Pictures from the Rez
Some pictures from Pine Ridge Reservation, Badlands National Park, Wounded Knee Cemetery, Red Cloud Indian School and Black Elk’s cabin.
Tasting Life Twice
The Dogs on the Rez Speak Lakota
Indian Reservation dogs
Are teenagers run wild,
Hanging around gas stations
And grocery stores;
Dozing in shadows
Or gathered on corners,
Staying out after dark,
No one calling them home.
Sore-pawed
Tourist-hustlers,
Patch-furred
Trash-rustlers,
Whip-tailed and hungry,
Long-legged and lean;
Teeth sharpened on pine cones,
Surviving
The ticks, fleas,
And porcupine quills.
They roam invisible spaces
Between American highways,
In their eyes, the secret landmarks
Of legend’s terrain;
Four-footed emblems
Of ancestral nomads,
In liminal places
Ignoring defeat,
They remain.
- Jean Kavanagh
Office Boss on the Rez
A picture of Kilo, our top dog boss, at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He’s making sure we get to work.
Birthday Fun
Even if it rains on your parade, keep marching.
At Carley’s birthday party, a bunch of silly second grade girls painted their fingernails, competed for prizes in the limbo contest, a sack race, a three-legged race and a water balloon toss. Their cheeks were bedazzled with the colorful creations of a face painter. And they were enchanted by the stories of a mysterious stranger from the order of tall hats and tall tales. Later they threw water balloons at the same storyteller. Who does such a thing?
In between it all, the girls danced to Miley Cyrus (“Party in the USA”), Jessie J, (“Price Tag”), “Cha Cha Slide”, “Party Rock Anthem” and a bunch of other boogie tunes.
Missouri River at Sundown
Gorgeous spring sunset on the Missouri River viewed from Les Bourgeois Bistro with a bottle of Jeunette Rouge, some wonderful company and a great new album playing in the background: Jack Johnson & Friends: Best of the Kokua Festival. This day’s gift.
Val Kilmer as Citizen Twain
It’s been over a hundred years since Mark Twain last visited our area. He’s coming back! William Woods University is preparing to host Val Kilmer for an evening performance of Citizen Twain. Kilmer, who is best known for his roles in Top Gun, Batman, The Doors and Tombstone, will bring America’s greatest storyteller to life with an evening performance of Twain’s wit and wisdom. While here at The Woods, we’ll even make a side trip to Twain’s hometown, my hometown and America’s hometown – Hannibal, Missouri!
If you’re in the neighborhood, come join us for an unforgettable night of entertainment.
Tuesday, May 1st, 7 PM Dulany Auditorium, Fulton, Missouri (seating is limited)
A Father and Son Go on Their Last Oddysey Together
I’m pulled in by the allure of road trip stories, be they from classical lit or the age of exploration or the Beat Writers or more recent ones from friends and students. Here is another really good one from NPR’s weekend edition.
A few years ago, author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching the epic Greek poem The Odyssey when his father decided to take his class.
Jay Mendelsohn, a retired research scientist, wanted to understand his son better, and understand his life’s work. When Daniel decided he wanted to retrace one of the most epic journeys of Greek literature, Jay became his travel partner.
Daniel, a professor at Bard College in New York, wrote about the trip for the April 2012 issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine. His father did not like the character of Odysseus in the first place, Daniel tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.
“He said, ‘How can this guy be a hero? You know, he lies, he tricks people, he cheats on his wife, he cries’ — my father didn’t like that at all,” Daniel remembers – “How can you make this guy the center of a poem,’” Daniel remembers.
But Jay did love Homer’s first poem, The Iliad, and he wanted to learn more about Homer and Ancient Greece. So, they partnered up and began cruising the Mediterranean, starting in the ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey – the city where Odysseus’ journey begins.
“One certainly gets a sense of the cultural power and authority of the Homeric poems, both The Iliad and The Odyssey,” he says, “from the fact that already in antiquity, it was a tourist destination to go to Troy.” Even Alexander The Great visited the city as a tourist, he says.
Of course, Daniel and Jay didn’t stop there. They visited places throughout Greece and the Mediterranean associated with locations in Homer’s The Odyssey. There’s a lot of speculation, however, about whether these sites are truly the places mentioned in these epic poems.
“A lot of these sites,” Daniel says, “like Calypso’s cave on Malta, one definitely feels like they were sort of invented — or at least hyped.” Jay got a big kick out of each location anyway, Daniel says, even the phoniest ones.
The two companions traveled the ancient world on a cruise ship, which offered lectures by academics and archeologists. It was a small cruise ship, with about 80 passengers on board, but that didn’t stop them from having unlikely encounters.
“The Odyssey is, of course, about funny encounters and unexpected coincidences and meetings that are too good to be true,” Daniel says. “We got to talking with a couple that we had seen a couple times, and it turns out he had been the CEO of my dad’s company,” he says.
Some of the people they met even had an uncanny resemblance to characters from The Odyssey.
For example: There’s one key moment in The Odyssey when Odysseus returns to his palace in Ithaca — in disguise, to slay all the suitors who had been courting his wife while he was away. Once at the palace, however, he’s recognized by a scar on his leg from a childhood wound.
Coincidentally, Daniel was sunbathing on the deck when he noticed a Dutch man with a scar on his leg and an extraordinary story.
During World War II, this man was a starving teenager. He was weak and malnourished and ended up injuring himself while chopping firewood, swinging the axe into his own leg. This wound almost cost him his life.
“A family friend, who was a classicist, helped him get through this illness in part by reading The Odyssey to him,” Mendelsohn says. “Even though he was not a classic student, he recited to me, on the deck of this ship as an elderly man, lines from The Odyssey in Greek,” he says.
The man told Daniel he was on the cruise because he had vowed to see what Odysseus saw before he died.
All in all, it was a good trip for both father and son — and an especially poignant one. On April 6, 2012, Jay Mendelsohn passed away.
“I can’t travel with him anymore,” Daniel says, “but in a lot of ways, he will stay with me during the remaining trips that I am making and the readings I am making of these texts,” he says. “That just became a different kind of odyssey.”
He Loved to Tell Stories
When I was in graduate school at Regent College, I once asked my professor, Eugene Peterson, for suggested readings on the art and craft of preaching. He suggested to me Fred Craddock. “Start there”, he said. And I did. I began reading various books by Craddock and found him to be a wonderful guide in the art of storytelling the Bible, the celebration of narrative as a genre and also in the care and use of language.
A few days ago, John Blake of CNN did an excellent piece on Craddock in an article entitled, “A Preaching ‘Genius’ Faces His Toughest Convert’. Craddock is candid in the article, talking about his struggles as a child with the shame of his family’s poverty and his struggles as an adult with his dad’s silence (“I struggled with his silence. I wanted him to say he was proud of me.”).
The following part of the article was especially good, where Blake talks about Fred Craddock Sr.’s love of stories and the web they spun in inspiring his own son, who would become a legendary preacher.
“Fred Craddock Sr. had plenty to say about other subjects. He stood 5-foot-7, weighed 150 pounds and even in his 50s could do one-arm chin-ups. He liked to dance, race his horse at county fairs.
Most of all, he loved to tell stories.
His son and namesake, Fred Jr., was one of his most devoted fans. Father and son developed a storytelling ritual. At the end of the day, the elder Craddock would return to his home in the small town of Humboldt, Tennessee, roll a Bull Durham cigarette by the fireplace and say to no one in particular, “Boy, I never hope to see what I saw today.”
Craddock, his three brothers and his sister flocked around their father.
“What’d you see today?”
“Oh, you kids still up? No, you go to bed. You don’t want to have nightmares.”
His children protested. Back and forth they’d go before Craddock Sr. finally said, “Well, sit down, but don’t blame me if you have nightmares.”
Craddock Sr. thrilled his children with adventure stories about Chief Loud Thunder, Civil War battles and, on occasion, stories from the Bible. The elder Craddock taught his son some of his first lessons in theology.
Each student in Craddock’s first-grade class was required to answer morning roll call with a Bible verse. Craddock didn’t know any, until his father taught him one. One morning, he stood up “like a bantam rooster” and repeated his father’s scripture:
“Samson took the jawbone of an ass and killed 10,000 Filipinos.”
The teacher sent Craddock home with a stern note to his parents for his use of profanity. Ethel Craddock chided her husband, but he chuckled, saying, “I bet the class enjoyed it.”
The elder Craddock developed a following. Storytellers were admired in rural Tennessee during the first half of the 20th century. Television was nonexistent. Books were expensive. People spent their day around pot-bellied stoves, whittling wood and spitting tobacco while swapping stories.
When Craddock Sr. stopped on a corner to roll a cigarette, crowds gathered, because they knew a tall tale was coming. They rarely guessed how it would end. Craddock Sr. would uncork a story, lead his audience up to the edge, then suddenly announce that he had to go to work and walk away.
Says his son: “I’m convinced now that he didn’t know where his stories were going when he started.””
The Parable of the Fisherman and the Businessman
One of my students wrote a reflection on the following quotation from the Dalai Lama. Asked what surprises him most about humanity he said: “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived”.
Her paper got me thinking about a parable I have come across a few times in recent years. I’m not sure what the original source is but one version is the following:
An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.
“How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked.
“Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.
“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked.
“I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.
“But… What do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor.”
The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”
He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you could run your expanded enterprise with proper management.
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, senor, how long will all this take?”
To which the American replied, “15-20 years, 25 tops.”
“But what then, senor?”
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”
“Millions senor? Then what?”
“Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll in to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
Remembering Lot’s Wife
Here is a poem I shared with my class yesterday after we discussed Jewish Midrash and modern poetry. The poem by Wislawa Szymborska is an allusion to a text in Genesis about nameless “Lot’s wife” who turned into a pillar of salt for looking back upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:26). The destroying angel said run fast and do not look back or stop. Nameless Lot’s wife looked back. Interestingly, Jesus is reported as saying in the Gospel accounts, “remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32), suggesting not to look back at the life you are about to lose. Szymborska gives voice to nameless Lot’s wife and suggests she may have had plenty of reasons for looking back.
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot’s neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn’t so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now–every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn’t breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It’s not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It’s possible I fell facing the city.
Travis Tamerius
A journal of reflections on things seen and unseen, wimsical and wise, ordinary and odd, magical and mundane-
