy was beside her. He took the pipe, the bowl now cold to the touch, tapped it clean on the edge of his chair, slipped it back into the beaded bag, and said, “It begins, Agnes. Today it begins.”

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be | Tagged , , , , | Comment (1)

We Can’t Afford Not to Get it Right!

April 16, 2008

Today Leon Hale and I gave a presentation about our book, Washaka—The Bear Dreamer to a classroom of students in an alternative school. It is a brand new, beautiful facility on the edge of the northern hills. The teachers are committed and determined to help these students who have been school referred, court ordered . . . or dumped . . . on them. I asked to use the bathroom when we first got there and somebody with a key had to let me in. She said the entire place was a “lockdown” facility. Not a single door there could be opened without a key. The teachers (bless their hearts) were skittish, constantly looking around, counting heads, monitoring behavior.

I wanted to say, FOR GOD’S SAKE—THESE ARE OUR CHILDREN!! I had a flash back to one of the first real jobs I had which was in an “Attention” center for troubled youth. I hated that place. It took children who have been knocked around by life and treated them as if they were criminals. I only lasted a few months at that job.

This past year I’ve been invited to be a part of a progressive international group that is forming around the youth. It is called Global Passageways and is made up of both young people and “elders” who are working their butts off to find a way to treat the young with respect and guidance. I don’t yet know what will be accomplished by this global movement, but I hope it is something soon.

Yesterday Milt attended a town meeting that was discussing a mere 4 million dollar shortfall in our local school system. On the cut list of services were all elementary music, all elementary librarians (can you believe it?), the gifted and talented program, and who knows what all. Sports were not on the list.

I cannot for the life of me understand what kind of a wake-up call it will take for us to understand that our priorities are completely and totally upside down in this country. If we don’t invest in the youth—we have no future. Simple as that. We can’t afford not to get it right. The cost will be much, much greater than a war in some distant land . . .

Goodnight. I shouldn’t get up so early . . .

On a positive note, I finally got an agent for one of my novels. The novel is about how Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) takes pity on the human race and sends us a little help . . .

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, The Education Crises | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Being and Becoming–a Parntership

April 13, 2008

We did a Family Constellation Workshop this afternoon. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a group process that works deeply within the connected soul of the family of origin. By using representatives for family members, we can bring into visibility the hidden ties and loyalties that run through us. For the past ten years we have been coming together to do deep healing within the family and I am always amazed at the sheer amount of love that flows there. Today nearly everyone in the group tapped into that love and it was sweet and sad and beautiful all at the same time. Within all of our hearts there is still a little girl or boy who needs the energy of mother and father—no matter our circumstances. And when we fully take that energy, we can at last become fully adult.

I love facilitating the constellation work. It is like touching the face of the creator—or having the creator touch me. I started reading a book that a friend recommended called Teacher. On the first page the author said something like when we are creative—we cannot be destructive. I feel this. To fully take our adult strength and become a creative force in the universe is what it is all about. Unfortunately, many of us linger in childhood unable to take that strength and put it to work.

It is a long road, this path to full adulthood. Today I was trying to explain to the group that we do it the same way we learned as children. We must study the people around us and “steal” from them the qualities and ways of being that we most admire. We have to model behavior in order to gain that new behavior. We have to do it. I remember when I first started speaking to groups, I was so scared and so shy that I knew I needed a few new resources. I started to watch how other people behaved as teachers; and I would snatch a vocal quality here, a gesture there, a stronger voice or posture and then I would watch to see if it had the effect I was hoping for. Most of us don’t realize that new ways of being come in slowly—and only with great practice. Nobody “gets it” just like that.

Today I decided it is time for me to learn again how to gain even more strength in the world. Milt and I have both decided to go to the next level, together. As we do this, there are a couple of things I plan to be vigilant about. One is to take special care of the little, scared girl in me who always hates to risk new things; and the other is to look out and identify new models for me to emulate. Tonight we saw a wonderful show about a single man who introduced classical music to the poor children of Venezuela. The story was so inspiring that it brought tears to my eyes. Over 300,000 children playing instruments from the time they are two years old and up? I want to learn from that man.

Take good care and look around yourself to see what, if anything, you have to contribute to the creative pot of the world. And then do it.

I love this life. For those of you who are not familiar with Constellation Work, there are lots of resources (I hope the links all work) at http://www.manykites.com We have been doing so much messing around with the websites that I’m not exactly sure what is still working—but we will continue to add materials as we go along.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

All My Relatives

April 9, 2008

Below is a story I wrote a number of years ago.  The genesis of this story is my own husband’s adoption story.  This story still touches my heart.

Jamie

 

 

All My Relations

by Jamie Lee

(Published by Heartlands Magazine, October 2005)

 

Bill carried the plain manila envelope around all day but every time his fingers reached toward the small metal clasp holding it shut they pulled away.  He drove home with the thing, like something alive, on the car seat next to him.  Normally he loved driving through the soft valley to their house tucked up against the Black Hills, but today he saw only the envelope.  He carried it into the house.  Jessie, his wife, knew instantly what it was. 

He went to the couch, sat down, opened the envelope, read the thin file of adoption papers for 13 minutes, got up, silently handed the papers to Jesse, and walked into the kitchen.  He polished the stainless steel teapot with a scratchy green pad and a pearl of dish soap.  He filled it with water, lit the stove, stared at the dancing blue flame, and then Jessie was standing behind him, arms circling his middle, saying, “Such a sad story, honey.  I can’t believe that this baby is you.” until sharp slivers of thought caught in the back of his mind.   

The soft, mothering part of Jessie made him want to tie feelings like small pouches of tobacco and hang them from her branches like prayers.  Later, she said what broke her heart was that he had no name, not for three months, except the names the nurses and nuns attached the nameless baby; Daniel in the hospital, later John or Peter in the mission.  And Jessie was furious at cruel, cutting notes scrawled into the records by well-meaning nuns referring again and again to how “fortunate” that Boy Daniel (or whatever) does not look too Indian. 

Bill was half Lakota, some Cherokee, some Cree, and who knew what else.  A breed, he thought.  It always comes down to that, breeds and pedigrees, a race of people forced to carry papers and proof of blood quantum.  It pissed him off.  Royally.  It did.  His only goal in opening the adoption file was to register with the tribe to get financial aid as an Indian for graduate school.  He hadn’t anticipated questions of place, and belonging, and blood quantum to thicken like blood pudding in his mind. 

It became the Indian Question.  What does it mean to be Lakota?  Blood, birth, state of mind?  He caught himself staring in bank windows at his own high cheekbones and wondering about Lakota, or staring down at the flat fingernails on the ends of his fingers, another sign.  And he didn’t understand Jessie saying “No wonder, honey!  Good God, no wonder.”  And when he questioned her she said only that he was always waiting.  

He didn’t quite get her meaning but the adoption papers had lit a lamp on the screen of his mind.  Scenes of a young mother staring through pane glass at the tiny bundled boy that is her son.  She is small, hair braided, cheek pressed to cold glass whispering “My son.”  The babies hair is dark like night sky, flying from his scalp.  She considers that it was his feet poking against her womb these many months, his fingers now uncurling and reaching–seeking her–only her.  And then she disappears, unable to sign the papers, unable to stay. 

How?  How could she do it?  It wasn’t a real question in Bill’s mind.  He knew how.  After years wandering around these South Dakota reservations, he’d seen a hundred girls just like her; scared, young, foolish, drunk, incested or raped by uncles and strangers, girls like his mother.   

The birth record said her name was Forrest.  What had it been before?  Had it been Stands in Timber or Catches the Wind?  What would his name have been if she had not given him up for adoption, if she hadn’t died, if the white man had not named her grandparents ‘Forrest’ to make the bookkeeping easier?

Three days after reading the papers Bill blew up at a guy who hung a Sundance skirt on a wall like a trophy animal.  The guy said he was a real Indian.  Bill told him to stuff it.  Sure he wasn’t raised on Pine Ridge.  Sure he’d had whiteman advantages, raised by a nice couple in eastern South Dakota, didn’t talk Lakota.  So what?  He’d trade it all to know a single grandfather, to have one uncle guide him into his vision, to sit in the Inipi ceremony and know just who the hell he was. 

Not Indian.  Not white.

If it weren’t for Jessie, he’d be a crazy man.  Jessie was white but had spent the first twenty-five years on a reservation in northern Minnesota.  Talk about racial confusion–she seemed more Indian than he.  Oh, how he loved watching her bow to the flowers, or spread her arms above her head to greet the sky or a tree.  She seemed born to the land although no Indian blood ran through her veins like red water. 

Bill tried to shake off confusion like a dog crawling out of a creek.  His confusion was compounded by Jessie’s odd delusions.  Last night she’d wrapped her arms around his middle and said once again.  “I think I’m pregnant”.  She crossed the room, sat down in the old orange, uglier-than-sin rocking chair that was too comfortable to throw out, and rubbed her belly in small circular motions.  Her face was round and soft and smiling as she stared at an oily spot on the wall across the living room. 

Bill didn’t understand.   “No honey, you know you aren’t pregnant.  You know that, so why do you keep bringing it up?”

“I don’t know.  I feel it.  I feel like I’m pregnant, that’s all.”

“Look honey.  You aren’t pregnant.  You couldn’t possibly be pregnant.  You know I had a vasectomy.  I’m forty-four, and you’ve had your babies and I’m sorry you didn’t have them with me, but you didn’t.  You aren’t pregnant.”  He didn’t want to sound exasperated but he was.  Bill loved Jessie, but strange things were about and he didn’t understand why or how it coincided with wanting to understand what is Lakota? 

To tell the truth, she looked pregnant.  She hadn’t gained weight or showed any physical signs, but her skin was clear and shining, her eyes bright and expectant. 

“Have you been dreaming again?” he asked her.

“Oh yes.”  She looked straight at him “Do you want to hear about it?”

“Sure.”  He smiled for the first time that day.

“This time we were up on a high trail at Bear Butte, almost a ledge, and there were others with us, all others, all of our relatives were there.  Oh Bill, it was the holiest place ever.”

She sounded like a young girl–not his thirty-eight year old wife and mate.  He crossed the room, sat on the floor at her feet, and rested his head against her knee, suddenly tired of thinking, and questions.  Jessie told him of her dream. 

“Part of the trail was buried with rock that had tumbled from above.  It had the strangest sound.  Bones, I thought.  It sounded like bones and broken crockery and I knew right away why this place is holy.  The whole mountain is nothing but bones; mountain bones, Indian bones, bones from animals, and god bones, and bird bones.  So many bones.”  She stopped talking and fanned all ten fingers out to feel his scull beneath her hands.  His scalped tingled as if her fingertips were fireflies emitting tiny chemical jolts into his scull.  His middle grew mossy, and he was afraid to breath, afraid that if he moved she too would fly off and leave him.  Waiting.  Waiting. 

She talked on.  “Then you took my hand and said come on.  I wanted to take one of the bones with me so I went down on my knees and found a small stone shaped like a scull.  I stuck it in my pocket but it was hot.  When I stood up, it felt like wind prayers coming from out across the plains and surrounding us.  Remember the sound of that silence, and that wind?  God, it was something.”  She laughed quietly and leaned her upper body to form a soft feminine shelter over him.  “Maybe that’s what made me pregnant.” 

He loved her dreams, words spreading over him like yellow cream, or surrounding them like an oily, rainbow-bubble flown from a child’s lips.  He wished he understood what gentle force gave her these sweet dreams but feared if he discovered the source, it would prove to be illusion only with no sweet blend of pious gentle love wrapping them both like a swaddling cloth. 

In this space it only mattered that he loved her.  All that was lost could be found again if he just stayed in this place with her.  He knew that.    “I wish I could give you a baby.  I do.”  He was apologizing. 

She shook her head and kissed his warm brow.  “I don’t need a baby silly.  I just need to be pregnant.”

Bill closed his eyes for a moment and saw a range of hills, dark-skinned and feminine, wearing the golden prairie like a skirt of soft, yellow buckskin.  Mother Earth.  She had birthed them all–that’s what the stories said.    This gentle mother had not given him away but, rather, drew him in closer and closer until his own heart beat a single rhythm with hers.  His painful questions suddenly lost their end marks and their power to wound.   

Jesse was pregnant.  So was he.  So were all the people, both on the reservation and off, because the earth herself was expecting, poised in a single breathless moment of waiting for the new time and in this time, they would all be born new.  Didn’t the old stories say it? 

And the Earth took the ones closest to her inside of herself…

 

By Jamie | Posted in Short Fiction | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The Mother Load

April 8, 2008

Tonight is the anniversary of my mother’s death and tomorrow (April 9) is the anniversary of her birth.  My relationship with my mother was a complicated one.  It is odd how when parents do it right their children sometimes get a little “too big for their britches.”  That was a favorite phrase that my father used when we tried to rule the household.  But my goal is to revisit my relationship with my mother tonight and not my dad. 

 My mother had eight children.  I was third girl and was followed by five brothers. 

 No, not a summary.  I want to do what Natalie Goldberg urges writers to do and ” write to the bone.” 

 I looked down at my mother for some reason.  I thought she was not very smart, that she took things too seriously (particularly her Catholic faith), and that she didn’t really “get” me.  I was always a dreamy little girl with my nose in a book and she was a busy mom with a large household to run.  I constantly felt guilty for not doing enough to help, and the shadow of that guilt still follows me today.  My mother was not good at saying what she meant and would always couch things in a kind of passive-aggressive way, speaking from the side of her mouth.  “Long suffering” is another term I’ve heard that describes my mom. 

 I often wondered what my mother did with her dreams and aspirations and I used that against her somehow.  How could she “settle” for so little?  Did she drown that dreamy part of her when she was young and never let her re-emerge?  And why did I think that who she was was not enough?  Didn’t she raise eight children to be creative and responsible adults? We are all still alive today and doing well raising families of our own. 

 As I think about it now, I think my own scornful thoughts were retaliation.  I wanted my mom to see ME.  I wanted her to tell me she was proud of me, that I had become someone she liked and admired.  I wanted her attention—desperately.  I still do. 

 Now I sometimes feel like my own children don’t get me; that they judge my life and find it wanting.  Isn’t it strange-what goes around comes around. 

 So on this, the eve of both her birth and death, I want to remember some of the things that were right with us.  Both Mom and I loved the quiet times.  My fondest memories are of putting puzzles together on rainy or snowy days, picking blueberries together, and playing scrabble for hours on end even though she never could beat me. 

 In my last year of college, I moved home to save money.  I was in my final semester of courses and planning a spring wedding.  I was tired . . . tired of thinking, tired of partying, tired of working so hard and pushing to put myself through college.  For one semester, instead of working so hard in a bar to pay the bills, I just moved home for the winter.  I did my classes, studied and then spent hours and hours and hours with my mom playing scrabble.  We didn’t talk much-my mother never was much for deep conversations but it was so comforting to just be there with her. 

 I am older now and wiser (I hope).  I realize fully that both of my parents gave me all I needed in order to pursue an education, create a nice life, and extend that life forward for my own children and my work.  I have the steadiness of my mother, the creativity of my father, and the love of life and children that both of them shared.  Something that I have learned in my constellation work is that the gift of life is the biggest gift of all—and my parents are much, much bigger than I am and always will be even though they are both gone now.

 Oh, and what I wouldn’t give to lay out a scrabble board or grab the berry bucket and head to the woods with my mother just one more time . . . just one more time.

 I miss you, Mom. 

 Love,

 Patti

 P.S.  My legal name is Patricia Lee Lee.  I have gone by “Jamie Lee” for the past twenty years except with my family–all of my brothers and sisters still call me Patti. 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Sketching the Male Protagonist

April 6, 2008

So often when I present programs people or students will ask, “Where do ideas come from?” For me, that is part of the magic of writing. I never actually know where anything is going to come from until I am in the middle of it. The post tonight is a bit of wild mind writing I did while trying to learn more about the male protagonist in one of my stories several years ago. (A Good Soft Blanket) I like it because it shows the total organic emergence of a character. I had no idea that this was part of Charles’ history until I scribbled these words. You’ll see what I mean . . .

Sketching the Male Protagonist

Charles. He is like pudding, loose and soft, his shape never molding. He walks the frames of each scene like bluewash background; no stiff poke, no grit, no getty-up. He is the tender, perfect boy who slips into the back desk in the classroom and listens, never asking questions, never offering opinion, sprung from nothing into nothing. He is a cartoon without color or feature, with no secrets, no sins and no sinister bottom note to the perfect top.

What can I add to this poor pasty man whose life unfolds around him in passive acquiescence? What will wake him up? What does he fear?

He fears fire. He fears loss. He fears being left once again among the living. Charles blames himself for mom and dad’s grief–and his little brother’s death. It was a spark, only a spark–a smoldering error never extinguished, never put out, still burning in his soul.

I like it, the helpless go-along has a reason to not make waves, not engage fully, not be worthy to have the care of innocents or father a child or love a child.

Yes, this deepens the man–puts the boy back in his soul. No, Charles is not pudding but water and charred wood and a long stretch of scar tissue on the upper arm that failed to pull the little brother out through the window of his parent’s burning farmhouse. His fault. His secret. His torment.

How did the fire start?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Everybody knows that model glue is flammable. Charles, seven years old, and his younger brother hide in a tiny back closet assembling the model ship with secret plans to sail on great oceans. They work for hours—until dark—until little brother says, “I’ll light a candle so we can see what we are doing.”

And Charles, preoccupied, not hearing the little brother, steps out for just a minute–just one short, sixty-second god-damn minute and then whoosh, the world bursts into flame.

Oh my god, oh my god–for the rest of his life he hears that oh my god scream from his own lips and from the lips of his little brother before he died.

Yes. Charles built the boat that carried his little brother across the sea to the other realm. And the punishment? To never be happy, never cover the scar, never wear long sleeves or care for children. Again and again he turns from what will make him happy, from Rose (his pretty woman) and from her children and the children they could have together.

Ah, this leads smoothly to the forest fire in my story–to the sacred ring where all children are kept safe by magic and grace. Now, at last, Charles must face his fear or lose them all—and his own soul as well.

Later, after Charles has passed the test, little Emily, precious psychic child, sees the younger brother laughing and playing and she tells Charles he need not torture himself–little brother lives in a splendid castle on the other side.

‘

Charles looks different to me now. Finally I find an empathy with his heart, with his suffering as he finds his true place upon the page. He attracts me, awakens my healing heart that wants to smooth the scars along his arm. Now, he is ready for Rose. Now we can discover how a man with the heavy burden meets a magical woman under a Tucson sun.

He will resist, of course, and move toward and away again and again but, oh the love is strong and the pull of destiny even stronger. Now the high tides in the blood ruled by the moon will move them. He will lose the fight and he will love her. And he will learn to trust again that the world is a good place–even when it isn’t.

. . . that’s the man I was looking for.

If you like the stories and bits and pieces I am posting on my blog, please forward it to others and invite them in to check it out. My goal is to widen my readership over the next year and you can help. Thanks.

Jamie Lee

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, Short Fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The Auction

April 6, 2008

It is late but I feel like posting something tonight anyway so I went searching old files for a story.  This one was actually published in the South Dakota Review many years ago but I was so amazed to read it through carefully and see how rough it was.  I did a bunch of editing and am posting it anway.   For the past year and a half I’ve been teaching a course using a textbook by Dr. Rita Smilkstein called Tools for Writing.  This book has given me more than a four year English degree did in terms of my grammar and punctuation.  Suddenly I am able to see what I was doing wrong.   I also have had some wonderful help from Page Lambert and others from my writing group (Bearlodge Writers) on point of view and narrative distance.   What blows my mind is that I’ve been submitting work for over 25 years but without the skills I needed to be effective.  Anyway, here is the story with a bit more spit and polish than it had many years ago.  I still like the story.  It came to me when my sister told me the story of a farm auction in eastern South Dakota and I thought how odd it must be to see your life ”auctioned off.”  

 

The Auction 

 

Grandpa stood at the lace-curtained window looking down from the second story bedroom to the yard below.  Look at all those people down there, he thought.  Must be at least thirty or forty, maybe more.  The crowd below was milling about in the early autumn sun.  He thought that perhaps a person ought to feel more than he was feeling.  It was odd . . .and then to have the whole family skating around his moods so cautiously. 

Imagine all those people, Grandma, coming to the farm to pick over all of our old junk.  He rubbed the lace between his fingers; it smelled dusty, and he thought about his wife again . . . his mate, his friend.  The missing her didn’t stop–not for a moment.  Oh, it eased a bit, settling into his middle like a heavy cat on his lap, soft, but heavy. 

But still, there was the missing her.

The farm auction was scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m.  Furniture littered the yard in ragged rows hauled out early this morning by a couple of young fellows.  He saw the oak credenza brought over from Germany a century before by Grandma’s family; the tattered curved sectional, bounced nearly to death by generations of grand kids; the kitchen table, so many hours sipping coffee, making plans, talking; and still more tables, chairs, beds, and boxes and boxes of accumulation.  Forty-seven years of marriage, weddings, births, school kids, graduations were now strewn about in boxes and fingered by strangers–all due to be sold at auction at 9:00 a.m.  In less than one day, a century of stuff would be scattered and sent off in opposite directions.

Why does it all seem so silly and dull, he wondered.  He watched the three men set up the auctioneer’s stand.  The bald one’s head is shining already.  Going to be a hot one.  The two younger workers were taller but quick to take orders from the squat, balding man.  From the window, they all looked like speechless dolls dancing noiselessly around his sunburned yard. 

“Dad?  Dad, are you up here?” 

He heard his oldest son, Jim, thump up the stairs just has he’d done a thousand times before.  It was a familiar, comforting sound.

Jim came into the bedroom but stopped abruptly as he saw his father near the window still clutching a bit of lace in his fingertips and staring down at the yard.  “Oh, sorry, Dad.” he said.  “I didn’t mean to bust in on you.  Maybe you would rather be alone.  I’ll just go back down . . . .”

“No.  It’s fine.  In fact, come over here a minute, son.  Look at this.”  He waited until Jim stood beside him and then he pointed down at the yard.  “Did you ever think so much stuff could come out of such a small house as this?  Lord, it never seemed that big—to hold so much.” 

They stood side by side and gazed quietly at the yard below.  “Years ago, we were settlers, and now we are settling up.”  He chuckled just a bit at his own play on words.  Jim didn’t seem to get the humor.

Grandpa looked across the yard and to the east.  Away from the auction activity a long table covered in pretty linen, Grandma’s linen, stood alone beneath the crab apple tree.  It was covered with dishes and figurines and dainty little porcelain boxes.  On one end a tall pewter candelabrum stood sentry over the long rows of assorted pretties.  He saw his grandchildren, sixteen in all, milling around the table carefully fondling each pretty bauble.  In a few minutes, they would line up oldest first, youngest last and begin the slow procession past the table.   Each child would choose some special thing one at a time to keep from Grandma and Grandpa’s things.  The line would move until the table was bare or each child, (some not so young anymore) was satisfied with his or her finds. 

Jim squirmed uncomfortably beside him.  “It seemed the only way, Dad.  Sure hope you don’t mind.  Mary and I thought the younger ones should have something . . . . ” His voice trailed off apologetically.

Grandpa knew that Jim didn’t understand his silence, yet how could he tell his son that it wasn’t displeasure—or even sadness.  He’d never been one for talking about how things were on the inside and he didn’t know how to start now.  Even as he spoke, his words sounded useless, like drops of rain hitting hard clay.  “I know Jim, Grandma wanted the kids to have something.  And the apartment will be great, really.  All of those people my own age and new things to do.”

Jim stood a while longer and then backed away slowly as if not quite sure what to do or say.  Finally, he smiled stiffly and said, “Well, guess I’ll leave you alone for a bit.”  And then he was gone again, and Grandpa smiled and chuckled a bit.  The boy was just like his father—long on feelings, short on words.

He finally turned away from the window and sat on the small loveseat he’d decided to keep for his new apartment because it was small.  Well, how the hell do you explain it?  I mean, a man ought to feel something after farming the same spread for better than fifty years and then just stopping all of a sudden one day, selling the whole works to some young couple with grand visions of their own?  He could already see them filling the empty spaces he and Grandma had once occupied.  They would turn the soil, raise families, make memories and fill the house with their own years of accumulation. 

Life was such a mystery.

No, Jim couldn’t understand.  Not yet.  It’s only things ,son, he thought.  Only things.  It gets real easy to let the things go when it’s just the missing that is left—missing Grandma, missing the farm, missing youth . . . Lord, who’d have ever thought we would live so long anyhow. 

The heavy cat feeling shifted and was settling in his lap again.  Things don’t make a life, and they don’t go along in death.  They’re just things.  His heart felt full and heavy.  It was good to just sit by a window and see–really see–that all that stuff down there was not what life is about.   No, the good things were all safe where nobody could get at them.  These things couldn’t be auctioned off at any price.  These things were given away for free. 

Right Grandma? 

The microphone screeched as the auctioneer began.  “Gather round folks, we’re gonna be all done by mid afternoon so let’s get it started.” 

It was 9:00 a.m. straight up.   

 

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Short Fiction | Comments (0)

An Eyelash Away From Creation

April 1, 2008

Anybody who has spent time with Natalie Goldberg’s writing books has probably done “writing practice.”  The bit below was a spin-off writing practice that followed A Good Soft Blanket.  I tried to get Milt to tell me if I was getting too edgy and risking my “reputation.”   He said I didn’t have to be a Pollyanna.  I’ll let you tell me.

 

Writing Practice

 

So, what if the good soft blankets were all distributed but Doria had a continuing connection with them, what stories would they tell?  Go.

Charles stared at Doria across the kitchen table of the tight apartment they had rented for the winter.  “You’ve done it, Doria.  Now let it be.  Let somebody else take it up.”

She was like glass, opaque and rippled with story lines etched and bubbling themselves into her surface.  He saw her—no he saw through her and it scared him.  Transparent.  See through.  It was only when he was looking elsewhere and not at her that he got that impression.

“You were giggling in your sleep.  But when I flicked on the light, your eyes were open and tears were streaming down your cheeks.  I couldn’t wake you.”

The smile was soft, petal soft.  “I know.  It’s like I go there. I am given the scenes, months of scenes in a moment.”

“What was this one?”

“Do you remember the banker from Mt. Pleasant, Michigan?  The one that was so damn sure of himself?”

Charles remembered Brent, in his suit, an unlikely candidate for one of Doria’s blankets and yet there he was, in three piece glory, dragging down, down into the pile of soft fuzz and plucking a pale peach and cream comforter from near the bottom.  Even the color seemed unlikely to go with the dark blue suit and burgundy tie.

Charles plucked a cherry from the dish and bit flesh and juicy red and stared in amazement at the pit revealed.  “I remember him.  Peaches and cream.  What did you dream?”

“It started out, he took a pottery course, you know, one of those convenient, cheap community ed classes . . . .”

Brent was proud, proud of his position, his philanthropy, his wife, his two kids.  A man who has worn thee pieces has no business picking up something as damp and clammy as a lump of clay and slapping it on a wheel and using a perfectly shined shoe to turn a kick-wheel.  Why, anything could happen.  Anything at all, if his hands have anything to say about it, cupped and slipping over the mound of slick clay until it becomes the oiled breast of a woman he never met.  A push of the thumbs and a nipple rises, erect, but still soft.  He closes his eyes and moisture gathers on his brow and, hastily, he flattens a palm over the offending appendage. 

Oh, but see, the mound elongates and the non Indian suddenly spies the two-spirit of his nonancestor.  A penis.  He drives his thumbs into the head of clay and a cup swirls effortlessly and he thinks, ah, the pot, I approach the cup, the center.  He cannot stop his hands from trembling and the virgin clay collapses in on itself.

By now his eyes have whitened and his underarms are damp and the aging woman potter with hair too permed and too frosted and too tired to find it’s way between anybody’s fingers steps near his right elbow and whispers “Oh, too bad.  It was coming up nicely, don’t you think?”

It takes a moment to understand what she is talking about–his first pot.  The class is over and he goes home and has his first wet dream in over 20 years.

He wants to forget but all week, between the first class and the second, his hands, like Adam and Eve, think only of fruit.  The serpent, the garden, everything he touches feels cool.  And damp.  Like a cave.  “Silly fricking class…” he mutters to his wife.  Too old, he tells his children.  And then he picks up his Sunday paper and reads about a mud slide in California and gets an erection.  Jesus, he thinks.  A doomed man.  A banker.

Week after week he goes back to the wheel, the clay, the hands holding and holding, to center the clay, his shoulders ache and he asks the teacher could he come in between classes. 

“Addicting, isn’t it.”  She nods, gives him a key.  To the classroom.

His shoulders widen.  His suit feels tight.  He ignores the secretaries, the tellers, the way they gape when he walks coat-less into the bank.  In his pants pocket, a zip-lock bag with a small hunk of wet clay that he pushes and pinches into a thousand different shapes even as he flips pages with clients to examine profit and loss.

Profit.

And loss.

He thinks that next winter, when all outside dissolves into icy white, he might try a sculpture class. 

 

“So, that was my dream.  I guess it’s like that for so many of them.  Probably we are so obsessed with sex because it is only an eyelash away from creation.  What do you think?”

Charles’ mouth is still sucking the cherry pit that, only a moment earlier, had been embedded in the womb of the fleshy cherry.  “I think you must be right.”

 

By Jamie | Posted in Short Fiction | Tagged , | Comments (0)