My Grandpa Knew That

Never Forget.

I received an email, announcing the arrival of 700 Marines in New York on November seventh, from my cousin. Her son is a Marine; he has served two tours of duty in Iraq, and she is proud.

We have a long history of fighting for our homelands. My uncles escaped service because, like their father, both were alcoholics and color blind; but my cousins served: Cipriano Montes (World War II), Gilbert Tamayo, Bobby Tamayo, and Frank "Babe" Rodriquez (Vietnam).

My cousins' email proudly announced, in blue boldface size 16 font: It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. It is the fifth in a new class of warship—designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, LA to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept. 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there."

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the "hair on my neck stood up. It had big meaning to it for all of us, " he said. "They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back."

The email concluded with this request: Please keep this going so everyone can see what we are made of in this country! Blessed are those who have one hand held by God and the other held by a friend!

I keep asking myself who could think of this.

Never Forget.

The official US Navy sight says the Commissioning Ceremony of PCU New York (scheduled for November 7th, 2009 at the Intrepid Museum Pier 88 South, Pier 86 North NYC, NY), "is the occasion when the ship will 'Come Alive" and the New York becomes USS New York.

When the ship was Christened, on the first of March, 2008, in Avondale LA, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England offered the follow "remarks:" "These three ships (USS Arlington, USS Somerset, the USS New York) stand for 'life, liberty. . . and the pursuit of all who threaten it' and will ensure that we never forget. . . 11 September 2001."

President Bush, the born again, inspired the ship's motto "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never Forget." when he visited the Pentagon on September 12, the day after the towers were struck down. He told those at the meeting, "I will never forget." And he continued by going around the room, looking at each person, his eye to theirs repeating, "never forget."

During the ship's Christening England went on to say, "Ultimately what will win the war on terror—like the cold war—are the choices people make, whether the terrorists' path of violence, or the far better path of Peace, Democracy, and Development."

Never forget language.

Never forget the way we live matters.

I still cannot fully comprehend this Frankenstein project: transforming the refuse of the Twin Towers into a war ship, Christening this weapon, and then bringing it to life in a public ceremony.

Everyone knows the Marine's motto: When it absolutely has to be destroyed over night.

Never forget our genocide is not complete.

The earth is our mother. She sustains us and any livelihood founded on her destruction is unequivocally self annihilating. Contemporary society is very pleased with itself, extolling the superiority of its skill set and the victory of technology over hunting, gathering and agrarian lives.

Deloria and Wildcat remind us that our ancestors judged their spiritual and intellectual development when "people could recognize an imbalance and address it as a society of interrelated people."

The attack on the Twin Towers clearly reflected an imbalance.

In his book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, Woody Tasch asks his readers to commit to a few basic ideological truths: "We need to discover ways of thinking and speaking that can put economics in its place. . . In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations."

Slow Money as a philosophy offers a redress to our current imbalances by non violent action. These non violent acts are a greater threat to this nation than any weapon yet manufactured by the US Military because they place the relationships between people, plants and animals at the center of all thought and all activity.

Tasch continues: "Advocacy revolving around agrarianism and around appropriate scale and appropriate technology. . . are part of the broader historical movement toward the possibility that one day, non-violence might trump violence as an organizing principle for the affairs of man."

Never forget: We are children of earth. Who are they?

My Grandpa Knew That

Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, in his first book, Banker to the Poor, writes, "Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all."

Poverty is often thought of only in terms of cold hard cash, or in recent times, the quicksand of credit. But I grew up with Dolly and her coat of many colors, and "I knew I was rich." It is precisely this wealth, of spirit and dissent, that has and continues to inform my work (as a wife and as a writer) today. My greatest failing, as a writer, has been my inability to offer a distinctive and unambiguous explanation of my understanding of poverty and wealth.

I am beginning this series for that sole purpose.

In July I came across Christopher Ketcham's Article on Daniel Suelo, the sadhus who has lived without money for the last 10 years, residing just north of Monument Valley, in the caves outside of Moab. My first feeling on reading this article was "this is what they want you to believe" that you've got to live in a cave if you want to live outside this economy. I thought it was nothing more than a propaganda leaflet in the "you can't ignore the economic realities" machine. The same machine that ignores the environmental and colonial realities so intimately shaped by said economy. As the web leads you to click on and click off, I did.

I have been reading Yunus's work, after it was introduced to me by Woody Tasch, the author of Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Reading Tasch's book is what made me decide to quit writing For Future Reference in favor of My Grandpa Knew That; at least once on each page I would hear myself screaming "Shicheii, bil bééhózín." (More on Slow Money coming.)

Working through K'é and For Future Reference I have tried to unravel the negative feedback system many of us (land based people) find ourselves in: we are rich, in knowledge, but this knowledge has become worthless in what is known as The Market, and more perniciously, it is becoming worthless to many of us, in what we know of ourselves and our minds. Many American Indian political and educational professionals are responding to the abject poverty in both reservation and urban communities in ways that leave the heart of our nations (our knowledge and expertise) behind.

There are economic realities and we cannot ignore them. But these realities do not form or result from an isolated universe, as a sort of Merry-Go-Round we either have a ticket to ride, or not.

I reread Ketcham's article on Suelo and want to point out this passage: "In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribes people in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. 'It looked,' he says, 'like money was impoverishing them.'"

The idea that money could be impoverishing is significant. We must take it seriously without being flip or ignorant about homelessness, nutrition and health care.

"The economy" is a cultural framework with undeniable consequences on our daily lives, but it is also a fabrication. We do not need to accept the rules as they are laid down for us.

Yunus writes:

"Experts on poverty alleviation insist that training is absolutely vital for the poor to move up the economic ladder. But if you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty."

I do not believe that keeping our focus on moving up the economic ladder is the best approach, but his point about "retaining the returns of our labor" is clearly true. If we can refocus our attention to the land, and land based communities, consequently redefining capital, and the control of capital, we might be able to make some of the many changes essential for our survival.

Deloria and Wildcat, in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, describe an Indian Metaphysics, offering it as a way of approaching solutions to our contemporary problems. This metaphysics uses an indigenous knowledge base as its point of origin: dirt, water, people, plants, animals and the relationships between these beings as recorded in our languages, ceremonies, games and material culture.

I begin here, in the dirt, with the people.

The title for this series is inspired by Duane BigEagle's poem, My Grandfather Was A Quantum Physicist.

K'é: 'ólta': Formal Education

It's that time of year, back to school. I would be just getting home from my Grandfather's sister's homes. They would take me in, and shuffle me about, to insure my head would be good, after my Grandfather's passing. I'd be stuffed with recipes for tségha'nilchi', white corn, blue corn and yellow corn bread-tamales-soups and mutton. The Body of Christ was the last place I wanted to be, but in San Francisco it was my only option.

My grandma believed an education would solve all our problems.

T'áá hó 'ájít'éego t'éiyá.

Diné Bizaad: Bínáhoo'aah (Rediscovering the Navajo Langauge, ©2007, Salina Bookshelf, Inc.) gives a rough translation of this statement: "success is up to you, achievement is up to you, perseverance is up to you, the amount of self-effort that you exert is up to you, it (success) is up to you, it (success) is all in your own strength."

Shimá Sání dóó Shicheii, dóó Shimá for all their disagreements agreed on that truth: T'áá hó 'ájít'éego t'éiyá.

With my mind, organization/plans, and their instruction I could be successful. I was already cooking, making toys from the dump, sewing, planting and raising seeds, caring for livestock and I could sing and dance to the complete songbooks of Cabaret, Glenn Campbell, Neil Diamond and Johnny Mathis.

Words and language develop a strong sense of self. One of the essential gifts of my home schooling was the difference of their opinions coupled with the passion they (My Grandma, Grandpa and Mother) each held for their theories.

Chief Manuelito said education is a ladder. Article 6 of the Navajo-US Treaty of 1868 mandates "formal education" of the People's children—If knowledge is a ladder, I ask, to where?

In his diaries Kafka repeats: "When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. . .Often I think it over and then I always have to say that my education has done me great harm in some ways. . .Often I think it over and give my thoughts free rein, without interfering, and always, no matter how I turn or twist it, I come to the conclusion that in some respects my education has done me terrible harm. . .Often I think it over and give my thoughts free rein, without interfering, but I always come to the conclusion that my education has spoiled me more than I can understand. . . I often think it over and give my thoughts free rein without interfering, but I always come to the same conclusion: that my education has spoiled me more than all the people I know and more than I can conceive."

At Corpus Christi I learnt, that like my mother, I talked backwards and pronounced English wrong. I also learnt we were heathens, a fact my mother and I argued about long into high school. I was good at school as long as I didn't let it leak into the house. I was even better at home, as long as I kept everything there hidden from school.

Often school is a place that takes our children away from us, from our beliefs and from our values.

Diné Bizaad: Bínáhoo'aah's chapter on 'ólta' stresses the centrality of thoughts and knowledge to traditional Navajo culture. Paying attention was the key to success at home. Watching, I learned everything, especially the things I rely on most today: how to budget my money, how to cook food, how to grow plants from seed, how to pray and how to laugh. Words flew like songbirds out of Bat Woman's basket and I made a home for them, each one, inside myself.

My Grandmother died when I was entering fourth grade, and my Grandfather died when I was entering eighth. From them I know what is closest to my soul.

I was taught that knowledge is a shield and we walk behind it. My entire oeuvre asserts: We must root ourselves, firmly, in the teachings of our ancestors. Tradition responds to a changing world. That is the precise nature of its power: to provide answers to life's questions and to offer responses to daily experiences.

Our daily decisions and activities provide us movement and are infused with direction. It is vital we know this and remember that, as we send our children off to "day schools" and as we say our farewells to good friends.

This column is about keeping good relations.

Living within the structure provided by our system of K'é helps us face each other, our near relations as well as those, "not strangers, but only lacking the knowing."

I met Sonny Tuttle at Santa Fe Indian Market, two years ago. He had a booth near ours, and made the rounds, looking for pretty women and talking good story. He was a most wonderful talker. He was the most positive person I've ever met. So full of light and energy. There was no one who could keep up with him, save ma'ii, maybe. He was there in the morning, setting up before we were, and he closed down the clubs at night. At 75, 76, he put us all to shame, with our coffees and early bedtimes. In his finery of crisp jeans, red wool wrapped braids and tall cowboy hat he looked good.

He ran the circuit: pow wows and Indian Markets. The summer time circuit that gives us all an excuse to drop everything, jump in the truck and stay up all night singing, dancing, talking, and making babies. This year he placed fifth in the Men's Golden Age dance category at the 111th Annual Arlee 4th of July Celebration.

Growing up it was the summers I loved most, for they gave me time with my family, time to learn what it meant to be, human.

With deep sadness I learned that Sonny died in a car accident near Hungry Horse on Saturday, July 25th. His memorial was held on the Flathead reservation in the St. Ignatius Longhouse. I will always remember Sonny dancing on the tables at the La Fonda. He told us that he held court there, every Saturday, every Indian Market. I see him, now, dancing. May he dance, always in beauty.

I dedicate this month's K'é to my dear friend, Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, mother of Ivy and Gemma, and the late Mr. Sonny Tuttle, father, artist, and traditional dancer.

For Future Reference is retired.

For Future Reference is retired.

My Grandpa Knew That will debut on September 1, 2009.

K'é: Alcoholics and Child Molesters

for all friends of Bill

I was at a party and a friend was telling her sister's story. She had just adopted a family of three Yup'ik kids from Alaska. It's a story she tells often, about the kids, their history of FAS, the complete selflessness it took to adopt the lot of them, in order to keep them together.

Most people don't know much about the ICWA of 1978. She does. She had to deplete her savings in order to legally adopt them.

At this point in the story most people's sympathies are with the storyteller and her sister, especially considering the expense she went to raise another woman's children. We're the lone hold outs. Mostly I stand there silent. This is not a teachable moment. But this time the storyteller refused to end the session.

The mother, of the children, is, of course, a demon. All three kids have FAS. You'd think she would learn. To stop drinking or not to get pregnant, I'm not sure which, but you'd think she would've learned by now.

We stand there silent, and an unusual thing happens. The party host notices. Silence and tension build among the listeners but the storyteller is not affected. She keeps on talking. The kids require an unbelievable amount of work and many financial and social resources. Her sister is dauntless. She refuses to let them sink into the squalor. Their village, there's nothing there. "I mean they're all alcoholics and child molesters."

I am a child of alcoholics and child molesters.

It's common knowledge. Childhood shapes every aspect of adulthood. If I make it, March 29, marks my 20th birthday. 20 years sober. 20 years is half my life, nearly to date. If I continue on this road I will soon have more days sober than I had drinking.

Of the many things that have gotten me here, white knuckles included, nothing has helped more than my home schooling. I exist because my mother bore me and I am who I am because they, my family, raised me.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was first established in 1978 (25 U.S.C. § 1902) in response to the historical removal of Indian children into non Indian families . The imposition of western models of the family on Indian families has been devastating. The intent of ICWA is to "protect the best interest of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian Tribes and Families," by giving jurisdiction to the tribe in matters concerning all of their members, especially their children.

Removing children from the family removes the future. Their removal is a final blow in the systematic destruction to our clan, kinship and traditional educational systems. Removing children says, there is nothing here, in this house, in this culture, in this village to learn from. You are nothing, of no value.

Traditional knowledge enables us to see our place and our responsibility within the movement that is history, as the community experiences it. When children are born they have a responsibility—that responsibility is to become an elder.

Vine Deloria's chapter, "Knowing and Understanding," in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, offers the following insight:

"Even the most severely eroded Indian community today still has a substantial fragment of the old ways left, and these ways are to be found in the Indian family.

Even badly shattered families preserve enough elements of kinship so that whatever the experiences of the young, there is a sense that life has some unifying principles that can be discerned through experience and that guide behavior."

Mine is one of those "badly shattered families." I have never wished my experiences on another, nor have I ever wanted to be removed from my relations.

"The old ways of educating affirmed the basic principle that human personality was derived from accepting the responsibility to be a contributing member of a society. Kinship and clan were built upon the idea that if each individual performed his or her task properly, society as a whole would function. Because everyone was related to everyone else in some specific manner, by giving to others within that society, a person was enabled to receive what was necessary to survive and prosper.

The family was a multigenerational complex of people, and clan and kinship responsibilities extended beyond the grave and far into the future.

The elder exemplifies both the good and the bad experiences of life, and in witnessing their failures as much as their successes we are cushioned in our despair of disappointment and bolstered in our exuberance of success."

It has taken me over half my life to sift through the good and bad examples from my home. Where I have wounds I also have salve.

Kinship in its most expansive sense helps us account for our movements and experiences across the land, up through the previous worlds and into the Navajo Nation now. Our memories of migration, colonization, slavery, alcoholism, drug abuse and urbanization are revealed in the strains and breaks to our families, and in our responsibility to address those strains and breaks today.

When we turn our backs on any member of our community, and fail to recognize them as such, be they father, ant or rock we turn our backs on ourselves.

Healing a community requires more of us than removal. Individual families are targeted as the illness in most therapeutic models, but the removal of specific children, by itself, does nothing to address the roots or context of family violence. Taking children from their villages and giving up on whole communities to locate and develop the necessary resources to survive is part of the overall agenda to annihilate Indigenous people and Indigenous culture.

My Grandfather's and my Uncle's response to their own spiritual suffering was one of violence. Their choices form a legacy we pass down. Like clothes, they affect future wearers for generations. The world told them they were nothing and no one and they acted like that was a truth they would never escape from. I witnessed their failure, and bore the weight of some of it in particular. These experiences of observation and abuse taught me the consequence of believing their lies and hate, and of accepting their realities and visions as my own.

In the worst of moments my Grandfather took his fight against his own degradation out directly on his children’s' bodies and souls and my Grandmother attributed the blame to our culture: "Don't be a damn fool like your father. Crazy Indian."

Last year I had the clarity of mind to recognize, in part, why I drank. It was that feeling I didn't want to have, I sent the drink in search of. The particulars of feeling like a nothing may be a family pain, especially for our position in the world and the deep irreparable fissures in our family caused by our experience of racism and religious persecution. I stopped for a moment and said out loud, "this is why I drank. Not to feel this." And then I kept on walking. The spiritual strength and emotional maturity required to make a different response is a gift also given by my relations: the unfathomable belief that we can be "more beautiful than broken."

For Future Reference: I am I cried

part two

President Obama's words to as-Aribiya refuse to leave my ear hole:

"[I]f you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task."

When Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) Bishop Richard Williamson there was a swift and strident outcry. Williamson's denial of the Holocaust is unpardonable. Few could tolerate his statement: "I believe there were no gas chambers."

In the midst of the uproar his SSPX colleague Father Floriano Abrahamowicz, another of the four "traditionalist" bishops excummunicated by Pope John Paul II, told the Italian newspaper, the Tribuna, "I know the gas chambers existed—at least, for disinfecting—but not whether they caused deaths or not."

In response to Obama's recent words, there has only been shrill silence.

Even when I repeat his words to others the response has been, "Yeah. Right. What's the problem."

This is hardly the same.
No it isn't.

Recognize: 2., to know by some detail

The United States of America is a settler colony. The settlers moved in and continue to occupy our homelands. In response the Nations within (Indigenous Nations) have continued to assert three things: we exist, it happened here, and it is happening now. The details of America's history as a colonial power go beyond this writing.

Historically we, Indigenous People of the America, have failed to register as a people. Our history does not seem to bare weight. Our elders lack authority. We've spent the last 517 years simply asserting our existence.

Invisibility is a power many of our ancestors used to great strategic affect. This is different.

Recognize: 4., to acknowledge the existence, validity, authority or genuineness

The day after the oral arguments for the California case against Proposition 8 opened and closed, the San Francisco Chronicle was already reporting that the court seems to favor the validity of Proposition 8.

During the arguments proponents for Proposition 8 said that the weddings performed during the 5 months when same sex marriages were legal, would not be invalidated, but they would not be recognized.

Where is Duane Big Eagle when you need him?

Obama's election has been hailed as a turning point in the U. S. national consciousness, a day after of sorts, a moment in linear time reflecting an evolution of thought, a wholescale shift in character, a now to oppose a then.

We are flooded every day with words and images that deny our humanity and experience. On June 6 of 2008, in McLean VA, the USPS issued the new priority mail stamp. On Janaury first of 2009, additional postage was already required. Regardless it was my only option. I refuse to send an elder a SASE with the defaced Black Hills as postage. I asked for other stamps. The Postmaster said there were none. I can do math. So I asked for other stamps that would add up to the new rate. It took nearly 15 minutes and her constant sighing, but I left with a SASE that looked not unlike the image on the official USPS poster for suspect mail.

California AAA's western wonder page sports the "Mountain Men" this month. Sculpting of Gutzon Borglum's giant homage to four U.S. presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln—began in 1927. Fourteen years later, Mount Rushmore National Memorial stood head and shoulders above South Dakota's Black Hills. The magazine arrived shortly after my frustration at the post office.

These are trifles. Yes. But these trifles wear us down in a relentless assault on our souls, as we face our occupied homelands today, as we face an academic and popular insistence that we don't exist, we did not know who we were, or where we came from, and our conquest is complete and definitive.

Recognize: 9., to acknowledge as having the right to speak.

The most painful memory I have, in relation to homophobia, is the trip my wife and I took to Minneapolis to bless our nephew. His maternal grandmother introduced me to her mother as "This is Reid. We met her at the wedding."

I stood there, dumb. What do you say to that? How do you maintain your dignity in silence?

I was not even a friend, or a roommate. I was someone met at the wedding.

I am the oldest of the generation of "children" and my wife and I have been together the longest. We flew at great cost, to my health and our one income household. In a sentence I was reduced to no one of no consequence. And I stood there and swallowed.

Some say the Navajo philosophy is to walk around the rock.

My soul is tired and my feet not rested.

No matter how many times my wife and I marry there are many who will refuse to recognize our vows. My own Nation included. I understand that we are asking precisely for what they refuse to give: an acknowledgement of our humanity.

In the 3 years since my nephew's baptism I've developed a fetish for Nebraska, somehow convincing myself that if I could understand their minds I could somehow make a space within it.

There's the rock. Walk around it.

When I was little I used to run the house singing Neil Diamond.

"I am," I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
"I am," I cried
"I am," said I
And I am lost, and I can't even say why
Leavin' me lonely still
1971 Prophet Music, Inc. (ASCAP)

Some things are old. We feel them even when we are young. We do not know how. We do not always know why. But we know we do.

painting: Sitting Bear by Niki Lee

For Future Reference: I am I cried

This month, For Future Reference will take the form of a series, unfolding.

". . . with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human real. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and in his language, to rescue the sufferings from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity, and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him." Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair


Things to be Desired
for Ershod

“You’re an Indian, huh?”

“Navajo.”

“What are you doing here?”

“My Dad worked these docks. They called him Beaver.”

“He the Indian?”

She nods.

“I come down here too.”

He steps up close. Shaved iced. He’s a barely holding together. Twilight is a blanket. For the moment they step inside.

“See. You’re lucky.”

Two hundred pounds of fat, she doesn’t feel. What is it he’s saying.

“You know your people.”

She heard it all; but she never heard this.

“Black people. We don’t know our people.”

They stand, shoulder to shoulder, in the silence of recognition. The water coming up to the edge. Sometimes pouring over. He to the left. She to the right. One man, five foot seven. One woman, five foot one. Thin. Fat. Black. Beige. Close cut. Thick waist length braid. Before them the island. Behind them the buildings. Overhead the new sky of the Embarcadero. The Central Freeway just torn down. Earthquakes expose the mud beneath the surface. Structures fall. Pancakes with no syrup.

She doesn’t know what to say. This was her moment to find the quiet and he keeps on talking. Her head packed tight with wishful thinking.

“My Sister gave me this. Have you seen it?”

He hands her a folded paper, the Desiderata. She looks at it. Reads. Still not looking at him. The intimacy between. Her father’s people always find her. Head nods and hat tips, an index finger raised to the eye; she walks the city streets and they stake a claim. Daughters lost. Fathers found. Uncles and nieces.

“He an alcoholic too?”

She turns and looks at his ear. Small ears. Hers are huge, no one disputes the size of ancestry in the earlobe. Strings of ears on museum shelves, hers still attached. They frame the face. Eye to eye, you never see it.

“You got that look.”

“What is that?”

“Edgy.”

She hands him back his paper.

“You know they found that in a deserted place.”

“My mom likes sayings.”

“Yeah. So does my sister.”

He’s the left foot. She the right. A wave of water rushes over.

“Oh shit.”

The blue horses of morning.

He jumps. From left to right, making his way over to the knee deep concrete hedge, he sits. The bay immersing her calf deep inside it. Offerings she has none. Olokun. Yemaya. Even Oshun gathers here at this seven point juncture. One minute piles upon another and she follows him over to the seat and sits like she’s expected.

The cold gets colder, wet pants, shoes, socks. His jack rabbit jumping has him dry. She’s wet. A slow soggy slopping over.

“How long you been sober?”

“Four years.”

“You guys have a real problem with that.”

“With what?” She’s ready to leave, but doesn’t.

“Alcohol.”

She’s a lump of floured water. Poorly figured. No breasts, just flaps of skin, nipples like birthmarks. No suckling children or jealous lovers. Just an empty gnawing ache. Emptiness, fill it.

“I smoke crack, but I don’t do heroin.”

His speed picks up, or hers slows down. It’s difficult to judge the shifting perspectives. Cold water, darkening sky. The soles of her shoes sponges she can’t wring dry. Her back beneath the jacket, growing wide, loosing shape or absorbing it.

“See. That’s why I came down here. I told this woman to get me some and she brought me this.”
He holds his fingers out, palm up, in between them a swatch of air. He shakes his hand up and down.

“A balloon. And you know what’s in that shit.”

He drops his hand.

“I threw it away.”

Cars rush by. The night is on, not announcing it’s arrival.

“Fuck that shit. Excuse me, but no way. Not me.”

She breathes. Words. She has none. Wet feet, she had two.

“So I came down here. ‘Cause I know where it is and you know I might just go back and get it. So I come down here. Get me some air. That’s when I seen you saying your prayers.”

She keeps breathing air into the wordless mass. Two or more gathered together, this is a meeting. They are inside it.

He pours out of himself, “I wish you could see me another day. This shit makes me all paranoid. I’m not like this. Mean and paranoid. I’m a nice guy. If you could see me another day you would see. I’m not like this.”

His hands long strands of black thread. He wraps them around his words. They keep spilling forth, but like the girl they don’t hold water.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do they do it?”

She waits for him to finish.

“What I want to know is how can they? I understand people like you and me. Why we use. We need it. I gotta have it. We’re hooked. But these people that sell it. How can they do it? Make their money off of other people’s misery. I don’t understand.”

Thoughts can smother even the strongest fire.

“I don’t know.”

She’s tired. Narcotics are high heeled shoes. She don’t use them.

“Ershod.”

He says, extending his hand. She takes it, puts her inside. Names, she don’t give one.

“If you see me on the street, and I look like this, don’t come up to me. I’m mean.”

She don’t answer. It’s a gift and doesn’t require a response. Recognition takes many forms, in the intimacy of what to do and when to do it. Whodini rings in her ears, “One love, one love, you’re lucky just to have, one love.” She likes the slow decay of fermentation. One drink is too many, one hundred not enough.

At the corner she throws her shoes and socks into the trash. He melts into the unlit night. Her father. Her brother. The beaver who likes living down at the piles, his head on the pavement, a bottle at his hip.