NOTES

In the beginning my idea was that this blog would be focused on this geographical area but I find I'm tempted to stray, and right now I'm going to stray more than a little bit. I've just had some essays about my experience with Clinical Pastoral Education published in The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling. I consider it a major honor and am made bold. So I'm going to publish the essays I've written on this blog and then assemble them for a blook on Lulu.com. Eventually, I hope they'll find their way to other people going through the experience, which is meant to be a major initiation into the life of ministry and certainly is at LEAST that. But on the other hand, the hospital was at least in the Mid-West.

If you're close enough to a major library or hospital library that might carry this journal, it is pretty gripping to reat -- at least if you can handle some theology. Like animal control officers and fire or medical emergency responders, the stories really pile up and they are always surprising.

Anyway, I've got a lot things to post on my other blogs (especially scriverart.blogspot.com) which means that I'm a little short of time.

NOTES

An invaluable reference for those working with Blackfeet information is the School District #9 website. The location of the photos I used for the entry about Browning is at http://www.bps.k12.mt.us/library/library_photos.htm There are also online photos of the Babb School (same url) that show the Scriver sculptures, though in my post about Babb I used photos taken by Ray Djuff. Ray is a Calgary journalist and author who has specialized in Glacier Park and Waterton Park, but who is now working on a book about the Whitecalf family. There are photos of Whitecalf and his famous profile on the School District #9 website.

Prairie Mary

THE NEW YEAR

It’s taking me a long time to look back over the year to recall events, much less decide whether they were good or bad and whether I ought to change my strategies. As far as writing goes, I’ve made steady progress -- or so it seems. But there were surprises, some of them close to derailments.

The hardest is the most recent, my brother surfacing in major distress, only to disappear again, and my other brother reacting as though this were all my fault. I had occasion to call several cousins, reminding me how different we all are, how opposite our goals can be.

My diabetes 2 diagnosis was shortly after Christmas last year -- in fact, I joked that it was “Christmas diabetes” caused by over-ingestion of chocolate, which was the bulk of the gifts to me. This year there was no chocolate, but two very long-time friends got so angry at me -- partly because they misunderstood or wouldn’t tolerate my near-belligerent defense of myself -- that we may have broken the links between us. They are still stuck in the idea that diabetes is simply a matter of being a little pig for sugar and that there’s no such thing as a diet that can’t be abused or ignored now and then. In fact, even my friend here in Valier who has the same diagnosis and restrictions that I do, still doesn’t realize that this is different. This is not something small and personal -- it’s not even reservation-wide or national. Diabetes is a worldwide pandemic that has hit us while we were all fussing around about bird flu. Personally, I don’t even think it can be explained by transfats and lack of exercise. I think something quite sinister is going on, perhaps a virus and perhaps a reaction to a change in our environment that we may have put there ourselves. Were you as surprised as I by the number of ordinary household objects that contain the same radioactive element that poisoned the Russian spy? Polonium?

Both the pharmaceutical and insurance industries have seized hard on diabetes and no doubt will escalate their interference. They are not interested in finding the causes, only selling us drugs, prosthetic feet and “diabetes counselors,” as well as creating many rules disqualifying diabetics and fat people from jobs. There are dire predictions about the impact on Medicare.

Clearly it was time for me to -- not diet! -- change the way I eat. Luckily, I had been moving towards it for years and, in fact, was raised on basic local foods and (truly!) walked two miles twice a day to high school -- sometimes four times a day. It wasn’t until I left Browning that I really gained weight. Now again I can wear all the clothes I wore as a minister in the Eighties. I expect to lose forty pounds more. I’m pleased that my skin is mostly elastic enough that I’m not entirely swags and bags. (I joke that my "double chin" has become a "pleated throat.") But my sense of myself is quite different. I’m on guard all the time. Sometimes I feel more withered and hollow than simply reduced. I’ve always thought I was tough, a survivor. No more.

The new awareness is that my chemistry (blood sugar, blood pressure) is constantly fluctuating through the day and that it reacts strongly to sadness, anger, grief, disappointment, and happiness. It appears that there is a strong tie-in between the autonomic nervous system (the one that sort of corresponds to a subconscious) and the endocrine system. Well, we knew that. But we didn’t know that in diabetics the ends of stressed pain nerves wrap around the Isles of Langerhans, the insulin-makers, and throttle them.

Who am I, this sack of flesh that doesn’t ask me what to do -- just does its own thing? I’m not the only one asking. Everywhere I see articles asking, “What is consciousness?” And how does one relate to community that is almost entirely food-focussed? Christmas feast, New Year’s party, come over for lunch, let’s bake cookies, can we take you to dinner... I keep saying I’m afraid I’ll find that, without knowing it, I’ve eaten something I shouldn’t. Everyone thinks that’s pretty funny. Would they think that if I were talking about alcohol or cigarettes?

This is the year my bio of Bob was actually accepted by a respected academic press. Clyde, who upgraded all my old photos to usable quality, says he has much confidence in the production values of the team now working on the manuscript. All summer there was a major exhibit of Bob’s bronzes at the Royal Alberta Museum, which kindly invited Helene DeVicq to the opening. Doug MacFie, the Clan Master for the MacFies in Canada, says that Bob’s great-uncles scattered across the prairie provinces and I will begin trying to locate the descendants. I’m thinking that Alberta may be a better destination for my small archives than the Montana Historical Society, which stonewalls me.

This is also the year I finished writing “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” and put it on the market through Lulu.com, print-on-demand. It can be bought through any bookstore, including Amazon and Powells, and is on listed Google in German and Japanese! I have confidence that as I do more publicity, as people write reviews, the book will begin to take hold and snowball. I’ll put more books on Lulu.com, many of them of only limited interest, as I work through digesting my father’s photo albums. It lifts the cost off my shoulders and is available even to people I don’t know. Clan Strachan has reconvened and accepted for their archives my manuscript of “Homestead Strachans on the Prairie.” I will still be looking for publishers.

This was a big year for blogging. Prairiemary.blogspot.com gets about a thousand hits a week. (For comparison, many books are published in a printing of a thousand copies.) When I was posting stories about being an animal control officer in Portland in the Seventies, I acquired quite a few new readers. The blog community, at least my part of it, is just my speed -- of course, it’s self-selected! Librarians, constant readers, naturalists, archeologists, geneticists, eclectic essayists and grumpy old guys in England. Not at all the shock gossips that the media portrays.

Soon I’ll begin to address my religious materials: the Blackfeet ceremonial bundle, my pastoral care experience, and a manuscript I call “Circuit-Riding,” which is about the nature of congregations and ministers, essentially groping for a theory of community “grounded in place.” There seems to be a high interest in what might be called “the anthropology of religion,” which was my focus at the U of Chicago. I’ve gathered material for a Guide to the Blackfeet Reservation and am sending queries. So my writing agenda is full-to-bursting and going well.

My house is aging faster than I am, though we were both created in the Thirties. The pickiup had to be resurrected -- luckily we have a gifted mechanic in town -- and my teeth are next in line. More money had better come in soon. The yard is still offensive to the neighbors, but I begin to see a bit of understanding developing in my own mind about just what I’m doing with it anyway. These last few weeks I’ve actually been sorting and filing boxes of materials I’ve carried with me for many years.

Maybe the hardest New Year’s Resolution to make is simply “carry on as before.” A new idea might be energizing -- the confirmation of an old one reassuring. But I simply don’t know where all this is going. I love the house, the cats, the computer, the way the light moves across the yard and through the trees. I guess that’s enough.

FIVE RELUCTANT MEMES

If anyone else had asked me to fool around with this “meme” thing, wouldn’t a’ done it because I’m a SERIOUS multi-syllabic writer who has read important French stuff. Okay, there’s one.

Two, right this moment I’m allergic (no snow to keep dust, fungus and other invaders from floating around). The muscles at the base of my skull are a big fisted knot and my ears sing like two teakettles. This morning I quickly drove to Cut Bank (the closest pharmacy, which is thirty miles away) to pick up a prescription. I’m dismayed to see that it says “may take several days to be effective.” You might surmise from this that I’m not a good housekeeper and I’m really a bad patient, and you would be right. I’ll count those as freebies

Three, when I was little I had naturally curly bright-red hair. I assumed this meant I was privileged. My brother had the same hair but wore a knitted sailor’s cap pulled down over his ears to protect himself from fond old ladies. It ain’t whut happens to ya but how ya take it.

Four, my biography of Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, has as much stuff in it about me as about him, but I’ve discovered that one way to reveal other people is through one’s own reaction to them, so I think it’s legitimate. (“Bronze Inside and Out, a Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver,” due out in Spring from the University of Calgary Press.)

Five, I have a special fondness for Tennessee Williams’ plays and used “Alma” from “Summer and Smoke” for acting exercises long, long ago. The fellow who played "John" for me is now a famous actor and director in the Ashland Shakespearean Festival. I just got a Christmas card from him. (Maybe that's not a meme but a brag.)

A WILDERNESS TO SORT

In a huge effort, I’m sorting clips and scraps and notes that have accumulated in boxes for many years. As I go, I find “lost” things that I knew were in there somewhere. One of the categories of material I save is “prairie vegetable architecture,” which includes woodlots, hedgerows, snow fences and windbreaks -- mostly deliberately planted and maintained with some care but now, in the case of the trees and bushes planted in the Thirties, sometimes dead in a skeletal Halloween tableau. As mega-industrial ranches buy up the family farms, the houses the hedges used to surround have been burned, demolished, or trucked off somewhere else, leaving lonesome squares of grass with the footprint of a foundation in the middle. Along the road to the county seat one mare likes to keep her colts inside one of these squares because it makes a private, calm spot. The trees have aged out or died of drought.

There is a fellow who will come and remove them. His ad assures the consumer that he is fully insured which always summons up a mental image of him lying under a fallen tree, still clutching his chain saw. Of course, that not the way they do it now. They come in a cherry-picker, lean over and cut the top, then work down, limbing and making eighteen-inch sections as they go. An old farmer down the street has an electric splitter that reduces tree-sections to manageable piles of stove-length wood in no time. His heat is wood all winter.

One of the items I found was in the Valier Public Schools’ publication for the three or four hundred citizens in town. This promotes the school motto: “Positive, Prompt, Productive, Polite, Proud!” and includes the athletic and music schedules. Mr. Middleton was more literary than some of the previous superintendents and I cherish this particular essay.

***************

By Josh Middleton (reprinted with permission)

By mid-afternoon, I was satisfied with the jobs I was able to complete, but wanted to get one more done, which was cleaning and vacuuming the inside of our vehicles. After months of pebbles and dirt, it was time. Throughout the day my 2 year old and 5 year old were content to play around the area I was working, but as I was cleaning the car mats, I was aware that Mary, my pre-school daughter was not around. Not overly concerned, I continued to scrub the floor mats when just minutes later here came Mary holding a walking stick, wearing hiking boots, and carrying on her back her “see through” backpack which held one of her favorite stuffed toys.

Now if you know Mary, you realize that she is very serious in her playing, so I casually asked where she was going. Looking me straight in the eye, she replied, “Oh, nowhere.” I could see she was thinking about something so I pressed her for an answer. This time she said, “Dad, I really don’t want to tell you.”

This is where I wish I could turn off the “School Principal” in me and just let it be, but I continued my inquiry. I said, “Now, come on, Mary, you can tell me. It looks like you are going exploring or having a get-together with your stuffed animals. Tell your buddy where you are going.”

Exasperated with me for wanting to know, Mary turned to me and said with 100% seriousness, “I’m going to face my fears by going into the woods.”

Most of you know that I live about five miles out-of-town on a parcel of land that has a great wind break of trees, but it is not ‘woods’ as you would imagine. But to this five year old with such a vivid imagination, these are woods and with woods come scary images that are conjured up. Since moving here last Judy, Mary has loved walking among the trees but never by herself until this day. She left me to finish cleaning the car and walked the perimeter of our property that day, proudly returning to me fifteen minutes later to declare that she had conquered her fear, “Never looking back even once.”

************

I confess that all this sorting and filing means looking back at the past but that’s the nature of the job. Can I be less courageous than little Mary Middleton, who sets such a great example?

I see I have a big handful of instructions on how to plant the perfect windbreak -- the species of trees, the spacing, what cultivation they should receive. Down by Sun River there are century-old ranches with rows of cottonwoods on each side of their entry roads, in the French manner. The trees form a huge arch that sheds limbs in a treacherous manner and some have been cut down, but a few persist, suggesting a grander time.

My favorite vegetable architecture is an S-curve of irrigation ditch just a little out of Valier to the east. A row of willows grows alongside it, obviously planted, perhaps to provide a rooted reinforcement in the diked sidewall. It changes constantly and I wish I were Monet to capture the subtle variations of foliage and light and branches, which arch and bend like ballerinas, as romantic as wilderness.

I’m not afraid of wilderness. I’m just afraid of throwing out something I might need later.

SELECTED SHORTS

There’s a lot of miscellaneous stuff wandering around my virtual desktop, so I’ll just post it and get it out of the way even though none of them has quite fermented/gestated into a complete posting.

I read quite a bit about brain research and the genome, partly because I have so many family members with brain damage (husband, brother, cousin, father) and other relatives struggling with problems that may have genetic roots.

This below comes from a blog called “Gene Expression” and a regular poster called “Coffee Mug.” The photo won’t travel, given my technical skill, but it’s at:
(http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/place-and-plasticity-two-views-on.php) The piece is about the hippocampus and the photo shows a seahorse alongside a real dissected hippocampus from a brain -- the resemblance is very clear. Below is the concluding paragraph of the piece:

“Exploration of the hippocampus' abilities continues. I have not scratched the surface even in this mega-post. The theories of the hippocampus as a memory storage device and a cognitive map are not mutually exclusive and may turn out to be one and the same. I came to an interest in the hippocampus via a more philosophical route: considering the role of memory in the definition of the self and such, but there are plenty of noble non-navel-gazing reasons to delve deep into this structure as well. The hippocampus shows signs of damage and deterioration early on in Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, and the same recurrent excitatory connectivity so useful for memory storage may also provide the substrate for the electrical storms underlying epilepsy. I hope you now have some more of the conceptual framework necessary for reading and evaluating new hippocampus articles, and we can talk about it some more when good studies come out. Now make like a hippocampectomized rat and get lost!”

I’m also coming at an interest in the hippocampus through the issue of identity, but in two ways. First, the identities of these close and loved people changed subtly but so definitely that it was impossible to continue in relationship with them. Was this a failure of faithfulness? (In sickness or in health...) If another person is unrecognizable in terms of responses, even though they smell, taste, feel the same, are they even the same person?

Second, for a long time my rule has been to turn all questions of others onto myself. When I was a child and made declarations, people would say, “Oh, you’ll change. You’ll grow out of that.” So I have been determined to stay the same -- but how do I remember who I was? Aren’t I as likely as the next person to “forget” what’s inconvenient ? This is one of the appeals and uses of writing for me -- write down the evidence, then go back later to check the record.

The hippocampus also has a lot to do with the sorting and reassorting of memories done during sleep, probably causing dreams. Towards morning when I get a little chilled and rise through sleep enough to remember dreams, I often have what I call “snow dreams.” This morning I had the electric mattress warmer turned up high -- high enough that the cat left -- and instead of the usual dream about being at an insufficiently heated conference center, I dreamt about being in a room with a fireplace -- wonderful polished wood mantel filled with weathered discarded boards that were only burning in the middle. I think it had something to do with finding the website of Daniel Harper (www.danielharper.org) who is a UU minister in New Bedford. (Remember the Curtis Room, Dan?) I was reading about various UU issues and about Meadville/Lombard which is up to its usual tricks. So now, which is UUism -- the mantel or the burning wood?

Since Darrell told me about his Blackfeet Uncle (sort of like a Dutch Uncle, maybe), I’ve been making up pithy bits of advice to tell a young ‘un. Like: “If your pickup breaks down on the way home from Great Falls with the groceries in the back, eat the ice cream but don’t open the beer.” I was still in this mood when I got to Pro-Lube in Great Falls yesterday. They always want to vacuum the inside of the cab and I don’t want them to, but the Montana ethic is to always keep your pickup Very Clean. (The carwash in Valier is exempted from the ban on using water frivolously.) In the past I’ve asked them not to vacuum and they just did it anyway. So this time I told the young man, “Listen, I’m a drug dealer and I don’t want you to vacuum in my cab because the marijuana seeds collect on the floor and when I really need the money, I gather them up and sell them.” He laughed, looked at me sideways, and when he thought I wasn’t looking he checked the floor -- but he did NOT vacuum it! Do people trust illegal people to be more honest?

Yesterday the November winds were really ripping and the sky was torn in every direction. Great gray blankets of wooly clouds were hanging low and out to the horizon, but they were ripped and rolled, tumbled and twitched, so that bright blue sky shone through and sometimes there were even sudden bursts of white light. The ground has no snow again, which is why the clouds are dark underneath, and the Rockies are only patched with white. The windmills by Great Falls were turning in sync when I went by. They don’t strike me as ugly. They’re white and oddly sedate.

I suppose the day of an election ought to be breathless, held in suspense, but maybe this wild tumult is more appropriate to these times and our national predicaments. I had to leave several positions on my ballot empty since there were NO people I could vote for. I joked that it would save energy if I just had one big vote: “All incumbents out.” For weeks pollsters have been calling me and I’ve hung up without speaking. Now they’re having their revenge. Every time I settle down for a nap or a good long read, they call me and there’s no one on the line.

Daniel Harper and my new friend Sharon (SBpoet.com) are both participating in NaNoWriMo. Sharon took photos of the group that gathered to write their novels together (possibly at the Leaf & Bean in Missoula or is it Butterfly Something?). All sweet chix, sitting there with thousand dollar laptops in front of them (plus caffeinated beverages), and I’ll bet you ten dollars they were all writing about love. Riding, writing, those hippocampi through the sea of memory. Mermaids.

BEST AND BRIGHTEST

During my last year of seminary (1981-82) I typed half-time for a living at the U of Chicago Law School. The U of C is pretty much an elitist school, but the Law School is arguably the elitest and most formidable section of it. (They themselves could argue that well.) This evening I was reading a review by Cass Sunstein, one of the professors, who always arrived in the building so desperate to get to his computer and record what he’d thought in transit that his office looked as though a major crime had been committed and the room ransacked. It would have been easy to hide a good-sized body under the papers and books. Tonight the idea of Googling some of these people came to me. In those days we only had computer word-processors for professors, with a few that secretaries had to reserve in advance and use in a small sound-proof room with windows so the world could see we were not playing “Asteroids.” (The profs did.) Google is a game they would have relished even more.

Cass Sunstein, according to Google, is still there at U. of C. but his website won’t come up tonight. The review I was reading was of “Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It” by Sanford Levinson. Excellent review. But don’t ask Anton Scalia if he agrees with it. (Levinson argues for term limits on Supreme Court Justices.) I used to deliver his mail and sometimes rode the elevator beside him, fully aware that everyone knew he was destined for the Supreme Court. He tried not to be smug about it, with little success. That was, I’m shocked to realize, more than twenty-five years ago.

Two other Google results shocked me. The first was Monte Dube, who was nothing if not hip and bold: beard, longish hair, plaid shirt. My specific assignment was to type for the Bigelow Fellows, of which he was one. In those days we typed on a typewriter and used Whiteout or Corrasable paper. Dube and Berg, who was much more uptight, demanded that their letters never have any corrections, which one could detect by holding the letter up to the light. (There were two female “Fellows” and they pretty much did their own typing.) I could never pick Monte Dube out of a lineup now: baldish, clean-shaven. Is that a bespoke suit? He’s in law specializing in the health industry. I’d bet it IS tailored. And are those DIMPLES??

The other was Norval Morris, an Australian who was studying when and how the insanity plea should work. To give him something concrete to write about, he invented some “lost” stories by George Orwell, writing them in so convincing a manner that no one questioned their formidable style. One, I remember, was a man who shot his wife to death while dreaming of something else. It was the tropics and he was feverish... Truly, they were like novels until Morris turned to the legal argument and REALLY made your head spin with the issues he raised.

He insisted on cone coffee, which in those days one made in a big pyrex Chemex hourglass with a wooden collar, and I had a wrestling match to make it properly. (U of C lawyers were major coffee snobs and there was a little shop that sold cappacinos beyond anything I’ve ever had since. Foam to dream of.) Also, I could never quite get the knack of sitting in the modern chairs in his office and almost sprawled on the floor several times. I couldn’t decide whether he thought I was endearingly awkward or a great menacing cow.

The stories, which were convincingly “found” by one of Morris’ friends, raised quite a furor and I never could quite figure out whether this was a bad thing that would get the professor fired or whether it was a wonderful conspiracy that would become a legend. I guess he just liked ambiguity. I remember some important magazine calling to insist that I deliver him a message as soon as possible. He was playing tennis behind my lodgings, so I called him over to the fence and pushed the note through to him. He said, “You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?” I was, but I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. The shock is that he’s gone now -- died two years ago.

Jim White had a double appointment with English and Law. His secretary was Sharon Mikulich, who had a huge crush on Sting and loved “Guns and Roses.” First I’d ever heard of them. (Sharon has 22 Google entries because of her work on behalf of labor and because of marathon traveling!) She considered me reliable, so if she needed help, I typed White’s manuscripts, which I loved to do because they were about rhetoric and always excellent. White and I had several conversations about Norman Maclean and he was the one who told me that Maclean seemed to be in mental trouble and that people were wondering about alcoholism. Of course, it was Alzheimers and Maclean knew it was, couldn’t quite figure out what to do about it. Can anyone?

But the funniest story was about Franklin E. Zimring, a California script-writers' kid who somehow blundered into this totally unsuitable context and was stressing out. His back kept going into spasm, people said it was psychosomatic (probably), he made a great fuss, I thought he really was being treated so badly that I wept, and somehow he decided that I’d fallen in love with him. (Who wouldn’t? Smart, handsome, connected, dyslexic -- and proud of it all.) I left Chicago at the end of the academic year. (I was a little short on my transcript to actually graduate, but they agreed to let me pick up the last class or so in Montana -- Chicago was clearly an unsuitable context for ME, too!) Zimring organized (or rather the head of the secretarial division organized at his request) a farewell luncheon with him, me and the head of the secretaries, a charming and gracious lady who also bought me a necklace at the Oriental Institute -- at Zimring’s request. It had the Code of Hammarabi on it. I thought it was a classy thing to do. I mean, what if I’d REALLY been in love with him?

Tonight Zimring’s page at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, (his proper milieu) has a photo of him looking a bit like Jim Harrison. Maybe a little bit like a character from “Guys and Dolls.” He writes about kids and capital punishment, always defending the little guy. Well, maybe I’m still a little in love with him. He gets interviewed on NPR now and then.

You must understand that I came to this extraordinary collection of Big Brains straight from the doggy streets of Portland and had five years of experience with neighborhood animal cases. The person who appreciated this was the Viennese Hans Zeisel, who was a friend of Konrad Lorenz. I’d read Lorenz, so we could talk about him. Zeisel was also a director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which runs the Doomsday Clock and I remember that one day they advanced it closer to midnight. He was very upset, but I don’t remember what the specific cause was. It was as though in his mind it had stopped being a symbol, so that moving that hand was to him something actual and personal.

What I learned from all this was how little separation there is between ordinary folks and people of great privilege and honor. They were so far beyond me intellectually that I didn’t need to feel compared, even in terms of the youngsters. Sharon, who was a secretary then and remains a secretary, has probably had as much impact on the world as any of the professors. I sure hope that somewhere in there she got to meet Sting.