I meant, innocently enough, to bring some boxes into the house and do a bit of sorting. I brought in THREE boxes and soon had piles everywhere. And finally I found the poems I wrote -- the ONLY poems I've written.
On a quiet afternoon at Heart Butte School, we were working on poetry. We were really in the right mood for it. I’d say, “Let’s write a poem about horses!” And we’d do it. “Let’s write a poem about grandmas!” And we’d do it.
Then the kids said to me, “You’re always telling US what to do. Let us give you subjects and YOU write ‘em.” Okay.
Write one about love!
Love is a silver fish
Leaping in my heart.
It lives in another world
Liquid and cool and sometimes blue.
If love is dragged out into the light,
It dies gasping.
No, no! One about TEENAGED love!
I was only a trembling leaf until you
came like a wind
and sent me sailing.
Now I lie over your heart, green and tender
and ready to grow.
Your heart is thumping under me, as red as
I am green.
Our tender time togther will grow to a great
branching tree of love and shelter.
Now write a SEXY one!
I was hanging out the wash.
He handed me the pins.
I shook out his worn workshirt
and he put his arms around me.
The wind slapped the wet shirt against us
and we both laughed.
It took both of us to spread the sheets out in the sun.
Now one about love ending.
This morning the world died.
The sun plunged into a coal mine.
Now I hardly remember how it was --
only that I loved you
and you loved me.
But what could it have meant?
The world is dead.
Now write one about how it feels to be me, to be us.
Unseen, I mingle with you --
tip-toeing through your lives.
What are you about?
What do you have that I could take for mine?
I hear your secrets and see your skins --
You don’t seem so different from me.
But I’m invisible.
An artist friend in Kirkland gave me the print below. I think it fits with these poems. Well, there will eventually be a print below. At the moment I can't find it again. Which pile? Which box? Is it under the cat? I even emptied a couple of garbage bags. I'll find it -- might take a while.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
AMERICAN CLASS JANUS
When I was working on the biography of Bob Scriver, I acquired a copy of “Hunting and the American Imagination” by Daniel Justin Herman that has turned out to be enormously useful, but not just in regard to hunting. He suggests that when the English came to this continent, there were two big reasons or hopes that they brought with them. One was that this would be a land of free people without hierarchy, a democracy with one man [sic], one vote, a place to determine one’s own destiny without class or prejudice. The other was that since the landed gentry were entrenched in England, backed by the King and the Church of England, a common person could never be so important there, but in this new country with a new order yet unformed, they could hope to become dukes and princes as soon as things got organized. These two forces have been grappling ever since. (The relevance to hunting is that in England all wild game belonged to gentry and was on private property.)
What’s even more important is that they grapple within individuals and within institutions. Certainly the two are in me. (When my mother was angry at me, she called me “The Duchess.”) And they are within Unitarianism, even more so in the hyphenated version of the denomination since merger in 1961, even though the Universalists have to fight to hold their rural, equality-based sense of compassion in the face of the Unitarian cold reason Boston Mandarins. They’re winning, in a way, by pulling in blacks. And the split shows up again between the high churches (King’s Chapel, for instance, which really once WAS the King’s Chapel!) and the fellowships who have no clergy to lord it over them. (AGD used to call them the “Christ-hating savages,” but in fact he had the same split within himself. On one hand he praised a plain stone church -- on the other he wanted “good furniture.”)
I suppose the original split goes back to the very beginning of Christianity when the small house congregations of the primitive church were caught up by the Holy Roman Empire. Maybe the monastic movements were in part an attempt to get back to that early notion of equal beloved family members and yet monasteries are notorious for developing hierarchies. Still, I vividly recall visiting the Benedictine monastery in Saskatchewan for a retreat. We stopped by an old man in a ragged straw hat who was mowing the law to ask where we could find the abbot. He WAS the abbot. But the Canadian Unitarians withdrew from the Unitarian Universalist Association because they said the Yanks bossed them around and dominated everything. (“Who died and made YOU King???!!!”)
Blackfeet society never developed that split until they were crammed onto reservations. Status had to do with bravery, generosity and sometimes plain old longevity. People were not organized into hierarchies but clustered in families and extended families that came together and rent apart according to the forces of the place and time -- a need to band together to hunt, a personality clash that drove people apart. Human-scaled prestige didn’t have to claim God crowned them (or at least the Pope).
But they soon learned. Around here the main lesson is rubbed into you in high school: who has money, who has pull, who has brains, who it’s safe to pick on, who’d better be left alone. A band of boys I taught in Cut Bank ran amok with impunity because they were athletes. (I’m writing a novel: “Prairie Gladiators.” They ended up concussed, knees and shoulders blown, too poorly educated to succeed in college.) Rarely did they ever respect any boundaries, but they surely were careful of one boy: he came from a family rumored to be a motorcycle gang, really tough. When I was with Bob, when he was still the city magistrate and justice of the peace, still under fifty and capable of knocking someone flat, I got a very false idea of danger in Browning because I could walk anywhere anytime and people just backed off. Not so much because he would protect me as because they figured I was his possession and he would be jealous. (A famous plains Indian warrior was named, “The Man Who Is so Formidable That People Are Afraid of his Horse.”)
Ministers are usually better suited for either a “high” or “low” church, rarely fitting both. One generally interns in a “high” or big church that can afford to subsidize a learner, though one’s first church is generally small and struggling. Aged female ministers don’t start at the top. The system is meant to accommodate young men with a lifetime to climb the pyramid, accumulating wisdom, mentors, obligations, and good contacts along the way. A non-hierarchical system depends to some extent on a kind of nomadism, circulating through a web. (Circuit-riding.) I’m a “high” church preacher, or was. Or could have been. On the other hand, I’ve always been drawn to the Quaker movement, which often doesn’t even have ministers.
Another of those splits -- maybe the same one -- is between the two kinds of ministry, “enthusiastic” or “learned,” (accent on the second syllable). In the inspired style, one picks up the Bible, reads it, and preaches from the heart. Oddly, the church of this type of denomination is often hierarchical with one charismatic leader who controls the group. In the “learned” ministry, the leader is more like a doctor or lawyer and restrained by protocols of democracy and lay leadership like boards. The Catholic priest, of course, is a hybrid, meant to be an authority figure full of humility, which is hard for humans to manage.
For a long time, until Elizabeth I actually, England teetered back and forth between the florid extravagance of new-found wealth and the Puritanical insistence on clean, well-lighted spaces in which people wore plain clothing and often fasted. Again -- still with us. Movie stars live impossibly luxurious and unfettered home lives -- then go off to meditate at a Buddhist ashram. Maybe shave their heads.
My internship was in Hartford, Connecticut, where I confronted an array of church buildings. One of my favorite juxtapositions was a little wedding cake of white spired church downtown, right next to one of those mirror-box sky-scrapers that replicated it full of wavers and blips. The Universalist church was a study in 19th century luxury: fine furniture, a stained glass wall, creamy wainscoting and deep carpet. The Unitarian church was a set of concrete fins arranged in a circle with the roof suspended on cables between them: it moved when the wind blew, creaking like a ship, and leaked. Not far away was a Russian orthodox church with onion-topped spires.
While I was there the new Richard Meier Hartford Seminary was dedicated: all white with pipe railings. (They call them “vines.”) Maybe this is the ultimate melding of the simple and the rarified. From their website: "If any religious symbol can be said to dominate Richard Meier's design for Hartford Seminary, it is the primordial emblem of creation: light. Whether silhouetted against a cloudless summer sky or wrapped in the haze of a New England winter, this low white building is an arrestingly luminous presence... Transposed to full scale, Hartford Seminary displays a harmonious ordering of calm, simple volumes, and a modulation of radiant spaces unprecedented in Meier's work."
Sounds like the east slope of the Rockies to me. A good place to be as we evidently head into another Thirty Years War based on religion and feudalism again. But the people buying their fiefdoms all around here have neither Pope nor God.
What’s even more important is that they grapple within individuals and within institutions. Certainly the two are in me. (When my mother was angry at me, she called me “The Duchess.”) And they are within Unitarianism, even more so in the hyphenated version of the denomination since merger in 1961, even though the Universalists have to fight to hold their rural, equality-based sense of compassion in the face of the Unitarian cold reason Boston Mandarins. They’re winning, in a way, by pulling in blacks. And the split shows up again between the high churches (King’s Chapel, for instance, which really once WAS the King’s Chapel!) and the fellowships who have no clergy to lord it over them. (AGD used to call them the “Christ-hating savages,” but in fact he had the same split within himself. On one hand he praised a plain stone church -- on the other he wanted “good furniture.”)
I suppose the original split goes back to the very beginning of Christianity when the small house congregations of the primitive church were caught up by the Holy Roman Empire. Maybe the monastic movements were in part an attempt to get back to that early notion of equal beloved family members and yet monasteries are notorious for developing hierarchies. Still, I vividly recall visiting the Benedictine monastery in Saskatchewan for a retreat. We stopped by an old man in a ragged straw hat who was mowing the law to ask where we could find the abbot. He WAS the abbot. But the Canadian Unitarians withdrew from the Unitarian Universalist Association because they said the Yanks bossed them around and dominated everything. (“Who died and made YOU King???!!!”)
Blackfeet society never developed that split until they were crammed onto reservations. Status had to do with bravery, generosity and sometimes plain old longevity. People were not organized into hierarchies but clustered in families and extended families that came together and rent apart according to the forces of the place and time -- a need to band together to hunt, a personality clash that drove people apart. Human-scaled prestige didn’t have to claim God crowned them (or at least the Pope).
But they soon learned. Around here the main lesson is rubbed into you in high school: who has money, who has pull, who has brains, who it’s safe to pick on, who’d better be left alone. A band of boys I taught in Cut Bank ran amok with impunity because they were athletes. (I’m writing a novel: “Prairie Gladiators.” They ended up concussed, knees and shoulders blown, too poorly educated to succeed in college.) Rarely did they ever respect any boundaries, but they surely were careful of one boy: he came from a family rumored to be a motorcycle gang, really tough. When I was with Bob, when he was still the city magistrate and justice of the peace, still under fifty and capable of knocking someone flat, I got a very false idea of danger in Browning because I could walk anywhere anytime and people just backed off. Not so much because he would protect me as because they figured I was his possession and he would be jealous. (A famous plains Indian warrior was named, “The Man Who Is so Formidable That People Are Afraid of his Horse.”)
Ministers are usually better suited for either a “high” or “low” church, rarely fitting both. One generally interns in a “high” or big church that can afford to subsidize a learner, though one’s first church is generally small and struggling. Aged female ministers don’t start at the top. The system is meant to accommodate young men with a lifetime to climb the pyramid, accumulating wisdom, mentors, obligations, and good contacts along the way. A non-hierarchical system depends to some extent on a kind of nomadism, circulating through a web. (Circuit-riding.) I’m a “high” church preacher, or was. Or could have been. On the other hand, I’ve always been drawn to the Quaker movement, which often doesn’t even have ministers.
Another of those splits -- maybe the same one -- is between the two kinds of ministry, “enthusiastic” or “learned,” (accent on the second syllable). In the inspired style, one picks up the Bible, reads it, and preaches from the heart. Oddly, the church of this type of denomination is often hierarchical with one charismatic leader who controls the group. In the “learned” ministry, the leader is more like a doctor or lawyer and restrained by protocols of democracy and lay leadership like boards. The Catholic priest, of course, is a hybrid, meant to be an authority figure full of humility, which is hard for humans to manage.
For a long time, until Elizabeth I actually, England teetered back and forth between the florid extravagance of new-found wealth and the Puritanical insistence on clean, well-lighted spaces in which people wore plain clothing and often fasted. Again -- still with us. Movie stars live impossibly luxurious and unfettered home lives -- then go off to meditate at a Buddhist ashram. Maybe shave their heads.
My internship was in Hartford, Connecticut, where I confronted an array of church buildings. One of my favorite juxtapositions was a little wedding cake of white spired church downtown, right next to one of those mirror-box sky-scrapers that replicated it full of wavers and blips. The Universalist church was a study in 19th century luxury: fine furniture, a stained glass wall, creamy wainscoting and deep carpet. The Unitarian church was a set of concrete fins arranged in a circle with the roof suspended on cables between them: it moved when the wind blew, creaking like a ship, and leaked. Not far away was a Russian orthodox church with onion-topped spires.
While I was there the new Richard Meier Hartford Seminary was dedicated: all white with pipe railings. (They call them “vines.”) Maybe this is the ultimate melding of the simple and the rarified. From their website: "If any religious symbol can be said to dominate Richard Meier's design for Hartford Seminary, it is the primordial emblem of creation: light. Whether silhouetted against a cloudless summer sky or wrapped in the haze of a New England winter, this low white building is an arrestingly luminous presence... Transposed to full scale, Hartford Seminary displays a harmonious ordering of calm, simple volumes, and a modulation of radiant spaces unprecedented in Meier's work."
Sounds like the east slope of the Rockies to me. A good place to be as we evidently head into another Thirty Years War based on religion and feudalism again. But the people buying their fiefdoms all around here have neither Pope nor God.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
BLOGGER STRUGGLE
TODAY I WAS UNABLE TO GET TO MY BLOGS ALL MORNING. I DON'T KNOW WHY. THE INSTRUCTIONS ON WHAT TO DO TAKE ME IN A LITTLE CIRCLE. IF I DON'T SEEM TO BE POSTING FOR MORE THAN A FEW DAYS, ASSUME THIS RELENTLESS TORRENT OF "IMPROVEMENT" HAS FINALLY OVERWHELMED ME.
I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I WAS FINALLY ABLE TO BREAK THROUGH.
PRAIRIE MARY
I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I WAS FINALLY ABLE TO BREAK THROUGH.
PRAIRIE MARY
OLD BUILDING: OLD RELIGION?
I subscribe to several automatic enewsletters. One of the best is called “Sightings” and comes from the Martin Marty Center, part of the University of Chicago Divinity School, which I attended 1978 to 1982. My MA in Religious Studies is from there. The writer this time was Elizabeth Blasius, who studies historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is an archivist at the Chicago Cultural Center. She was talking about the problem of whether to restore St. Boniface church. She says, “...cats and pigeons know it intimately. The giant shipwreck of a building silently overlooks its rapidly changing West Town neighborhood, both relic and fixture among increasingly desirable real estate. Enormous rose windows are bandaged by plywood; doorways are stuffed with concrete blocks; bricks shift and spall from top to bottom. The building is mummified, shrouded by chain link fence, bejeweled with red and white signs warning "Private Property—No Trespassing." The bell towers and rooflines teem with life; flocks of birds and tufts of weeds feed off the structure like a giant coral reef.
“This bold-shouldered Romanesque skeleton, designed in 1896 and dedicated in 1904, was once a place where thousands of turn-of-the-century German-Americans (in 1900, one in four Chicagoans was a German immigrant) came to worship.”
When people talk about religion, they often talk about theology. A few will talk about community or even ethnicity. But hardly anyone talks about what an anthropologist would call “material culture.” Yet a building can be so much beloved. And the other things, too: the chalices and candlesticks, a particular hymnal, the carving on a pulpit.
I’m working my way through another English mystery series, “Waking the Dead.” I admit that part of the attraction of this genre is the architecture and the scenery. After the pilot I was left cold and almost dumped the rest off my Netflix queue, but the second installment was pretty good. This third one, called “The Blind Begger,” was excellent, both in story and presentation. It began with a man singing an Irish song in a bar -- oh, I can’t resist such a thing! It’s nearly religious to hear a healthy full-grown man really reach out in a beautiful voice! (It was one of the things I loved about the ministry, those men’s voices. When at the General Assembly the ministers, almost all male in those days, rose and pealed out “Rank by rank again we stand...” it was all I could do to keep from crying.) Much of the rest of the story took place in a Catholic church where they’d ripped up the floor in the crypt and found a modern body. I mean, the place had been an historic set of tombs in a pre-existing ancient church, but they had been removed and a person had been buried there twenty years earlier. I won’t put a spoiler in here. I’m not talking about the movie, so much as the setting anyway.
Across from Meadville/Lombard was Von Ogden Vogt’s idea of a perfect Unitarian church -- built as a replica of a European Catholic cathedral except that all the Catholic iconography had been replaced by mozaic and carved motifs of what at that time were triumphs of modern science: steam engines, aeroplanes, the glass beakers of a chem lab and so on. A niche held a statue of Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen. That is, Von Ogden Vogt was perfectly willing to throw the theology overboard, but he couldn’t bear to jettison the material culture. If he could have found a way to justify incense and bells, he probably would have. By the time I was supposed to be graduating and finishing up my senior thesis, the minister was Duke Gray, equally attached to Church of England vespers which seemed to fit the building.
I like churches in general, of all kinds, but as a matter of doctrine prefer small plain churches that don’t distract from the worship. So I say -- but the truth is that I’m also attracted to the grand, historic, fabulously designed and executed buildings of well-established religions. Not that I wanted to be the minister of such a church, since I know quite well that it would mean putting enormous effort into maintaining and funding it. The budgets of places like Notre Dame or Westminster Cathedral must be formidable, to saying nothing of the kind of crew it would take to maintain simple cleanliness. Anyway, Unitarians subscribe to the experimental, the individual, the Frank Lloyd Wright design.
Still, truth be told, part of my attraction to the U of Chicago was the glamour of stone quads with gargoyles, the Anglophilia of ringing bell changes in church towers, and the fine polished wood and stained glass of the two University places of worship. Bond Chapel was a small private space where the lecturn was a brass eagle and the worshipers were faculty, their family, and students. Rockefeller Chapel was a huge formal public space hosting, ceremonies such as graduation when the faculty approached in procession in colorful robes with the same roots in European academic robes as many ministers’ preaching gowns.
Blasius, who is not a religious academic, is speaking of the problem of what to do with formerly sacred spaces, constructed with great care and sacrifice and -- even in disrepair -- carrying enormous holiness and symbolism. There is a counter-culture fashion of making them into dance halls. In Helena there is one converted into a home. Sometimes they become excellent artist’s studios. But a huge old space like St. Boniface is unmanageable.
The parallel with the institutions and theologies of those old religions pulled along from one continent to another through century after century of change -- all the while resisting change and demanding resources -- is undeniable. Many of the ideas are so damaged by the pigeons and cats and weeds of contemporary science and attitudes that they are probably un-saveable in the long run. Yet we can’t help loving them, even in our media fantasies. A well-loved place, human voices lifted in song, light slanting through space, beautiful surfaces and costly art -- one can’t help responding. I guess the question is about what comes next.
“This bold-shouldered Romanesque skeleton, designed in 1896 and dedicated in 1904, was once a place where thousands of turn-of-the-century German-Americans (in 1900, one in four Chicagoans was a German immigrant) came to worship.”
When people talk about religion, they often talk about theology. A few will talk about community or even ethnicity. But hardly anyone talks about what an anthropologist would call “material culture.” Yet a building can be so much beloved. And the other things, too: the chalices and candlesticks, a particular hymnal, the carving on a pulpit.
I’m working my way through another English mystery series, “Waking the Dead.” I admit that part of the attraction of this genre is the architecture and the scenery. After the pilot I was left cold and almost dumped the rest off my Netflix queue, but the second installment was pretty good. This third one, called “The Blind Begger,” was excellent, both in story and presentation. It began with a man singing an Irish song in a bar -- oh, I can’t resist such a thing! It’s nearly religious to hear a healthy full-grown man really reach out in a beautiful voice! (It was one of the things I loved about the ministry, those men’s voices. When at the General Assembly the ministers, almost all male in those days, rose and pealed out “Rank by rank again we stand...” it was all I could do to keep from crying.) Much of the rest of the story took place in a Catholic church where they’d ripped up the floor in the crypt and found a modern body. I mean, the place had been an historic set of tombs in a pre-existing ancient church, but they had been removed and a person had been buried there twenty years earlier. I won’t put a spoiler in here. I’m not talking about the movie, so much as the setting anyway.
Across from Meadville/Lombard was Von Ogden Vogt’s idea of a perfect Unitarian church -- built as a replica of a European Catholic cathedral except that all the Catholic iconography had been replaced by mozaic and carved motifs of what at that time were triumphs of modern science: steam engines, aeroplanes, the glass beakers of a chem lab and so on. A niche held a statue of Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen. That is, Von Ogden Vogt was perfectly willing to throw the theology overboard, but he couldn’t bear to jettison the material culture. If he could have found a way to justify incense and bells, he probably would have. By the time I was supposed to be graduating and finishing up my senior thesis, the minister was Duke Gray, equally attached to Church of England vespers which seemed to fit the building.
I like churches in general, of all kinds, but as a matter of doctrine prefer small plain churches that don’t distract from the worship. So I say -- but the truth is that I’m also attracted to the grand, historic, fabulously designed and executed buildings of well-established religions. Not that I wanted to be the minister of such a church, since I know quite well that it would mean putting enormous effort into maintaining and funding it. The budgets of places like Notre Dame or Westminster Cathedral must be formidable, to saying nothing of the kind of crew it would take to maintain simple cleanliness. Anyway, Unitarians subscribe to the experimental, the individual, the Frank Lloyd Wright design.
Still, truth be told, part of my attraction to the U of Chicago was the glamour of stone quads with gargoyles, the Anglophilia of ringing bell changes in church towers, and the fine polished wood and stained glass of the two University places of worship. Bond Chapel was a small private space where the lecturn was a brass eagle and the worshipers were faculty, their family, and students. Rockefeller Chapel was a huge formal public space hosting, ceremonies such as graduation when the faculty approached in procession in colorful robes with the same roots in European academic robes as many ministers’ preaching gowns.
Blasius, who is not a religious academic, is speaking of the problem of what to do with formerly sacred spaces, constructed with great care and sacrifice and -- even in disrepair -- carrying enormous holiness and symbolism. There is a counter-culture fashion of making them into dance halls. In Helena there is one converted into a home. Sometimes they become excellent artist’s studios. But a huge old space like St. Boniface is unmanageable.
The parallel with the institutions and theologies of those old religions pulled along from one continent to another through century after century of change -- all the while resisting change and demanding resources -- is undeniable. Many of the ideas are so damaged by the pigeons and cats and weeds of contemporary science and attitudes that they are probably un-saveable in the long run. Yet we can’t help loving them, even in our media fantasies. A well-loved place, human voices lifted in song, light slanting through space, beautiful surfaces and costly art -- one can’t help responding. I guess the question is about what comes next.
Friday, October 12, 2007
CIRCLING THE REZ
Today I woke up with cabin fever and anyway I kept stumbling over the box of stuff I wanted to take up to the rez. So I just went out the door. Five minutes later I was back for that box. And while I was at it, picked up the grocery list for Cut Bank on the way home.
First stop, best stop. It was Heart Butte, where I taught ‘89-91. What made it so terrific was seeing the success of Janet and Merlin Running Crane at their “Heart Butte Trading Post.” Originally built as a kind of steel warehouse where a consortium of women did contract sewing (gas mask liners and other mysterious oddments), then used as a teen center (soon destroyed by outlier teens who couldn’t stand seeing anything good happen because it interfered with their conviction that the whole world was bad and that’s why everyone was mad at them), and now the Trading Post, this store is far more than just a store. It’s as close as there is to a cafe, for one thing, and right across from the Heart Butte Clinic. No pharmacy but there’s an ATM! You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that ATM!
Janet and Merlin, who have worked for both the school and the post office, know the importance of consistency, order, and learning how to do stuff, like on the computer: hence, a blog! A BLOG! http://www.heartbuttetradingpost.net/ This summer, when wildfires looked as though they might invade both Heart Butte and East Glacier, that blog was a welcome contact with the outside world, both for people not in town and for the firefighters themselves. Now that the excitement is over, Janet is posting history of the town, finding photos where she can. I’m just thrilled that someone is breaking this trail, and doing it with generosity and insight. It’s not a matter of getting rich in money, but in other ways.
I never remember that Janet grew up in Valier -- she says “on the west side of Lake Francis” which means a farm, not in town. She’s creating an elaborate scrapbook history of her own family. All I can say is that when you cross the best of the Norwegians with the best of the Blackfeet (Running Crane is the name of one of the strongest chiefs.) you’ve really got some productive, capable, determined people. We had two short but important discussions between Father Dan needing some help with his donations for Dan Boggs’ funeral (Oh, what a loss! One of the older, dependable, shrewd men we all counted on!) and a character in need of Spam and eggs for his lunch. (Janet says spam is all the rage in Heart Butte! But evidently no one fixes it the way my mom used to: baked with a crust of mustard, honey, clove, and cinnamon. They just fry a slice alongside their eggs.)
The first discussion was about privacy. Janet puts things in, then some family member calls her up and says, “If you dare say anything about such-and-such, I’ll never speak to you again!” She says usually she can’t figure out what the problem is, since what she was going to include seemed like good stuff, like the guy who’s making lots of money. But it’s a major thing around here never to let anyone know how much money you have. They might want to borrow some. They might demand that you pay back what you borrowed from THEM. The law might read about it and come looking for taxes or child support. Those outliers might come on a dark night with no one around and try to rob you. We ended up with a little list of why people around here are so often hooked on privacy:
1. They get sick of regulators always snooping around and wanting to know blood quantum, or acreage under irrigation, or a great-grandparents’ Dawes Act papers. Indians, more than any other people in America have been labeled, sorted, assigned, restricted, required, promoted, defined and redefined until they get sick of it. And, as Darrell Kipp has been saying for decades now, farmers are the new Indians.
2. People who grow up in families with alcoholism or other kinds of abuse are warned from toddlerhood never to let anyone know what happened at home. (If you could call it that.) In the absence of effective law, family members and others sometimes become enforcers. And, unreasonably, the stigma attaches to the victim as much as to the perp.
3. Secrets and the pretense of secrecy are part of the underground currency of a reservation. Mix that with sex, and you’ve got a lot of wandering electrical potential.
4. At one time the US government devoted itself to finding and killing Indians. You think they forget that? You think the FBI doesn’t obsess about it still?
The other conversation was about Janet’s indignation when a blogger called Heart Butte a “slum.” She was angry until someone pointed out that it does answer to the dictionary definition: “a squalid, dirty, overcrowded street or section of a city.” Well, maybe it does NOT! It’s certain not a city. “Squalid” means “having a dirty, neglected or poverty-stricken appearance.” Hmmm. It’s that. So we discussed possible responses to defend one’s feelings:
1. “Sure. So what are you going to do about it? Write us a check? Come help me paint my grandma’s house? Pull weeds this weekend?”
2. The humorous approach. “Sure, we have trash but with this wind at least it’s different trash every day.”
3. Putting down the outsider: “Hey, maybe it don’t look too good, but you’ll never find better friends and truer hearts. And I defy you find any spot on the planet that has more beautiful mountains and views!”
4. More of the same: “You just think that because you’ve never been in these houses, but the same buildings that the sun bleaches paint off of and the wind tears apart on the outside are cozy and bright and clean on the inside.”
I went on my way whistling just as the lunch crowd began to come. The aspens are about blown leafless now, but in a few spots there are groves that get a little more water, a little more sun, a little less wind, so that you drive around a curve and confront a big cumulus of brassy gold against the bull pines. I have favorite places I watch for: certain pole gates, little copses where horses hang out when it’s windy, Mittens Lake. A person accumulates these markers. Lingering snow on the mountains makes the geology plain to the thoughtful observer: long horizontal ledges along curtains of stone, certain peaks that have eroded with almost evenly spaced avalanches marked by white, here and there a mountain scooped out by ancient glaciers as though it were ice cream. I always have to remind myself to watch the road. Not much traffic -- lucky.
In Browning I went to the Blackfeet Community College Library to give them most of the box of books and magazines, all of them on American Indian art. I bought them long ago and always intended to read them, but now there are others who need them more. The librarian is Gordon Monroe’s daughter. Gordon was one of my excellent students back in the Sixties and I was provoked when he quit school about three months before he would have graduated so that he could go to Bible School. But plainly it was the right thing to do. When he came back, he continued with his church work as well as picking up art, which led him into being Bob Scriver’s fiberglass man. Gordie is the one who made the big fiberglass bucking bull now in front of the Blackfeet Heritage Center that used to be the Scriver Studio and museum as well as the big bucking horse that’s up in front of the Babb School. He also makes his own figures and that’s where it gets interesting, because most of his work is derivative -- that is, based on someone else’s work -- but always with his own twist on it.
The perfect example was down at the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Bob made two big sculptures of Blackfeet religious ceremonies: one of the Medicine Pipe Bundle Opening and one of the Beaver Bundle Opening. They’re quite impressive, near-dioramas. Gordie made his own ceremonial sculpture: Hand Game, a gambling game very ancient and overwhelmingly popular. It does have religious significance: isn't life a gamble? His figures sit in two lines instead of a circle but they are about the same scale, a little more rough-hewn, and quite as individual as the portraits Bob made.
No one was home in the other places I visited. Even the Cuts Wood School kids had all piled into a vehicle and gone somewhere on a picnic or a field trip. So I went on to shop, still whistling. Met another Heart Butte person on the parking lot of the grocery store and exchanged hugs and news. It was a good day.
First stop, best stop. It was Heart Butte, where I taught ‘89-91. What made it so terrific was seeing the success of Janet and Merlin Running Crane at their “Heart Butte Trading Post.” Originally built as a kind of steel warehouse where a consortium of women did contract sewing (gas mask liners and other mysterious oddments), then used as a teen center (soon destroyed by outlier teens who couldn’t stand seeing anything good happen because it interfered with their conviction that the whole world was bad and that’s why everyone was mad at them), and now the Trading Post, this store is far more than just a store. It’s as close as there is to a cafe, for one thing, and right across from the Heart Butte Clinic. No pharmacy but there’s an ATM! You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that ATM!
Janet and Merlin, who have worked for both the school and the post office, know the importance of consistency, order, and learning how to do stuff, like on the computer: hence, a blog! A BLOG! http://www.heartbuttetradingpost.net/ This summer, when wildfires looked as though they might invade both Heart Butte and East Glacier, that blog was a welcome contact with the outside world, both for people not in town and for the firefighters themselves. Now that the excitement is over, Janet is posting history of the town, finding photos where she can. I’m just thrilled that someone is breaking this trail, and doing it with generosity and insight. It’s not a matter of getting rich in money, but in other ways.
I never remember that Janet grew up in Valier -- she says “on the west side of Lake Francis” which means a farm, not in town. She’s creating an elaborate scrapbook history of her own family. All I can say is that when you cross the best of the Norwegians with the best of the Blackfeet (Running Crane is the name of one of the strongest chiefs.) you’ve really got some productive, capable, determined people. We had two short but important discussions between Father Dan needing some help with his donations for Dan Boggs’ funeral (Oh, what a loss! One of the older, dependable, shrewd men we all counted on!) and a character in need of Spam and eggs for his lunch. (Janet says spam is all the rage in Heart Butte! But evidently no one fixes it the way my mom used to: baked with a crust of mustard, honey, clove, and cinnamon. They just fry a slice alongside their eggs.)
The first discussion was about privacy. Janet puts things in, then some family member calls her up and says, “If you dare say anything about such-and-such, I’ll never speak to you again!” She says usually she can’t figure out what the problem is, since what she was going to include seemed like good stuff, like the guy who’s making lots of money. But it’s a major thing around here never to let anyone know how much money you have. They might want to borrow some. They might demand that you pay back what you borrowed from THEM. The law might read about it and come looking for taxes or child support. Those outliers might come on a dark night with no one around and try to rob you. We ended up with a little list of why people around here are so often hooked on privacy:
1. They get sick of regulators always snooping around and wanting to know blood quantum, or acreage under irrigation, or a great-grandparents’ Dawes Act papers. Indians, more than any other people in America have been labeled, sorted, assigned, restricted, required, promoted, defined and redefined until they get sick of it. And, as Darrell Kipp has been saying for decades now, farmers are the new Indians.
2. People who grow up in families with alcoholism or other kinds of abuse are warned from toddlerhood never to let anyone know what happened at home. (If you could call it that.) In the absence of effective law, family members and others sometimes become enforcers. And, unreasonably, the stigma attaches to the victim as much as to the perp.
3. Secrets and the pretense of secrecy are part of the underground currency of a reservation. Mix that with sex, and you’ve got a lot of wandering electrical potential.
4. At one time the US government devoted itself to finding and killing Indians. You think they forget that? You think the FBI doesn’t obsess about it still?
The other conversation was about Janet’s indignation when a blogger called Heart Butte a “slum.” She was angry until someone pointed out that it does answer to the dictionary definition: “a squalid, dirty, overcrowded street or section of a city.” Well, maybe it does NOT! It’s certain not a city. “Squalid” means “having a dirty, neglected or poverty-stricken appearance.” Hmmm. It’s that. So we discussed possible responses to defend one’s feelings:
1. “Sure. So what are you going to do about it? Write us a check? Come help me paint my grandma’s house? Pull weeds this weekend?”
2. The humorous approach. “Sure, we have trash but with this wind at least it’s different trash every day.”
3. Putting down the outsider: “Hey, maybe it don’t look too good, but you’ll never find better friends and truer hearts. And I defy you find any spot on the planet that has more beautiful mountains and views!”
4. More of the same: “You just think that because you’ve never been in these houses, but the same buildings that the sun bleaches paint off of and the wind tears apart on the outside are cozy and bright and clean on the inside.”
I went on my way whistling just as the lunch crowd began to come. The aspens are about blown leafless now, but in a few spots there are groves that get a little more water, a little more sun, a little less wind, so that you drive around a curve and confront a big cumulus of brassy gold against the bull pines. I have favorite places I watch for: certain pole gates, little copses where horses hang out when it’s windy, Mittens Lake. A person accumulates these markers. Lingering snow on the mountains makes the geology plain to the thoughtful observer: long horizontal ledges along curtains of stone, certain peaks that have eroded with almost evenly spaced avalanches marked by white, here and there a mountain scooped out by ancient glaciers as though it were ice cream. I always have to remind myself to watch the road. Not much traffic -- lucky.
In Browning I went to the Blackfeet Community College Library to give them most of the box of books and magazines, all of them on American Indian art. I bought them long ago and always intended to read them, but now there are others who need them more. The librarian is Gordon Monroe’s daughter. Gordon was one of my excellent students back in the Sixties and I was provoked when he quit school about three months before he would have graduated so that he could go to Bible School. But plainly it was the right thing to do. When he came back, he continued with his church work as well as picking up art, which led him into being Bob Scriver’s fiberglass man. Gordie is the one who made the big fiberglass bucking bull now in front of the Blackfeet Heritage Center that used to be the Scriver Studio and museum as well as the big bucking horse that’s up in front of the Babb School. He also makes his own figures and that’s where it gets interesting, because most of his work is derivative -- that is, based on someone else’s work -- but always with his own twist on it.
The perfect example was down at the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Bob made two big sculptures of Blackfeet religious ceremonies: one of the Medicine Pipe Bundle Opening and one of the Beaver Bundle Opening. They’re quite impressive, near-dioramas. Gordie made his own ceremonial sculpture: Hand Game, a gambling game very ancient and overwhelmingly popular. It does have religious significance: isn't life a gamble? His figures sit in two lines instead of a circle but they are about the same scale, a little more rough-hewn, and quite as individual as the portraits Bob made.
No one was home in the other places I visited. Even the Cuts Wood School kids had all piled into a vehicle and gone somewhere on a picnic or a field trip. So I went on to shop, still whistling. Met another Heart Butte person on the parking lot of the grocery store and exchanged hugs and news. It was a good day.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
WHY I LOVE BIG STATUES: A Trip
This is Ezra Cornell and Bruce Strachan (my father) in Ithaca, NY, on August 17, 1952. The bronze is by Hermon Atkins MacNeil. You can buy a miniature version of it at:
http://www.georgeglazer.com/prints/portraits/ezracornell.html for $650 or so. MacNeil’s papers are at Cornell. An heroic sized casting of his statue called “Sun Worshipper“ is among the pieces in the Scriver estate in the Montana Historical Society.
"The Response: The National War Memorial in Confederation Square," Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Designed by Vernon March of England and unveiled in May 1939 by King George VI. The memorial is over 63 feet high with 22 bronze figures. To the right is the Chateau Laurier where we had breakfast, my father rightly figuring that would be the cheapest meal for five of us. Mark and Paul had a fine time toasting each other with the stemmed grapefruit dishes, to the amusement of several businessmen peeping over their newspapers. My moment came (this was August 18, 1952) when a gnat was discovered swimming in my milk. My father called the headwaiter over and simply pointed. “Mon dieu!” shrieked that dignified man, and rushed off to the kitchen with my milk. I was mortified.
Concord, Mass, on Aug. 20, 1952. Monument to the “Embattled Farmer” -- the “Minute Man” who responded quickly to provide the “shot heard round the world,” the first resistance to the British in the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775. The sculptor was Daniel Chester French, who first studied art with Louisa May Alcott’s younger sister Amy. He was only 25 when he did this sculpture which is very much adapted from the Apollo Belvedere, a cast of which was available for study at the Atheneum in Boston.
A new angle on the Statue of Liberty. The sculptor here was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi We didn’t get to go inside and go up in her head. The very idea fascinated a lot of people, including Bob Scriver who wanted to make a giant statue of Jesus with a hollow head so you could go up there and look waaaaay over the prairie. This was the 21st of August and it may have been the day that the subway doors began to close, cutting we kids off from our parents. A native New Yorker, standing nearby and reading his paper, simply reached out and put his hand on the door, which made it open again. We didn’t know about that, but we scampered through in a hurry. The man didn’t even look at us. He’d already seen everything. Once on the platform, we realized that we kids didn’t know the name of our hotel. In fact, our parents had to look at the key tag.
On August 23, the “Soldiers National Monument” on Gettysburg Battlefield, the spot where Lincoln gave his famous speech from notes on the back of an envelope. Randolph Rogers was the sculptor and the statues are more classically cut in marble -- not bronze. At the top is a female “victory” figure with laurel wreaths. Around the bottom are four figures, two male soldiers in uniforms and two symbolic female figures, one with a sheaf of wheat and the other with a pencil and pad. (Well, someone always has to take notes.)
Here’s another marble statue, easily recognized as the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial building, especially remarkable for the light. The sculptor was Daniel Chester French again and he had to really work hard to get the light to work. We were there on the 23rd of August. I don’t know what time of day. Some of the photos are really stunning because of sunset or sunrise. I’m not sure which direction Lincoln faces.
Rudulph Evans was the sculptor for this statue of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was a Beaux Arts sculptor who worked with Rodin and Saint Gaudens, but who knows his name today? My father was a great admirer of Jefferson and owned a copy of his small pocket “Jefferson Bible,” which was the Gospels with all the miracles removed. I gave that little book to my cousin’s son, who is also an admirer of Jefferson. Recently a new statue of Jefferson was cast not far from here. It’s quite similar except that it was put in motion with a foot advanced foward and the coat blowing out behind. Quite nice but with much less “gravitas” which is what many people prefer in their national heroes.
Here’s Gutzon Borglum’s iconic presidential portraits. There’s a nice book about the whole harrowing process: “Gutzon Borglum: Artist and Patriot” by Willadene Price 1961, a paperback. "Great White Fathers: The True Story of Gutzon Borglum and His Obsessive Quest to Create the Mt. Rushmore National Monument" by John Taliafero is a much more modern and opinionated book. This photo was taken on Saturday, August 30, 1952, and we had no inkling at all that Indian activists would someday climb the trail behind in order to pour blood-colored paint down their faces. Neither did we realize how thin this bluff is. There’s not much stone behind the heads and someday the whole thing will cave off.
Sic transit gloria.
But statues last longer than people. My parents and the younger brother have died. I grew up and married a sculptor, Bob Scriver, who also died, but he left a few portraits of himself.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
DIABETES: Cascading, Grumbling & Floating
Sometimes a book is mightier than the AMA or even the pharm predators. Gary Taubes’ latest book seems to be one of them. He takes on several “known” food issues and by carefully tracing the history of the idea and rereading the original evidence, he finds evidence of “cascading” everywhere. Cascading is when a consensus develops about what works and why, but it comes out of the maybe/sorta/kinda results of research that is never quite confirmed but soon becomes the common wisdom. (If it doesn't work, it's the patient's fault.) A good example might be the release yesterday of news about a drug that helps “some” (a fifth or less) alcoholics give up or decrease their drinking. The release is accompanied by glowing praise from newly “saved” patients. The research was financed by the pharm company that produces the stuff and which declares, “Now you don’t have to go to expensive rehab or attend night-after-night of AA. Now you can just go to your family doctor for a prescription.” (Drug pushers sound alike.)
A doctor in Montana who writes a column for the GF Tribune noted this week a movement, very quiet, towards allowing “behind the counter drugs.” (http://tinyurl.com/32qtv6) This would mean “avoiding the expense of paying for a visit to a physician when you and the pharmacist know what you need.” The doctor tried to put a good spin on it, but I think it’s just another pharm scam.
Part of what’s pushing us in that direction is the attitudes of the doctors themselves, who have been convinced by the pharm villains that listening is not what patients need: patients need miracle drugs. The pharm people are also shutting down the supply of “samples” for doctors to give to patients. Now the doctors give the patients “vouchers” to present to the pharmacist, assuming there’s still a drug store with a pharmacist in your neck of the woods. The rules favor the Big Box pharm operations, which are much more agreeable and much less transparent. And you'll be more grateful to your pill-pusher than to your physician advisor.
What I predict -- and HOPE for -- is a rising class of “medical listeners” who can help people find their way through the absolute labyrinth of drugs that an aging person faces these days at the same time that they have diminished capacity to round up general info, say, on a computer, and time and focus to devote to sifting it. Anyway, a lot of things we thought we “knew” are turning out, on deeper investigation, to be pretty dubious.
The one that Taubes took on first was the idea that the calories of what goes in (food) equals what comes out (“food ash” -- poop) less energy. This is not so. The amount of calories extracted from the food depends on a whole symphony of hormones and other molecules which are entirely individual in detail, though tied into systems. Not only the amount but the kind and the disposition of those calories is governed by this “symphony”: some calories go to the liver, some to the cells for “burning,” some to muscle tissues, and some have atoms and molecules extracted to make more hormones etc. Cholesterol into one’s mouth does not equal cholesterol into one's veins and arteries. It might kinda/sorta/somewhat affect what makes it into your tissues, but it’s perfectly possible to scarf down bacon and have no cholesterol in the blood.
But that’s a natural fat people have been eating for a long time. Transfats and other human-constructed molecules go into the body and have no natural pathways. They must invent new ones and some of them might not do you any good at all. Molecular klinkers can accumulate, clogging up liver and other body factories. Clearly the body is a food “transformer” that does not just pass it all through after extracting calories.
Here’s another example of “cascading.” Diabetes 1 has been known for a long time and clearly is caused by a failure of the pancreas’ specialty cells, the Isles of Langerhans, to make insulin. People who aren’t making their own insulin either get insulin from other animals or take manmade insulin (hoping it is close enough to the human stuff to not create klinkers). Many people have been kept alive and have even thrived on this regime.
When Diabetes 2 came along, blood sugar was tested and was too high. This suggested a need for insulin BUT the other side of the equation was that it turned out cells could simply REFUSE insulin, even when it was present. This is an entirely different problem and gave rise to metformin and other similar drugs, including some that are now under suspicion of causing heart problems. What has not been much discussed, since these patients are also prescribed insulin-hypers and then insulin, is that a body can have TOO MUCH insulin in the blood, with bad consequences for other organs and feedback loops. (Few if any docs test for too much insulin.) It’s like cortisol, which is homemade (in the body) cortisone, which is helpful in small amounts but over time had an erosive effect, In fact, cortisol levels are somehow related to insulin. And so are the “sex” hormones and whole other molecule loop pathways. My friend can’t sleep if she takes metformin. It gives me a brief little “hot flash,” not so much the kind at menopause (which I didn’t have) but the kind you get when you work too hard too late.
All this stuff badly needs to be talked out frankly and with confidence with someone who really listens. That used to be doctors and pharmacists, but my friends and I are finding that they are no longer sympathetic or even willing to listen. It takes too much time. There’s a line behind you, a waiting room of sick people. My friend is inclined to edit what she tells both in order to keep the doctor from fixating on some pet peeve of his or because she doesn’t want to compromise her case for what SHE wants to do, what she thinks it’s possible to do. (She cannot tolerate a low-carb diet and insists that all fruit is healthy.) She’s more and more inclined to invest in what I consider to be quacks and I see that as a trend all over town. People tell me shocking things they pay money for. (The “clean colon” craze is here.) The healthiest thing I’ve heard of is probably foot massage. It’s still hard to find diabetes-friendly food in these stores except the stuff the pharm-food people tweak to be “fat-free, sugar-free, guilt-free.”
And me? I’m floating in space. My readings are good. My nurse practitioner left town. I can’t get the A1c that’s due until I accept another doctor, but who? What if I’m totally fooling myself? The friend I criticize still gets good A1c stats, so what’s the problem?
The only plan I have is staying alive until they figure this stuff out.
A doctor in Montana who writes a column for the GF Tribune noted this week a movement, very quiet, towards allowing “behind the counter drugs.” (http://tinyurl.com/32qtv6) This would mean “avoiding the expense of paying for a visit to a physician when you and the pharmacist know what you need.” The doctor tried to put a good spin on it, but I think it’s just another pharm scam.
Part of what’s pushing us in that direction is the attitudes of the doctors themselves, who have been convinced by the pharm villains that listening is not what patients need: patients need miracle drugs. The pharm people are also shutting down the supply of “samples” for doctors to give to patients. Now the doctors give the patients “vouchers” to present to the pharmacist, assuming there’s still a drug store with a pharmacist in your neck of the woods. The rules favor the Big Box pharm operations, which are much more agreeable and much less transparent. And you'll be more grateful to your pill-pusher than to your physician advisor.
What I predict -- and HOPE for -- is a rising class of “medical listeners” who can help people find their way through the absolute labyrinth of drugs that an aging person faces these days at the same time that they have diminished capacity to round up general info, say, on a computer, and time and focus to devote to sifting it. Anyway, a lot of things we thought we “knew” are turning out, on deeper investigation, to be pretty dubious.
The one that Taubes took on first was the idea that the calories of what goes in (food) equals what comes out (“food ash” -- poop) less energy. This is not so. The amount of calories extracted from the food depends on a whole symphony of hormones and other molecules which are entirely individual in detail, though tied into systems. Not only the amount but the kind and the disposition of those calories is governed by this “symphony”: some calories go to the liver, some to the cells for “burning,” some to muscle tissues, and some have atoms and molecules extracted to make more hormones etc. Cholesterol into one’s mouth does not equal cholesterol into one's veins and arteries. It might kinda/sorta/somewhat affect what makes it into your tissues, but it’s perfectly possible to scarf down bacon and have no cholesterol in the blood.
But that’s a natural fat people have been eating for a long time. Transfats and other human-constructed molecules go into the body and have no natural pathways. They must invent new ones and some of them might not do you any good at all. Molecular klinkers can accumulate, clogging up liver and other body factories. Clearly the body is a food “transformer” that does not just pass it all through after extracting calories.
Here’s another example of “cascading.” Diabetes 1 has been known for a long time and clearly is caused by a failure of the pancreas’ specialty cells, the Isles of Langerhans, to make insulin. People who aren’t making their own insulin either get insulin from other animals or take manmade insulin (hoping it is close enough to the human stuff to not create klinkers). Many people have been kept alive and have even thrived on this regime.
When Diabetes 2 came along, blood sugar was tested and was too high. This suggested a need for insulin BUT the other side of the equation was that it turned out cells could simply REFUSE insulin, even when it was present. This is an entirely different problem and gave rise to metformin and other similar drugs, including some that are now under suspicion of causing heart problems. What has not been much discussed, since these patients are also prescribed insulin-hypers and then insulin, is that a body can have TOO MUCH insulin in the blood, with bad consequences for other organs and feedback loops. (Few if any docs test for too much insulin.) It’s like cortisol, which is homemade (in the body) cortisone, which is helpful in small amounts but over time had an erosive effect, In fact, cortisol levels are somehow related to insulin. And so are the “sex” hormones and whole other molecule loop pathways. My friend can’t sleep if she takes metformin. It gives me a brief little “hot flash,” not so much the kind at menopause (which I didn’t have) but the kind you get when you work too hard too late.
All this stuff badly needs to be talked out frankly and with confidence with someone who really listens. That used to be doctors and pharmacists, but my friends and I are finding that they are no longer sympathetic or even willing to listen. It takes too much time. There’s a line behind you, a waiting room of sick people. My friend is inclined to edit what she tells both in order to keep the doctor from fixating on some pet peeve of his or because she doesn’t want to compromise her case for what SHE wants to do, what she thinks it’s possible to do. (She cannot tolerate a low-carb diet and insists that all fruit is healthy.) She’s more and more inclined to invest in what I consider to be quacks and I see that as a trend all over town. People tell me shocking things they pay money for. (The “clean colon” craze is here.) The healthiest thing I’ve heard of is probably foot massage. It’s still hard to find diabetes-friendly food in these stores except the stuff the pharm-food people tweak to be “fat-free, sugar-free, guilt-free.”
And me? I’m floating in space. My readings are good. My nurse practitioner left town. I can’t get the A1c that’s due until I accept another doctor, but who? What if I’m totally fooling myself? The friend I criticize still gets good A1c stats, so what’s the problem?
The only plan I have is staying alive until they figure this stuff out.
Monday, October 08, 2007
BOTH SIDES NOW: The Dream Bed (fiction)
“What do you think about mountain mysticism?” Felix asked Clare over coffee in her kitchen.
“You mean, could a person get high?” she joked.
“Would a person fasting up in the mountains really have a vision?”
He was serious. “Clive had quite a bit of information about all this, I think. He said there were dream beds all through this part of the Rockies and over in the Sweetgrass Hills. He took a few photos or his informants did, but they’ve never been published for fear modern people would either go up to destroy them or risk their lives trying to fast in them.”
“What did they look like?”
“Not much. A little wall about the size of a bathtub, enough to keep the wind off a person lying down. Sometimes the wall is shale on edge, propped along in a row, and sometimes it’s piled. Depends on what rocks are handy. But they don’t call these mountains “rocky” for nothing.”
“Then they’re all above tree level. The altitude where trees stop growing.”
“I suppose so. The idea is to be able to meditate while looking into the distance. There’s a story, you know. It began to be a competition among the parents to see whose son could fast the longest and bring back the most powerful vision. Opinions differed about which animal helper might be the most powerful, but competition is always dangerous when people are doing risky things.”
“Extreme.”
“What?”
“Today we’d call that extreme, like extreme sports.”
“Yes. Ordinary mountains are dangerous all by themselves. More tourists die falling off mountains in Glacier Park every year than the bears kill. They’re all afraid of bears, but they'll stand on the edge of cliffs, climbing over the guard rails to get there.”
“What’s the story?”
“A boy goes up to a dreaming spot. His father goes with him so he can come back and check on him now and then, as his people expect him to do. But the father wants his son to be tough, to excel, so he doesn’t go back until the third day -- maybe the fourth. When he gets there, the son is gone. Instead a little bird has taken his place.”
“What do you think REALLY happened to that boy? Do you think a predator dragged him off?”
“Maybe the vision he had was that he didn’t need such an unreliable father and he just left. Went to live with other people.” Clare emptied the dregs of her coffee. She ought to figure out how to make filter coffee without grounds getting over the edge into the plastic cone, but the truth was that she sort of liked biting the bigger particles of beans. “I’d best get to work.”
“I’m going on up the mountain today. I’m gonna look for a dream bed. Obviously my father won’t come looking for me since he can barely get himself across a room and I don’t want company. Snugs will stay with him. But if I don’t show up by this time tomorrow, will you call someone? If Snugs calls, they won’t pay attention. He’s just another unreliable Indian.”
“Who?”
“Snugs. My nephew.”
“No, I mean, who do I call?”
“Sheriff, I suppose. He must know about search and rescue. I’ll be in the Lewis & Clark forest. I’m going up the trail out of Heart Butte. I’ll draw a little map and leave it on my kitchen table.”
“Of course I’ll call.” But she stood in front of her studio and watched Felix’ retreating back until Goldie meowed to get inside. Then she went in to start a fire in the studio woodstove, thinking it was chilly, maybe this cold front might bring rain or even snow up high. Worried, she knew better than to interfere.
Felix left his map with a fork on top to hold it down and cautioned Snugs and his father not to move it. He threw some bologna and cheese into his backpack -- not a big pack with a frame but more of a day pack. Some matches in a waterproof holder plus a butane barbecue lighter. A quarter-inch map. A compass hung on his jacket zipper. Hiking boots. Half was thrilled and waltzed in a circle when Felix threw in some dog chow.
Leaving the car as far in as he could drive, he found the trailhead. Half an hour of walking before he began to hit his stride and remember what it was like to swing along this way. It felt great. The bull pines and aspen were damp from the last showers but it looked as though the clearing that always followed a cold front in fall was beginning to push the clouds back. The aspens had lost a lot of leaves this high. Sometimes he saw bear scat, loaded with the remains of berries, but it was all old stuff. He kept Half within eyesight.
Once up into the high ridges, he could see a lot farther. Long veils of mist were writhing and parting, slowly leaving. As they went they revealed the wall-like stone of the Rocky Mountain ramparts. It had eructed in sections, like a slab that had been broken from underneath -- probably that’s about what happened. When there was enough blue sky for the sun to warm the stone, he began to see eagles gyring on the rising air. Golden eagles -- not bald eagles. Wide strong wings and broad tails of valuable feathers. Now that eagles were protected, the feathers were worth even more. Anything forbidden is attractive.
Fweet. Marmots. A whole colony in the remains of an avalanche, bustling around stashing grass in their holes. Fweet. On the alert.
Up high in the cliff he could see a broken place in the rock and a white swash like paint beneath it. Eagle nest. When he looked more closely, he could see ends of sticks that he knew were from the piles and tangles the eagles made for nests. Scanning the long slope of scree, he looked for something that might be the remains of an eagle-catching pit, a place a man could hunker down with a kind of lid of leafy branches where he could put bait so the eagle would land on it. Then he’d grab through the branches and get the bird by the ankles. Have to be fast. Have to avoid those claws, as long as a man’s fingers and sharp as... Not edged like a knife, but more like a construction nail. Like metal. Black. Curved. How could the catcher evade the yellow hooked beak? Couldn’t. Bound to get hurt. Must’ve been worth it. Extreme but rewarding.
Warmed by exertion and the steady sun reflected off stone, he took off his jacket and stuffed it into the pack. He didn’t need the compass up here -- he could see for many many miles, the long slow slope of prairie off into a purple-hazed distance and little scribbles that were towns, easy to ignore. He took deep breaths, more than panting, a kind of exhaltation expressed as exhaling.
Half loped ahead, then doubled back, but he had slowed down some. Felix let him go. He’d see bears soon enough if there were any up this high. They’d be by the marmots maybe -- otherwise they needed bulk food this time of year and would more likely be lower. He was startled when Half came back barking and agitated. The dog had been higher and past a ridge, so he approached the ridge with caution.
There was no bear. Instead a pile of rock looked manmade, arranged rather than fallen. Something dark was in it. He approached carefully and Half stayed close.
It was a vision bed, a rock wall of piled rock, just big enough to outline a body. Felix nearly backed away, afraid of interrupting someone in the midst of a fast. He stood at a distance, watching for movement, but there was none. “Hello?” he yelled.
It seemed to be a man, on his face, under a blanket except for his head. He could see that the head had three dark braids, which is the way Blackfeet do boys’ hair. “Are you all right?” There was no response. He and Half went slowly closer. The body seemed flat. The blanket was discolored. He began to suspect that this person was not all right at all. Or maybe ultimately all right, if you wanted to look at it that way.
He threw a handful of pebbles onto the blanket but there was no movement. In a while he and Half went to stand beside the low wall and look directly down at the body. Clearly, this young (?) man was dead. Half’s back hairs were standing up in a ridge. They circled along the outside perimeter of the wall until they could see the face, where the head was turned to one side, and a hand stuck out of a jacket. That wrist had a Navajo-style bracelet, a cuff. The silver was oxidized dark but the turquoise was still pure. He had been dead a long time, mummified as dry meat by the sun, wind and low humidity. He had not turned into a small bird.
“You mean, could a person get high?” she joked.
“Would a person fasting up in the mountains really have a vision?”
He was serious. “Clive had quite a bit of information about all this, I think. He said there were dream beds all through this part of the Rockies and over in the Sweetgrass Hills. He took a few photos or his informants did, but they’ve never been published for fear modern people would either go up to destroy them or risk their lives trying to fast in them.”
“What did they look like?”
“Not much. A little wall about the size of a bathtub, enough to keep the wind off a person lying down. Sometimes the wall is shale on edge, propped along in a row, and sometimes it’s piled. Depends on what rocks are handy. But they don’t call these mountains “rocky” for nothing.”
“Then they’re all above tree level. The altitude where trees stop growing.”
“I suppose so. The idea is to be able to meditate while looking into the distance. There’s a story, you know. It began to be a competition among the parents to see whose son could fast the longest and bring back the most powerful vision. Opinions differed about which animal helper might be the most powerful, but competition is always dangerous when people are doing risky things.”
“Extreme.”
“What?”
“Today we’d call that extreme, like extreme sports.”
“Yes. Ordinary mountains are dangerous all by themselves. More tourists die falling off mountains in Glacier Park every year than the bears kill. They’re all afraid of bears, but they'll stand on the edge of cliffs, climbing over the guard rails to get there.”
“What’s the story?”
“A boy goes up to a dreaming spot. His father goes with him so he can come back and check on him now and then, as his people expect him to do. But the father wants his son to be tough, to excel, so he doesn’t go back until the third day -- maybe the fourth. When he gets there, the son is gone. Instead a little bird has taken his place.”
“What do you think REALLY happened to that boy? Do you think a predator dragged him off?”
“Maybe the vision he had was that he didn’t need such an unreliable father and he just left. Went to live with other people.” Clare emptied the dregs of her coffee. She ought to figure out how to make filter coffee without grounds getting over the edge into the plastic cone, but the truth was that she sort of liked biting the bigger particles of beans. “I’d best get to work.”
“I’m going on up the mountain today. I’m gonna look for a dream bed. Obviously my father won’t come looking for me since he can barely get himself across a room and I don’t want company. Snugs will stay with him. But if I don’t show up by this time tomorrow, will you call someone? If Snugs calls, they won’t pay attention. He’s just another unreliable Indian.”
“Who?”
“Snugs. My nephew.”
“No, I mean, who do I call?”
“Sheriff, I suppose. He must know about search and rescue. I’ll be in the Lewis & Clark forest. I’m going up the trail out of Heart Butte. I’ll draw a little map and leave it on my kitchen table.”
“Of course I’ll call.” But she stood in front of her studio and watched Felix’ retreating back until Goldie meowed to get inside. Then she went in to start a fire in the studio woodstove, thinking it was chilly, maybe this cold front might bring rain or even snow up high. Worried, she knew better than to interfere.
Felix left his map with a fork on top to hold it down and cautioned Snugs and his father not to move it. He threw some bologna and cheese into his backpack -- not a big pack with a frame but more of a day pack. Some matches in a waterproof holder plus a butane barbecue lighter. A quarter-inch map. A compass hung on his jacket zipper. Hiking boots. Half was thrilled and waltzed in a circle when Felix threw in some dog chow.
Leaving the car as far in as he could drive, he found the trailhead. Half an hour of walking before he began to hit his stride and remember what it was like to swing along this way. It felt great. The bull pines and aspen were damp from the last showers but it looked as though the clearing that always followed a cold front in fall was beginning to push the clouds back. The aspens had lost a lot of leaves this high. Sometimes he saw bear scat, loaded with the remains of berries, but it was all old stuff. He kept Half within eyesight.
Once up into the high ridges, he could see a lot farther. Long veils of mist were writhing and parting, slowly leaving. As they went they revealed the wall-like stone of the Rocky Mountain ramparts. It had eructed in sections, like a slab that had been broken from underneath -- probably that’s about what happened. When there was enough blue sky for the sun to warm the stone, he began to see eagles gyring on the rising air. Golden eagles -- not bald eagles. Wide strong wings and broad tails of valuable feathers. Now that eagles were protected, the feathers were worth even more. Anything forbidden is attractive.
Fweet. Marmots. A whole colony in the remains of an avalanche, bustling around stashing grass in their holes. Fweet. On the alert.
Up high in the cliff he could see a broken place in the rock and a white swash like paint beneath it. Eagle nest. When he looked more closely, he could see ends of sticks that he knew were from the piles and tangles the eagles made for nests. Scanning the long slope of scree, he looked for something that might be the remains of an eagle-catching pit, a place a man could hunker down with a kind of lid of leafy branches where he could put bait so the eagle would land on it. Then he’d grab through the branches and get the bird by the ankles. Have to be fast. Have to avoid those claws, as long as a man’s fingers and sharp as... Not edged like a knife, but more like a construction nail. Like metal. Black. Curved. How could the catcher evade the yellow hooked beak? Couldn’t. Bound to get hurt. Must’ve been worth it. Extreme but rewarding.
Warmed by exertion and the steady sun reflected off stone, he took off his jacket and stuffed it into the pack. He didn’t need the compass up here -- he could see for many many miles, the long slow slope of prairie off into a purple-hazed distance and little scribbles that were towns, easy to ignore. He took deep breaths, more than panting, a kind of exhaltation expressed as exhaling.
Half loped ahead, then doubled back, but he had slowed down some. Felix let him go. He’d see bears soon enough if there were any up this high. They’d be by the marmots maybe -- otherwise they needed bulk food this time of year and would more likely be lower. He was startled when Half came back barking and agitated. The dog had been higher and past a ridge, so he approached the ridge with caution.
There was no bear. Instead a pile of rock looked manmade, arranged rather than fallen. Something dark was in it. He approached carefully and Half stayed close.
It was a vision bed, a rock wall of piled rock, just big enough to outline a body. Felix nearly backed away, afraid of interrupting someone in the midst of a fast. He stood at a distance, watching for movement, but there was none. “Hello?” he yelled.
It seemed to be a man, on his face, under a blanket except for his head. He could see that the head had three dark braids, which is the way Blackfeet do boys’ hair. “Are you all right?” There was no response. He and Half went slowly closer. The body seemed flat. The blanket was discolored. He began to suspect that this person was not all right at all. Or maybe ultimately all right, if you wanted to look at it that way.
He threw a handful of pebbles onto the blanket but there was no movement. In a while he and Half went to stand beside the low wall and look directly down at the body. Clearly, this young (?) man was dead. Half’s back hairs were standing up in a ridge. They circled along the outside perimeter of the wall until they could see the face, where the head was turned to one side, and a hand stuck out of a jacket. That wrist had a Navajo-style bracelet, a cuff. The silver was oxidized dark but the turquoise was still pure. He had been dead a long time, mummified as dry meat by the sun, wind and low humidity. He had not turned into a small bird.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
WHAT WOMEN WANT
Last spring a Canadian writer contacted me by phone. She’d been referred to me by another Canadian writer, a friend. This caller had an idea for a book that would be nonfiction, a sort of journalist’s extended piece, proposing that people needn’t look at retirement as a long, grim decline into poor health and diminishing money, but could see it as a chance for the gleeful recreation they had never had before. (Remember these are prairie Canadians we’re talking about.) She had petitioned my friend, who writes rather mordant fiction and memoir, to come up with examples of people in this happy circumstance so that she could interview them as the substance of her book. She was sure that such a cheerful book would sell. (I’m always impressed by the number of publishers -- esp. regional magazines -- who say they want “up-beat” material.)
As it happens, she called me just after my brother died, aged 63, indigent, living in his truck except that a stranger took him in after he had a serious heart attack. I didn’t have enough money to go intervene when he had his heart attack and I didn’t have enough money to go when he died. In fact, I couldn’t really afford the phone bills so I appreciated the phone card my cousin sent for Christmas. Luckily my other brother did have money to go and cope, but all there was to do was order cremation and sort what was in the truck. He gave the truck to the kind stranger.
Also, from this time of year until maybe April, I am COLD -- not because this house can’t be kept warm, but because I don’t have enough money for the fuel necessary to do that. (The fuel people, of course, say that if I would just INSULATE, though this house was previously insulated in a desultory way in a publicly funded Help-the-Elderly way, or that I could get a subsidy if I would only APPLY. The application requires me to allow access to all records: bank, medical, property ownership, etc. Very useful info to some and a total invasion of privacy.)
So I was less than gleeful.
The writer never called back. She must have interviewed someone else, but I haven’t seen or heard about the book. But then, there’s a kind of wall between here and Canada except when a Canadian city advertises in the Great Falls Tribune, which specializes in “focused” advertising inserts.
Today’s insert is called “What Women Want” which is meant to bring in customers to an “Expo” at the Civic Center which is mostly an orgy of shopping.
In addition to the shoe ads I see more than six full-page ads for medical care, mostly cancer, backed by text “stories” that are related. If someone from Outer Slobbovia were to wonder what women want in this region, they would probably deduce that they want to look about 25 years old and be willing to undergo bariatric surgery (restricting stomach capacity) and a new thing called “lipodissolve” (unapproved injection of chemicals directly into fat) to achieve that, plus spending lots of money on makeup, exercise clubs, and chemical peels. Also, of course, they must be hyperalert for cancer which seems about as prevalent as pregnancy. There are NO ads for abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood.
There is a single clever ad for the CM Russell Museum which imitates a singles ad: “Man Seeking Women.” “I am a handsome cowboy lookin’ for some good lady pals. My interests include tellin’ stories, spending time with friends, and creating masterpieces. I am very good with my hands.” “My friends call me Charlie.” No mention of the well-known fact that many of Charlie’s best friends were prostitutes.
What are we to make of all this? Heck, I’d just laugh, shrug and go on, except that there’s this bio of Bob to market. Clearly the “romance ethic” either dominates the female reader market or is thought to dominate it. This means that the “love affair” between Bob and me or between him and the second wife, Jeanette, should be exploited but not in a realistic way that considers things like compatability, the dynamics of success, what intimacy really means, or how and why women contribute to the success of men. Much less female alcoholism which is the shorthand version of Bob’s fourth wife. Or teen pregnancy -- that's the first wife.
There are two stories in this women’s section about women who are considered exemplars in High-Line communities. One is the wife of a discredited judge who has had to go back to private practice. The other is the wife co-owner half of the local complex of weekly community newspapers who keeps an iron grip on content, often excluding Indians or any bad news. Bad from the point of view of her husband, who coaches the local basketball team. I won’t go into detail, but you know what the sports issues are these days.
The GF Trib is not a bicoastal newspaper. You will not find real singles ads in this section, nor anything about contraception, nor anything about marriage counseling or issues like co-dependence. If you want to be a feminist, go for it. Just understand that takes you off the marriage market. But does it? This is a trickily two-layered region: your basic mostly-Scandinaavian homesteader-rancher stock overlaid with people with way too much money who came here to escape the kind of environment where a person CAN make too much money. So on the one hand, people will admire a self-made Montana sculptor uncritically on the basis of his subject matter without any sense of what his career might mean internationally except how much money his work is worth. The people who came here from the outside will divide between those who only value artists like those in their university art history course and those who want to be “regional” and dive into the local arts world.
How much should a marketer be local (the U of Calgary Press sees itself as a “Heartland” press) and how much should be international outreach? Would two separate approaches interfere with each other?
This matters for writers. When the Montana Festival of the Book started, it was given a big boost by a number of writers who had national reputations but for whatever reason lived or had roots in Montana. Now most of the people who moved to Montana, thinking that would make them better-selling writers, have discovered it wasn’t the key and have moved away again. But there IS writing among the local people, sprung up like grass and unpromoted. No one knows anything about it and they aren’t likely to find out much, not even where to order it. Barnes & Noble will not sell it.
Meanwhile for the Manhattan publishers, out-sourcing to foreign countries is the name of the game. They want the story of some suffering African or Afghan child who barely escaped to tell about it and who inexplicably seems to have discovered how to write a book and contact an agent. These have sold well in the past, so the marketers, who call the shots, assume they will sell well now. They are not inclined to experiment because a wrong decision will cost them big bucks. Even drawing on the internal Third World of the black ghetto and the red rez has turned out to trigger firestorms. Not safe.
What this “women’s” insert shows me is only another example of the circular media reasoning that is globally guiding us away from a constructive future by refusing to look realistically at the present. What this means to me and to other writers is an open question. In the meantime, I may not be having a “gleeful” retirement with lots of travel, home upgrades, and free time, but I AM living out a lifelong intention to write. This is not an end for me but a beginning and -- like all beginnings -- tough, sometimes lonely, risky, and enormously satisfying. And I could care less what I look like.
This insert is not for me. How could it be? What I want is not for sale. The media these days IS.
As it happens, she called me just after my brother died, aged 63, indigent, living in his truck except that a stranger took him in after he had a serious heart attack. I didn’t have enough money to go intervene when he had his heart attack and I didn’t have enough money to go when he died. In fact, I couldn’t really afford the phone bills so I appreciated the phone card my cousin sent for Christmas. Luckily my other brother did have money to go and cope, but all there was to do was order cremation and sort what was in the truck. He gave the truck to the kind stranger.
Also, from this time of year until maybe April, I am COLD -- not because this house can’t be kept warm, but because I don’t have enough money for the fuel necessary to do that. (The fuel people, of course, say that if I would just INSULATE, though this house was previously insulated in a desultory way in a publicly funded Help-the-Elderly way, or that I could get a subsidy if I would only APPLY. The application requires me to allow access to all records: bank, medical, property ownership, etc. Very useful info to some and a total invasion of privacy.)
So I was less than gleeful.
The writer never called back. She must have interviewed someone else, but I haven’t seen or heard about the book. But then, there’s a kind of wall between here and Canada except when a Canadian city advertises in the Great Falls Tribune, which specializes in “focused” advertising inserts.
Today’s insert is called “What Women Want” which is meant to bring in customers to an “Expo” at the Civic Center which is mostly an orgy of shopping.
In addition to the shoe ads I see more than six full-page ads for medical care, mostly cancer, backed by text “stories” that are related. If someone from Outer Slobbovia were to wonder what women want in this region, they would probably deduce that they want to look about 25 years old and be willing to undergo bariatric surgery (restricting stomach capacity) and a new thing called “lipodissolve” (unapproved injection of chemicals directly into fat) to achieve that, plus spending lots of money on makeup, exercise clubs, and chemical peels. Also, of course, they must be hyperalert for cancer which seems about as prevalent as pregnancy. There are NO ads for abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood.
There is a single clever ad for the CM Russell Museum which imitates a singles ad: “Man Seeking Women.” “I am a handsome cowboy lookin’ for some good lady pals. My interests include tellin’ stories, spending time with friends, and creating masterpieces. I am very good with my hands.” “My friends call me Charlie.” No mention of the well-known fact that many of Charlie’s best friends were prostitutes.
What are we to make of all this? Heck, I’d just laugh, shrug and go on, except that there’s this bio of Bob to market. Clearly the “romance ethic” either dominates the female reader market or is thought to dominate it. This means that the “love affair” between Bob and me or between him and the second wife, Jeanette, should be exploited but not in a realistic way that considers things like compatability, the dynamics of success, what intimacy really means, or how and why women contribute to the success of men. Much less female alcoholism which is the shorthand version of Bob’s fourth wife. Or teen pregnancy -- that's the first wife.
There are two stories in this women’s section about women who are considered exemplars in High-Line communities. One is the wife of a discredited judge who has had to go back to private practice. The other is the wife co-owner half of the local complex of weekly community newspapers who keeps an iron grip on content, often excluding Indians or any bad news. Bad from the point of view of her husband, who coaches the local basketball team. I won’t go into detail, but you know what the sports issues are these days.
The GF Trib is not a bicoastal newspaper. You will not find real singles ads in this section, nor anything about contraception, nor anything about marriage counseling or issues like co-dependence. If you want to be a feminist, go for it. Just understand that takes you off the marriage market. But does it? This is a trickily two-layered region: your basic mostly-Scandinaavian homesteader-rancher stock overlaid with people with way too much money who came here to escape the kind of environment where a person CAN make too much money. So on the one hand, people will admire a self-made Montana sculptor uncritically on the basis of his subject matter without any sense of what his career might mean internationally except how much money his work is worth. The people who came here from the outside will divide between those who only value artists like those in their university art history course and those who want to be “regional” and dive into the local arts world.
How much should a marketer be local (the U of Calgary Press sees itself as a “Heartland” press) and how much should be international outreach? Would two separate approaches interfere with each other?
This matters for writers. When the Montana Festival of the Book started, it was given a big boost by a number of writers who had national reputations but for whatever reason lived or had roots in Montana. Now most of the people who moved to Montana, thinking that would make them better-selling writers, have discovered it wasn’t the key and have moved away again. But there IS writing among the local people, sprung up like grass and unpromoted. No one knows anything about it and they aren’t likely to find out much, not even where to order it. Barnes & Noble will not sell it.
Meanwhile for the Manhattan publishers, out-sourcing to foreign countries is the name of the game. They want the story of some suffering African or Afghan child who barely escaped to tell about it and who inexplicably seems to have discovered how to write a book and contact an agent. These have sold well in the past, so the marketers, who call the shots, assume they will sell well now. They are not inclined to experiment because a wrong decision will cost them big bucks. Even drawing on the internal Third World of the black ghetto and the red rez has turned out to trigger firestorms. Not safe.
What this “women’s” insert shows me is only another example of the circular media reasoning that is globally guiding us away from a constructive future by refusing to look realistically at the present. What this means to me and to other writers is an open question. In the meantime, I may not be having a “gleeful” retirement with lots of travel, home upgrades, and free time, but I AM living out a lifelong intention to write. This is not an end for me but a beginning and -- like all beginnings -- tough, sometimes lonely, risky, and enormously satisfying. And I could care less what I look like.
This insert is not for me. How could it be? What I want is not for sale. The media these days IS.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT PROMOTING BOOKS
Little or nothing. Though I’m quite aware that I’ve done a lot of promoting in my time -- just not books. (Lulu.com is beginning to move towards more emphasis on promotion and less on printing.) That means moving more towards being what we call a “publisher”, a kind of business which in the modern sense has only existed for a few hundred years, if that, and appears to be de-constructing itself.
As review, this is what a publisher does:
Seeks out or accepts work that seems worthy. (Now the criterion has become “seems saleable” which means mostly “like something that sold well earlier.”)
Edits for good sense, organization, and so on as well as correcting grammar and punctuation. (No more. Spell-check, if that.)
>Lays-out the copy with illustrations. (Hooray for this, but they used to pay for the illustrations.)
Proofs for type-setting errors. (Ha!)
Defines a market and promotes the book to that market. (Today’s topic.)
Maintains a warehouse of copies from which to ship. (This is what Print On Demand eliminates.)
Actually ships the books out to the bookstores and customers. Looks for helpful reviewers.
Back to promotion. Bob Scriver had me writing news releases and little brochures from the moment I hit Browning in 1961. One of the reasons it worked was that I really believed in him and his work. When he divorced me in 1970, School District #9, impressed by what they thought I’d done for Bob, hired me to “improve the image” of the district because everyone complained so much. Grandiously, I thought “why improve the IMAGE when the reality needs so much improving?” So that lasted about three months while I bustled around trying to get faculty communication going when what the Superintendent wanted was a nice veneer of photos and stories about how terrific the teachers and esp. the administrators were.
Then I was at Multnomah County Animal Control where Burgwin and I were almost on the same page, except this time I went a little too far the other direction. I did do officer training and in-house education, but I did more with image improvement, or thought I did. I learned to interact with the media by inventing occasions for stories, though I nearly came a cropper with one of Burgwin’s good ideas: issuing the lowest numbered dog licenses for the year (#1 through 5) to the Mayor and Commissioners who had dogs. My subconscious did this by nearly losing the first ten dog licenses off the pile on the very morning we were supposed to hand them out at City Hall.
One of my most successful stories was “how to pick up dog poop without making a total fool of yourself.” No one had thought of the plastic bag strategy then, so I had something to say and it was both a little naughty and quite useful. I also had some standing gigs with radio journalists and an agreement that if anyone canceled at the last minute, I’d come as fast as I could with a fairly decent story in hand. Burgwin had me tracking statistics on graphs (no computers yet) which was an excellent practice for both improving our strategy and keeping the media interested: they love statistics.
The dark side that I discovered in those days was the utter cynicism of modern media: they ALWAYS thought that we had an ulterior motive, that we were covering something up, that there was something vicious and evil lurking in there. They talked abut me being “a dog-catching flack” and didn’t believe what I told them. And I always considered their sentimentality to be their dark side. (One young female reporter explained to me, after a young woman had died in an accident and she’d written a tear jerker about how the woman’s cat slept on her bed in hopes she’d return, that the truth was that the cat had ALWAYS slept on the bed but the photographer had gotten a photo of the cat on the bed and the reporter’s editor made her build that into a big deal.) Their even DARKER side was inventing confrontations and oppositions and inflated dangers everywhere, and then projecting them onto us. They LOVED everyone to be deadlocked in controversy, so much more exciting than complicated compromises.
My next experience came in the church context as the circuit-riding Unitarian minister in Montana 1982-85. Again, the press pushed everything into pre-existing muffin tins, off-handed assumptions about what religion is -- all without any insight into church politics or denominational polity, the history of religions, or anything else very useful. Either you were starting a heresy or you were having a bake sale and that was all there was to it. Nevertheless, I romanced reporters and sent out letters to the editor. Sometimes it helped, if they got addresses and meeting times right. Something like my book of sermons, “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” went whistling right by their ears. Anyway, what reporter has time to read a religious book, even if they cared? The days of publishing sermons on the front page of the paper are long gone.
My last formal job in Portland was working for the City of Portland and it confirmed every suspicion any reporter ever had about cover-ups, behind the scenes deals, “spun” information and so on. In those years the city had an explosion of imported drug crime, a near-flooding of the downtown, a landslide that sent expensive houses sliding down onto other expensive houses, a county commissioner who picked up little boys, a slum landlord scandal, and so on. All hushed up, covered up, re-interpreted. I wasn’t doing any PR but I learned a lot from watching and listening.
So now I’m back in Montana since 1999 and watching the same sort of thing with Bob Scriver’s estate. “How can we wring more money out of it?” “If we never allow access to the inventory, no one will miss the ...” “How do we hide some of the, er, expediences that were, um, necessary?” Claims of being Bob’s best friend or his cousin. The ridiculous promotion of a little tourist piece Bob did early in his career as a “limited edition” valuable “find,” which lost people some money -- partly because of lousy casting. THAT was interesting to watch! And suppression. Old accusations and interceptions. Lots of people have lots of reasons to be suspicious of what I’ve written. Most of them can relax. Most of what I wrote in this book is funny stories, some sad, some amazing. The kind of thing you tell your friends after you read it. That’s a form of promotion right there, the form that really counts.
Tim, a person who has intense and bitter experience with the media, says that they will not be interested in the book -- they will want to go after ME, to find my hidden secrets, my unsuspected nature, and reveal that. So much more fun to snoop around in the life of someone still living, esp. if the book is supposed to be a memoir and if Indians are involved, though the Indian appetite for political witch-hunts has somewhat died down. He says I could play it demure and big-eyed, or I could play it all-knowing and not-quite-nice. I kind of like the latter alternative, but there’s not a lot for them to dig up. I guess that’s never stopped anyone in the past. There’s always something that can be smudged and skewed a bit a little to look worse than it is.
But, more helpfully, the real job is to figure out who will like to read this book and who could care less, so we can leave them out. We know about Western art fans, sculptors trying to succeed, Blackfeet, High Line Montanans, and maybe people who are interested in the Philosophy of Place. Brian Dippie suggests that the love story will pull in even those super-sophisticated Manhattan types. We’ll see. It’s a good one: not just Bob and me but Bob and Blackfeet and me and the reservation.
As review, this is what a publisher does:
Seeks out or accepts work that seems worthy. (Now the criterion has become “seems saleable” which means mostly “like something that sold well earlier.”)
Edits for good sense, organization, and so on as well as correcting grammar and punctuation. (No more. Spell-check, if that.)
>Lays-out the copy with illustrations. (Hooray for this, but they used to pay for the illustrations.)
Proofs for type-setting errors. (Ha!)
Defines a market and promotes the book to that market. (Today’s topic.)
Maintains a warehouse of copies from which to ship. (This is what Print On Demand eliminates.)
Actually ships the books out to the bookstores and customers. Looks for helpful reviewers.
Back to promotion. Bob Scriver had me writing news releases and little brochures from the moment I hit Browning in 1961. One of the reasons it worked was that I really believed in him and his work. When he divorced me in 1970, School District #9, impressed by what they thought I’d done for Bob, hired me to “improve the image” of the district because everyone complained so much. Grandiously, I thought “why improve the IMAGE when the reality needs so much improving?” So that lasted about three months while I bustled around trying to get faculty communication going when what the Superintendent wanted was a nice veneer of photos and stories about how terrific the teachers and esp. the administrators were.
Then I was at Multnomah County Animal Control where Burgwin and I were almost on the same page, except this time I went a little too far the other direction. I did do officer training and in-house education, but I did more with image improvement, or thought I did. I learned to interact with the media by inventing occasions for stories, though I nearly came a cropper with one of Burgwin’s good ideas: issuing the lowest numbered dog licenses for the year (#1 through 5) to the Mayor and Commissioners who had dogs. My subconscious did this by nearly losing the first ten dog licenses off the pile on the very morning we were supposed to hand them out at City Hall.
One of my most successful stories was “how to pick up dog poop without making a total fool of yourself.” No one had thought of the plastic bag strategy then, so I had something to say and it was both a little naughty and quite useful. I also had some standing gigs with radio journalists and an agreement that if anyone canceled at the last minute, I’d come as fast as I could with a fairly decent story in hand. Burgwin had me tracking statistics on graphs (no computers yet) which was an excellent practice for both improving our strategy and keeping the media interested: they love statistics.
The dark side that I discovered in those days was the utter cynicism of modern media: they ALWAYS thought that we had an ulterior motive, that we were covering something up, that there was something vicious and evil lurking in there. They talked abut me being “a dog-catching flack” and didn’t believe what I told them. And I always considered their sentimentality to be their dark side. (One young female reporter explained to me, after a young woman had died in an accident and she’d written a tear jerker about how the woman’s cat slept on her bed in hopes she’d return, that the truth was that the cat had ALWAYS slept on the bed but the photographer had gotten a photo of the cat on the bed and the reporter’s editor made her build that into a big deal.) Their even DARKER side was inventing confrontations and oppositions and inflated dangers everywhere, and then projecting them onto us. They LOVED everyone to be deadlocked in controversy, so much more exciting than complicated compromises.
My next experience came in the church context as the circuit-riding Unitarian minister in Montana 1982-85. Again, the press pushed everything into pre-existing muffin tins, off-handed assumptions about what religion is -- all without any insight into church politics or denominational polity, the history of religions, or anything else very useful. Either you were starting a heresy or you were having a bake sale and that was all there was to it. Nevertheless, I romanced reporters and sent out letters to the editor. Sometimes it helped, if they got addresses and meeting times right. Something like my book of sermons, “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” went whistling right by their ears. Anyway, what reporter has time to read a religious book, even if they cared? The days of publishing sermons on the front page of the paper are long gone.
My last formal job in Portland was working for the City of Portland and it confirmed every suspicion any reporter ever had about cover-ups, behind the scenes deals, “spun” information and so on. In those years the city had an explosion of imported drug crime, a near-flooding of the downtown, a landslide that sent expensive houses sliding down onto other expensive houses, a county commissioner who picked up little boys, a slum landlord scandal, and so on. All hushed up, covered up, re-interpreted. I wasn’t doing any PR but I learned a lot from watching and listening.
So now I’m back in Montana since 1999 and watching the same sort of thing with Bob Scriver’s estate. “How can we wring more money out of it?” “If we never allow access to the inventory, no one will miss the ...” “How do we hide some of the, er, expediences that were, um, necessary?” Claims of being Bob’s best friend or his cousin. The ridiculous promotion of a little tourist piece Bob did early in his career as a “limited edition” valuable “find,” which lost people some money -- partly because of lousy casting. THAT was interesting to watch! And suppression. Old accusations and interceptions. Lots of people have lots of reasons to be suspicious of what I’ve written. Most of them can relax. Most of what I wrote in this book is funny stories, some sad, some amazing. The kind of thing you tell your friends after you read it. That’s a form of promotion right there, the form that really counts.
Tim, a person who has intense and bitter experience with the media, says that they will not be interested in the book -- they will want to go after ME, to find my hidden secrets, my unsuspected nature, and reveal that. So much more fun to snoop around in the life of someone still living, esp. if the book is supposed to be a memoir and if Indians are involved, though the Indian appetite for political witch-hunts has somewhat died down. He says I could play it demure and big-eyed, or I could play it all-knowing and not-quite-nice. I kind of like the latter alternative, but there’s not a lot for them to dig up. I guess that’s never stopped anyone in the past. There’s always something that can be smudged and skewed a bit a little to look worse than it is.
But, more helpfully, the real job is to figure out who will like to read this book and who could care less, so we can leave them out. We know about Western art fans, sculptors trying to succeed, Blackfeet, High Line Montanans, and maybe people who are interested in the Philosophy of Place. Brian Dippie suggests that the love story will pull in even those super-sophisticated Manhattan types. We’ll see. It’s a good one: not just Bob and me but Bob and Blackfeet and me and the reservation.
Friday, October 05, 2007
SWAN AND STEVENS
Beulah Swan Finney notes on her own page in the little genealogy book that she wrote out that she was born in the year of the Chicago fire! October 28, 1871, in Branch County, Michigan. She names no town. Maybe there wasn’t one. Her parents were Samuel Wixom Finney -- we’ve “done” the Finneys -- and Mary Alice Stevens. They were living in Burkmere, South Dakota, when Beulah married on September 19, 1901, in the family home. She was thirty, had taught school and proved up her own homestead.
But first we’re talking about Beulah’s maternal grandparents. Orra Bennett Stevens was born in England about 1822. He came to Ohio where he died around 1899 or 1900. We don’t know who his parents were. His brother Linus married Beulah Swan, the ORIGINAL Beulah Swan, about 1843 in Ohio. Linus and Orra were Civil War veterans on the Union side. Two other brothers, named Mark and Theodore (“Dore”), were both born in Ohio and may have been too young to enlist.
Amy Swan, “our” Beulah’s grandmother, was born about 1824 and died in Michigan in 1879. Her father, Nathan Swan, was a British veteran of the War of 1812, so maybe Canadian as we would say now. There is no record of Nathan’s wife. Amy married Orra Bennett Stevens and they had six children who would be “our” Beulah’s aunts and uncles.
1) Emma F., born 1845 in Ohio, married Melvin M. Dickerson, a veteran of the Union side of the Civil War. His parents were named Alonzo and Lucy Dickerson. Melvin married a second time after Emma died, and that second wife left her home in Mendon, MI, to Florence, who was her stepdaughter, Emma’s genetic child. (Florence never married. No name for that kind stepmother.)
Florence is carving. This is her inherited house. The right side of her face had been removed because of cancer. The other people at the table are l.to r: My mother and two brothers, Sarah Blum, Florence, and then Fred and Ida Smith. It's August, 1952.
Above is Florence’s house from the outside, 2517 Townsend, Mendota, MI. You can’t tell much about it, but it’s quite like the house of Fred and Ida Smith below.
87 E. Jefferson, Quincy, MI. There was a big garden and flock of chickens in the back.
At Florence’s house, a clear case of gender sorting. Goody-Goody Mary plays her only piano piece on the big old square piano for Sara Blum while the boys zero in on television, almost the first we’d seen.
Emma and Melvin’s children (all born in Michigan) who would be “our” Beulah’s cousins included:
1) Amy Lee (b. 2/3/69 - d. 1917 or 1918) who married Leon Farwell. Emma died in Michigan about 1903 or 1904.
2) Omar R. (b. Sept 1871 - d. about 1935) married Nora and had a daughter named Ethel.
3) Grace was born October 28, 1874, (same date as “our” Beulah) and died in 1948. She married Oren Herrick. Their children were Paul and Marion. Grace’s son Paul married Edith and their daughter was named Patricia. (We visited them in Detroit.) Marion married Fred Sommes and they had two children, Frederick and Florence.
480 Bournemouth Circle, Grosse Pt. Farms 30, Michigan. This would be Paul, Edith and Patricia. They introduced us to “Mr. Peepers” on the television. My father had had the brilliant idea of flying out and buying a car there, since it was Detroit. It had those little windshield squirters, the first we’d seen. We named the car “Mr. Peepers” after his water fountain that burbled menacingly every time anyone got a drink.
4 and 5) Sarah was born in 1876. She married Louie Blum, who was previously married. She had no children but Louie’s children were Laurence and Harriet. We visited Sarah Blum and Florence Dickerson (b.1889) in Michigan. See above. Florence was the mayor of her town, Mendota! She had taught school all her life.
6) Kenneth was born about 1883 and married Belva. Their children were another Omar and a nameless daughter.
Mary Alice Stevens, Amy Swan Stevens’ second daughter, was born in Ohio in 1847 and died November 16, 1916, in Faulkton, South Dakota. She married Samuel Wixom Finney. This was “our” Beulah’s mother and Beulah’s family was living with her when she died. Her husband had died earlier and she was in poor health by then. They are in the Faulkton Cemetery.
Thomas Willitt Stevens, “our” Beulah’s uncle, was born in Michigan in 1849 and died about 1926 in Quincy, Michigan. He married Libby Barlow. Their children were all born in Hersey, MI. Mulford, Arthur, Fred, and Nettie. Nettie married a man named Hall and had several sons. Thomas lived in Branch Co. until about 1877 or 78 when he and his wife and Mulford moved farther north into Osceola Co. Some years later after the death of his wife, he remairred and returned to Branch County.
Louisa Stevens, “our” Beulah’s aunt, was born in 1851 and died about 1906 or 1907 in Michigan. She married Chauncy Smith about 1870. Their children were Fred C. (b. October 28, 1877 !) and Glenn (b. @1882). One or two others died in infancy. (Fred Smith is in the photos of Blum and Dickerson above, if it’s the same Fred Smith. He was quite a bold character and pressed Paul to drink cold milk until Paul got sick, which Paul thought was a betrayal. He never realized he was being teased and didn’t have to drink the milk.)
Then there were twins! Joseph and Jannette, “our” Beulah’s aunt and uncle, but we don’t know what year they were born. Maybe 1860. Joseph died about 1932. He married Kate Chase about 1878. Their children were Charley (b. 1883 or 84), Leona (b. 1891 and married Perce Drinker, one of my favorite names: I presume short for Percy.), and Theodore (Ted) (b. 1894 or so) Joseph was a mechanic, carpenter and cabinet maker. he was a member in good standing of the Odd Fellows, Maccabees, and the Baptist choir in both Quincy and Reading, Mi. when he lived in those places.
Jannette(called Nettie) died at the age of 22 or 24, always delicate, never married, a musician by nature, training and occupation -- teaching music. There’s that echo again: Beulah’s sister, also Nettie, also died young.
After Amy Swan Stevens died in 1879, O.B. Stevens, “our” Beulah’s grandfather, lived back and forth between his son Thomas of Hersey, MI and his daughter Mary Alice Stevens Finney in Ashton, MI, until he remarried in 1883 to Mrs. Angeline Stewart in Hersey. He and Angeline returned to live in Quincy about 1886.
I had a devil of a time sorting this out in my head. I hope I didn't make too many errors. Beulah wrote the information in a more conventional family tree way, but then had second thoughts which are written in later or up the side.
But first we’re talking about Beulah’s maternal grandparents. Orra Bennett Stevens was born in England about 1822. He came to Ohio where he died around 1899 or 1900. We don’t know who his parents were. His brother Linus married Beulah Swan, the ORIGINAL Beulah Swan, about 1843 in Ohio. Linus and Orra were Civil War veterans on the Union side. Two other brothers, named Mark and Theodore (“Dore”), were both born in Ohio and may have been too young to enlist.
Amy Swan, “our” Beulah’s grandmother, was born about 1824 and died in Michigan in 1879. Her father, Nathan Swan, was a British veteran of the War of 1812, so maybe Canadian as we would say now. There is no record of Nathan’s wife. Amy married Orra Bennett Stevens and they had six children who would be “our” Beulah’s aunts and uncles.
1) Emma F., born 1845 in Ohio, married Melvin M. Dickerson, a veteran of the Union side of the Civil War. His parents were named Alonzo and Lucy Dickerson. Melvin married a second time after Emma died, and that second wife left her home in Mendon, MI, to Florence, who was her stepdaughter, Emma’s genetic child. (Florence never married. No name for that kind stepmother.)
Florence is carving. This is her inherited house. The right side of her face had been removed because of cancer. The other people at the table are l.to r: My mother and two brothers, Sarah Blum, Florence, and then Fred and Ida Smith. It's August, 1952.
Above is Florence’s house from the outside, 2517 Townsend, Mendota, MI. You can’t tell much about it, but it’s quite like the house of Fred and Ida Smith below.
87 E. Jefferson, Quincy, MI. There was a big garden and flock of chickens in the back.
At Florence’s house, a clear case of gender sorting. Goody-Goody Mary plays her only piano piece on the big old square piano for Sara Blum while the boys zero in on television, almost the first we’d seen.
Emma and Melvin’s children (all born in Michigan) who would be “our” Beulah’s cousins included:
1) Amy Lee (b. 2/3/69 - d. 1917 or 1918) who married Leon Farwell. Emma died in Michigan about 1903 or 1904.
2) Omar R. (b. Sept 1871 - d. about 1935) married Nora and had a daughter named Ethel.
3) Grace was born October 28, 1874, (same date as “our” Beulah) and died in 1948. She married Oren Herrick. Their children were Paul and Marion. Grace’s son Paul married Edith and their daughter was named Patricia. (We visited them in Detroit.) Marion married Fred Sommes and they had two children, Frederick and Florence.
480 Bournemouth Circle, Grosse Pt. Farms 30, Michigan. This would be Paul, Edith and Patricia. They introduced us to “Mr. Peepers” on the television. My father had had the brilliant idea of flying out and buying a car there, since it was Detroit. It had those little windshield squirters, the first we’d seen. We named the car “Mr. Peepers” after his water fountain that burbled menacingly every time anyone got a drink.
4 and 5) Sarah was born in 1876. She married Louie Blum, who was previously married. She had no children but Louie’s children were Laurence and Harriet. We visited Sarah Blum and Florence Dickerson (b.1889) in Michigan. See above. Florence was the mayor of her town, Mendota! She had taught school all her life.
6) Kenneth was born about 1883 and married Belva. Their children were another Omar and a nameless daughter.
Mary Alice Stevens, Amy Swan Stevens’ second daughter, was born in Ohio in 1847 and died November 16, 1916, in Faulkton, South Dakota. She married Samuel Wixom Finney. This was “our” Beulah’s mother and Beulah’s family was living with her when she died. Her husband had died earlier and she was in poor health by then. They are in the Faulkton Cemetery.
Thomas Willitt Stevens, “our” Beulah’s uncle, was born in Michigan in 1849 and died about 1926 in Quincy, Michigan. He married Libby Barlow. Their children were all born in Hersey, MI. Mulford, Arthur, Fred, and Nettie. Nettie married a man named Hall and had several sons. Thomas lived in Branch Co. until about 1877 or 78 when he and his wife and Mulford moved farther north into Osceola Co. Some years later after the death of his wife, he remairred and returned to Branch County.
Louisa Stevens, “our” Beulah’s aunt, was born in 1851 and died about 1906 or 1907 in Michigan. She married Chauncy Smith about 1870. Their children were Fred C. (b. October 28, 1877 !) and Glenn (b. @1882). One or two others died in infancy. (Fred Smith is in the photos of Blum and Dickerson above, if it’s the same Fred Smith. He was quite a bold character and pressed Paul to drink cold milk until Paul got sick, which Paul thought was a betrayal. He never realized he was being teased and didn’t have to drink the milk.)
Then there were twins! Joseph and Jannette, “our” Beulah’s aunt and uncle, but we don’t know what year they were born. Maybe 1860. Joseph died about 1932. He married Kate Chase about 1878. Their children were Charley (b. 1883 or 84), Leona (b. 1891 and married Perce Drinker, one of my favorite names: I presume short for Percy.), and Theodore (Ted) (b. 1894 or so) Joseph was a mechanic, carpenter and cabinet maker. he was a member in good standing of the Odd Fellows, Maccabees, and the Baptist choir in both Quincy and Reading, Mi. when he lived in those places.
Jannette(called Nettie) died at the age of 22 or 24, always delicate, never married, a musician by nature, training and occupation -- teaching music. There’s that echo again: Beulah’s sister, also Nettie, also died young.
After Amy Swan Stevens died in 1879, O.B. Stevens, “our” Beulah’s grandfather, lived back and forth between his son Thomas of Hersey, MI and his daughter Mary Alice Stevens Finney in Ashton, MI, until he remarried in 1883 to Mrs. Angeline Stewart in Hersey. He and Angeline returned to live in Quincy about 1886.
I had a devil of a time sorting this out in my head. I hope I didn't make too many errors. Beulah wrote the information in a more conventional family tree way, but then had second thoughts which are written in later or up the side.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
FALL NOW
So I start the day with a good head of steam and charge out to the side yard to pick up all the limbs I sawed off the other day and jam then into the pickiup. Mission accomplished, I go to drive to the dump. Hmmm. Pickiup keys inside the house.
Double Hmmm. Back door locked. Oh, well, no biggie -- I keep a backup set hidden. Triple Hmmmm. They’re not there. Must’ve taken them inside with some files and boxes. Now what?
I’ve done this twice in the eight years I’ve been here. The first time I lost my temper, jangled the flimsy knob hard, and it opened. But I’ve replaced that knob now and it won’t jangle open. I tried. Hinges are on the inside of both doors -- can’t get in by unscrewing the hinges.
The second time Rick the hippie handyman was still in town. He came over with a pocket full of keys -- turned out that every time he installed a new lock on anyone’s house, he kept one of the spare keys. Took about seven tries to open the door. He looked carefully at the key and put it back in a separate pocket. I was highly suspicious of his motives. But he made me promise to hide a key somewhere, cross my heart and hope to die. He made me actually DO that: cross my heart but said he wouldn’t force anyone to hope to die. And he didn't stay to see where I hid the key.
This time I discovered that I’d luckily put the reversible slow power screwdriver back in its cabinet in the garage -- unlike the drill, which is floating around the bedroom waiting for me to install the door framing woodwork, which is that fancy composite stuff that you can’t drive a nail into. So I just took the storm window off of my office window and climbed in. Squibbie was the next one up the ladder and in. Crackers came to investigate and was the first to go back out. Squibbie went, too, then both came back. Then I had to convince a yellowjacket that this was NOT the place for her to winter-up. The storm window has to come off in order to really clean the window anyway and I hadn’t done it for a couple of years. Flies get trapped in there in summer and make a mess.
Since I was outside dragging my ladder around, I started on the gutters which are primitively installed and at the moment full of yellow poplar leaves. I thought I’d get my dandy gutter shooter out and sluice all that stuff out in minutes. Too bad. I had hung my gutter shooter up in the garage last fall without making sure it was empty of water -- it never occurred to me that it had water IN it without being hooked to the hose. But it was burst clear down its length. So now, gloves and scraper, which will work but not as well. The best move I made was in 1999 when I bought a house only one story tall, though I have a tendency to sit around and wonder if I could get a second story out of it. Loretta next door managed that in her house, though it meant installing a steel beam and lowering the ceiling.
Anyway, good time to take a break and drive out to the dump roll-off at the edge of town. Pick up some gossip, throw some political stones, and share diabetes ideas, since the manager’s daughter is struggling with gestational diabetes that won’t go into remission. They live in Pendroy, which is one of the smaller towns around -- a school, a dinner club, a lawyer, and a few houses -- and they are beginning to be suspicious of the water. It’s the same as the Valier water. How much should we worry? Where can we get facts? Would filters work? The state has just imposed new requirements on the sewage lagoons out by that roll-off and the cost shows on our bills. Our infrastructure bills are climbing steeply.
The forecast is 28 degrees, rain and possibly snow tonight. I already brought in the geranium window boxes but they crowd the cats out of their favorite window. I’d better put them in pots. That means down to the hardware store for potting soil. In this town we all use Miracle Grow. Now some searching around out in the back garage for pots... I once had an assortment of white ceramic pots that I loved but they’re long gone. Wonder if I could replace them around here. Not until the book sells.
Check the email: message from the U of Calgary Press: “Please take a look at this back copy for the book and see if it’s okay.” Well, they have me living in Browning instead of Valier. Maybe we should say “near the Blackfeet Reservation.” We’ve got to decide whether to say Blackfeet (Montana-side) or Blackfoot (Canada-side). Blackfeet is the same as Amskapi Pikuni in their own language -- if we say THAT, most people will be baffled. Blackfoot is the whole Confederation on both sides. That’ll baffle’em, too. Am I Bob’s wife, his ex-wife, ex-wife now bereaved, third-wife-of-four, once-wife, wife in the Sixties, ex-wife and friend. Oh, the hell with it. WIFE. The other three are dead anyway. (Art McKnight used to come up to my van at service stations, lean on the window and say, “I don’t care, Mary -- you were his BEST wife.” Guess we can’t really put that on the back of the book.)
Back to the gutters. Loretta calls over, “Workin’ hard?” I know my lines: “Hardly workin’!” It’s like call-and-response in an African American church. Someone else goes by, “Don’t fall now!” I have no comeback. Shall I fall later? “Heck, I was planning on falling and sueing the homeowner!” Too complicated.
The weather is supposed to be rotten until Sunday and wet for a couple of days. I could go back out there and finish some more gutters. First, take my blood glucose: 85. Work is good for your blood! Cuppa coffee, maybe a bran muffin. Then back at it. The cats are bored and have gone back to sleep.
Double Hmmm. Back door locked. Oh, well, no biggie -- I keep a backup set hidden. Triple Hmmmm. They’re not there. Must’ve taken them inside with some files and boxes. Now what?
I’ve done this twice in the eight years I’ve been here. The first time I lost my temper, jangled the flimsy knob hard, and it opened. But I’ve replaced that knob now and it won’t jangle open. I tried. Hinges are on the inside of both doors -- can’t get in by unscrewing the hinges.
The second time Rick the hippie handyman was still in town. He came over with a pocket full of keys -- turned out that every time he installed a new lock on anyone’s house, he kept one of the spare keys. Took about seven tries to open the door. He looked carefully at the key and put it back in a separate pocket. I was highly suspicious of his motives. But he made me promise to hide a key somewhere, cross my heart and hope to die. He made me actually DO that: cross my heart but said he wouldn’t force anyone to hope to die. And he didn't stay to see where I hid the key.
This time I discovered that I’d luckily put the reversible slow power screwdriver back in its cabinet in the garage -- unlike the drill, which is floating around the bedroom waiting for me to install the door framing woodwork, which is that fancy composite stuff that you can’t drive a nail into. So I just took the storm window off of my office window and climbed in. Squibbie was the next one up the ladder and in. Crackers came to investigate and was the first to go back out. Squibbie went, too, then both came back. Then I had to convince a yellowjacket that this was NOT the place for her to winter-up. The storm window has to come off in order to really clean the window anyway and I hadn’t done it for a couple of years. Flies get trapped in there in summer and make a mess.
Since I was outside dragging my ladder around, I started on the gutters which are primitively installed and at the moment full of yellow poplar leaves. I thought I’d get my dandy gutter shooter out and sluice all that stuff out in minutes. Too bad. I had hung my gutter shooter up in the garage last fall without making sure it was empty of water -- it never occurred to me that it had water IN it without being hooked to the hose. But it was burst clear down its length. So now, gloves and scraper, which will work but not as well. The best move I made was in 1999 when I bought a house only one story tall, though I have a tendency to sit around and wonder if I could get a second story out of it. Loretta next door managed that in her house, though it meant installing a steel beam and lowering the ceiling.
Anyway, good time to take a break and drive out to the dump roll-off at the edge of town. Pick up some gossip, throw some political stones, and share diabetes ideas, since the manager’s daughter is struggling with gestational diabetes that won’t go into remission. They live in Pendroy, which is one of the smaller towns around -- a school, a dinner club, a lawyer, and a few houses -- and they are beginning to be suspicious of the water. It’s the same as the Valier water. How much should we worry? Where can we get facts? Would filters work? The state has just imposed new requirements on the sewage lagoons out by that roll-off and the cost shows on our bills. Our infrastructure bills are climbing steeply.
The forecast is 28 degrees, rain and possibly snow tonight. I already brought in the geranium window boxes but they crowd the cats out of their favorite window. I’d better put them in pots. That means down to the hardware store for potting soil. In this town we all use Miracle Grow. Now some searching around out in the back garage for pots... I once had an assortment of white ceramic pots that I loved but they’re long gone. Wonder if I could replace them around here. Not until the book sells.
Check the email: message from the U of Calgary Press: “Please take a look at this back copy for the book and see if it’s okay.” Well, they have me living in Browning instead of Valier. Maybe we should say “near the Blackfeet Reservation.” We’ve got to decide whether to say Blackfeet (Montana-side) or Blackfoot (Canada-side). Blackfeet is the same as Amskapi Pikuni in their own language -- if we say THAT, most people will be baffled. Blackfoot is the whole Confederation on both sides. That’ll baffle’em, too. Am I Bob’s wife, his ex-wife, ex-wife now bereaved, third-wife-of-four, once-wife, wife in the Sixties, ex-wife and friend. Oh, the hell with it. WIFE. The other three are dead anyway. (Art McKnight used to come up to my van at service stations, lean on the window and say, “I don’t care, Mary -- you were his BEST wife.” Guess we can’t really put that on the back of the book.)
Back to the gutters. Loretta calls over, “Workin’ hard?” I know my lines: “Hardly workin’!” It’s like call-and-response in an African American church. Someone else goes by, “Don’t fall now!” I have no comeback. Shall I fall later? “Heck, I was planning on falling and sueing the homeowner!” Too complicated.
The weather is supposed to be rotten until Sunday and wet for a couple of days. I could go back out there and finish some more gutters. First, take my blood glucose: 85. Work is good for your blood! Cuppa coffee, maybe a bran muffin. Then back at it. The cats are bored and have gone back to sleep.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
BOTH SIDES NOW 10/3
Michael Blowhard from 2blowhards.com compares screenwriting with novels: “Even from the point of view of the creators: At least a life in showbiz can have some amazing payoffs in terms of ego, money, blowjobs. What with fame, beauty, stardom, drugs, and the possibility of immense amount of dough, it makes some kind of sense for a certain kind of person to pitch-in heart and mind. Novel-writing, though ... Given that writing a novel is an unrewarding slog (few blowjobs, lots of loneliness, the publishing industry itself a pain in the ass), why would anyone volunteer to write one?”
As so many say in other places, for some it is NOT an unrewarding slog, not a slog at all but a venturing after an irresistible call, and very much rewarding in terms of visions, ideas, insights, and the opportunity to shape words into satisfying sentences. For me, retired, it’s almost a continuation of dreaming except for the pile of paper.
People who do yoga speak humorously but rather scornfully of “monkeyhead,” which means a brain full of ideas, pouring out, jostling each other for priority, insisting on expression, destroying order. And there’s another impulse reaching out for more ideas, new images, things never thought of before but possibly life-changing. Novels come out of those two. Not the pretentious kind of Manhattan-approved styling and moueing, but a long swath of world knitted out of life.
It takes me a long time, not because it’s laborious, but because it forms slowly in my subconscious, like exposing photo paper in the pan of solution in the darkroom. Then the work is to shape it by considering whether it compromises anyone, whether it is accessible to a reader who knows nothing about it, whether there are too many long complex sentences -- all of this is pleasant work, especially done at home with cats sprawled alongside and sun streaming in the window.
Following is part of “Both Sides Now,” which is what one might call filtered autobiography since it uses me (a 70 year old woman) but as a painter rather than writer, an Indian man (a composite of a dozen Blackfeet I know, often former students who are still friends), and a sort of archetypal anthro/professor who has more to do with my Unitarian world than rez life. This is an argument about the huge shift in academia that left not only individuals but whole disciplines high and dry -- a sea change entirely invisible to people on reservations and yet affecting them deeply in terms of how they think of themselves and what resources they might find. The painter is an observer, a conduit. “Clive” is an example of a type. These are all things I think about all the time. I do NOT think of publishers. They are indeed a pain in the ass.
CLIVE AND BUNDLE OPENINGS
The first time they had gone to a Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening, she had had no idea at all what to expect, what to wear, what to take along. Clive didn’t seem to have a very clear notion either, though he’d read a great deal about it. The accounts were all historical. No one in the Sixties seemed to be aware the ceremony still lived -- it was below the perception of even the anthropologists. She had taken a dance shawl, the kind with a long silk fringe on it, thinking that it might be like church where one was supposed to cover up, maybe even cover one’s head. But it turned out to be so very warm and humid -- late spring, which is a rainy season, and many people packed into a small house -- and they sat so long on the floor that she ended up folding it into a cushion. At least she was against the wall where she could lean her back and there was an open window with air coming in, but the drawback was that restless small children climbed in and out over the top of her, sometimes spilling their pop on her. Once a little girl reached through the window, patted her bright springy hair, then shrieked and ran off. Women sat on one side, men on the other.
They were the only white people there. Clive had been given a folding chair, since he was older, and he was clearly having a wonderful time. What she called his “James Willard Schultz side” was showing, though he usually tried to suppress it as too romantic for a professional anthropologist. Still, it explained his overwhelming love for this particular group of people and his deep desire to understand everything, no matter discomfort or resistance. She herself was not interested in being an active participant in such ceremonies, preferring to devote all her attention to absorbing the sensory richness of faces, light, smudge, drums and voices. She wanted to be what Emerson called “a transparent eyeball” -- seeing but unseen. But Clive would be taking mental notes and long into the night would be putting them onto paper. It was, of course, forbidden to write or draw during the ceremony.
The old people, in their eighties, were more inclined to be like her, just present and absorbing, than like Clive’s effort to be both “in” the ceremony and reflecting upon it. He would have loved to have “become” a faux Indian and could probably do a convincing job of it with his beak of a nose and tendency to tan easily, but he was also watching himself and everyone else, trying to be a camera/recorder. He wanted to be part of the “in-group” he was observing while still preserving his status as a professional, his refuge in an ivory tower.
After that first time, they knew to bring old sofa cushions to sit on, bowls for the berry soup, and lots and lots of dollar bills to hand out. Clive was careful to explain to her that these ceremonies were meant to distribute wealth from those who had it to those who needed it. This was not a matter of greed, but there were also elements of compliment -- one gave money to a particularly evocative dancer -- and competition -- the Canadians showed off by giving away more money than the Americans. Little rivalries developed where one man gave another a bit of money, only to have the second man give it back with interest the next time one of his relatives danced. The money exchange was accompanied by eloquent speeches, but they were in Blackfeet. Clive had not mastered Blackfeet so he get an informant to explain in the coming days. There was no way to find out how accurate the interpretation would be.
As so many say in other places, for some it is NOT an unrewarding slog, not a slog at all but a venturing after an irresistible call, and very much rewarding in terms of visions, ideas, insights, and the opportunity to shape words into satisfying sentences. For me, retired, it’s almost a continuation of dreaming except for the pile of paper.
People who do yoga speak humorously but rather scornfully of “monkeyhead,” which means a brain full of ideas, pouring out, jostling each other for priority, insisting on expression, destroying order. And there’s another impulse reaching out for more ideas, new images, things never thought of before but possibly life-changing. Novels come out of those two. Not the pretentious kind of Manhattan-approved styling and moueing, but a long swath of world knitted out of life.
It takes me a long time, not because it’s laborious, but because it forms slowly in my subconscious, like exposing photo paper in the pan of solution in the darkroom. Then the work is to shape it by considering whether it compromises anyone, whether it is accessible to a reader who knows nothing about it, whether there are too many long complex sentences -- all of this is pleasant work, especially done at home with cats sprawled alongside and sun streaming in the window.
Following is part of “Both Sides Now,” which is what one might call filtered autobiography since it uses me (a 70 year old woman) but as a painter rather than writer, an Indian man (a composite of a dozen Blackfeet I know, often former students who are still friends), and a sort of archetypal anthro/professor who has more to do with my Unitarian world than rez life. This is an argument about the huge shift in academia that left not only individuals but whole disciplines high and dry -- a sea change entirely invisible to people on reservations and yet affecting them deeply in terms of how they think of themselves and what resources they might find. The painter is an observer, a conduit. “Clive” is an example of a type. These are all things I think about all the time. I do NOT think of publishers. They are indeed a pain in the ass.
CLIVE AND BUNDLE OPENINGS
The first time they had gone to a Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening, she had had no idea at all what to expect, what to wear, what to take along. Clive didn’t seem to have a very clear notion either, though he’d read a great deal about it. The accounts were all historical. No one in the Sixties seemed to be aware the ceremony still lived -- it was below the perception of even the anthropologists. She had taken a dance shawl, the kind with a long silk fringe on it, thinking that it might be like church where one was supposed to cover up, maybe even cover one’s head. But it turned out to be so very warm and humid -- late spring, which is a rainy season, and many people packed into a small house -- and they sat so long on the floor that she ended up folding it into a cushion. At least she was against the wall where she could lean her back and there was an open window with air coming in, but the drawback was that restless small children climbed in and out over the top of her, sometimes spilling their pop on her. Once a little girl reached through the window, patted her bright springy hair, then shrieked and ran off. Women sat on one side, men on the other.
They were the only white people there. Clive had been given a folding chair, since he was older, and he was clearly having a wonderful time. What she called his “James Willard Schultz side” was showing, though he usually tried to suppress it as too romantic for a professional anthropologist. Still, it explained his overwhelming love for this particular group of people and his deep desire to understand everything, no matter discomfort or resistance. She herself was not interested in being an active participant in such ceremonies, preferring to devote all her attention to absorbing the sensory richness of faces, light, smudge, drums and voices. She wanted to be what Emerson called “a transparent eyeball” -- seeing but unseen. But Clive would be taking mental notes and long into the night would be putting them onto paper. It was, of course, forbidden to write or draw during the ceremony.
The old people, in their eighties, were more inclined to be like her, just present and absorbing, than like Clive’s effort to be both “in” the ceremony and reflecting upon it. He would have loved to have “become” a faux Indian and could probably do a convincing job of it with his beak of a nose and tendency to tan easily, but he was also watching himself and everyone else, trying to be a camera/recorder. He wanted to be part of the “in-group” he was observing while still preserving his status as a professional, his refuge in an ivory tower.
After that first time, they knew to bring old sofa cushions to sit on, bowls for the berry soup, and lots and lots of dollar bills to hand out. Clive was careful to explain to her that these ceremonies were meant to distribute wealth from those who had it to those who needed it. This was not a matter of greed, but there were also elements of compliment -- one gave money to a particularly evocative dancer -- and competition -- the Canadians showed off by giving away more money than the Americans. Little rivalries developed where one man gave another a bit of money, only to have the second man give it back with interest the next time one of his relatives danced. The money exchange was accompanied by eloquent speeches, but they were in Blackfeet. Clive had not mastered Blackfeet so he get an informant to explain in the coming days. There was no way to find out how accurate the interpretation would be.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
FINNEY
Recently my cousin’s son, while cleaning out the family attic, discovered a paper sack of clothes: two women’s “waists” and a baby dress. The sack was labeled “Mary Nettie Finney,” but who was Mary Nettie? As is often the case, we knew our grandfather’s side of the family much better than our grandmother’s side, the Finney side. I went to my grandmother’s careful notebook and found the following page. Mary Nettie, called “May,” my cousin’s mother’s name as well, was our grandmother Beulah’s younger sister, who married Chester Orr as a young woman and died in childbirth. The child was a second baby and a girl. The first was a boy who survived. Chester Orr remarried presumably.
The oldest Finney my branch knows about comes from the work of Donna Marie Finney Selnes, wife of Marvin Selnes, who did a good deal of reseach in 1979. She is now in a nursing home due to Alzheimer’s. Therefore she is not aware that there is a television series called “Finney” that is along the same lines as "The Sopranos.” I don’t know whether she would consider that some kind of betrayal or laugh at the incongruity of a such a family having the same name as our highly respectable ancestors, but I suspect the latter.
Luther Humphrey Finney (our grandmother Beulah’s grandfather) was born in 1819 in Vermont and died in Algansee, Branch County, Michigan in 1884. He was evidently riding on a load of hay going into the barn and either hit his head hard on the top of the door or was knocked to the ground. He had been married twice, first to Elizabeth A. Blanchard, who was six years younger than himself. With her he had two children, Samuel Wixom (b. 1843) and Mary Ann (b.1846). In 1852 he remarried Matilda Palmer, in Butler, Branch County, Michigan. It was a Justice of the Peace wedding. Her parents were from New York, but we know no names. She died in 1885 in Michigan, surviving her husband by a year. They had had a son, named Herbert (“Bertie”), born about 1864 and dying sometime before 1880 as a child.
Luther may have had an older brother named “Romanta” who sold him some land for $258 in 1841. Romanta’s parents were born in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Luther may have moved to Michigan on his marriage to Elizabeth Blanchard or he may have met her there.
In 1863 Luther’s daughter, Mary Alice (17), married James A. Ransom (24) in the middle of the Civil War (April 1861 to April 1865). Her brother, Samuel, was the official witness. In the next year he joined the Union Army but was mustered out about fourteen months later because of ill health. By that time his new half-brother, Herbert (“Bertie”), would have been about a year old. There is no way to tell whether the birth of the baby had any relationship to Mary Alice’s marriage or Samuel’s enlistment, but it would be an interesting situation for reflection in a novel, since this son died as a child.
The second daughter, Florence (“Flora”) married Jason Wagar. We have no date, circumstances or subsequent events.
Samuel’s enlistment description says he had “dark hair, black eyes, light complexion and a height of five foot, five inches.” He was expected to serve in the First Regiment, Michigan Light Artillery, but in June 1864 he was in the hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in December was hospitalized in Nashville with “chronic conjunctivitis.” It may have been something similar to what swept the Plains Indian tribes as trachoma. In May, 1865, still struggling with his eyes, he was mustered out in Quincy, Michigan.
Mary A. Stevens (aged 18 and born in Ohio but living in Quincy) married Samuel (24) in August, 1967, at her family home. Samuel’s sister, Mary Alice Finney had died in 1866. Since Samuel and Mary Alice had been close, one wonders how much his sister’s death inclined him to marry “Mary A.”
In 1886 the family moved to South Dakota. By this time there were four children: Orra (17 yrs), Beulah (14 1/2), Mary Nettie (13 yrs) and Bert (9 yrs). Bert was Donna Selnes’ grandfather, Beulah was my grandmother, Mary Nettie’s clothes turned up in my cousin’s attic. During the first year in South Dakota, the family lived in a sod house while they built a simple wooden house. I think Beulah missed Michigan, a wooded place. She told about walking with her mother along a narrow forest path and meeting a group of Indian men who stood aside to let them pass. As she passed them with her head high, she heard one of the men say (she claimed), “Squaw heap brave.” I think this was apochryphal, but the men probably were approving or at least benign.
The “Dakota Boom” ended in 1887 and one of the prairie-clearing blizzards hit in 1888. In 1890 Mary Nettie (17) married Chester Orr at the family home in Burkmere. In 1893 she gave birth to Bertie Raymond Orr and they soon moved to Neepawa, Manitoba. where she died in September, 1897, presumably in childbirth. No one in her birth family had seen her after she left. They don’t sound very approving of Chester.
In 1872, Orra Luther (23) married Mary Lewis Nelson, a widow with a five year old daughter, Julia Nelson. Orra and Mary’s first child was Orra Leslie Finney (b. 1893). Beulah’s notes indicate another boy, Leo, (b. 1885) and then a pair of twins, but nothing about them. They moved to the state of Washington, Orra joined the Army and was sent to Philippines where the story thins out. He returned to South Dakota in 1913, emigrated to Manitoba with Sam and Beulah Strachan but a year later returned to Faulkton S.D. where he died in 1921. There are hints of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and alcoholism.
Bert went on farming in Faulk County, South Dakota, marrying Tillie Erickson in 1904. Bert died in Wisconsin in 1936 after moving there with Tillie two years earlier to be near a daughter. His obituary says, “Mr. Finney was a quiet, unassuming man. His business associates speak of his honest and integrity and his desire to deal fairly with all. His family speak of his kindly nature and his loving devotion to home and family. He met difficulties uncomplainingly. He had unwavering faith in the future of the county which had been his home for a number of years.”
I met “Aunt Tillie” as a very old woman and was much impressed by her liveliness and spirit. “Gee, kid!” she said, “It’s great to see you all!” She gave birth to six children and lost only the last one, Archie Ray, as a baby in 1922 but survived herself until 1969.
I’m beginning to read analysis that compares the consequences of the Homestead Act to the Indian version, the Dawes Act, which also divvied up federal territory into private ownership. I’m very interested in this research as it develops.
The oldest Finney my branch knows about comes from the work of Donna Marie Finney Selnes, wife of Marvin Selnes, who did a good deal of reseach in 1979. She is now in a nursing home due to Alzheimer’s. Therefore she is not aware that there is a television series called “Finney” that is along the same lines as "The Sopranos.” I don’t know whether she would consider that some kind of betrayal or laugh at the incongruity of a such a family having the same name as our highly respectable ancestors, but I suspect the latter.
Luther Humphrey Finney (our grandmother Beulah’s grandfather) was born in 1819 in Vermont and died in Algansee, Branch County, Michigan in 1884. He was evidently riding on a load of hay going into the barn and either hit his head hard on the top of the door or was knocked to the ground. He had been married twice, first to Elizabeth A. Blanchard, who was six years younger than himself. With her he had two children, Samuel Wixom (b. 1843) and Mary Ann (b.1846). In 1852 he remarried Matilda Palmer, in Butler, Branch County, Michigan. It was a Justice of the Peace wedding. Her parents were from New York, but we know no names. She died in 1885 in Michigan, surviving her husband by a year. They had had a son, named Herbert (“Bertie”), born about 1864 and dying sometime before 1880 as a child.
Luther may have had an older brother named “Romanta” who sold him some land for $258 in 1841. Romanta’s parents were born in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Luther may have moved to Michigan on his marriage to Elizabeth Blanchard or he may have met her there.
In 1863 Luther’s daughter, Mary Alice (17), married James A. Ransom (24) in the middle of the Civil War (April 1861 to April 1865). Her brother, Samuel, was the official witness. In the next year he joined the Union Army but was mustered out about fourteen months later because of ill health. By that time his new half-brother, Herbert (“Bertie”), would have been about a year old. There is no way to tell whether the birth of the baby had any relationship to Mary Alice’s marriage or Samuel’s enlistment, but it would be an interesting situation for reflection in a novel, since this son died as a child.
The second daughter, Florence (“Flora”) married Jason Wagar. We have no date, circumstances or subsequent events.
Samuel’s enlistment description says he had “dark hair, black eyes, light complexion and a height of five foot, five inches.” He was expected to serve in the First Regiment, Michigan Light Artillery, but in June 1864 he was in the hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in December was hospitalized in Nashville with “chronic conjunctivitis.” It may have been something similar to what swept the Plains Indian tribes as trachoma. In May, 1865, still struggling with his eyes, he was mustered out in Quincy, Michigan.
Mary A. Stevens (aged 18 and born in Ohio but living in Quincy) married Samuel (24) in August, 1967, at her family home. Samuel’s sister, Mary Alice Finney had died in 1866. Since Samuel and Mary Alice had been close, one wonders how much his sister’s death inclined him to marry “Mary A.”
In 1886 the family moved to South Dakota. By this time there were four children: Orra (17 yrs), Beulah (14 1/2), Mary Nettie (13 yrs) and Bert (9 yrs). Bert was Donna Selnes’ grandfather, Beulah was my grandmother, Mary Nettie’s clothes turned up in my cousin’s attic. During the first year in South Dakota, the family lived in a sod house while they built a simple wooden house. I think Beulah missed Michigan, a wooded place. She told about walking with her mother along a narrow forest path and meeting a group of Indian men who stood aside to let them pass. As she passed them with her head high, she heard one of the men say (she claimed), “Squaw heap brave.” I think this was apochryphal, but the men probably were approving or at least benign.
The “Dakota Boom” ended in 1887 and one of the prairie-clearing blizzards hit in 1888. In 1890 Mary Nettie (17) married Chester Orr at the family home in Burkmere. In 1893 she gave birth to Bertie Raymond Orr and they soon moved to Neepawa, Manitoba. where she died in September, 1897, presumably in childbirth. No one in her birth family had seen her after she left. They don’t sound very approving of Chester.
In 1872, Orra Luther (23) married Mary Lewis Nelson, a widow with a five year old daughter, Julia Nelson. Orra and Mary’s first child was Orra Leslie Finney (b. 1893). Beulah’s notes indicate another boy, Leo, (b. 1885) and then a pair of twins, but nothing about them. They moved to the state of Washington, Orra joined the Army and was sent to Philippines where the story thins out. He returned to South Dakota in 1913, emigrated to Manitoba with Sam and Beulah Strachan but a year later returned to Faulkton S.D. where he died in 1921. There are hints of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and alcoholism.
Bert went on farming in Faulk County, South Dakota, marrying Tillie Erickson in 1904. Bert died in Wisconsin in 1936 after moving there with Tillie two years earlier to be near a daughter. His obituary says, “Mr. Finney was a quiet, unassuming man. His business associates speak of his honest and integrity and his desire to deal fairly with all. His family speak of his kindly nature and his loving devotion to home and family. He met difficulties uncomplainingly. He had unwavering faith in the future of the county which had been his home for a number of years.”
I met “Aunt Tillie” as a very old woman and was much impressed by her liveliness and spirit. “Gee, kid!” she said, “It’s great to see you all!” She gave birth to six children and lost only the last one, Archie Ray, as a baby in 1922 but survived herself until 1969.
I’m beginning to read analysis that compares the consequences of the Homestead Act to the Indian version, the Dawes Act, which also divvied up federal territory into private ownership. I’m very interested in this research as it develops.
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