First ceremony .... cw

 

My cousin and I were having a phone visit recently, sharing our experience with the importance of Story when she said, “We, as the older generation are the bridge between the past and the future for those who follow.” She is in her seventies ~ I am eighty-three.

I look at the calendar and see this Sunday, Easter, is eighty years since Easter, 1941 with those early memories of my first two ceremonies. 

I don’t remember the drive from San Francisco where we had been living in a small apartment we’d lived in the four months since my third birthday and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’m told our belongings were packed to move later that day into the flat on a quieter street near a park where we lived until war’s end. 

My father had the day off. He’d been working in the shipyard twelve-hour days, seven days a week since the war broke with early battles devastating damage to our navy’s ships. 

We’d made the trip for my brother and I were going to be baptized that day for the pastor had retired after years ~ since Daddy had been a boy.

I remember feeling a little cheated for the babies, including my toddler brother, were held, but  I “was too big” so stood with my father while the minister’s damp fingers touched my head, ~ with my parents promises, the Ceremony of  my welcome into the Christian Church.

What I most remember is how beautiful a spring day it was and how very glad I was to hold on tight to my Grandpa’s large, calloused hand as we climbed the steps going into the church. I felt safe in the shadow of his tall form!

Stepping into the old Two Rock church, filling with its Easter crowd of people Grandpa looked down at me, his deep voice telling me, “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative!” 

The feeling his words caused as I looked around, has stayed with me all my life. There have been so many times that I have deeply doubted that I belonged ~ anywhere ~ but that memory ~ his voice, his words, has been an undercurrent, warming me, reassuring me. “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative.” 

That Ceremony ~ a ceremony which, throughout my life, has helped to keep me whole.

Many years later I came to see how his words opened me, opened me to learning that everyone, everywhere is my relative ~ all of earth’s creation!

So, this Holy Week of 2020, I remember.

For Kristen, cw

 

Many years later in our new home, while unpacking to organize my new office, I pull out a box and read notes from a class I took one summer. They speak of the structure of English versus the structure of Native languages ~ how “the hoops bleed” in the process of translation. I remember the grief of a friend of mine, a member of the certification committee struggling to form what is now the university’s Rural Human Services program. His frustration and grieving came about because, as the committee worked on curriculum trying to put into English those important things of his culture, he realized what was being left out. English only provided snapshots, nothing of what was around it.

 

How often Peter said the same thing to me. “I can’t say it right in English. It doesn’t mean anything that way! English is no good for what I want to say.”

 

In one of my times in that village an Athabaskan tells me about the layers of meaning in their language. He tells that while many of the older people speak their language fluently, Peter, he said, is the last one who can speak the high language, the language that speaks to the deepest symbol, the most profound meaning of things. The man telling me speaks his language and can understand much but not all of the meaning when the “high” language is spoken. His sadness came from knowing there was no way for him to learn to speak from the depth of that which he calls the “high”.

Story cw

 Vicki, your comments, in our conversations as well as written, has me looking at how I want to share my thoughts, especially in this blog, though also the family Facebook page I’m part of.  It also has me reaffirming what we shared yesterday about our thinking and goals (if we want to use that word) have, and are, evolving for our effort.

Today, I’ll tell “Story” in hopes people’s thinking and memories will respond. I know it will influence our phone visits!  Part of this I shared on Facebook a few weeks ago.

And, it is a longer post than what either of us usually write. 😊

The elevation at Idol City (those mining claims of my childhood) is six thousand feet so there was always a chance of frost at night and a rapid chill whenever the sun went behind a cloud. In my memory I hear the crackle of the fire in both the cook stove and in the heating stove, which stood in the middle of the bedroom, burning in the evenings when we needed its warmth against the chill mountain air. We used pine, fir and, especially for cooking heat, mountain mahogany. Toasty warmth as my eyes grew heavy with sleepiness, water heating in wash pans and tea kettle for the dishes and, of course, lamplight - in later years a Coleman gas lantern hanging from a nail so Mom could better see. The scent of tobacco from Granddad and Dad's pipes as they planned for the work ahead, the sound of Granddad’s voice as he told a story - how he could tell stories!

It was there I began to learn the importance of “Story” ~ especially those stories which teach us about who or what we are.

Years later that lesson came home, and I became particularly aware of Story’s power as a group of family members gathered in a restaurant after my aunt’s death. As “Aunt Angie” stories began to be told, the richness of Story washed over and around us and I realized how important hearing them was ~ to all of us. We didn’t come together often, some of us had met only a few times, but as the river of memories circled and embraced us, I realized through Story, we were able to be family, bound together through the ties of love and memory. We were able to laugh and grieve. Story not only bound us together but helped us experience closure as we honored her life through our shared memories.

For me there was added the richness of experiencing how Granddad’s talent for telling stories has come down through the generations for at least three of his descendants have, each in their own unique way, inherited Clyde’s ability to weave spells through their gift of storytelling. “How rich we are!” I thought as I felt the spell of their story telling weaving around me that wonderful evening.

Since then I’ve come to see how hungry others often are for a sense of connection and belonging which can only come from knowing who they are which is best known through knowing their family’s Story.

My sense of how important it is for people to have that sense of belonging, of knowing “where they came from” gained clarity during a family dinner as we sat, eating and talking. Our children were grown ~ all, at least out of high school ~ and we always gathered, monthly or oftener, for a time of “family.” The conversation that day turned to friends of theirs struggling with a variety of troubles, marital and legal.

“They don’t know who they are, they grew up so far away from extended family, they have no grounding” was their response when I asked why their friends were struggling. “Why is it different for you?” I asked, “We moved you up here, away from your grandparents, aunts and uncles ~ just like your friends?” My children seemed grounded to me ~ focused, certainly not having any work or legal troubles. The four pointed to the “ancestor pictures” covering the wall of our dining area, “We know who we are,” they said, “because of those pictures ~ not just the pictures ~ we know their stories.”

That conversation was a beginning impetus for me to write ~ and, here we are today😊