STAGES OF LIFE

I.

When I was an animal control officer and working nights, I knocked on the door of a complainant unhappy about a dog that barked constantly.  When the woman came to the door, she gasped.  “Mary Strachan!  I thought I got you a good scholarship to a fine university!  What are you doing in that uniform?”  It was my high school counselor.  A sweet old maid who did everything by the book.  “And does your mother know you’re out in a truck this time of night?”

Actually, when I graduated from high school I was given awards for being in dramatics, which everyone expected, but I was also made “Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year”, which caused my mother to almost faint from laughing.  I could barely peel a potato and in those days before stick’um diapers, every baby I had to care for was in danger of a pin stick.

II. and III.

High school dramatics was only one of many incarnations.   I went from there to Northwestern University where I was in the theatre department as backstage support.  The theories have guided me ever since.  When I graduated in 1961, I sort of accidentally ended up being hired by the school system on the Blackfeet reservation, me in my high-necked blouses and tweed skirts.  (No jeans allowed in those days.) 

IV.

From there I went all for love into the life of Bob Scriver, cowboy sculptor and big game taxidermist, white but born on the rez in 1914.  He was considered a genius.  It was so exciting and romantic in a dozen ways, so risky and intense and unknown to outsiders, that it was obvious everything would be a little boring from then on.

V.

But we divorced and I ended up back in Portland looking for a job.  A panel interviewed me for animal control.  It was a time for being inclusive and one male interviewer was black.  He was the one most interested in my resumé.  They asked if I could heft a dog into a truck.  I told them that I knew I could pick up a wolf because I had (it was dead), I couldn’t pick up both ends of a cougar at once because they are so long, and I had to skid bears.  

They asked if I could write a ticket for an angry person and I said I had flunked seniors who imagined they would be great sports stars at graduation.  The then head of animal control said I had to have a recommend from someone for whom I had cared for animals.  Bob wrote it for me.  The head could have hired a man — which he preferred — but the background check revealed a felony.  Soon the boss left.

VI. and VII.

The new boss thought I had balls.  He was an old cop and knew what he was talking about.  Challenged to create an education department, I was suddenly “management” and decided I’d better pull up my socks.  I took classes at PSU and joined the Unitarian Church.  This led to PNWD Leadership School which pulled me out of the psych idea (which turned out to require statistics) and into seminary at the U of Chicago Div School.  Also, Meadville/Lombard.

VIII.

It was great.  I turned 40 there and then did a U-turn.  Longing for the east slope rez or at least Montana, I found two UU district execs who encouraged the idea of circuit-riding among four small fellowships and engineered it for me.

For three years I lived in an old delivery van, preached twice each Sunday at congregations separated by a hundred miles, one of them back in Helena where I had a studio apartment in the top of the old Parchen building, a former red-brick printing plant where I occasionally felt small earthquakes.

IX.

In the fourth year I was interim minister in Kirkland, WA, where the church looked across the lake at Seattle and was located in an old mortuary with the embalming slab still in the basement.  Upstairs had a freestanding fireplace and a lot of vivid art.  I told them it was a love affair rather than a marriage and that was right.  Quite memorable. The minister they finally called said I doomed him by being so good.  Sorry.

X.

In 1986 I accepted the call to the Saskatoon Unitarian Church.  Among other things, they didn’t like “Indians.”  Now they do.  Too late.  In 1988 I decided it was all a mistake and went back to Portland.  This time I ended up doing clerical work for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings.   Plus a bit of pulpit supply.  My mother was dying of cancer.  I stayed until she died, took my bequest of $30,000 and bought this house in Valier, Montana, on the high east slope of the Rockies, next to the Blackfeet rez.  Bob died about the same time as my mother -- 1998.  My mother had an easy death.  Bob did not.  His fourth wife converted everything to money (they say eleven million dollars) and took it with her to Canada where she died in a few years.  Lawyers got most of the money.

None of this tells you one damn thing about who I am.  People here in town don’t know.  I'm just another poor old lady.  The many people who knew me in Browning in the Sixties only knew part of me.  My old animal control boss and his wife came to visit here and were completely puzzled that I was no longer the same person.  We went for a brisk morning walk along the lake and that was as good as it got.

People who had me tagged as an adjunct to Bob Scriver were very very wrong, even though they had read the biography of him I wrote, “Bronze Inside and Out”, that was published by the U of Calgary Press.  All that meant anything to them was money and fame.  The life of the mind didn't exist.  Anyway, the worst of them have died.  They WERE bad, but didn’t think so.

XI.

So these are the chapters of one kind of book -- so far.

Some people follow my writing — sort of.  Many say it all goes over their heads and they’re probably right.  It took me a while to catch up with those French/Algerian post-everything philosophers just becoming popular when I was in seminary, and even more time to think through to the other side to things like deep time, thick history, embodiment, continuous DNA through all living beings, cosmic rhythms, and a whole new system of meaning and knowing that isn’t a new religion (yet) and may never form into an institution — just comprise a paradigm shift after millions of people in the world have died and twenty years of scheming corruption has been unmasked.  It will be very different.  But it may unite the world.

XII.

This chapter may never be written.  I had a powerful secret friend who would be known to you if you’d followed my blogging since 2006.  We are now distant . . . but not.  Why should I explain?

What I want you to grasp is that I’m writing on a personal, even intimate, level but it is NOT an invitation.  Stay away.