Post
by the mingo » September 12th, 2009, 12:12 am
Today, for a little while, I sat by a grave. It was the culmination of a three day quest that I knew ahead of time would certainly end up with me sitting by a grave. I had to reach back into the past along my own timeline 43 years to find this spot. I have had roughly twenty two million six hundred thousand & eight hundred more minutes of life than the young woman whose bones lie beneath this earth here. I started school with this girl, kindergarten right from the git go the year of '56. Ten years later we had finished what they used to call "junior high" and were ready to begin high school that fall. In the first half of August she fell victim to an accidental gunshot wound to the head from a .22 caliber rifle. She never regained consciousness & died the next day. Her death was surprising & sudden like a flock of birds flushed from cover.
I do not know why but I've been thinking about her lately. Maybe because I've never forgotten how good she was to me. By that I mean she was one of those girls that everybody liked. She was pretty & popular & lively & the whole world was at her feet. Because of the alphabetizing of our names she used to sit behind me in almost every class we had together & she would talk to me. Talk to me about how things were going. Many times she engaged me in conversation all on her own. I was not handsome or popular or had any standing in any of the "in" groups in school. Yet she talked to me like I was a person. Without mean-spiritedness. Without using me. Without ANY conceit. That's the way I remember her.
But I never knew where she had been buried. They didn't have "closure councilors" in those days and the events after her death have never been clear to me. I'm sure someone must have mentioned the funeral and burial to me but I've never been able to remember it.
For me it had returned to the circling winds. I spoke to my uncle about all this last week.
He spit his chew into his coffee can leaned forward into my face and said, "Boy, (I'm 58 & he still calls me Boy) how many times do I have to tell you part of the blood moving through your veins was born to the Haudenashonee, born to the house of the Wolf Clan?
Three days ago I decided & took up the hunt.
It began high tech but it was a low tech item that proved key. Address in hand I jumped in the Jeep heading out, I thought, to find her father. I ended instead in finding her mother. 86 years old. She remembered me. From her, well, you know the rest.
So today, for a little while, I sat by a grave. When I got up to go I told the girl I'd be back from time to time. I got back in the Jeep. But I just sat there. Ya know, for the first time in my life I realized I was tired. Not tired out, Tired. Not tired in my body, though there is that. Not tired in my mind, though there is that too. But tired deeper in. Tired in my spirit. All the way through. Twenty two million, six hundred thousand & eight hundred more minutes of life than what she was given & I'm still treading dust. And her the better person even now & always.
You can't figure God.
Doll, you may have found a place of rest but I'm still on the trail.
