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Utopian Attitudes
As we left the outskirts of Sioux Falls, our drive to the Yankton Reservation took us through an expanse of checkerboard farmland. It was deemed an open reservation due to the mix of Native Americans and white landowners within its boundaries, and this became clear as we pulled into Wagner, which looked as all-American as any other farming community in the Midwest. We met Father Field and his wife Mary, Rocky, Elmo, Edna, Peter and Annette that day—names of people we would come to know very well as we built a church they had been asking the Diocese to provide for them for many years.
Our second stop was Greenwood, which rests in the nipple extending below the rectangular state at its southeast corner, its meandering outline there defined by the Missouri River. The church we would be replacing with the one we would build was eerily quiet—its interiors musty from being closed up for quite some time because the community that once utilized it had moved to Wagner to be closer to the services a town provides. I’d never been as moved by “The Lord’s Prayer” as when I saw a large framed needlepoint of it, written in the Sioux language, hanging in the vestibule. It was as rag-tag as the little strip of land along the Missouri River we found ourselves walking along that day—the waterway nothing more than a stream indolently moving through a deep ravine the river had made before being dammed upstream. The quiet spot held a collection of abandoned churches and a few run-down houses, and I could feel the sweep of history, though not the bustling one that had long been silenced along the jagged banks.
After the lush vegetation of Greenwood, our next stop—Lower Brule, a closed reservation—felt barren and dry. We met Marilyn, Boots, Gloria and Mr. Small Jumper, all eager to greet us because they welcomed our help. Father James, who was younger than most of the priests we’d met in the mission field, had been assigned to the isolated reservation that held nothing but buttes and flats spanning for miles. When we left the Lower Brule, we traversed the Crow Creek Reservation, moving through undulant gold grasses as we listened to Randy explaining that the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were all arms of the Sioux tribe, and that the first-letter change of their names designates their linguistic differences—certain words used by all the Sioux would begin with “D,” “L,” or “N,” depending upon which segment of the tribe the speaker had been born into.
As we headed farther north and west, we drove a rain-soaked road that rose and fell away, mimicking the undulant profile of the hills. The Missouri River tracked us, slithering out of sight through distant gorges and reappearing when the cliffs gave way to expansive meadows. We glided along the silvered ribbon winding through velvety green for several hours until we came to a field of flattened grass that was littered with beater cars, giant speakers, several pine bowers and an odd assortment of people, both Native American and white.
The four-day, out-of-doors Convocation was in full swing. Christian hymns blared from the speakers as we walked through the trampled prairie grass rousing grasshoppers with every step. I attempted to make eye contact with the Native Americans I passed, but my searching looks were met with stoic distance. I sat alone for most of the afternoon, watching puffy clouds glide effortlessly through an enormous sky as I wondered why my attempts to connect were being met with such resistance.
I realized there was so much to learn. I had always taken my ability to connect with other human beings for granted, and I had already been told once since we’d arrived that I was being very idealistic. What else is new? I thought, admitting that I could see this in most of my dealings, though I wouldn’t have been so quick to put a name on my emotional makeup. It was a bit like being categorized, then stamped with a number to be shelved in the “Idealist” section of the library. How did I come about these “utopian” attitudes? I wondered as I scribbled in the notebook in my lap, the smell of pine infusing the air.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
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This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. The question du jour: “What do you take for granted?” I hope you enjoyed my realization about taking human connections for granted; to see the other posts answering this question, click here for the full roster.
A Place That Felt Familiar
We made the trip to Costa Rica but stayed only three days because Jim’s best friend’s mother had died. Though the emotions we would be facing as we tried to comfort his friend would be painful, the entry in my writer’s notebook the morning before we returned to the states illustrated that anything at that moment would have been better than more time in Puerto Limon:
The rain is steady; steady is the rain. The pain is ready; ready is the pain.
It was the time of year in Chattanooga when fog would often mute the morning light and I felt like a jewel ensconced in a pretty box filled with cottony cushioning. Like snow, the fogbanks made everything so beautifully quiet and I forced myself to grow as still as humanly possible, to cease the rattling that would normally occur as I tried to dash my self against the sides of the box of my life that was emotionally small enough to keep me safe, which meant it was no where near large enough to allow me to grow. The “stolen” time, as I saw it, that I’d enjoyed with our return from Costa Rica to attend the funeral had brought me some satisfying movement in my writing, but a question was nagging at me: How could I speak more softly in my work and let the words do all the talking? I wasn’t even close to having an answer, but I was taking notes as fast as I could!
This delicious time for writing ended abruptly with our return to Central America one week after we’d winger our way home. We drove to Atlanta to fly south, leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. one cold, damp morning, the cruel early hours the point in time I realized that a subculture exists among Homo sapiens—one which stays under the radar during daylight hours, making night’s lusty minutes its own. This dawned on me when we stopped at a Waffle Shop on the outskirts of town to have breakfast. The waitresses were putting on a show and you could tell that many of the people lounging around the counter were regulars. There was an unusual mix of clientele: many of them looked to be blue-collar workers who ate breakfast there more mornings than not, while others seemed of the drifter variety.
One guy could have passed for an extra in “Easy Rider,” while another would have been the perfect fit as a cover model for Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album. He wore a long denim coat that flared from the waist, a pair of dirty jeans and dilapidated cowboy boots. His hair was a tawdry shade of blonde that seemed laminated to his scalp by a wax-like layer of grease that caught the dull light, subdued as it was by the grime-covered globes on the light fixtures. His gold hoop earring in his left ear was about the size of a nickel and he walked like he’d been born astride a hog—not of the pig family but of the Harley variety.
It was about 30 degrees outside so the most surprising guy wore a pair of white cotton pants, a thin khaki cotton jacket over a pink cotton shirt and a white linen beret. I fully expected to see sandals on the feet of this sales-manager-trying-too-hard-to-look-like-he’s-on-vacation type, and was relieved to find that he’d at least put on sneakers. I thought about this odd mix of humanity all the way to the Atlanta airport and enjoyed getting their descriptions down on paper during the plane ride to Miami.
The Miami airport was always chaotic and we barely made our connecting flight. Once on the plane, I tried to settle in with James Michener’s Alaska but I couldn’t concentrate. As I stared out the airplane window, I saw how the shadow of our plane sprawled on Biscayne Bay like the tin man were he to decide he’d like to spread his arms and fly. There were five colors of metal riveted to the spot we momentarily held on the water, then our shadowy imprint sifted from the choppy bay to a series of well-dressed tennis courts, each of which quickly vaporized with our passing as our downburst of energy fueled our glide toward Costa Rica. What would I do with all of the anxiety I was accumulating for this, one of our last trips to finish the church in Zent? I wondered, realizing the answer would only come when it was ready to present itself.
A church service was held in our honor during our first Sunday back at work. It was a sweet but modest affair by our standards in the Episcopal Church in Tennessee. The collection plate was a plastic washtub, and the parishioners fanned out in what would be the sanctuary of the church, which would likely be furnished with beat-up folding chairs, their hands clasped in front of them as they stood. Father Wilson spoke of the excitement the village would know with the completion of the church, sentiments that were echoed by the villagers who had prepared lunch for us after the service. We arrived in Limon that day just in time to see the parishioners of St. Marks leaving a luncheon of their own. I sat on the top step of the center next door and played a game à la Dorothea Brande as I watched people I knew exit the building. Brande advocated contrasting different people faced by the same dilemma as a way to build characterization skills:
Gus would laugh at most anything; Gertrude would say, “Oh my!” or “Aye, yae, yae!” then ask Gus what to do; Mr. Green would have a whisper of a smile on his lips, then say “Yes?” and play the victim; Mr. Plummer would say, “Yes, man; it’s a cruel world,” then take to his drink; Mr. Douglas would scratch his head and look confused; I would mull and mull and mull before daring to breathe; Jim would grab the bull by the horns, then assume my mulling was weakness while I continued to mull, terrified that if I acted too spontaneously I’d make a mistake.
I’d been feeling particularly homesick since we’d arrived so I made myself feel more connected to home by recording the beauty I’d seen when the sun illuminated the water of the lake the afternoon before we’d left Chattanooga. The effusive light was sparkling as if someone took chips of glass and tossed them onto the choppy surface. Only an intense enough sun could have enticed them to stay afloat, bidding them to dance on the peaks of the ripples as they twinkled, setting the entire lake aglow. As they winked, I imagined their glee would have resulted in high-pitched squeals, their merriment-making with the wind all the rush they needed to breathe the steamy puffs of anima billowing forth in the crisp air. I shivered as I closed my writer’s notebook and headed into the center, the chill not a circumstance of the ever-present dampness of the tropical air through which I moved but of my longing to be shunted into the briskness of winter in a place that felt familiar.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
The Color of a Winter Storm
The snow-pack drove the gulls, which were normally perched on the lawn, into our little cove on the lake. The neighbors came out one by one, throwing bits of crackers into the air, and the birds circled, nabbing whatever crumbs they could from the dank sky the same color as their wings. In between feedings, they’d bob contentedly on the surface of the water, looking as if they’d had a royal supper. I’d never noticed how these birds, which have always seemed to me to represent summer, are actually the color of a winter storm.
I wandered around the neighborhood with my camera, snapping photos of lush red berries caked in snow and bald rocks dripping with icicles. I’d barely run my fingers through my hair, and had thrown on Jim’s mustard-colored down jacket, which pretty much swallowed me, before heading out into the frosty landscape. My sweats were tucked into beat-up gray running boots that barely cleared the deep mounds of snow. I picked through vegetation, looking for any image I felt conveyed the creativity I wanted to express for my first photography workshop.
Being exacting with some of the shots put me in some pretty precarious poses while Sam limped along beside me in the plowed parking lot, lifting his snow-packed paws for me to clean every so often as he made his way from bush to bush and snow-bank to snow-bank. It was blissful—the hush that had come over the snow-plunged world brought such peace with it! I stayed out as long as my numb, reddened fingers would allow before herding Sam back into the house, my heart set on a warm cup of cappuccino.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with writing exercises from Brande’s book, describing the mechanic at the local service station who couldn’t figure out how to service the Jag after he’d professed to be an “import expert.” Striding up to the sitting area where I was waiting, he asked me how much oil the car should take—like I would know! I looked at him as if he’d sprouted an extra head and he got the message, loping off to figure it out, his grimy fingers digging into his greasy scalp as he scratched his head.
In another exercise I set out to “tell myself how I comb my hair without using gestures.” The entry trailed off in my writer’s notebook, the ringing phone signaling it was time for me to begin the machinations that would pave our way back to Costa Rica. I sat thumping my pencil against the page wondering when life would slow down enough to allow me to have more time to be creative. I prayed it would be soon while knowing it wasn’t likely to happen at all.
I’d received another rejection for a poem and realized that in my headlong rush to submit, I was forgetting to pay more attention to the quality of my work. The words came rolling out and in my excitement I let them be rather than taking them to task by forming the sentences into something finer than their raw, undigested states. No verse is free, I thought as I looked at the poem I’d sent out into the world, which had come back to me unappreciated. Each line of it had taken a piece of me with it and would now leach more from me as I struggled to hone and perfect the poem’s structure and meaning.
I actually wondered if I was being beat into submission by blaring magazine ads noting contests. Was I forgetting that the importance of writing was in the creating rather than the submitting? I wondered. It also occurred to me that I was far from the well-rounded, fully developed writer I wanted to become. How could I expect my short stories or poems to be sophisticated if I had not reached full ripeness as a writer? I questioned. I wanted to really “get” this so that I could have more patience with myself and with the writing process.
These realizations were bringing a rawness to my life that made me feel exposed—like a peeled cucumber, its cool flesh dangerously delicate. As we dined at one of Chattanooga’s finest restaurants far above the city lights one night, I enjoyed how the valley stretching out before us looked like a finely decorated holiday village. It occurred to me as I was admiring the view that the woman seated next to me, whom I’d come to know socially, was always so happy that I was doing whatever I was doing, even when what I was doing felt like nothing!
She had the sweet drawl of a woman raised in the deep south and I wouldn’t say she was especially pretty but her warmth brought an openness to her expression that always drew me in. She was only mildly feminine, I guess; maybe the word handsome was a better descriptor given her dark brown hair, olive skin and somewhat masculine face. We sat at the elegantly set table exchanging pleasantries while I tried to gage her life and she tried to gage mine—a social give-and-take with which I had become achingly familiar.
At that moment the lights of a ball field in the distance flashed on and I was shunted into the memory of myself as a little girl—face smudged with dirt and sneakers caked with mud as I furiously argued with the boys on the tiny diamond in elementary school because they’d needed me to play in the outfield but wouldn’t let me bat. I’d punched one of them and had landed in trouble with my third-grade teacher, whom I adored. I hadn’t cared about getting in trouble, per se, because Donny had deserved the bloody nose. But I did care that I’d disappointed Mrs. Oliver—one of the rare teachers I’d had who seemed to see my potential as a brainy girl.
The woman at my table nudged me from my reverie, realizing, I guess, that my attention had wandered. I nodded and smiled as she droned on, thinking of George Gabb’s statement, “Let your heart hold hands with your beliefs,” for some odd reason. I realized then that I couldn’t imagine anything this woman might fiercely believe in and that made me sad for her. But wasn’t that arrogant of me? I vehemently believed in plenty and yet I was far from having it all figured out where devoting my life to my passions was concerned.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. I'm still so far from actualizing myself in my writing at this point in my story, but my writing life does finally gel. To see a recent poem, visit this post on Roaming By Design. Thanks for stopping in!
