Archive for May, 2008

Girl on the Northern Range

Published by Jamie on May 29, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Our Straw Bale Project and Short Fiction. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

A guilt piece–I haven’t written in here for too many days.  I’ve ordered my blueberry plants and Saturday we leave for northern Minnesota to check out our land.  Here is a very autobiographical piece about growing up on the iron range of Minnesota.  This became a long series of “stories” that later I realized were very close to the bone for me.   Call it fiction.

Here it is.

Jamie

 Girl On the Northern Range

 

In the middle of the town square sat a chunk of taconite as tall as a tree.  It stood like a forward guard before the tiny string of shops that formed the main street and the downtown of Babbitt, Minnesota.  There was a Laundromat, cafe, grocery store, drug store, and post office-all in a single long building set off the main street.  The small mining community, folded deep in forest country just minutes from Canada, twisted out and around the jutting rock. 

  The chunk of rock had stood, silent gray sentry, since the early fifties when the humble potato field was laid flat and barren by cheerful yellow bulldozers.  Contractors opened veins in the earth and dropped in sewer systems and water lines, and concrete trucks with swirling bellies rumbled and growled, spitting out sidewalks and driveways.  Houses sprouted rapidly in small semicircles around larger semicircles until, from the air, the humble potato field looked like the patterned swirls of a fancy ceiling.  An elementary school was built, and a single strip of shops that housed a grocery store, a drug store, and one café. 

Young couples, blinking and shading their eyes, came to inspect the empty houses that stood waiting while realtors, working for the company, waved icons of security before the hopeful young men and women.  No crime, they said.  Superior schools, they said.  Job security, a place to raise a family, a chance at a new life, they said.  Papers were signed and keys distributed. 

The houses filled quickly with watery-eyed young women stroking swollen bellies.  The husbands became company men and carried their lunch in black tin boxes.  They stood on assigned corners at 6:30 a.m. or 3:30 p.m. and were swallowed alive by buses, digested daily by the taconite mine tucked up behind a hillside.

Taconite, a rough ore mined for the iron.  Tons and tons of earth gouged from the gentle, aching hillsides were dumped into an ear-shattering crusher (one of the largest in the world), as the iron ore, red as blood, was extracted from the earth.  The useless tailings left behind in lifeless gray-red mounds looked like fresh graves along the northern range.

Babbitt, cut and sewn from a single hastily-woven piece of fabric, was a postcard town plopped down in a hollow at the end of the civilized world.  It was cut off, isolated, as sterile as dental instruments lined up on a gliding tray.  There were no theaters, no bars, no shopping malls or traffic-and no tourists or travelers, and no strangers.  Those headed for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area never reached Babbit, but turned north two miles before on the highway to Ely.  In its raw, red-faced infancy there were also no old people, no teenagers, no divorces, no rich and no poor.  And there were no Black people and no Indians.  With ancestors from Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all inhabitants were as fair-faced as the blanket of winter snow.

It was to this bewildered wilderness that the children first opened their eyes. 

Sissy lived in a pale green house at 48 Garden Circle.  Her father built a stone step with black wrought-iron railings that made their house stand apart from the others so carefully placed along the semi-circle.  Sissy was a middle child, in the middle of the wilderness.  It was in this place that she first attempted to find her own outline, like a single tree against the sky, but when she looked about she could not see the tree for the forest was everywhere.  A strange wonder and a bewilderment set in. 

Although, at age seven or eight, there was no reason to believe herself different, still, something in Sissy felt foreign and apart.  Alone.  It came to her at odd moments, unexpected, like a secret, like when she would tumble onto her back in the dry, crisping grasses of autumn edging the forest and the full wide blue of the sky would instantly steal away her age.  It spoke to her in the tongues and mantras of ancient prophets and seers.  “Look here”, it would chant, “I am your looking glass.  As big as I am . . . so are you.” 

A holiness and a wonder would fill her tiny spirit and lift her into a blue baptism of ecstasy and sky and then, when she could stand it no longer, she would roll over onto her belly and be equally awed by the sandy scent of the earth as it withdrew from summer.  Finally, her senses drunk and reeling with autumn gods come alive, Sissy would race down the ditch toward home, stop, and approach the house cautiously.  So carefully would she fold the blue-sky spirit, like a tablecloth, and tuck it away, and only then enter the house. 

The house was noisy.  And stale.  It smelled of furniture polish and diaper pails.  Little boys squalled needfully and older sisters whined and fussed at each other and at nothing.  The television squawked and clamored in a broken language, certainly not the language of wind in the trees and skies that speak.  She felt like autumn itself, pulling in all of its life-giving forces, tucking its roots, curling its leaves.

Sissy did her chores without words.  She tended to little boy runny noses, socks stuffed into corners, and white metal kitchen cabinets smeared grimy with finger prints.  Every moment was a forever, a waiting she could scarcely endure, but did.  Out of doors, they played on without her, the trees and skies and songs on the wind, and it was not easy, this waiting.

There were so many things that Sissy did not understand.  She did not understand about hard wooden school desks and sitting still.  Or about gray buses that shoveled up fathers on street corners every morning and afternoon.  And she didn’t understand uninspired women with swollen bellies wandering from one kitchen table to another in houses so all-the-same that you never need ask where’s the bathroom, or where’s the light switch?  And she really didn’t understand Sunday mornings and chapel caps and genuflecting and black robes and strange melodic masses that didn’t sound at all like the sky, but were called God.  It was these things she didn’t understand that made her feel alien and foreign somehow.  These things were not like the things that she did understand; the things that happened out there, on the edge of the world.

She understood the woods.  She understood that if she ran a certain way through the underbrush, with a certain understanding, she could run real fast and never be switched with a branch or tumbled by a root or jutting log.  But she had to run a certain way, like all of her parts were loosely assembled and separate from one another, and yet together.  When she ran like that, she ran like a deer runs or like a wolf runs.  She also understood that she must stay in the little woods because she was little.  The big woods went on to forever once you crossed the skinny stream, skinny as an old brown pencil, connecting two muddy ponds.  The big woods were for bears and big things.  The big woods would swallow a little girl like her, and this she understood and respected.

And the icy spring-fed Birch Lake in summer-that she understood, respected and loved.  Those iron-rich brown waters would envelope her heated skin with a shock and a jolt like memories leaping from nowhere.  Sissy loved to swim way out and lay on her back-unresisting, sinking, until inches of water lay over her like translucent, textured glass.  In this place, with the bright skies blurred yellow and blue, and all sounds muted and drowned, then she would feel in her right place. 

Always she sought a better match mate than the even rows of houses lined up like teeth on gums in obsessive half-circles.  Inside her was a great, stretching hungry mouth that wanted to bite down hard on something.  Anything.  So when her mother gathered her brood and walked down past the chunk of taconite to the town library it was like that mouth had found, at last, its desired food.  Books; forests on shelves, introductions to other places, far away places, and people, like her, people not content with four walls and sameness and steady, expected trails going nowhere.  But the feast of books, rather than filling her, fed only her appetite and made the mouth inside link up to a great empty belly, ravenous and greedy, and aching.   

To satisfy the hungry thing, she went more and more often to the great stands of pine, birch, and maple to listen.  She found dry, rocky places filled with scraggly raspberry bushes and tasted the tiny red jewels, or sat in the sodden lower areas and looked, eye-to-eye at blueberry bushes, their berries glowing like deep blue pearls. 

She was a quiet child, well mannered, and shy, and did as she was told.  She sprinkled the laundry with a pop bottle corked by a metal cap full of tiny holes.  Carefully, she sprinkled, rolling each piece and tucking it into a plastic bag with the other damp-smelling shirts and sheets and dish towels.  She did not ask why or verbalize these foreign things, these rough pine-bark, high-sky things to anyone.  She didn’t know the words to speak.  She didn’t know the words. 

Then, slowly, there opened a great space between the things she understood and the things she did not understand and she stood puzzled, chewing a single fingernail, between a grand stand of forest and a pale green house on Garden Circle and, try as she might, Sissy could not reconcile one with the other.  Confusion descended like a veil or thin membrane that made all things difficult to see and understand.  A ragged whispering began in her head and continued from day into night and night into day and it spoke to her of the world.  She listened, a barren dry kind of listening, not understanding, or not wanting to understand.  The skies grew silent.  The trees stood tight together and seemed to exclude her.  She turned away.   

The chasm widened and the spell of blue-pearl berries, big woods and tall golden grasses became like bright, wild eyes that, giving a final look, blinked heavy-lidded, closed, and drew a blanket around her youth.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blunt Force Impact

Published by Jamie on May 14, 2008 in Essays, On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , .

This was written a few months after my first husband, Wayne, was killed in a plane crash.  I did not post one of the later edited versions because I decided I like the first version better–raw and to the bone. 

Blunt Force Impact

I can’t find the top of my bedroom dresser again. Flat surfaces don’t stay flat in my life. Deciding it’s a good day to clear it, I empty the tissue paper out of a shoebox and start with one thing empty. I begin picking though the contents and realize that the pile is a collage that represents my life these past two months. It’s not all my stuff. There are two movie stubs, my husbands. He usually goes to the movies alone-a voracious appetite for Hollywood and I’m a picky eater. A boarding pass from Luthansa Air; in October we flew to Germany to interview a man with a deep soul and to experience Europe together for the first time. We landed in Frankfurt and took a train to Kufstein, Austria. I felt strangely at home there.
On the dresser is a single small, tan pebble with a lighter streak running through it. It looks like the tip of a finger. Dachau. I picked the pebble up at Dachau knowing full well it was probably a recent addition, hauled in with a load of rough gravel to keep the mud from seeping up. Atop my jewelry box is the small yellow booklet on Edith Stein, the Carmelite Nun who died at Dachau. The nuns have surrounded Dachau with prayer. We bought the German version of the booklet. Intention? To learn German.

I recognize that I’m distracting myself with this sudden need to clear my dresser top. I’ve just reserved a room in a motel at the top of Rimrock Highway in order to gather my focus to finish the final paper of my master’s program today. I asked for room number nine on the second floor. It’s the last room on the end near the rocky slate wall that rises above Rapid Creek. I can see number nine in my mind. I’ve been there three or four times already. It smells of dust and old carpet and some cheap deodorizer but it has no phone. It’s cheap. And except for the creek running below the rock wall, there is nothing to distract me. My paper is on “belongingness”. Ironic-that I retreat from my husband, my son, my eight-year-old granddaughter to write about belonging.

I sort the stray socks that have lost their mates, separating his from mine. There is a small leather box from India or Guatamala bought at a third world store to support the worker from other nations. It holds my favorite earrings, including the small dream catchers with colored metallic thread catching the dreams. More stones, from Vermont, gathered on walks in between learning sessions in structural thinking with the Fritz’s.

After Germany I drove from Philly to Vermont. It was in the old New England house serving as a conference center that the idea for my position paper came to me. I had not yet made the crossing between an old German man whose work is ancestral, almost Shamanic, dealing with the deep, hidden pools of family and the Fritz’s who deal only with structures. I felt out of it. I picked the fist-size stone up walking alone on the skinny, leafy, Vermont road while repeating a walking mantra to myself. Systems? Or structures. Does human behavior link to long ancestral lines, or internal structures? I resent being asked to choose. Why must I choose to belong? And at what price? This becomes the topic of my paper.

The lone socks on my dresser are mated once again; blue to blue, beige to beige, paired for life, until the next wash day, and then they risk separation once again.

The sand dollar on my dresser is from Orange County. That dollar, and some of the stones, are there by intention-for me to look at. When we came back from California last July, there were two sand dollars. On a beach outside of Santa Barbara I found a fresh sand dollar, before the gulls had plucked its center out. It was the first, perfectly intact sand dollar I’d ever found on all the beaches I have walked. I broke it trying to protect it so my granddaughter could take it to show and tell. The one on my dresser is the less than perfect one.

Belongingness sounds like a too simple topic for a final paper in a master’s program in Human Development, but it is the one I’ve chosen. Not belongingness so much as conscious belongingness. The paper is called a “position paper” and I find that ironic as well, that I should be asked to scan my studies and choose and defend a position. Conscious belonging is about gaining the freedom of self to not just blindly belong but to pick, choose, finger the cities of the self like the stuff on my dresser and decide what deserves care and attention-and what to discard. I tried hard to protect that sand dollar but ended up snapping it into two pieces.

Blind belonging.

The most curious item on my dresser is a small leather box. It’s a toy, probably 50 years old, a viewfinder complete with the small round cards. I can’t figure out how it came to be on my dresser. I didn’t put it there. Usually, it’s tucked high up into the closet; it may be an antique so nobody is allowed to play with it. I take it out of the box. The plastic is that heavy dark plastic. I slip in a card at random and click through the Sonoran Desert, fascinated by the 3-D effect. I stop on a Joshua tree, looking at how it reaches upward, like most living things, especially plants. I met my husband in the desert lands around Tucson and so always have a special fondness for things of the desert. Once we spent the drive between Tucson and Phoenix creating a joke book we called Saguaro Psychology. We personified each Saguaro and gave it a caption.

I put the viewfinder back up in the closet and pick up a book of poetry by Rilke. Poor, brilliant Rilke. I read an article on his life once. His mother lost a baby daughter and later named her son Ranier Marie after the dead daughter. My German teacher, who we interviewed in Germany, would see Rilke caught in the tangle of his mother’s grief and bravely bearing it for her. Belongingness.

I think back to Germany, to Bert’s living room. He is 76 and had just had knee surgery and would lunge his body into the couch so that his legs would land propped on two giant pillows. He would grin every time. To his left was what looked like a giant piece of orangish quartz lit from within by a small bulb. Salt, he said, from the mine at Bertesch Gaden.

Salt. I wanted to lick it like a deer in a meadow. He wouldn’t have minded, I’m sure. Instead I politely and discretely wet my finger on my tongue, rubbed it across the salt lamp, and put the finger back in my mouth. Salt. Bert grinned again, his understanding allowing plenty of room for common curiosity. Later, his wife gave us a small glass jar filled with broken chunks of the stony salt and told us to fill it with water and mix ½ teaspoon a day with water and drink it. The molecules match those of the body, she said. It heals.

When a mind closes around “positions” that don’t align with the current belonging, the current group, we lose out on wide, awakening variety, of not licking a chunk of salt because who would want to risk such social error. If I were back in Bert’s living room, I would flatten my tongue on that chunk and damn the consequences. Out in my living room I have a smaller version of Bert’s lamp that we bought for 22 euros in Bertesh Gaden. I can lick that one whenever I like but, oddly, I haven’t. I only want to lick his, at that precise moment in time.

My position is that we should not be so quick to defend a position. If I fix my eye too firmly on one position, I go blind to all others. I lose fluidity. I lose my right to change. I lose my heart.
I wonder. Had I known I was going to write about my dresser top this morning, would I have paid closer attention? For instance, I can’t recall the movies he saw. I looked, but I didn’t see. I didn’t know I’d be asked, an hour later, to recall it. I want to say Bowling, which would be short for Bowling for Columbine. He saw that in downtown Manhattan a month ago. There should be three stubs that say Bowling because the next day we both went to the matinee. There is a theme in the things on my dresser top and, perhaps, in the things I only imagine are there, like three stubs for Bowling for Columbine. The shootings at Columbine School are about belongingness-or not. Inclusion. Exclusion.

Suddenly, I remember what else was on my dresser top. Two photos. Just remembering them crashes me back into early September. September 4.

The first photo is a long, horizontal picture of my 17-year-old daughter, Lisa, at the wheel of her car. Her smile is big. She has a fabulous smile. Her left arm is extended straight out the window, her wrists circled with two blue bands of uncertain material. With attitude, that arm says. Behind her, a giant, cloud layered sky.

The second photo also has sky, bare of clouds this time. A steel power line structure takes the center of the photo like a giant. And on the earth below, tattered, scattered, and burned is a single engine Cessna belonging to my first husband, the father of my three children. Lisa’s dad. It’s a newspaper clipping that reads, “Local men dead after air crash. Near I-94 in central North Dakota.

The two pictures are incongruent, out of synch. When I called Lisa in the middle of the night to tell her that her father was dead, she screamed. As she screamed, her sister came in the door of her apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska, and they screamed together. I could hardly breath, listening to them scream with me a fucking nine hours away and my son still asleep in his bed in the sunroom.
I realize that my failure to remember these two pictures sitting on my dresser top while I ruminate about stones and sand dollars is my mind’s effort to shield me from this memory, of my children crying and their blade-sharp question, “Do you think he loved us? Really?”

The social scientist, Kurt Lewin said it is not belonging but our own uncertainty of belonging that makes us vulnerable. Rilke writes,

Finally, using both my eyes
I close my face,
And when it lies with its weight in my hand
It looks almost like rest.
That’s so they won’t think I have nowhere
To lay my head.
Blunt force impact. I will despise those words forever.

Later, my children went with their uncle to the site of the crash and threw carnations of all colors gathered from memorial mourners over the site. And then they dirtied their hands with soot and soil, digging like archeologists in search of any sign of him. My eldest filmed the scene which ended with my 17-year-old son washing a chunk of metal that looked like a sculpture of cumulus nimbus clouds. A piece of engine melted from form . . . to formless. His back is to the camera, he squats, dipping the metal in a stock pond on a piece of prairie outside of Bismark, North Dakota. In front of him, an incredible sunset swallows his hurt, taking it back to the earth.

Suddenly, I understand why my dresser top got so piled up these past two months. I don’t know where to put all the things it contains, how to assimilate, integrate–how to fit each item into the greater soul of my life. I can’t file and tuck these things away-and I can’t get rid of them either.

I think again about the position paper, of my tasteless motel room waiting for me at the top of Rimrock where I will go and sit cross-legged on a blue bedspread for the next twenty-four hours and write about belonging-or not; about conscious belonging-or not.

For Wayne

Published by Jamie on May 13, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 1 Comment .

This time of the year I often think of my first husband, Wayne Christopherson.  We met out at Sylvan Lake in 1976.  I was the hostess out there and he was a Grey Line Bus driver.  He was so tall and young and gangly and his smile was always wide and real.  He loved driving those tourists around the Black Hills.  A favorite story of his was when he had a load of tourists and was about to take them through one of the thin tunnels along the Needles Highway.  He loved doing an “ah shucks” farm boy laugh and telling them that it was his first time taking a bus through that tunnel and he sure could use their help.  If you have ever taken a car through one of those tunnels, you would understand his odd sense of humor.  You would never, ever think a bus could make it unscathed, and the tourists instantly became back seat drivers. 

Wayne and I got to be friends but not too “friendly”.  I was in my third year of college just busting my butt trying to make enough money to finish the final year.  As it happened, I made and saved every penny and decided to have some fun.  The next winter I took my hard-earned savings and went to study in Oxford, England for two trimesters.  That trip was definitely one of my “rites of passage”.  I can still remember landing in that foreign country alone, knowing no one, finding everything from the money to the transportation so unfamiliar I barely made it from London to Oxford by train.  Those 6 months were an incredible experience for me.  When I flew home in June, I think I had 80 cents in my pocket and no prospects.  I called Sylvan Lake again and my old boss had filled all but some waitress positions.  I grabbed it and went back to the Hills for the summer.  (I am originally from Cass Lake, Minnesota.)

 It was kind of a come down to go from running the dining room to being “just a waitress”.  I was older than most of the kids working there and lonely.  Wayne was no longer driving bus, but one day he and a friend of his wandered in for lunch.  I was so happy to see him that he must have thought he won the lottery.  We dated through the summer, got engaged at Thanksgiving, and married the following Memorial Day Weekend (1977) one week after my college graduation.

I moved permanently to the Black Hills.  Wayne had just bought a house, and I was so thrilled to at last have a home of my own.  I planted a luscious garden, hunted for work, painted walls, wallpapered, stripped ugly cupboards, and generally settled into the married life.  It was not a marriage made in heaven but, on looking back, it gave us both what we were looking for at the time.  And better yet, it gave us three of the most incredible children I could have ever wished for.  They are so smart and beautiful and warm-hearted-my gifts from Wayne, and I so honor him as the bearer of those gifts.  The second gift Wayne gave me was my current husband, Milt. (Yes, that is a long, interesting story.)   Wayne and Milt were friends, and I can remember Wayne telling me that I was just going to “love” his new friend-because we were so alike.  When Wayne and I split, it was to go to other, more compatible unions. 

His birthday was the 9th of May (he would have been 55 this year).  And our anniversary would have been the 28th of May.  It just does not seem possible that he’s no longer with us.  Sometimes I dream that I see that long, lanky form coming through the door again, smiling that smile. 

 One September day almost five years ago, he and Chuck, his number one guy, were flying a small plane along a powerline in North Dakota and the plane crashed.  Both were killed instantly.  Wayne was 49 years old. 

 This is already a long post, so tomorrow I’m going to post a piece I wrote after his death.  It is called “Blunt Force Impact”.  This will be my little memorial to a great guy who did a lot of wonderful things for people.  Where ever he is, I hope he gets this message of gratitude from me.  We had our differences, Wayne, but we were completely together in our love for our children.  This November your son is getting married—and I so wish you could be here. 

 Good night.

 Jamie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On This Mother’s Day

Published by Jamie on May 11, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

We had a wonderful Mother’s Day today.  Milt and I took some time off and drove over to Devil’s Tower in eastern Wyoming to help a friend celebrate the release of her new book (Standing Witness by Jeanne Rogers).  As you go west outside of Spearfish, the land is so beautiful it never fails to take my breath away.  There are red earth cutaways, rolling low mountains leading up to the Bear Lodge Mountains and then-Devil’s Tower.  The only place that even comes close is those beautiful Badlands that I have been driving through twice a week for the past nine months. 

Milt drove, I built Bead People and we talked all the way over there.  It feels like after several weeks of trying to define what we want to do with our eclectic websites, we finally had a break through and the vision cleared.  We decided we need to put a divider between our creative selves and the website that offers those creative works to others (otherwise known as ‘the business’).  Our plan is to create a very simple publisher’s site that offers books, CDs, and films (all downloadable) with some teacher-friendly lesson plans for each piece.  We also recognize that all of the material we produce is heart-friendly, spirit-friendly and earth friendly.  Bit by bit we will upload the many voices of Indian Country that we have collected over the years as well as material on the family, on health, on sustainable living and all that jazz.  It will take some time but we’ll manage it.

But tonight, I want to talk about something else besides Mother’s Day or our constantly looping plans.  For the past year I have not been able to attend my favorite writer’s group, The Bear Lodge Writers of Sundance, WY.  I was several years in their midst on a twice monthly basis.  In that time I grew as a writer so much.  So many nights I risked a new piece (or an old piece) on this group with a quivery voice only to finish and have them  offer such encouragement that I began to think I really could do this writing thing.  They saw me through the writing and publication of Washaka, and celebrated with me when it began to do well.  Today, I even saw a space on the bookshelf at Devil’s Tower that had been reserved for an order of my book. 

Early on in my life I needed groups that offered a more therapeutic support for who I was becoming.  That was good and useful in its time, but I realize more and more that we all need a circle of support for our creative development.  Risking the creation of something new in the world is like having a baby-it sometimes feels painful, awkward, and even life-threatening.  We need a birth coach to progress during the uncertain times of new creation because we are all mothers at this time, male and female alike.  And if we are coaching that other mother in creating the new thing, we need to coo and ooh over the infant creation, and we need to hold its head firmly as it gains strength. 

Today feels more like Thanksgiving to me.  I feel like giving thanks to all who have been such a part of my life.  There are no words adequate to describe the gifts and gifts that have been given with no request for a return gift.

I hope you all had as wonderful a day as I had.  Find or form your own creative group and give no more time to the angst and negativity that seems to surround us like a storm.  The sun is still shining.  Always.

School is over for the summer and my plan is to take a long, cool drink at my own creative fountain. 

Jamie

My Aunt Carol

Published by Jamie on May 7, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It has been awhile since I posted any fiction.   I clicked through files and found this story.  It has never been published but it did find an interesting home.  In the nineties when Milt and I were producing radio documentaries, we decided to do a documentary on the human heart-is it just a biological pump . . . or something more?  While deciding the approach, we thought it would be fun to weave ordinary documentary material with fiction, and I chose this story to use as a backdrop for the documentary called “You Got to Have Heart”.  It is still probably one of my favorites of all the documentaries we produced during that time.  We had some fun with composed music, poetry, fiction plus real interviews with heart transplant patients, the doc who first performed a heart transplant using a machine instead of a real heart.  The show aired nationally on PRI on Valentine’s Day.  You can still get it on a CD or (soon) as a download.  Go to www.oyate.com and visit the store to find it. 

 Be sure to leave a comment or sign up to get this blog.  It keeps me writing to know people are actually reading it.  JL

 My Aunt Carol

 ”Oh, you know how your Aunt Carol is . . . ”

I was twelve the first time my mother said that to me, like I really did know. Or like I possessed a wisdom beyond my years or something.  I did not know how my Aunt Carol was.  Not then anyway.

Aunt Carol lived in Santa Fe in one of those old adobe houses just a few blocks from the main plaza.  Mom was worried about her poor sister in Santa Fe, so we went to visit her, just mom and me.  It was my first trip out of South Dakota so I was pretty excited. Anything past Newcastle, Wyoming was “the big world.”  You see, at twelve, I had this lump in my middle; I mean, it wasn’t a real lump, not like a hunchback’s lump or anything, but it was a thing buried down there somewhere and I could feel it.  It made me hungry all the time for wanting to know about stuff.  So when my mom said “You know how you’re Aunt Carol is.” I checked the lump to see did I know?  What did I know?  What should I know?  I really wanted to know.

Aunt Carol was selling her furniture and most of her belongings.  Mom’s cousin called in early May from Los Alamos-that’s where they made the Bomb, you know.  Anyway, the cousin visited Auntie, learned about the selling of the furniture and the belongings, and called my Mom IMMEDIATELY because she thought my Mom should know what Carol was up to NOW.

On the trip to Santa Fe, Denver was my favorite.  It showed up all smeary and gray with cars and city scattered everywhere like a lost monopoly game.  The whole world was so buried in clouds that I couldn’t even see the Rocky Mountains until Denver was already behind us.  Then, all of a sudden, we flopped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS.  I almost cried, the lump hurt so hard.  But I didn’t want Mom to think I was like her sister or something so I pretended I wasn’t even very impressed when we just dropped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS. 

I tried to get it out of my Mom.  “What’s wrong with selling your furniture?”  Mom had that pinched, whitish look when I asked that, her eyes squinting and red lipstick bunching together making her lips look as thin as fingernail cuttings.

“Your Aunt is very peculiar, dear, a dreamer . . . ” and then her sentence just dropped like dust onto the dashboard.

Oh sure, well that explains everything, I thought.  I’m not usually sarcastic but her answer made me crazy.  I didn’t know much about my Aunt.  I knew she had done a lot of neat things like gone to college, traveled through Europe, got married, got divorced.  “What does Aunt Carol do for a living?” I asked Mom.  The question sounded absurd to me.  We were south of Colorado Springs now.  The thing that seemed absurd was the way adults say “for a living” and here I was, twelve years old, and saying it myself like it was a sacred mantra or like it meant something to me.  Do for a living.  It sounded sort of once removed from life, like when somebody says “her cousin, by marriage” as a way of letting you know they are not REALLY related.  That was how “for a living” sounded to me and yet here I was asking my Mom what Aunt Carol did “for a living”.

Mom wasn’t much for talking right then.  She just sort of stared and drov and drove and stared.  I felt like we had separate rooms and she had her door closed, so I read a book, felt for the lump, and wondered exactly HOW peculiar Aunt Carol was going to be.  I secretly hoped she would be VERY peculiar so I could be like Mom and say how very peculiar my Aunt Carol is.  That would be something.  I have a peculiar Aunt who lives in Santa Fe without any furniture. 

Maybe I needed something out of the ordinary or maybe it was the lump in my middle that made me feel so peculiar.

Soon we mounted Raton Pass like it was a pony and tumbled down toward Santa Fe.

Santa Fe was something; all the streets named “Calle” instead of regular street names like Oak or Maple.  And no sharp corners on the buildings, just round adobe edges like castles in beach sand.  Even the shabby tumbling adobes looked like they belonged there, not like you should toss a little gasoline on them and remove them like the wobbly wood houses in my hometown.  Mom surprised herself by finding Aunt Carol’s place without getting horribly lost. 

Mom and Aunt Carol hugged and laughed and cried and spun little circles on the stoop of Carol’s adobe.  I was surprised.  I really expected my Mom would be much more reserved around such a peculiar person, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all.

Aunt Carol didn’t know about the cousin informant or that my Mom already knew about the missing furniture.  Evidently, Aunt Carol had taken up collecting pretty old furniture and antiques years earlier and had quite a collection before she decided to sell it all.  But I had been instructed to not SAY A WORD about the furniture.  (Mom’s can be so peculiar sometimes, weaving a lie just so.)  Anyway, I was naturally dying for them to stop hugging and crying and get on with it.  Finally we got our bags from the trunk and went into Carol’s house.

My mother seized the moment.  “Carol.  My God.  What has happened to all your beautiful furniture???”  I grinned.  I couldn’t help myself-the lump was giggling.  (I was beginning to think of it as a friendly sort of tumor.) As for myself, I was disappointed.  I’m not sure what I expected but it wasn’t this.  There was, well, no furniture, not that her living room was empty.  Not at all.  There just wasn’t anything regular like you expect to see when you go into an ordinary old living room.

 Carol grinned at me (why did she grin at me?) and winked.  I felt like I had snuck in and sold her furniture myself.  Aunt Carol looked at my mom and said, “I sold it, Beth.”

That was all she said.

“But why?  Why would you sell all those lovely old pieces?”

I finally really looked around.  I didn’t know what she sold but  I thought what was left looked better than most anything I’d ever seen.  The floors were wood, shiny as marbles, with thick, velvety rugs everywhere that had flowers and fancy designs dancing around their borders.  Giant colorful pillows were stacked in one corner around a low table with a glass top (the ONLY piece of furniture in the room).  Above us, a cloth fan-folded screen drifted down from the ceiling and almost hugged the low table.  There were no lamps except for ghostly white paper globes, three of them, each a different size.  I say ghostly not because they were white paper but because they were so light they looked like chubby angels flying above us, still swaying from when we came in the door. 

That was about it.  A few pictures on the walls and, oh yeah, two other things.  One was a painted wooden carousel horse that, had I been six and not twelve, I would have already been on its back riding like the wind.  The other thing was a large painter’s easel that held a huge canvas filled with flowers. 

It stopped me.  That painting.  I could almost smell those flowers and it made the lump ache awful to look at them.  I wanted to pluck a flower from that beautiful, ironed-flat garden, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.  Carol, my most peculiar Aunt, was looking my way out of the corner of her eye, smiling while she talked patiently to my Mom.  I got the feeling that she saw the lump and maybe wanted to paint it or something. 

I didn’t know my peculiar Aunt was a painter.  I was a painter.  Or at least I secretly dreamed about being one.  I could remember my first box of crayons like it was yesterday, each waxy stick glowing hot like colored candles.  My Aunt Carol watched me, still smiling, and then she turned back to my Mom. “Oh, Sis, that old furniture didn’t mean anything to me anymore.  That’s all.  And I needed the space to do my painting.  This isn’t a very large house, you see, and all those heavy dark things were so . . .  so heavy I couldn’t breathe.”

“But, Carol, what did you DO with it all?”

“I sold some.  Gave some away.  You know.”

Now my Aunt was saying, “You know” to my mother as if she did know.  She didn’t know.  I could tell by the way her face moved against itself like a lake in a storm.   She definitely did not know!  But what I didn’t know was why Mom looked so pinched and why Aunt Carol looked all lit up like there was a candle behind each eye.  Shining.  That was what I wanted to find out about my Aunt Carol.  Mom couldn’t get her mind off what was missing long enough to notice what was there.  When Carol and my Mom went into the kitchen to drink tea and “get to the bottom of this,” Carol took her garden painting off the easel, handed me her pallet and brush, placed a small stretched white, whiter than snow canvas on the easel, winked again, and said, “Here baby, have some fun.” 

         *              *               *

 I’ve been looking for My Aunt Carol all my life but, instead of an easel with a glorious flower garden splattered and taking root on a canvas, I have a neat, tight-assed little computer, a Papermate pen, and reams of paper painted in ink and pink and purple and blue and black and every bit as beautiful as my Aunt Carol’s canvas. 

It’s the Gypsy in me.  I must have been a Gypsy in a past life because, sometimes, I forget that I’m not in this lifetime.  When she visits me, I’m older than time, younger than a minute.  If not constantly vigilant, I could mistake my Suburu wagon for a Gypsy caravan and find myself loading it with a few pots and pans, a set of tarot cards, writing a bad check, and off I go. 

The first time the Gypsy came I was in college killing myself to make enough money to deserve to be there. Unfortunately, I discovered that Highway Two runs not only through Bemidji, Minnesota but keeps on going all the way to the west coast until it reaches the Puget Sound.  This was a perilous discovery. 

How about it?  Pretend I don’t know I am a student, tuition paid by pushing drinks in a supper club filled with people floating around the bar like amoebas in a primordial sea that smelled strangely of Miller Beer?  Simply forget?  Become a Gypsy in a greenish-blue Buick speeding toward the Puget Sound?  Couldn’t get lost if I tried?  The map promised that-an invitation out of lake country.  The Gypsy read my palm and promised me a long loose life if I followed that single line west-all the way west. 

Of course, I never did.  I never followed Highway Two all the way to the Puget Sound.  I was a responsible student, after all, sitting in intro to education classes with puffed up professors declaring that I would soon hold the youth of America in my hands, the power to mold the young minds of the future.  Ha!  What Gypsy, running west with bangle earrings and inner voices could lure me from such a noble path?  I ignored her and she slept like Van Winkle for a hundred years.

A second Gypsy invitation came years later in Colorado, while stuck on a prairie with car trouble, three kids, and a husband who thought my name was “Whythehelldidn’tyou?”  When we finally made it off the stark yellow prairie to a hotel room, the television lulled the stretched-tight rubber band family back into shape.

I went for a walk down a concrete sidewalk thinking about whether to step on the cracks or not, and whether it would do any good or not.  Now that I was a mother, I considered these things more carefully.  I thought I wanted only a cup of coffee, a short respite from the kids, but somewhere along that sidewalk she jumped out of the covered caravan of my mind and joined my walk. 

“We could walk across Colorado” she said. “To the mountains.  To the sea. 

“You mean not go back to that hotel room.  Not go back to him?” I queried. 

“Yeah, I mean not go back.” 

I was shocked, naturally.  My heart began beating rapidly, and I shivered.  She went for me then. 

“You know all those people who just disappear?  They aren’t lost.  They know where they are.  You would know where you were, too.  Maybe for the first time ever, you would know.  Even if nobody else did!”

I got hot.  And then I got cold.  Would he report me as a missing person?  Would he even notice me missing?  True, it was a miserable life I was leading.  Who could blame me? But would they spend forever wondering was I alive, dead, disappeared?

That time it was short, chubby little arms that reached out a great distance to pull my ears and grab my hair.  He was only two, my son.  Somehow that two seemed more powerful than a Highway named Two.  I never thought of fate as having little fat pudgy hands and fingers that, had I left, would have clutched at me until forever was over.  So there you are.  No Gypsy–and no Aunt Carol. 

Although later I did unload most of the furniture, and him, (my husband, not my son) and invited the Gypsy to bring her computer and tambourine and come live with us.  She hangs out in the kitchen before a bright white stretch of countertop like a short road, and dreams about the sea while watching the apple tree bud, bloom, bear, drop, and rot, only to start all over again.  She never lets me forget that she is near. 

 

 

creative, generative, colorful, exciting, zesty, juicy, visionary, joyful plans

Published by Jamie on May 6, 2008 in Bead people, Indian Country, On Becoming Human and Writing. 1 Comment .

Tonight I realized that a single comment from a reader motivates me to continue writing in this “virtual” kitchen.  That is how I think of it.  You and I have just sat down with a cup of coffee or tea and we get to talk together about life.  Anyway, thanks for writing Renee. 

 I have been in such a mind tornado lately, trying to make good decisions about the future, trying to see INTO the future.  It doesn’t work for me.  One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that my body is a better director than my mind.  The other day I just got tired of thinking and so I re-entered the novel I began last summer but never got back to after school started.  It is called “Still Mountain” and is placed in the same world as an earlier novel called “Silver”.  Still Mountain is the center and the source of all stories.  My characters are all caught in a story world, in a world where stories come alive.

I think about what the yogis say about Shiva.  Shiva opens his eyes and the world springs into existence-Shiva closes his eyes and it is gone.  As soon as I opened my notebook and re-entered my earlier story, all else disappeared from view.  I love that feeling.   My life is good and I wouldn’t change anything, but the story world is . . . wow.

This past week has been so sweet.  The other day a Lakota woman, my Elder, suggested that I should write a book about me.  I laughed a little and said there is nothing special about me or my life.  She said, “But you give us so much.  You make it okay for us to open.”  Then she explained that trusting a white person is difficult-but not with me.  She almost made me cry.  I hugged her and told her she had just given me a great gift.  I never, ever want to see color first and the human heart second.  She confirmed for me that I am seeing correctly.

Then this morning Milt and I did another Bead People session at the 9th Grade Academy.  The students there are doing a special give-away at the end of the year-everybody in the school and all supporters will get a Bead Person and the little Wind book.  What is so stunning to me is that these students have been placed in this school because they struggle in the mainstream educational system, but you should see them with the beads.  I set out large trays of beads and give them wire and tools and it is like a reverse cyclone.  All the dispersed energy of the room pulls itself toward the center and . . . the hands are busy building Bead People.  I guess that is one reason I love building the Bead People myself.  It forces me to leave my head and get into my hands and body.  If you are not familiar with this project, check out www.thebeadpeople.org on the web.  You may even have to try it.

I am a bit all over the map tonight but it feels good.  I have just a few more tests to give and then we have potluck good-byes (a tradition for final classes at OLC).  Then I am free for the summer.  Naturally, I have a list as long as my arm of things I want to do but number one is to get back to writing practice.  Nothing can happen in storyland unless I put pen to paper and see what will emerge.  Some writers plot things out ahead of time and make intricate outlines.  Me?  I walk out onto the diving board . . . a take a plunge. 

And oh, I am ready for a plunge.  The deeper the waters, the better. 

I hope you are all entering this fine spring with your own creative, generative, colorful, exciting, zesty, juicy, visionary, joyful plans.  Just set the hum drum aside for a few hours a day and enter the new land and see what might emerge. 

Goodnight my friends.

Jamie

 

 

 

 

Semester’s end . . .

Published by Jamie on May 1, 2008 in Essays, Indian Country, On Becoming Human and The Education Crises. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I am sitting out in Kyle, SD on the Pine Ridge Reservation watching a spring blizzard move in.  So strange–I could be home with my husband, warm and cozy.  We have meetings (maybe?) tomorrow and so I stayed here in the motel.  We have one more week of our semester at Oglala Lakota College and I have been testing students all week.  It is so strange–we have worked hard together all semester and I have seen them gain confidence, find their stride, and make great advances in learning how to learn.  I love it–and I hate that some “national” test gets to decide their fate and not me, their teacher. 

I can’t even imagine what the repercussions of this “test them” mentality will do on real learning.  At a time when we need to be showing people the power of creating and learning–we put them in a box instead.  It upsets me.  Sometimes I wish I could care less–how is that for a goal?  I know, it wouldn’t be me and it wouldn’t make any sense. 

On the other hand, I had a bunch of my “rapper” type students who sometimes smell like pot and who sometimes can’t make class pass through to the upper English class.  For each one, I put an ‘A’ on their test paper, shook their hands, and congratulated them. 

If I had my druthers (is that really a word?), I would re-write school like I have been re-writing my novel.  I would look for the most exquisite combination of creation, learning, energy work, challenge etc, etc.  I would make students plant gardens, test soil, make art and music, study only what interests them greatly.  I would not be a wise guy at the front of the room with a condescending attitude and a superior stick up my you know what. 

Guess I needed a rant and I also needed to post something.  I did get through the final little tweaky changes for ONE DRUM so I can send it off to my agent tomorrow.  Only 100 pages of tiny edits left.

Good night, friends.

Jamie