It was a 20 year plan. I've outlived it. I can't frame up another one because I don't know how much time I have left. Could be another 20 years but neither the pickup nor the house have that much time left in them without more money than I have.
The unexpected but predicted pandemic has hit us all pretty hard, but I have a few surprising turns that are just me. When the news of the pandemic hit, I thought I'd update my "in case of my death" binder and called my brother who turned out to have died two years ago. His wife said he wanted no contact with me and he considered notification of his demise to be "contact." She didn't tell anyone else in the family either. He's two years younger than me and I had some conversations I wanted to finish with him. Nothing hostile -- I just wondered what he thought. My other brother, who was dead much earlier, was definitely a topic. An in-law had died. A cousin was in a mental ward because of repeated concussions. Another cousin had "nervous breakdowns."
But things began to change before that. A few former students are beginning to make contact and their account of the Sixties is quite different from mine. (A few have died already.) One brought an outsider white acquaintance to visit who assumed I "knew" about "Indian writers." What I mostly know dates back to the Seventies when the NA Renaissance books were being remaindered and I was in Portland buying them for five bucks each at Powells. That wave has ended. This guy didn't know that. Today's indigenous writers are QUITE different, no longer polite, no longer writing for whites. Mixed feelings about being categorized.
Also, the assumption on the part of both men was that I was a kind of hobbyist. A grannie figure. By the time I got through blasting them, my former student was aghast and labeling me negative and arrogant. No lie.
But what "got" me was that the former student confessed that he never reads. I had wondered why he was satisfied with a sort of nothing job that let him live well in Portland, protecting his son and wife. He's more metis than Blackft. His head was still where it was since he was here in the Sixties. I had wondered why he didn't mention my work -- he never knew it existed. Far more people have read my writing on my blogs than most writers of books ever have readers. There's just no publisher to bind it with a cover.
When I realized my mother's side of the family hadn't been told about my brother's death, I began to try to make contact with them and discovered more shocks. They had written me off -- their resentment on the part of some of them amounts to blame for things I could not have done, like saving my brothers. Earlier a childhood friend had had the same reaction. Actually, my mother took the same attitude. It seems to be related to attending seminary and the U of Chicago Div School. They felt I had betrayed them by acquiring something like "higher powers" in a world they knew nothing about and then not using those powers on behalf of them. I wasn't entitled.
If I had been male and pursuing a PhD, even if it were in lit instead of physics, that would have been all right. Accepted. Somehow I was disturbing world order. Even while I was serving congregations, a hint of that was clinging. Several of those folks told me they could preach better than I could, that they were smarter and better educated. Maybe they were. I hadn't thought of it as a competition. But their expectation was that I was "hired" to be somehow superior to them. They live in hierarchies.
I sympathized. The ministers I had considered role models turned out to have clay feet. By the time I gave up, they were retiring, had better churches in bigger cities, or simply died. Even the women who were my cohort disappeared. The unmarriageable ones married after all and left. Some had a hard time being called by congregations that paid well, so they starved out. The idealism leaked out of me by 1988.
But I made the right decision twenty years ago. I've had two decades in which to write, to use what I learned, and to think. I only made one real mistake when I moved in here: I replaced the shallow rusted bathtub with a corner shower. But I don't think small soaking tubs were on the market then. One would make winter here so much more bearable.
The decade that was a true awakening was due to something I can't talk about. It was another writer with a far broader worldview than my Montana history anecdotes. He knew what "Indians" are really like -- it often takes white people (outsiders) to say some things, to escape the romance of it all and local retribution from the less romantic. But that wasn't the point. He saw me as a writer and he was a damn good one himself. He challenged me to a moral scope I hadn't had. I respected his opinion. So my plan now that I'm 80 is to write as long as I've got.
But a question remains. If I'm so special, so educated, why can't I help my relatives? It's because they think I'm just so damn special, educated, and out-of-touch with their lives. This is clearly true. What will I do about it? Most of them don't read. Their attitude towards me is often painful, so I get defiant. I go out of touch to save myself. I'm about the only person I can really save. I can't fire me, but maybe I'll quit.
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Here's a good sermon for this moment. Grannon again. The first half is enough. He's struggling with his own advice. His clientele mostly always wants love, sweet love. Grannon has settled into being alone. I will say that vocations are a kind of marriage. Just don't expect love.
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