Archive for the 'Writings by J. Lee' Category

Thanks to the person in Montreal, Canada. Not fiction–but truth.

Published by Jamie on October 2, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

The story, West Toward Berkley, is an autobiographical story about the principal in my high school.  The man was literally “bigger than life” and he inspired me and moved me and contributed to who I am today.  It is very gratifying to hear from readers who read my bits and pieces and recognize the truth of them.  In truth, his name was Red Benson.  I so honor this man for what he taught me and I hope others will see my post on this great man. 

True confessions.  Every word of this story was true.

 

Jamie Lee

West Toward Berkley, a short story

Published by Jamie on August 22, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 1 Comment .

 Jackie wanted someone to admire, someone wise and noble with qualities she could refashion like fine strands of silver and wear around her neck.  She lived on a reservation in northern Minnesota in the second poorest county in the nation and worked in a twenty-four hour restaurant/bus stop that served up lumpy potatoes with thick gravy to tourists and hot chili late at night to men who lined up at the counter and slurred their words and smudged chili over the counter-tops like children with finger-paints.  Only it was a greasy, reddish paint, a war paint, a paint that stained and smelled and made Jackie’s stomach uneasy. 

Sometimes, while walking home near midnight, she would stare down the deserted grubby main street and compose poetry in her mind.  She kicked at old wine bottles and crushed paper cups.

 Yellow trashcan

Tipped disconsolately

Disgorges its wealth

Upon the empty street. 

 

She stared up at the sky trying to see past the town, past the reservation, past the confines of her own seventeen years.  Milk white lamps stood useless sentry in rows along the avenue.  And when she couldn’t get past the weak glow of street lamps to the dark wide sky beyond, she tried instead to open her belly and let the sky come to her. 

 

Lifeless neon

Calls to no one

No one answer. 

 

Something was blowing up inside of her, a mass or a tumor of emotion that needed to be bled off or poured into something worthy.  It made her silent and watchful.  It made her want to finger the faces of the townsfolk, to crawl behind their eyes into complex optic networks and explore neural catacombs and pathways.  She listened, wanting to reach past greasy insides to feel a heart.  Was it pumping?  Throbbing?  Alive? 

She went to school, went to work, went home.  She went to parties and pretended to join tribal dances around beer kegs on deserted beaches where young warriors honored the sky with thin sticks of marijuana and peace pipes full of hashish.  Even here she tried, working hard, to learn the mathematics of human existence. 

But it never added up.  Not in the early seventies.  Vietnam, the American Indian Movement, drugs, education, parents, values–do what I say and not what I do.  Finally she chicken-scratched with a dark lead pencil every wrong answer and found only that she had no respect.  None. Finally, bloated and thick with anger and not understanding, she became a child activist showing up at city council meetings, racial forums, writing pieces for the school paper, speaking loud and out and waiting to see what happened.  Nobody paid much attention to a noisy child who partied and worked in a greasy spoon–except Smith.  Smith noticed.

Smith was a huge man, a giant of a man and the principle of Jackie’s high school.  “Smith” was his first name.  He was a white man with a gray fuzzy tangle of hair on his head and shoulders so broad they carried the whole school, teachers and students alike.  Smith didn’t mess around.  It was not unusual to see him strolling the halls of the high school with a smirk on his face as if he wished a fight would start so he could stop it.  And when a fight did start the huge bear of a man would grab a squirming ninth or tenth grader in each hand and hold them inches above the floor against the cold metal lockers and demand, “What is the problem here?  Is there a problem?”  The boys would shake their heads wildly, their feet dangling like horse-thieves beneath a rope.  The truth was, none of the kids wanted to risk attracting Smith’s attention.  Normally he was as gentle as a mamma bear with her cubs; playful, pawing, teasing, making even the poor reservation town a den of safety.  And he didn’t watch just the tough kids having tough times–he watched them all.  He watched Jackie. 

Of course there was much about Jackie that he saw but did not understand.  For instance, he didn’t know that the year before Jackie had decided to quit crying.  And since making that decision, she had only cried once.  Last September. 

True, it was a hard, sucking avalanche cry that took her breath and buried her momentarily.  Grandma Clara had a stroke and Jackie’s mom sent her to wait for the ambulance.  Something about seeing her great, huge grandmother’s form so still and helpless on the floor caught Jackie in the middle like a hard punch.  Clara, who grew bright finger carrots and let the kids pull them from the stubborn dark soil and wash them under the outdoors faucet, sweet and good.  Clara, who played 31 like a master, gathering grandchildren’s dimes in a neat pile with hands delicate and bluish and then, at the last minute, would go soft-hearted and give the dimes back.  Or Clara, who fingered holy beads with a whisper, her lips moving in long lines of Hail Mary, Mother of God.  Jackie did cry then.  When Clara hit the floor.  But that was the last time she cried.  

Not even when she visited Clara and hated the nursing home with its acrid smell and Clara, so thin now, would move the lifeless left arm by a bony wrist with the hand that still worked and lean over toward Jackie with a sagging mouth and ask, why?  Why has God done this to me?  Why?  Please tell me.  And Jackie had nothing to say about nothing and only made herself more determined to find out why, God.  Why? 

After that she also quit going to confession and stood firm like a warrior in spite of glaring looks as the congregation shuffled up to receive the body and blood of Christ every Sunday morning.  Confession, like tears, did nothing, as far as Jackie could tell.  Smith did not hear her swear silently that no more would she kneel to a God that had no ears or let the holy mass swirl around her like stinging hornets of fear and retribution.  These were the decisions she made as she scanned the world for what meant something. 

It was painful to be awakening and impotent at the same critical moment.  Idealism, wishful thinking, raced through Jackie like strong medicine and it didn’t seem fair that with the world marching on campuses, on the steps of the Whitehouse, in Georgia–she was trapped shuffling from typing to world history, mute and acquiescent.  So when students began donning black armbands and protesting Kent State, it was time.  She enlisted two friends, Dee and Wayne, and together they bought rolls of black crepe paper and typed up notices and snuck into the paper staff room and mimeographed half-page notices and wandered the halls slipping them to students both Indian and white.  It felt right, to do something.  Anything.   WE CANNOT LET THEM KILL US! Screamed the half sheet of paper, declaring that on Tuesday, at 2:00, the students were to rise from their desks, don the black arm band and leave the school to sit on the front lawn in protest of the police action at Kent State. 

It was important, she believed.  It was essential, she believed.  It was about speaking out, being heard, showing concern.  Probably everybody believed as she did, thought Jackie.  Probably the ones that really cared were just shy or uncertain.  Probably the 23 kids that showed up on the school lawn at 2:00 really did care about more than a lark on the lawn, a chance to dump last hour. 

And probably it was not apathy, but some heavier layer of belief, that made 20 of them scuttle back into the school the minute Smith stood on the steps and said “Git to class” in that big voice of his.  And maybe there was a reason that Smith dismissed Dee and Wayne with a glance and stood so long on the steps looking at Jackie like he was wondering what to do next and finally just said quietly, “When you are done, please come and see me in my office.” 

And when she sat in front of Smith’s desk with him towering over the whole room with its stacked desk, sagging bookshelves and a window that looked west toward Berkeley, it seemed to Jackie that his face was the center of a Mandela of high school talismans and she waited.  Unafraid.  She was prepared to pay a price for what she believed.

But she wasn’t prepared for Smith’s deep warm chuckle sprinkling out over her like warm rain and a voice as soft and tender as the wind in trees.  In fact, she would rather he picked her up and dangle her from a locker somewhere in a glossy hallway and not just sit there.  Silent.  Looking her in the eye as if she were his equal.  Respecting.  Her.  For that she was not prepared.  And the words that followed scattered her elementary mathematics like torn pages tossed.  “Why didn’t you come to me?” he said.  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about the students of Kent State.” he said.  “I would have helped you.”  And what he said next was like driving little dry sticks and pebbles down her throat because she knew he spoke the truth.  “Those others don’t care.  Don’t you see that?  They just wanted to skip out of school.  They don’t care, Jackie.  Do you understand?”

And she did understand but she didn’t want to understand and suddenly Jackie didn’t know then where she belonged because Smith did care.  That was what really struck her.  He did care.  And he was a big giant of a man and old, and she was a young wisp of a girl and intense and they sat across from one another and talked for a long, long time after school on Tuesday and when she left a strange, shaky feeling had formed in her middle and it may have been sadness or youth leaving or simply knowing she didn’t know anymore.

Two years later she was in college and heard about Smith’s stroke and that things had turned to shit at school.  The police spent noon hours walking the halls of the high school and the little man who had taken Smith’s place stayed in his office and tried to manage things from there.  Jackie went to the nursing home and found Smith in the physical therapy room doing rope exercises and he was still a big giant of a man in spite of the wheelchair and loss of speech.

When he saw Jackie his eyes twinkled and he would have chuckled that deep chuckle if he could have but instead he just raised a big trembling paw in her direction and she walked across the room and held the hand of a giant.  It was still a big, strong, honest hand in spite of the stroke and she was glad to hold it in both of her smaller hands.  She knew he could still hear and understand but that he wouldn’t be able to speak so she talked long in the safety of his silence.  There were things she wanted to tell him–things she wanted to tell herself.  That she had it figured out, that it made sense now, that she deserved his respect, but she was speechless, thoughtless, about these things.  Instead she talked about college, the snow on Diamond Point, how she liked to park her car on Lake Bemidji and walk to class and how many other campuses could boast a parking lot of ice?  But all the unspoken things gathered in her throat and stuck there and when she left there were only a few hard, river-rock tears that she wiped on her sleeve like a kid.

 

 

The Homestead

Published by Jamie on July 16, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Our Straw Bale Project, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 1 Comment .

Tonight the moon was almost full and shining red through the pines on the bit of earth in Northern Minnesota that we have recently tagged “our land” (although I still doubt that anybody can actually “own” such a thing).  We have been here for one week and the magical flow we discovered from the moment we decided to buy into these twenty acres continues. 

On our way out from Rapid City, SD, Milt and I were coming to terms with the fact that we probably would not have the expertise or resources to actually begin building our strawbale house.  On Tuesday we considered finding a camper or something more substantial than a tent to live in while we prepare our project.  On Wednesday we found two potential old campers, made an offer on one, hooked it to my brother’s truck, and pulled it to our homestead.  It is a 1966 Trailblazer and we bought it for $250.  By Thursday we had cleaned it, repaired some leaks, blocked it, and generally made it livable.  Now, a week later, we are sleeping like babies in our cozy bed and listening to all the night sounds with the breezes blowing across our faces.  Of course, we also do nightly mosquito checks to make sure none of the friendly (hungry) little buggers have followed us in the door.  

They have completely torn up the main street of Cass Lake.  Evidently the town received a major “Miracle” grant and is trying to bring itself back to life.  The main street will now be paved with bricks that, hopefully, will attract new businesses and energy.  I walked around down there today thinking about how busy it was when I went to high school here-two drug stores, three grocery stores, several bars, Two Traders, and the Five and Dime.  Now-not much. 

Not since I graduated from college and moved to SD (in 1977) have I spent this much time here.  I am feeling strange and adrift, as if my main street had been torn up and something new was about to replace it.  I am just not sure what.  Our small 8 x 18 foot trailer requires that we choose carefully what we “want” and then keep it in its right space.  The land makes me breathe more fully in a way that I haven’t in many years.  A few days ago I discovered one of the most beautiful wild blueberry patches I’ve ever seen-and it is right on our land.  The plants are loaded with green berries that begin to blush toward blue.  I go now every day to see how they are progressing and feel confident they will be ripe for me to pick before I have to leave.

All of this is making me feel oddly alive and young.  It makes me wonder what it was I was trying to accomplish-push, push, push.  Sometimes I have tried so hard to be “something” that I just forgot to “be”.

 Now I just want to be.

 So far this is the first writing I have done since we got here.  We were busy carving a small space for ourselves, nudging Mother Nature over just a bit.  Tonight was the first night I felt that peculiar itch I get to put words on paper (or my computer).  I am curious to see if I can find a new rhythm of writing AND being as we are here over the next two weeks.  We did set up to do The Bead People at the annual Rib Fest this weekend so that should be fun.  

 It has also been many years since I have lived close to so many family members again.  They keep popping in and out and bringing many gifts.  When I woke up this morning there was a small round table outside the trailer.  I didn’t see it but evidently my nephew, Ryan, found it at the recycling place and thought we might be able to use it.  He wrote his name with sticks to let us know he had left it.  And then tonight when I returned home from doing some other stuff, there was a bucket of newly-dug raspberry bushes beside my trailer-and a new metal plate replacing the hole in the floor near my front door.  Last night we were ferried over the lake by one brother so we could join another brother on Star Island while he tried out their new Snuba gear.  Snuba is a combination of snorkeling and scuba-a generator on a floating tire, two 40-foot hoses, mouth breathing gear and weights to help you explore the underwater world.  

 So, I am surrounded by gifts both from the earth and from family and friends.  Could it be that as I seek a simpler life, it will get richer in many other ways?  Probably.  I would certainly like to find out. 

 What a life.  And by the way, my 24 blueberry plants seem to be thriving and establishing new roots-just like us.  I think it will be hard to leave in two weeks and the only thing I will miss are a few trillion ticks and mosquitoes.

 More on our adventures to follow . . .

 Jamie   

 

 

 

 

God Night

Published by Jamie on June 24, 2008 in Bead people, Essays, On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I feel like I am coming home to myself at last.  I needed a bit of summer to restore my spirit.  Today I went to the park and built Bead People underneath a tree.  It is so strange how those little characters can restore my equilibrium.  The project itself is beginning to grow outside of my own creations.  My daughter, Nichol, has started the first outside Chapter of Friends of The Bead People in Lincoln, NE.  And, in typical Nichol style, she has created a beautiful, enchanted booth that makes me want to go to Lincoln and build a few just to sit inside of it.  She called the other night and told me that she had three blind people building bead people in her tent.  It was such a lovely image I nearly got teary-eyed.

It is strange how engaging such a simple project can be.  It reminds me that beads have been a part of every single human culture since the beginning of time.  They have been created from mud and glass and seeds and shells.  They have been used to adorn, as money, and of course, as gifts.  It must be embedded into our collective souls-this love of beads. 

Sadly, her partner Lynette, who is 7 months pregnant, has been told she needs to be on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.  Although I’ve never met her, her energy and enthusiasm for the Bead People has reached me from 11 hours away.  We will hold her in our thoughts and prayers.  Nichol also told me that she sent her husband home with a list of necessary items she would need for her hospital stay-and top of the list were her Bead People supplies. 

We are now inviting others to get involved.  You can see details and meet Nicci and Lynette at www.thebeadpeople.org.  In recent weeks we have had money donations for printing, bead donations from as far away as Australia, and several requests to get involved.  Two women at our own Journey Museum fell madly in love with The Bead People and I spent over an hour with them as they handled each little person in order to pick the ones they wanted for the gift shop.  I loved watching them play.

That is what the project is about.  It is play-with a mission.  It gives us a way to sit around and get to know each other and to talk about life and how to create the world we all want, where “family” takes on a much bigger meaning.  I love the Lakota saying, Mitakeya Oyasin-We are all related.  I believe that in my heart.  Our humanness so outweighs the differences.

I am back at work on another novel.  While we were in D.C. recently, I had a note from my agent with her list of first submissions for my novel, One Drum.  Suddenly it struck me that my life-long goal of “being a writer” was at hand and I want to be ready if a publisher wants to see what else I have up my sleeve.  The novel I went back to work on is about a small and very wise lizard (yes, I said lizard), named Sulee who is sent to help a girl named Lela.  This little lizard is so engaging.  He is smart, funny, and very sincere.  It sounds like a children’s book but it is not.  It is in the same theme of what I’ve begun to think of as my “Earth Series”.  Sulee lives in a world where the animals, the stones, the trees are all awake and aware, tuned into the earth in a way that humans have forgotten.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll post the opening pages just to give you an idea of this wise-but young-little lizard.  Oh, the working title is “Sulee-A Lizard’s Tale”.

God night.  That was a typo but I rather like it.

Jamie

Coming Home Again

Published by Jamie on June 24, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

We just got home from Washington D.C.  We went for the Silver Docs film festival in Maryland and Milt went to lots of movies and I wandered the city and played with beads.  It is good to be home again–always.

This morning I was searching the web for some information on another person who is doing video letters from prisoners to their children at home–very cool.  Anyway, I came across a blog called “Writing the Line Between Heaven and Earth” and I recognized that as one of my own titles.  I stopped and clicked onto the blog and it WAS one of my own titles.  I had completely forgotten that I tried to start a blog almost exactly a year ago (the only post on there was July 17).  It made me wonder how many other remnants of myself are floating around out there in cyber space.  It is like outer space where all these tests and trials have been jettisoned into space and never brought home so they just . . . float.

Who cleans up the web?  A question.

I am sitting at my kitchen table and the smell of the white peonies I cut yesterday is almost overwhelming.  I shook the ants off and put them in a blue vase for my mom and dad.  Peonies were the flowers they had at their wedding.  In my family, June 18th is a significant date:  the date my parents married, the date they had their first child, and the date which marked my father’s death.  In the year that he died, it was also Father’s Day and he died with all eight of his children and our mother in a circle around him.  I think just in his honors that I will post a small piece I did called “My Father’s Hands”. 

 

My Father’s Hands

 In last night’s dream my father gave me a tiny bag with trails of heart-shaped beads wandering the pale cloth.  Something in my soul wants to finger the tiny heart-shaped beads wondering what he meant by this gift.  Did he mean follow this little trail, my darling girl, and you shall carry anything that comes after with ease. 

So many books are about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, but what of the daughter caught by a golden thread to her father’s soul?  What of that child? 

I am a grown woman, a grandmother now, who looks down at her own stubby fingers one day and sees her father’s hands.  They are not the hands of a piano player or a dancer but the sturdy hands of labor, of getting things done, of endurance and strength.  I remember his hands in one scene and then another; tying myskates in winter, sketching the walls of his new house or solving an intricate problem on paper as if each knubby fingertip had its very own brain and only when his hands moved could he think. 

I remember the warmth and strength of his hands as he kneaded the calves of my legs late in the night when growing pains hurt bad enough to wake me up crying.  I see his hands holding cards in a favorite game of whist or bridge or gently patting the shoulder of a friend he met on the street.  I see his two hands on a steering wheel driving to grandma’s house or holding the very edges of the Sunday paper after church, a plate of powdered donuts hidden on the other side of the news.  I smile and remember the way my father’s hands would pick up myneedlepoint project and run the yarn through six rows, tugging just a little too tightly so that Icould always see in the tapestry of the finished work his rows beside my own.

I see his hands holding the Louis La’Mour book late in the evening, letting go only to take a sip of the beer warming on the side table; his hands building two houses to shelter those he loved most, his hands fashioning the ugliest boat ever out of wood and plank, his hands turning wood, twisting metal, picking berries and then building a special screen to roll the berries down gently to clean them.

I see his hands playfully slapping my mother’s backside or holding her against the fridge to steal a kiss, and his hands wielding the razor that plowed a smooth path through his lathered chin and me, sitting on the closed lid of the pot, waiting for the moment when he would turn and growl and try to kiss my cheek like  a rabid dog.  I would squeal and run out of the bathroom giggling. 

All of this I see in an instant when I looked down and saw my own small, square hands, so sturdy and strong. 

And she see his hands, swollen and bruised, a blueberry stain on the back where the IV had kept him alive for three more minutes, five more minutes, and then that last and final breath, of death.  And he was gone, living on in the short fingers of my own hands that crack in the winter . . . just like his did. 

 

Farmer John and Candide

Published by Jamie on June 11, 2008 in Our Straw Bale Project, Short Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

We are home again and I am scrambling to get my home garden in.  We shot a lot of footage and Milt is producing something he calls “The Blueberry Chronicles”.  You can see them at http://www.hollowbonefilms.com  He is having some fun with it. 

I have a cold and am not good company tonight so I’ll skip out and put in a bit of fiction instead.  I like the beginning of this odd series I started that is my version of “Candide” and “Siddhartha” combined.  I’ll let you figure that one out.

 

Evida
Or How a Forest Girl Discovers the World

Evida Takes a Walk and Finds Herself Separate 
There could be no better place on earth than this the young girl thought as she stepped her toes into the muddy edge of the pool of water to catch a closer look at the water spiders skimming the clouded surface.  She was in a small clearing carved out by road workers who had taken the red soil for their road-like purposes and left behind the moon.   The clearing was dotted with rough craters that were filled with water and each pool birthed a new universe teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding, and scruffy grasses poking up among the reddish mounds. 

She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find her self encased in a wrapper of skin that separated her from this beloved world.   Up until that moment, it had not occurred to her that she was separate. 

Evida lived along the northern edge of the nation in what she simply called Blueberry Country in honor of the low bush berries that filled her forest.  No one else ever came to this small, scarred piece of earth but Evida, and she came daily that spring to watch the transformation between winter and spring.  It was, in truth, a muddy mess, but she loved it.  She ran along the plowed ridges that separated one small pool from another so often that her bare feet padded and packed the sand as if it were an ancient road carrying tribal inhabitants across the Bering Strait. 

Life was good.

Down the road her parents had built a house that sheltered Evida and her five brothers and sisters in a cocoon of warmth and safety.  That her dad had tried to defy Mother Nature and built his house in a swamp seemed not to matter to them.  When the ditches filled with murky water, Evida and the other kids leaned over the edge to see the wigglers that bred there by the millions and would soon turn into mosquitoes.  It was a small price to pay for paradise–a few hundred red, itchy welts and the little screamers buzzing them to sleep each night.

Evida couldn’t figure out what was different this spring, different from all the others she had endured in her full eight years.  Something had changed.  The color of a single green leaf bud opening on a twig belonging to the larger tree pierced her eyes almost painfully.  The dry grasses of last year, as they gave way to the newer shoots poking up from some mysterious earth ethos, seemed to say reassuringly, “We go gratefully, never mind.  We’ve had our season.” 

Wind, sun, birds, the tiniest flowers, all spoke to her in a language once incomprehensible, but now understood clearly as if by magic.  Going to sleep each night was almost a burden, that she must close her eyes to such beauty for the dimmer world of sleep and dreams. 

She took to speaking aloud, only when alone of course, to the many offerings of nature.  I love you, little bird.  I love you tiny clover.  I love you big mamma tree.  I love you creepy little spider on my hand. 

What had caused such an awakening?  She didn’t know, couldn’t understand.  Perhaps an old bearded philosopher standing beneath a tree watching her from his invisible vantage point would nod knowingly and whisper, “Ah, she now feels her self separate from.”  It didn’t matter to Evida.  In truth, there wasn’t a bearded old one to explain that where once she was simply a part of nature, like trees and grass, now she saw her self as occupying a human body. No, she simply drank the realization in, letting it fill her soul and spirit with such rich nectar that by noon she was drunk, intoxicated and asleep on the grass. 

When she opened her eyes again there was a blue-silk sky wrapping her like a sari.  It was exotic, foreign, scented with the spice of Mother Nature’s unique perfume.  When she stood again and stretched her arms to touch the blue silk, she glanced down and saw the imprint of her own small body in the grass.  She felt just the slightest shiver of what could be fear or foreboding, a wisp of warning of things to come, but she tossed her blonde hair and walked off.

Thirty years later, she would return to this same spot, now an overgrown piece of the forest once again, desperate to find the slightest indentation she had left on Mother Earth. 

Walking back into her Mother’s house in her newly found eight-year-old body was like finding an alternate universe with an entirely different set of shapes, forms, tastes and smells, and its own moon and sun.  The blue silk sari dissolved like a thin skin of ice beneath the heat of this new sun, and the blue was replaced with the gray garb of an ordinary peasant

“Where have you been, Evida?  Lunch was over an hour ago and little Johnny has a dirty diaper and Rocky has a fever and and and and . . . .”

Evida stood for a moment, stunned and shrinking rapidly as all the wide thought-forms fled the little house where her parents ate and slept and were raising six children like raising chickens in a wire coop.

“Yes, Mamma.”  She said.  “I’m here now.”

Here.  Now.  The rest would simply have to wait out there in the wilderness for her return.  Evida turned her attention once again to the business of being eight, third girl in a family of six.  It was okay, this life in this house.  She helped her oldest sister, Kay, fold clothes and roll socks.  She helped her next oldest sister Ann change little Scott.  Ann and Evida got the giggles when Ann removed the nasty diaper and jokingly pointed to his tiny penis and said “Ready…aim…fire.” only to have the little squirt–squirt.  Ann panicked and threw the new diaper over the warm stream, and then had to use a third diaper to have the baby officially and legally changed.  

Kay, Ann, Evida, William, Joseph, and Scott had checked into the family in polite two-year intervals ranging from ages twelve to two.  If you added their ages together it came to forty-two and Evida couldn’t begin to imagine herself at forty-two.  She tried it once, but it was unfathomable. 

All in all, it was a pleasant family to find one self suddenly occupying. 

 

 

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

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