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

October 2, 2008

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

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

Semester’s end . . .

May 1, 2008

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

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

Finishing One Drum

April 20, 2008

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

 

ONE DRUM
Chapter I

 February 27, 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the greater scheme of things

Only she who sings,

And learns to play the wind,

Will ever grow wings.

Now I play the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Two young boys were walking toward the sleeping woman.

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

 

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

All My Relatives

April 9, 2008

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

Jamie

 

 

All My Relations

by Jamie Lee

(Published by Heartlands Magazine, October 2005)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Indian.  Not white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 8

March 21, 2008

Day Four

Afternoon Recording Session

“Ready, Takoja?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

After First Woman told me a small part of her story, she became very no-nonsense and marched through the instructions efficiently. She went back into the gray-walled structure and came back holding a nested set of metal bowls. They were of a deep, bronze color with thin rims of colored enamel, four bowls in all.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” She picked each one up and set them side by side on the slab of cottonwood. With a tiny cloth-ended mallet, she tapped each one and a beautiful sound rang out. “I am using these to illustrate this lesson for you.   I told you earlier that this chamber of open potential in the brains of The Weavers was fragile, a container that must be filled. Actually, the inner chamber of the brain depends upon this nest of containers. This first, the smallest, is the mother and her womb. This next size is father and family. The third is the community, meaning everything from a neighborhood to the larger human community. The fourth bowl is the natural world and its many attending realms and worlds.” As she spoke of each bowl, she tapped its edge and when all four bowls were singing together, that single fine sound seemed to contain all the music and stories of all the people perfectly harmonized into one sound. “Do you hear it?”

I was transfixed by that rare sound and could only nod.

First Woman touched a fingertip on each bowl to still the sound. She laughed. “That sound will put you into meditation and prayer. In fact, that sound is meditation and prayer.”

She rapped each edge again with the mallet and let the sound sing out across the turquoise pool. I listened, feeling strangely moved and emotional.     I never wanted it to stop ringing. This time she let the sound fade out naturally but, even after the ringing had stopped, I could still hear it in my ears.

“They are nested, Albert. This is so important to remember. Each container holds the next container.” She reached a hand toward the ground and a pretty silver pitcher was in her hand. First Woman nested the bowls together again, and poured the water into the center bowl. When it was filled it poured out into the next bowl, and when that was filled, it poured out into the next, and so on until the water flowed back out onto the earth itself. “Do you see, Albert? Life, or more precisely spirit, is such an overflowing thing that if we just let it flow naturally it will fill every container. It flows from one container to the next, from one generation to the next and on and on. It is unending, this flow. But the nest of bowls must be in order. Do you see?”

“Yes, I see.”

“Good. Then you see there is an order here that must be followed.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She lifted the pitcher of water and put it in my hands. “This is the energy of life itself vibrating. It is creative, it fills and empties and contains us all. I have it in this pitcher but, in truth, it cannot be contained by anything and yet is con-tained by everything. Do you understand?”

I did understand, and nodded, feeling like a schoolboy sitting beside my pretty teacher with the pretty bowls. Later, this lesson would prove to be both the simplest lesson, and the most difficult. The energy that is life-mysterious, felt and yet not felt, seen and yet not seen, immeasurable.

 ”Albert, when you understand this natural order of things, it becomes easier to be a Watcher, easier to see when a person, or an institution, has gone out of order. And a child in order will become a Weaver, capable of using this special chamber in the brain in very different ways, but only with proper training. My instruction for training the young Weavers is quite simple really. The key is to understand that the Weavers weave-one idea into another, one thought into another, one bit of information with another, one person to another, one country to another. They are pattern-makers. They do not learn by absorbing information like wads of cotton absorbing liquid, but by weaving, integrating one thing with another. Our job, then, is to feed finer and finer threads and more colors onto their loom so that they can weave the vision. We could call them spider children but Weaver sounds better, don’t you think? Do you under-stand? We do not learn-we weave.”

First Woman stopped talking; to give me time to do my own weaving. I’m not sure what I had expected. I waited for more information and there was no more. She had finished the lesson with four bowls, and the instruction to allow the Weavers to weave. I couldn’t resist asking. “That’s it? That is all we need in order to enter the new time of gathering?”

First Woman shook her head. “Oh, Albert, you have no idea how difficult this simple lesson will be-for them to weave the new fabric out of the old? The challenges will be great as the Wind of a Thousand Years dies out. Earth will look like the aftermath of a great storm, and the people will cling to their old identities like life rafts. They will form false camps of belonging, fearful of separating or standing alone. They will reject the Weavers in a hundred different ways, calling them names, challenging their ideas, excluding them. Only those firmly planted in their families, whose center bowl can overflow into the other bowls, will be able to proceed. Old institutions of health and education will collapse, and we must pay careful attention to the families and the food supply. The only grace is that it is the right time, and more and more will weave their connections between this earthly realm and the other realms. Help will come from other places. But there will be many challenges. Come, walk to the waterfall with me, and then you must go.”

First Woman took my hand and together we followed the footpath to the edge of the twin falls. Neither of us spoke for many minutes. We walked, both lost in our own thoughts of spider children and weavers and the new world. Once she paused and said, “Albert, remember this. The strongest thread on the Weaver’s loom is always love . . . only love.”

I knew my time in this realm was nearly completed. We were standing at the foot of the waterfall and I saw large, fat goldfish the size of my hand in the clear stone plates that held the water. Panic rose in my throat, and in my middle.  I didn’t want to leave this place.  I was afraid to crawl back into that broken body in another time and place.

First Woman saw my panic. “And Albert, fear is the sharp blade that cuts the thread of the Weaver’s loom.  Trust is the only thing that can mend the break.  You must trust.”

We stood a moment staring into the falling waters. She said, “Now, it is time for you to cleanse yourself. Walk into the shallow pool beneath the falls and put your body beneath its spray.”

I started to object.

“No, Albert. All will be well. You must never cling to your belonging when it is time to separate. Go now into the falls.” She dropped my hand, and then handed me the smallest of the four bowls. “Hold this close to your chest while you cleanse.”

The twin streams of water flowing over the ledge were no more than ten yards away, but it was difficult to force my feet to walk those ten yards. I knew. I must have known. I wondered if it was possible that the tears I’d wept earlier had merged with the waters above and I would now be showering in my own tears.

I walked into the shallow waters and then plunged beneath the falls, clutching the bowl against my chest. An explosion of water crashed over my head and shoulders and, in the next instant, I was blinking my eyes open in the disgustingly dirty and broken body of the Albert who had slid from his horse. It was a cruel awakening.

“Some hot tea, please, Jilly.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

Albert’s Notes

Jilly hurried off to fix the tea while I fought my lungs for that first deep breath all over again. She was back in just minutes pressing the cup into my trembling hands and murmuring, “Drink, Grandpa. It will restore you.”

I gasped. “Ah, Jilly. You have no idea how difficult it was to leave that realm and return to this one.” But I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t yet time for me to stay there.”  I gulped the tea and felt its heat burn through my body. It did restore me and I breathed more easily. “

I better get back to Jilly and finish this story. She worries about me.

“Is your little machine still on?

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Good. I feel better. Where was I? Oh yes. It was like being born again, but into a broken, dehydrated, god-awful body. As you young people like to say, it was gross.”

“Oh, Grandfather.”

“See, I’m fine now, my humor returns. Let me just get the poor boy home, and then we will call it a night.”

As far as I could tell, there were no broken bones. My slide from the horse had been caused by the blindness, the bleeding red rain in my eyes.  I was, however, dehydrated, disoriented, and weak with hunger. Unconscious and unaware, I had lain beneath that grove for two full days. Had I been in full sun, I would have died. I tried to whistle for old George, but my lips were so parched and swollen    I couldn’t make a sound. George, I am convinced, had his own lessons and arrangements with the higher realms because just minutes after I regained consciousness, he came galloping up. I think First Woman must have sent him to get me. My duffle bag was still on his back and I used the stirrups to yank myself upright and get to the water in my pack. I don’t need to tell you in detail how filthy I was. I drank half the canteen of water and then threw it right up again. I think it was the smell that made me sick. I smelled that bad.

My mind was fogged over, and my eyes were bleary-but not blind. I was relieved to be able to see, but had no immediate recall of what had happened while I was unconscious. I was just damn glad to be alive, even in this disgusting body. My recollection of getting back up on George, and making my way back home is pretty sketchy but somehow I managed it. Or George did.

When I rode up to that poor old cabin, it looked like a palace. I heard my mother scream from inside the house and soon she and my sisters flew out of the door, off the stoop and began kissing me, and crying, and half carrying me into the kitchen.  They asked no questions, just kept kissing and crying. I stayed awake long enough to strip to the bone and scrub and scrub, and scrub. If I hadn’t already been a red man, I would have been after that scrubbing.

For the first days after my return I had lost all memories from those two days. That space in my brain was simply closed off to me. My body healed, and my mother and sisters began to relax again. They must have sensed a change in me, but they asked no questions.

The only thing that felt different at first was that my anger was gone. The demon living inside my body had left. You can’t imagine what a relief it was to no longer have that raw, red energy control my days and nights.  I was not like one of those sinners who suddenly find the lord. I still liked a cold beer, but I didn’t need a case of it to kill the demon any longer.

Something inside of me was different, but I didn’t know what or why. I figured it was because  I had lucked out and cheated death. I should have been dead after my foolish drunken ride off to rescue my father.

Mother was struggling to provide for the family so I took a job on a ranch near Martin and began working long, hot days fixing fence, tossing hay, and running cattle. The work felt good, maybe for the first time. It stripped my body of all the bad influences I had dumped on it for so long. I got stronger, and clearer, and healthier with each passing week. I took most of my wages and handed them to my mother without saying a word. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me as if she was wondering what had happened to change her struggling boy into a man. But still, she didn’t ask, just thanked me.

I spent time with my sisters, Shawna and Silvie, and was shocked to see them becoming young women. It was as if I had not seen them-really seen them-since our father died, as if I had been living in a dark fog. In August, I turned twenty-one and marked the moment not by getting blind drunk, but wondering why I no longer wanted to get blind drunk. I shot a few games of pool in Vetal, had a couple of beers, and went back to the ranch.

And then I met Sarah. And I remembered.

“Jilly, I want to stop here for the night. I need to consider how much more to tell.

“Yes, Grandfather. But you know I want to hear the rest.”

“I know, dear. And you will. You will.

Albert’s Notes

Jilly and I barbecued a couple of steaks and baked potatoes to celebrate the end of the telling of my two-day journey. She finished her transcription an hour ago and went to bed. I am restless, staring out the window, an eye on the world like the moon above. I’m not sure how much of my life I need to put into this story. In some ways, it feels finished right now, and yet in other ways the experience goes on and on and will continue to go on and on even when I am gone from this place.

When I quiet my mind and sit a moment in my spirit,  I realize that I want to leave my reporting of the visit to the other realms as it is. A lot of interpreting and meaning-making will just drain the energy off the basic lessons I was given. It will weaken them. Better to let them stand and let others do their own meaning-making, their own weaving.

In many decades of study, reading, tracing the world’s great philosophies, I have found nothing as clear or truthful as the simple lessons taught to me over those two days. I look out at the world from these old eyes, and I see the aftermath of the storm.

The Wind of a Thousand Years is a breeze now, but the clean-up is a big job. At the same time, I see the opening of the new spiral of gathering and belonging, a world of individuals seeking spirit and right place, seeking true identity and roots, finding creation. They are the Weavers, and some of them, like Jilly, are coming of age now. Beneath the tattered gray blanket, a tremendous energy builds. We are remembering to remember.

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 7

March 20, 2008

Day Four

Morning Recording Session

“Already this becomes a pattern, Jilly, with you sitting there, and me sipping coffee. Is your talking machine on?”

“On and recording, Grandfather.

“Good, this is good. We are almost there. Let me see, where did I leave off yesterday?”

In all the time I had spent with my father, we had been in the beautiful emerald valley, the sun bright and yellow above us. Now, as Father finished his instructions to me, his form again shifted to the smaller, sinewy form of First Man as we neared the top of the hill. The gray walls I’d first encountered with my Grandfather rose suddenly around us once again. They were the color of slate and threw light back at me. I put my hand flat on its surface and it felt as solid.

First Man smiled. “Don’t worry. It is solid, just not as solid as we once believed.”

I entered through the same arched doorway into the wide hall but, when I turned to speak to First Man, he was gone. He had not followed me in. Fear clutched my middle for an instant but the feeling was quickly removed by that warm presence behind me that father had told me to sink into my belly. Evidently, I had done it right.

I wandered an open, empty space that looked like a large, enclosed courtyard. Uncertain about what to do next, I waited, but not for long.

I felt her presence before she entered. There was a change in the air, a softening of the energy.  It’s hard to describe, but when I turned to see where the change was coming from, I saw First Woman enter from an opening to my right. I think I had expected a female twin to the sinewy First Man but, instead, before me stood the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. She was so beautiful that I felt suddenly oafish, lumpy and adolescent in her presence.

Her features were fine and smooth.  Long hair flowed to her waist and seemed to take the qualities of this place into itself because the color shifted with each step she took. It was dark as the night sky one moment, and a pale red sunrise the next, and then yellow as sunlight a second later. Finally, all color left until her hair looked like a moonbeam.    I must have looked ridiculous, like a boy meeting a movie star. She laughed and I heard bells, crystal bells, tinkling in her laughter. 

“Oh Albert.” She laughed again. “You look dumbstruck.” She ran a hand over her hair as if telling it to settle down, and it muted all color back to deep night.

You would think such a woman would wear flowing white robes but she wore only an ordinary tan cotton shift. No adornment, no rings, no beads, no strands of shell, or headgear or feathers. In truth, she needed nothing added.   I think I was just a little in love-maybe a lot.  Forever after I would seek her in all the women I saw, and would eventually marry the one who had her qualities. I shook myself and blushed. “Sorry. You are First Woman and I am a rude boy. I expected you to be old.”

“I am. I am very, very old.” She grinned. “Come, we have much to talk about and very little time.”

First Woman turned and quickly walked out the way she had entered. I followed. We passed the gray walls and were suddenly standing on the shore of a beautiful turquoise lake surrounded by red canyon walls. Across the lake, twin waterfalls flowed over high ledges and landed in limestone-crusted plates of stone that looked placed by the hand of god. A fine misty spray reached my face from where we stood.

First Woman said, “Pretty, isn’t it? It is my favorite place in all of the realms. Water helps me think.” She walked down the path a hundred yards and sat down on a wide slab of polished wood cut from a giant cottonwood tree. I took a place beside her.

“You are having quite the adventure, Albert.”

“Yes.”

“I am to instruct you about the Weavers, the children who are arriving. Many are already here, actually.”

I had nearly forgotten the words First Man had said, so filled with my father was I still. “Yes, First Man told me.”

The bright look on her face faded as though a cloud had passed overhead. I glanced upward but the sky was a sheet of blue.

“You must listen carefully, Albert. Much de-pends upon these children finding their place in this time. For a thousand years the wind has tumbled the people of earth into one another until they no longer remember where they belong, who they are, or what they have come to do. The longing, the seeking, the deep sense of aloneness and isolation will, for a time yet, cloud all connection with the higher realms, even with the earthly realm. It is a blindness of the soul-you know of what I speak.”

“Yes, I think I do.” I thought again of blind Albert unconscious beneath a grove of cotton-woods.

“It comes rapidly now, this time of change. Soon you must go back but my instructions are very specific and won’t take long, so I want to tell you one small story from my own storyline.” First Woman smiled and the shadow lifted.

Her smile warmed me to the core of my being. I really was in love. She could have talked for one hundred years and I would not have wiggled, so enamored of her was I. Her words were like warm water.

“Before the Wind began, actually it was already blowing, we just didn’t know it, but all the people had a deep belonging with the natural world. We spoke the language and heard the language of earth, stone, animals, dreams, and the soft whispers from the spirit realm. We spoke the language and we listened. It was a natural, graceful way of being. In truth, we couldn’t have survived this cycle without the help of the plants and animals. When the Wind began, it stirred the natural rhythms and disturbed them. It brought with it the beginning energy of separating and, with that, an awareness of what is mine-and what is yours.” First Woman stopped and gazed into my face. “Do you understand?”

I said I wasn’t sure.

“The deep harmonies were disturbed, Albert. Now, instead of living in belonging with all things, we drifted from true belonging into ownership. This belongs to me. That belongs to you. That doesn’t belong. You see?  The energy of belonging shifted.”

I nodded, now understanding her meaning.

“It is impossible to describe how this shift interrupted the natural rhythms, but you can see the result in your world. Now the people of earth fight to have, and not to be. From this place I am now, this high vista, I see the many cycles which form the spiral of which First Man spoke; the energies of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone. Now a new twist of the spiral opens. It will carry human-kind into the next, and even deeper, com-munication between the realms, but it has been very painful, this ending of one cycle and the opening of the new.”

As First Woman spoke, I felt the pain of which she spoke like a knife-point at my throat. I said nothing, just nodded again like a puppet.

“When I was a young girl I, like you, was taken to the this realm, and made a Watcher. It is very difficult to be a Watcher, Albert. You live in one world while simultaneously seeing another. It is confusing, and sometimes very painful. Always you ask why others cannot see what you see. You feel very alone. You see-but are seldom seen by others. Being instructed, as you have been during your time here, helped me, but still I had to live in a world that was rapidly changing.”

She took my hand in hers and continued. “In my village, a neighbor to First Man’s village, I was a maiden of the Sun. I took the Sun as my master. Another man, a priest in my village, fell into the Wind and took darkness into his soul. I tell you this not as an indulgence, but to let you know that in that time, the seed of this time was also planted. I fled my village with another Watcher from the south. I had twin babies in my womb. The evil priest believed himself to be the father of those babes, a boy and a girl but, in truth, they were special children formed from the mating of the Sun and the Moon.”

First Woman gave another tinkling laugh. “Never mind about the logistics of that mating. It simply was. There were others born to the Watchers at that same time around the world, and it is these special children who have seeded the human race with what is needed as the new spiral begins. The descendents of all of those children are like a silver net holding the potential for this new time, when the Wind is ending. I’ll try to explain in more modern terms. The energy of sun and moon combined in these children and created a new chamber in the brain.” First Woman tapped her forehead between her brows. “Here. This chamber is not unlike its predecessor, it is the place of connection, of gathering, but in these descendents of sun and moon, it carries an even greater potential, a preparation for the new spiral of gathering and belonging. A wider reach, so to speak.”

First Woman was excited about this mysterious chamber of which she spoke. Her eyes were wide and shining. I could not take the time to think through all she said because I simply needed to record her words in my mind so I wouldn’t forget.

“Oh, Albert. The potential is so great, so far- reaching and full of promise, and yet so fragile at the same time, but it is container only.  It is like having a miraculous machine, but it must first be turned on. If properly turned on, the human race will flourish once again and surpass its former state of being. The sense of belonging will reach far, far beyond the skin of a single person. Do you understand?”

“I think so.” In truth, I didn’t understand yet, but her excitement was so contagious that I was caught it its glow.

“The Wind of a Thousand Years will not have been in vain for it will herald in such a time of peace, of connection, of light. I want that for the next generation, and all the generations to follow.”

Her eyes misted over and pale particles of light and energy rose up from her shining hair again and formed a halo around her head. I was reminded of the sweet images of the Virgin Mary that I had so loved as a child. In fact, this woman was not unlike my image of that other woman. Such a vision she held for the human race and, with her help, I saw the promise of it too. Her vision of humanity bloomed in my own mind, although it was not the world I currently knew.

She watched my face, her gaze tender and sweet. “You see it?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then my story has carried what it needed to carry to you.” She leaned over and kissed my brow in the same place she had tapped her own brow. “Now sink it, Albert. Sink that vision into your middle.”

She sounded like my father and I laughed. With that most tender of kisses, First Woman became all business again. She ran quickly through my instructions on what she called ‘Care of the container for Weavers.’ She began by reminding me that we cannot know which children are descendents of the sun and moon energies and so therefore, the instructions apply to all children. “As it should be,” she said. She did say that we will in some ways be able to recognize the Weavers because they will enter the world greedy, restless for knowledge, impatient to learn-and intolerant when that learning is denied or constrained.

First Woman then spent a long time talking to me about how, in this new time, we must be mindful of the larger container of earth, that the Weavers must have pure water, pure air, the food supply restored and cared for, and that the ability of these children to weave will depend upon their own brain’s ability to weave its fine connections. “Caring for the weaving child requires a larger spiral of care,” she said, “Which includes care of the mother, care for the family, and care of the earth.”

Remember that the man receiving these rapid instructions was a crazy, young man who had not even considered fatherhood as an option yet. I think that First Woman must have poured the information like liquid into my own container.    I took it in whole, in one long, thirsty drink and have never forgotten the simple instructions she gave.   

However, in the world that unfolded as I grew and aged, following her instructions was another matter entirely. From what I could see, in the final decades of apathy and despair left in the wake of the mighty Wind, our institutions and culture did exactly the opposite of what she instructed. It was remarkable.

But I also saw that these children with the golden chambers, the special containers, would not be denied the learning or the care required.

“A break, Jilly? I begin to stray from my story.”

 ”Yes, Grandfather.”

Albert’s Notes

Jilly looked reluctant to push the stop button on her recorder, but smiled and clicked it off. Oh, I knew she was one of them, one of the Weavers. I haven’t yet said a word about the others, the ones not descended from this ancient line, born of sun and moon, the ones whose containers, for whatever reason, were not filled with this potential.

First Woman called them ‘The Weepers’. Sadly, those who could not pass through the final days of the Wind, she said, would cry all their lives for what they could not have, be, or do. They would die having never thrown off the gray net of despair. I will make no further mention of this hereafter. You will know them when you meet them, the Weepers. They cry and they cry. First Woman also told me to remember that eventually all will cross the stream again and be descendents of sun and moon.

For many years I wondered about this use of words beginning with a ‘W’ in this language of the other realms, and the new spiral. The only thing I saw is that it is the only letter in the English alphabet whose two thin arms reach for heaven, for the higher realms, while its bottom is firmly planted on the earth. ‘W’.  Firmly seated-but reaching.

The telling of this story, so long held, is both energizing and making me weary to the bone. I’m embarrassed to say I sent Jilly off to do useless errands so I could be alone in my home for a moment.

The meeting with First Woman shaped the rest of my life. I became an artist so I could capture her in oil or watercolor. I took up photography to chase her shadow on film. I wrote to feel her hand cover mine over the pen. I married my wife because she reminded me of First Woman. She was a good wife to me, too, and soon, I will find her again.

I think it is time for a rest.

I am an old man. After the last session I crabbed back into my room and stretched out on the bed for nearly an hour until Jilly returned and came back to see that I was all right. I didn’t tell her that it is only there, in my dreams, that I see First Woman. She is always there, whenever I seek her guidance. Refreshed from my nap, I told Jilly that we would do one more session after lunch. It is time to finish this story now.

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

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 6

March 19, 2008

To read the first five chapters of this short novel scroll down until you find Part 1.

 

Day Three

Afternoon recording session

“The coffee is good this afternoon, Jilly.”

“Thanks Grandpa. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Stop me, Takoja, if what I say is not clear. I want to get this next part down in a good way. Are we on?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The era of despair.

First Man said the end of each major cycle overlaps with the opening of the next. One is closing, another opening, but not like doors, not so clearly defined. He explained that during this long transition there will appear to be very different types of humans on earth. The time of transition will be blurred, and there will be difficult struggles as the long dark winter is ending and a new spring beginning.

First Man said several things would influence this time, whether we survive as a race, or simply blink out of all time. Most importantly, he said, we must take our gathering and belonging only from our ancestral line, and from the parents. The parents are like the spillway of a great reservoir high in the mountains. Like water spilling over a damn, the flow of life must enter us through the gateways of our parents and it is from there we take our truest belonging. We may choose to gather with others and belong, but all belonging is only fleeting and temporary except for the ancestral line. There we belong forever.  And we must return to tribes and clans and follow the line of memory and learning through these pathways.

If we do this, if we create strong families, from these sturdy cradles will spring the new child. First Man was very particular about this. This child, rooted firmly in the family, will remember to remember. This child will see both forward and backward. He called these children “The Weavers.” This child, he said, would be able to see back before the time of the Wind and remember to whom he truly belongs. Because they are firmly rooted in the family, like the Aspen, they will be strong and have long lives.

I asked First Man why he named them so. He said they would be born with the potential to weave one realm with another-very important. With proper care, they would remember the spirit realm from which they came. The Weavers would have access to the higher realms and would, therefore, have special abilities to hear, to feel, to see beyond the physical body and into the spirit body, wherever it roams.

First Man told me we must take great care in the raising of the weaving child and that I would receive further instructions on that later.  He said it is enough to know that in this new opening of the spiral-of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone-the gathering or bonding would be with the higher realms. The Weavers toss the net that makes this possible, the weaving of heaven and earth together into one continuous fabric.

I was entranced with that image, of small children weaving threads that tie this earthly life to the higher realms. He said the Watchers of my age become the Weavers in this new age.

When he had finished his long talk about the Weavers, I asked First Man the question that had been sitting on my breast ever since I came here to this place, or even longer perhaps, since I first came from the spirit realm as a newborn into my troubled family. He’d told me earlier that I chose it, it did not choose me, but I needed to ask again, “Why me, First Man?”

He looked at me for a long moment and then smiled. “Ah, that ancient question. Where would humankind be without that question?”

First Man began to turn away, but I was not to be put off. “I need to know. Why have you brought me here? Why have you told me about the spiral of life?”

“You forget so quickly, Albert. We did not bring you here. You came because of your question-and to find your father.”

“But I haven’t found my father.”

Then, in the odd manner of this realm, the moving points of light and energy rearranged themselves within the bird-like body of First Man. His flesh filled, his skeletal frame shifted before my eyes and, in a moment, First Man was my father.  He said nothing. Just stood before me with the steely strength I remembered so well.

“Father.”

“My son.”

I was stunned to be looking into the eyes of my father. Around me, points of light flickered with remembered images-father putting me on a pony, father teaching me to hunt, father cornering mother to steal a kiss, father wiping morning milk from my sister’s mouth. The poisonous pain and grief that had so filled me to the brim two years earlier when he died rushed to my head. I nearly passed out.  Deep within my belly the grief rolled up my body like thunder and, suddenly, an astounding sound issued from my mouth that was both human and animal, both call and cry. I couldn’t stop it. It was as if the wailing became like great birds that clutched my pain in their sharp talons, and then flew out of my body.

Father took me in his arms and held me. I couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say. He cradled my speechless body until the wailing ceased and only a breathless gasping issued from my mouth.

I grew calm again, resting deeply in his care. A bright, new sun rose in my body as I realized first, that he had not ever been gone from me, not where it counts, and second, that my strength was in my ancestral roots. Just as First Man had said, my true belonging was to my father and mother’s lines and in order to be strong in the world, I needed to remember that.  

Finally, my grief-to my great relief-was exhausted.  I pulled away from him and smiled at this man who had given me life from the seed of his body. “I found you.”

Father shook his head. “I was not lost. You were. What you found was yourself, Son. Come. Let’s sit.”

We chose a large boulder and sat in the sun. I wanted to know the connection between the man   I knew as my father, and First Man, who had showed me the story of The Wind of a Thousand Years.

“There is no need to tell you all of my stories, Son. The many times my spirit has traveled from this realm to the others is like a man crossing a streambed-first on one bank, then into the water, then up onto the far bank. You also have been in and out like a frog in a pond.” He laughed and the sound warmed my soul. “We all have. Most of us are blessed with not having to remember. We are all traveling the same spiral.” He stopped a moment and cocked his head as if listening, or testing the wind. “We must finish this talk soon. You cannot leave your physical body for so long that it is damaged or dies.”

At first I laughed. I’d grown so accustomed to this place, I’d nearly forgotten the young, drunk Albert beneath another grove of trees. But then the laughter died and a flood of shame brought the gray net hovering over my head. “I haven’t been a very good son, Father.”

“I know, Albert.”

“I am ashamed.”

“It will be better now, my boy. Not easy, but better. There is much that needs to be done, and you mustn’t replace pain and anger with guilt. Guilt is a useless thing unless we learn.”

“But what am I to do? What is the meaning of all of this?”

Father said, “The lessons have been clear. You will understand more and more as you age. One day, when the time is right, you are to give these lessons away. You are in your own small cycle, Son. You are gathering. You will go home and carry these things for many, many years, and then you will set them apart from you, give them away to others, and you will be alone once again.”

“How will I know when the time is right?”

“I can’t tell you that. You will know. All I can say is that one day when you are old and nearly ready to come back to this realm, a young woman will come to you. You will give her this story. Write down all you remember from your time here, and all you learn from it as you move through life. Keep it for her.”

“Who is she?”

“She is First Man’s wife. I call her First Woman. She is part of my story. You see Son, we are all part of long story lines. Occasionally, we remember them. Most of the time, we don’t. First Woman’s story also begins with the coming of the Wind. It is nearly time for you to meet her.”

Above my head the sky grew dense and gray. This clouded world was becoming familiar to me, caught by the net of my own fear and doubt. “Father, what if I fail? What if I don’t do this in a good way, whatever purpose I am to fill? How will I know?”

“You will know, Albert. We always know when the path is right. But then we must choose that path. There are other Watchers, many of them now around the world, who have been given a similar task. Your part is not so great. In fact, it is quite, quite small actually.”

Father must have seen the balloon of my pride deflate a little and he chuckled. “A holy man you’re not. Never take this gift in a prideful way. It is the only sure way to fail. Do you understand? You will be silent except with a few guides you will meet along the way, until it is time to complete this moment.”

“Yes Father, I understand.”

“Also understand, I will not be so far away.”

“Thank you, Father.” And then I thought of the little desk in the grove and laughed. “Why the school desk?”

Father laughed with me, and then slapped my shoulder. “If you would have gone and looked, you would have seen your initials carved into the corner. Come, now you will go to First Woman and get her teachings and then it will be time to return.”

There was so much I wanted to ask him, especially about the gunshot, the blood, the death, my mother and sisters, how I would explain to them-but all the questions fled my mind like nervous sparrows as soon as they landed. It was clearly not the time to ask these questions, and I thought about what he’d said about always knowing the right path.  I did, however, keep my eye on my father’s back as we walked, fearful that he would vanish in a swirl of moving points of energy. Grief began to rest on my shoulders like a shawl cut from the blanket of gray. Must I lose him a second time, I wondered. Why?

Before we’d walked a quarter mile, Father stopped walking and turned back to me, as if he’d sensed the direction of my thoughts. He put his hand on my shoulder and turned my body away from his. “Look again, Albert, out into the great valley to the grove of trees.”

I raised my eyes and stared out across the vast lands, my father at my back, his hand resting on my shoulder. Over my head he said, “This is my place always. You cannot lose me, just as my father holds his place forever at my back, and his behind him. You must plant this feeling, this energy, deeply into your body and then fear will no longer rule your life.”

I stood a long time and did as he told me. I took the radiant heat of his presence behind me and sunk it deep into my belly. As I did this, the fear, the grief, the grayness left once again.

“Good,” he said.

I turned, knowing this would be my final full look at the form of my father. “I love you, Father. I hadn’t told you that, not for a long time. That was the hardest thing. I never told you.”

Father smiled. “You didn’t have to.”

Albert’s Notes

Poor Jilly. This was proving to be an emotional task for her, acting as my secretary. Her cheeks were wet with tears yet again. She too had lost her father at a young age. “Come my takoja, let me show you.” Takoja means grandchild in Lakota. It was what my own grandfather called me when I was a boy in need of comfort.

I took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She had done all of the recording sessions sitting on my floor at my feet. Jilly swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. It made her look six and not twenty-three. We are always a child to our parent or grandparent. I turned her body so she could look out across my golden prairie, and then I stood behind her just as my father had done, my hands resting very lightly on her shoulders, to add presence and not burden. “Close your eyes,” I told her. “Now, let yourself feel your father behind you, and his father behind him here.” I pressed my fingertips against her right shoulder. “And on the other side, the line of your mother, stretching so far back you see only the haze of time.” I pressed my fingertips into her left shoulder. “Your strength comes in here, from behind you, from the strong men and women of your line. It comes to give you courage.”

Jilly nodded.

“You feel it?” I asked her.

She nodded again. I felt the subtle shifting of energy, the realignment of her body beneath my palms. I grinned and whispered in her ear. “Now sink it deep.” I waited a moment. “Good. Now open your eyes and look out there at our beautiful world. If you look very carefully, you will see the play, the points of light moving, always moving.”

When Jilly turned around to face me, she wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me. “Thank you, Grandpa. I got it. I sunk it deep.”

“Wonderful. Maybe we need a short walk. Let’s go see if the air out there is made of sugar this morning.”

We had a lovely walk and returned to my humble dwelling much refreshed. Jilly cut up some more chicken breasts for our supper and we ate it with one of those dull salads people are so wild about these days. Then I retired to my room to watch the darkness come and the pale light of the moon rise over the earth.  

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