A short story.. from a collection

The Bear is my Rider, The Eagle is my Horse

By Chip Wright

(Shri Jivananda Giri)

The sun rose quietly, not even a bird song to guide its way - like it was trying to avoid the sickness moving sluggishly over the village where the pale people lived. Their noses dripping with thick water. 

That was not good. I had no words then to speak but I remember the smell. This was dangerous water that should not be touched. My people all knew this. Grandmother said just seeing it sometimes could let it inside. I guess it didn’t want to come inside me. 

That was good. When it choose you the sweating came and the closing throat. If you were lucky, Great Grandfather took you quickly. But this did not happen to everyone, mostly just the old and very young.

When the old ones were taken, I was told it was because they wanted the young to have the first choice of fatty meat. I knew this was only true in the telling. These times brought sadness. 

The smell was very strong that day I remember, holding to my father’s leg, looking up and watching him talk. I felt safe in that sweet smell of him,  our family’s smell. A safe smell from many fires. I can still taste it on the back of my tongue. That smell was my shield,  my magic bag that holds me safe.

         Remembering the dawn

The people there were high above me, and made sounds that I couldn't understand. Even my father, who I always understood made words I had never heard. The talking held no laughter and echoed in me like a deep itch. The words roared,  like a fast river and I wanted to go.  Looking up I could not see the sky through the faces and the trees but when the talking would fade, I could hear birds singing, and the wind. That felt good and dance-like.  The sky now only an arm’s length away. I could reach out and grab fistfuls of it. 

I remember the front wall of the cabin rolled out from under my chin and filling my eyes.  It was hung with drying corn and deer skins. Sap glistened slowly moving down from the cracks in the logs. I thought how much that yellow sap looked like the thick water that came from pale peoples noses, but it smelled so much sweeter. Funny how things can look so much the same and be so different. A lesson I have remembered many times.  

It is from these memories I share this tale now. It is not to build fires in water, I see no use there. But a call to the morning, singing awake the dream and the questions? 

My time

It was long before the using time, when ideas and the winds were held in open hands. A willing time of free hearts and caring spirits. When the air smelled like blue spruce after a hot summer rain. A memory built of broken echoes,  like a bird caught under a basket. 

None of this was new. The world and all of its tastes, all  very very old.  My time had been many times. Lives like songs inside me older then the strongest trees.  Songs of times when we all danced together in the great hoop and drank from the glassy depths of the stars. And now another time to learn to walk and to talk while  the old ones inside me stood waiting to rise like summer corn. 

I can’t recall what we did in the village that day, or if that day was one of many. The truth is that what I saw there, looking up through the sky with my fingers digging into the laces of my father’s leggings, was all I needed of that day. A day set aside, just for remembering. 

Perhaps that’s the way with important things. Days and places get set aside by filling them with special memories, times that are set into the fabric of lives. Grouting them tight in an ageless mosaic of color and fired into the clay of a life's cooking pot. 

I’ve often thought that memories are already there, every memory there ever was.  We pass close enough to them and they get released, snagged on us like burrs,  as we push through our lives like we do through sage brush, opening stories that form us.  Still the sadness of the sick, and the truth of dying -- for so many is a place of shivering tears. 

It’s funny how some things can bring tremendous gifts and sorrows as well. A lesson of life I will remember many times. 

Evening dew

The fires in our home crackled and made hissing sounds when the cooking pot overflowed. Father and mother laughed a lot and would always tell me how important it was to laugh. (Some things we need to learn over and over.) 

I would sit there until the wood in the fire was no longer damp and burned with the dancing flame, then shed mother’s blanket and crawl to my place by the fire and lie on my stomach. I'd wiggle the muscles in my belly thinking I was shaking the earth. That made me laugh, to shake the earth with nothing but my belly! That was very funny and made me laugh even more. I would shake the whole world from my laughing thinking how easy it was to wiggle the earth. 

I’d roll on my back and speak in thoughts to Grandfather Turtle, telling him that I was just teasing, I did not want to make him upset. I knew that it was his job to make sure that the world moved in the right way and mine to help keep it whole and together, the way he had grown it. 

Funny though, when I would lie on my back and laugh at my joke, I would not wiggle the earth or the sky, just feel good and real. This was important laughter. 

Some things you don’t have to learn, you just know from inside.

The morning after

I turned my head and looked out across a long flat stretch of desert, pushing away the blanket that was wrapped around my face and shoulders. My legs were freezing. I pulled them up and tried to throw the blanket down around them.

Just then my belt buckle sent a shock through to my back as its cold metal rubbed against my skin.

“Damn, it’s cold this morning.” I spoke aloud. 

As the words fell from my mouth, the dream started to come back. The cabin, the fire, the smells, the child’s eyes and all that they had seen, the thick yellow water and the sweet yellow sap, the dancing shadows and the laughing.

“One hell of an epic dream,” fell from my mouth as I started shaking and opened my eyes. I was getting just how cold it was as the thundering sound of the train I had hopped started to awake me to my day. I puled the blanket up under my chin. I could see frost caught in the creases of my pants glistened in the morning sunlight. I sat  up shivering and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. 

The dawn was breaking on the horizon. The rhythm of the tracks started making its way back into my reality.  I watched as the flat desert rolled by in a pure pink and gray. The sunrise was like a painting, that no  gallery in the world  could frame. 

The sky was growing now from a black/blue to magenta.  Pinks and grays were getting layed across the bent grasses as the morning sun grew. The Sage stretched out in all directions turning from grey to gray greens. Misty shawls fell away as the land unfolded into yellows, blues, browns, and reds. 

I wondered what was on the flatcar I’d hopped. There’d  been no moon or any light when I'd hopped the train. I just knew it was heading south. I’d slipped on in Gerlach and crawled down into the trough that runs through the center of flatcars where i knew I could stay out of much of the wind, and fell asleep. 

I could see now I was under a refrigerated tractor trailer, its tandem wheels chained down just a few feet behind my head. There was another flatcar in front of me and the one behind me, both carrying trailers. 

I climbed out to the back of the flatcar. and stuck my head around to look. Safeway was painted in big red letters down the side of the trailer. The doors on the back had a strap with a lead seal where there usually was a lock. It had a date on it and in big red letters read, “Do not break seal.” I took out my pocket knife and cut the seal free, slipping it into my pocket, thinking I might be able to put it back after I had a look inside. 

I pulled the lever up and there was a hissing sound as the seal broke. It was a refrigerated trailer stacked right to the top with boxes, one on top of the other. You couldn’t even slip a piece of paper between them. There was no way to get one out without a ladder. 

There were no markings to tell what was in them just brown cardboard. I knew it had to be food so I stuck my knife in a box and sliced a five inch flap open. I pulled it away to see inside. There it was, beautiful, cold, red, and shiny. I reached in,  pulled it out smiling from ear to ear, opened my mouth and bit into the cold snapping flesh. A sour taste then a bursting sweetness, as the fragrance swirled up my nose. “Apples!” I called out “Yes!”   

Shaking again

It seems that I have always liked shaking the world to be sure I have a role in life. It also reminds me of my arrogance, which in turn makes me laugh. Laughter is good; it lets me know I can! 

I do not find comfort in a safe, predictable life. I am on a search for my inside heart -- the one that can sing and shake the world with its belly at the same time. 

It’s like adding another experience to life that  can help lighten the load. Though it seems it should be the opposite.  It’s funny how some things get almost weightless, the more of them you gather. 

I know that truth is not found easily, or ever truly found.  Some things you learn over and over. 

Another twist

You know, my elders would have scolded me for remembering all this. Certainly for sharing it. They had taken such pains to teach me the ways of the newness, the using time. I even had graduate degrees for all they had been worth. Gave me a good job to leave, I guess that’s something. 

It's not bad that they did this, my elders. It was about my own good, I know. It was to allow me and whatever family I might conjure up to be unfettered by others’ illusions. 

I can still hear my Grandmother:
“Forget those memories, those dreams, you did not live!”

“You are Scots, that’s it, never forget that. If I hear you do, I will come and pepper your tongue!” 

Those words echo in my mind as clearly as if she were here saying them right now. They are being spoken at all times in my heart, and ringing in my ears, My grandmother was a formidable woman. Like memories of all my coming to this place, that rise up like the smell of jasmine, louder with each breath, my grandmothers words are forever snagged on my soul. 

So I'm sorry I guess Grandma, but I need to open this place now. I’m trying to do it gently. I know your wishes for me were made from the truth of your journey. That your memories were billowing sails filled with sour air. But I need to shed winds, not forget them. I know it's about survival but what is that in an endless journey?  

I know you were branding me in love. I know.  I remember. But it's not for me to feed in pastures of wilting flowers and drying roots. New memories await with velcro fingers poised to join this reality as I push through. Memories, new life opening portals too long collapsed. 

I remember, she wrote me:

“For you there is such possibility, take the truth of choosing. I give this to you. No matter what might befall the world, you will always be yourself — that will never change. You are more then you know.  Choose life -- it is where something can be done. 

It is hard to live in the using time, remembering...  Now is the using time. It's a dangerous time. A time when you can be set like a can on a fence post, for some passing stranger to plink you out without a second thought, or you can walk untethered in a world where feathers are given to ladies’ hats, not to the hunters’ headdress.

Remember Grandson, this is the most important-- and the hardest gift I could give. Do not set yourself on the fence post. Forget the river that trails behind you.  Paddle straight into the using time and live, and teach.” 

Love, Grandma

The awakening

I rolled over and shook with a chill that reached to the core of my being. 'It's that damned dream again. Dreams in dreams in dreams. Lucid dreaming feels so real even when it's so strange. and that part about memories being already there waiting to show themselves. All we have to do is walk past them and they are ours.

Sometimes we know things even before their time has come. And even if we side-step,and  come back around and hook up because we like what we saw, in some way it is already imbedded.  We all have relationships that can’t be avoided. Sidestepping may already be in the plan? Some memories drag stuff with them, more truth than one might like.  I guess that is part of the journey.

As I was pondering these thoughts, that bitter taste in the back of my throat reminded me of the thick water and what my grandmother had written to me before she died.  And through grey mist things started to take form.  I heard the garage door start to open, that unmistakable sound, a whirring of the motor, rattling and a hum, and and  the white light shot on. Then the sounds stopped.

I opened my eyes and looked up and saw what I thought was sunlight coming through a misty cloud. Just then my car door swung open and a pair of hands grabbed my shirt.

A voice in the distance — no — it was right in my ear called out , "Turn off the motor, get some air in here!" then another voice. “Oh Shit” The hands pulled me out of the car and I  felt my feet drop and hit the garage floor. 

The garage I thought, oh that's it, I am in my garage. No, not that — I was in my car — dreaming — I was living! I’m still living?

My eyes were flooded with bright light as voices started to make their way deeper into my understanding. I coughed and felt that bitter bite in the back of my throat again. My head was pounding. The cold concrete on my back woke me even more. I tried to roll over but my body wouldn't work. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my legs. My feet, they were there but I could not move them. My arms, my head, my feet,  all  started to feel again. 

Slowly, slowly, I was returning.  Damn, somebody found me I though. At first I was pissed, then remembering how memories happen it all seemed funny, and started to make me laugh. And I remembered how much I liked shaking the world this way.  That made me laugh even more.

Some things we need to learn over and over and some things you don’t have to learn, you just know from inside.