Dances With Wolves

I'm adding to my "A Sunday Night Read" series. It's about time. This past week I spent a lot of time on the metro going into DC to look at apartments. Thankfully, I can read on the train, so I did just that. Before one of my trips in, I checked out my aunt's bookcase, fingers gliding along the books' spines. I pulled out "Dances With Wolves." I remember watching the movie years ago on Grandma's couch.


I realized that I don't really like book reviews that re-hash the plot. I'd rather read about how a book moved a reader or why it is so gripping or interesting, so that's what I'm going to do here after just a sentence or two of summarizing.


"Dances With Wolves" is about a man posted at a deserted US Army fort on the frontier in 1863. Moreover, it's about the man's transformation while living among his Comanche neighbors.


Probably the movie trailer can give a better synopsis than I can if you want to check it out...

While reading, I realized that I envy Lieutenant Dunbar. He experienced a different culture, a different world even. He was accepted by the people. He experience both the simple beauty (dances and tipi villiage life) and harsh reality (scalping a wagon-full of whites that killed buffalo for their fur and left the rest to rot) of Comanche life. 

It's the newess, the ultimate foreignness that gets me about Native American stories. I love learning about different perspectives. I'm also nostalgic for simpler times and the beauty of nature. It makes me sad to think about what was lost here in our country, but then doesn't it most people? I'm grappling to explain my feelings. I guess basically I'm in awe of something so radically different from what I know.

"Dances With Wolves" isn't preachy about the plight of the Indians. No, I didn't like the book for any feelings of remorse or melancholy it stirred about that. In fact, there were many lines in the book that I loved just for what they say about life. By the end of the book I had dog-eared 10 or so pages. In one passage the author, Micheal Blake, explains how Lieutenant Dunbar releases himself from the grip of the clock. I think this was his first step in freeing himself from the conventions of white society. 

Letting go of time is amazing. I know because when I go to my family's cabin in Canada measured minutes and hours cease to exist for me. Remembering this feeling inspired me to post a poem I wrote about a day on Green Lake.

"He woke with the sensuous afterglow of having surrendered completely, in this case to a nap...Shadows were creeping across the hut's doorway, and curious about how long he had slept, Dunbar pulled out the simple, old pocket watch that had been his father's. When he brought it to his face, he saw that it had stopped. For a moment he considered trying to set an approximate time, but instead he...hung the heirloom on a convenient hook a couple feet above the bed. He stared at the numbers on the watch's face, thinking how much more efficient it would be to work when a person felt like it, to eat when a person was hungry, to sleep when a person was sleepy. How it will be to live without time for a while, he thought."

What slaves we are to clocks. Throughout the course of my day I must be more concerned with the time than any other one thing. How nice to let it go, once in a while, especially when reading a a good book.

Lac Vert

A Green Lake morning

when the lake is still and hushed,

like a child in wonder.

All is silent except the wind

in the trees,

and I wonder if I am alone in the world.

But ah, the loon gives her crazy call and I know I am joined

by at least one.

Solitude does not last long – or does it? –

for from my spot

on the porch

I soon hear the cabin rustling to life.

Sister creaking down the stairs from our shared bedroom in the loft.

Dogs nails clicking on the wooden floors.

Door thrown open

as someone treks to the john.

Murmured good mornings.

Stretching.

The lake awakens with the cabin.

An errant breeze ripples the silky surface.

A seagull lands

jauntily

on our floating dock.

A boat motors across the lake,

out for an early morning fish.

I pause

from my reading

and look up to see the sun breaking

through the clouds

over Alligear’s Bay.

This Green Lake morning is slipping into a Green Lake day.

A Green Lake day is not confined

by the constraints of time.

Oh, time passes, sure,

but here it’s not measured

in hours or minutes.

We’ve no clock, see.

The day ambles on,

and it’s quite freeing – though at first perhaps unsettling –

to not know

that now it’s noon and so we must eat lunch.

canoe to the island

swim off the cliffs

rig up a worm and fish from shore

Go ahead.

Do what you like.

The day is yours, after all, and not the clock’s.

It doesn’t matter when you eat

or for how long you nap

or if you read all day in a paint-peeled rocker on the porch.

One thing is certain, though.

Boats launch at sunset.

I always sit in the point of the Alumacraft

my dad, the captain, at the helm.

We might troll Dead Head Alley,

pretending to be a school of hook-laced minnows,

or maybe we try casting jitterbugs at the inlet.

As our hands get cold on the reels

and our feet slosh in water at the bottom of the boat,

we point her toward a faint light across the bay

and are cabin bound.

Time for a Green Lake night.

A Green Lake night means

laughter

on the porch

as stories are traded,

retold,

exaggerated.

The clink of bottles

Maybe we’ll have a fire.

We tend to the insatiable flames and

alternately look skyward.

We see the stars as we see them only up here.

The sky looks like silver paint splattered

on a blue-black canvas.

The number of stars is staggering, really,

with no man-made lights to rival their twinkling.

Sometimes, instead, we play cards

at the table

by the rosy glow from an ancient oil lamp.

We pound the table when someone scoops

a trick with Big Ben.

And we laugh.

And eat crackers and cheese

And the brave ones try ‘dines.

After good nights are said,

I slip into my bed

under the crazy quilts Grandma made

years ago.

Flashlights click off

as the cabin settles.

I close my eyes

and then open them

but it makes no difference,

the darkness is absolute.

My eyes close

not to open again until it’s time for

another Green Lake Morning

Blind-Boy, Writer-Girl

There was a boy. His mother died. In childbirth. With him. He lived, then, with his father and grandparents. He had never seen any of them, though. He was blind. Complications from childbirth took his mother and his sight both.

There was a girl – a precocious little girl with big brown eyes. She lived with her mother, father and younger sister in a huge yellow house in the country. She was healthy and happy.  

The boy’s family was poor, of course. They eked out a living on Ireland’s western-most coast. Their lives and hearts were dull and gray. Except for the boy’s. He lived in a world of his own. As a toddler, he was delighted by each new discovery he made in the cottage. Stray buttons and broken crocks to put them in were his joys. His disposition could not be dampened by the blight of material things nor by the faces around him, etched in worry, because he did not know any other life then what he felt with his hands and heard with his ears. His blindness shielded him. And he was likely happier for it.

The girl loved reading more than anything. Her parents read “Little Women” and “Stuart Little” with her. She read countless books by herself, delighted with each new discovery she made in their pages. Long ago times and far-away lands were her joys. Yes, she loved reading more than anything. Until she discovered writing, and then they were about the same.

Slowly, subtly, the boy’s sheer joyousness at, well, everything impacted the other members of the family. It’s hard to stay down when there a bright child in the house. His father noticed his cleverness. He noticed the way the boy had a mental map of the cottage and never tripped over the same piece of furniture twice. He heard his son’s astute questions. The father began to hope. Hope for his son, the son’s future. This hope became more concrete – a desire and then a yearning to send his son to a school for the blind in the city. But how? How to afford the tuition?

The little girl went to a school that seemed big to her but was really quite small. In fourth grade, she loved her teacher, who wore a smile always, it seemed. The girl loved that they sang sometimes in class, even when it wasn’t time for music. The teacher told the girl she was so proud of her for reading a sixth-grade book. The girl smiled and never forgot that.

Between his son’s giggles and occasional tantrums, the father made a decision. He would go to America for a year, two at most. There, he’d heard, he could earn money – and lots of it – in the coal mines. His mother begged him not to go, fearing that a trip across the Atlantic was not one he would make back. The grandfather, however, remained silent. He understood a father’s longing for something better for his son. He didn’t fully dare to ask himself if he had failed his son. Perhaps not, though, if he had the courage to sail away, lonely but resolute.

In fourth grade, there was a writing contest.  The girl had the courage to give it a go. The goal was to write a story that went along with a painting of a man and a boy. Looking out at the ocean. Her parents helped her type the story on their new computer.

The boy didn’t understand his father leaving for a faraway place. His concept of place and space was limited, very. So the four-year-old boy hugged his father good-bye and then immediately re-immersed himself in his make-believe world.

                

The girl wrote the story, won the contest, and then promptly returned to her book world.

A year to the day of the father leaving, the boy and his slope-shouldered grandfather began their daily trek to the top of the hill. The looked out at the sea, west toward America, looking for the passenger ship that might bring the father home. Most often, all the grandfather saw was waves. But he and the boy stood there hand-in-hand every day, waiting, for twenty minutes or so. The grandfather seeing the driving waves. The boy seeing nothing. But imagining so much more.

The little girl is grown now. She still loves to read and write. And sometimes she dictates stories to her dreams. Or is it her dreams that dictate stories to her?

New beginnings ?

I just took a walk, a rather long contemplative one. I had a lot to think about because, well, I've made some big changes as of late. The walk was on a wooded trail. The sun cheery as it fell through the leaves in blotches. The trail was quiet, much more so than I'm used to, but that's because I'm no longer walking in Central Park. I'm in Maryland, staying with family. I got a job in DC. Not just a job, my dream job, actually. Very exciting. Quite unbelievable. A little strange.

Strange that I'm not still in New York. Strange that I left behind friends and a boyfriend and am essentially starting a new life. As soon as I wrote that last sentence, I questioned it and remembered a quote I wrote on a mirror in my old apartment: "I am constantly creating my life." So perhaps it's not a new life any more so than every day of my life. But it sure feels different.

Back to the walk: I paused on a bridge over a small stream. Arms crossed and leaning on the rail of the bridge, hip jutting to one side, I looked up at the sunlight, the light and dark green leaves. I looked down at the water and then let my gaze wander. (I had just finished reading "Dances With Wolves," so I was feeling particularly attuned to nature.) 

When I looked back down at the stream. I looked at the parts, not just the whole. I noticed a little bunch of leaves caught on a submerged stick, flapping in the modest current. Then, a handful of minnows swimming upstream. Lastly, a carefully designed spider's web stretching between branches, hovering above the surface of the water, prettily.

Sometimes the more intently you look, the easier it is to see things. Beautiful little things. I plan look closely at new things in the future, whether starting a new job or just out for a stroll.