Day 32: My wookie

Best Tilly story ever.

We were hiking together when some teenagers on dirt bikes came careening around the corner in front of us.  The girl at the head of the pack said, "A wookie!", and then, reflectively, over her shoulder as she flew by, "A short wookie..."

That's what she was. A short wookie, funny way of talking and all.  I called her Ursula, my little bear.

Rest in peace, girlie, and thank you for everything.

Day 31: Gifts

Once upon a time, there was a young woman.  This young woman had a boyfriend (whom she eventually married) who loved to hike.  He had grown up hiking, and had a real love of climbing to the tops of things.  And he wanted to share the tops of things with her.

Now, this young woman was in reasonable-ish shape.  But not climbing-to-the-tops-of-things shape.  And her boyfriend (later her husband) wasn't particularly good at calibrating those climbs to what she could actually do; he was calibrating them to his desire to share the outdoors and beauty with her.  So he took them on hikes that were really hard for her (but not for him).  And she spent those hikes struggling, and watching him not struggle, and feeling like she was holding him back, and feeling like a failure, and hating herself for that, and hating him for putting her in that position, and just generally being miserable and unhappy and angry and resentful (not to mention red-faced and panting).

And then one day, they got a puppy.  And, since she was about to spend a month in the Trinity Alps doing dissertation research, she took the puppy with her.  This puppy was a long-legged, happy, playful sort of puppy, with breeds like german shepherd and collie all mixed into her heritage, and she had energy to spare.  At home, she got three walks a day (to set her up for success, you see - a tired puppy is a less-destructive puppy), with lots of romping and playing.

The Trinity Alps are the mountains around the Trinity river, which has cut a gorge right down through the rock.  The tribe that the young woman was working with* have a language whose directionals intimately reflect this landscape: everything is described as being either upriver or downriver of other things; and also as being uphill or downhill of those things.

So this young woman found a trail where she could take her dog hiking.  A trail which ran upriver downhill from her car, and then downriver uphill back to her car.  It was steep.  And really hard.  And the first time she went on that trail, she spent a lot of the downriver uphill leg hating herself for being slow, and out of breath, and...  Her brain travelled that familiar path (also uphill, as it turns out), to the usual refrain: holding someone back.  Except, it was just her and her puppy.  And as she slowed down on a switchback to regain her breath, she could see that her puppy wasn't impatient or resentful.  Her puppy LOVED it!  Just as much as she LOVED going fast!  Or stopping entirely!  There were smells to smell, and running back and forth to be accomplished, and dirt to scratch at, and squirrels to consider. 

And panting?  Far from being embarrassed about needing to pant as she climbed uphill, this puppy panted all the time.  Happily, unconcernedly - the puppy breathed the way she needed to breathe to be comfortable and to do what she wanted to do.  And so the young woman, unobserved by other people and in the company of a dog who couldn't care less, learned to breathe hard without being embarrassed about it. 

There wasn't a happily-ever-after ending.  Life is a lot more complicated than that.  The young woman and her soon-to-be-husband still went on hikes where she often felt incompetent and miserable.  But she also hiked alone with her dog, and, on those hikes, she learned to love the quiet of the hills, and the growing strength of her body.  She learned to pace herself, because she knew she wasn't holding anyone back.  That dog offered her the gift of companionship without expectations of anything except time together.  She taught the young woman that stopping to smell a plant, or look at the ground squirrels, or to pant a little bit isn't such a bad thing. 

In fact, it just might be the whole point.


*As always, my most profound thanks to all of the Native California tribal communities who have given me the gift of their time, and who have allowed me to learn from and work with them over the years.  The tribe in this case is the Hupa (the language is also Hupa).

Day 30: Still here

We seem to have found a combination of meds, rest, and food that is letting Tilly be comfortable.  She has enough energy to come into whatever room we're in, to wag when she sees us, and even to bark when people come up the driveway.  Yesterday, I took my work outside onto the front lawn with me, and she came and settled down in the grass - a favorite pastime.  It's simultaneously awful to know that this isn't something that's going to get better, and really wonderful to have some extra time with her.

Day 29: Representation

My daughter recently reminded me of a Toni Morrison quote that she found her junior year when doing an oral report on Morrison's essays:

"There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no room for fear.  We speak, we write, we do language.  That is how civilizations heal."

I love that.  We do language.  Yes, we do.  And when we do it right, civilizations can, indeed heal.

Of course, as we are reminded every single day right now, when we do language wrong, we do incalculable harm.  Language is powerful stuff.

Since Toni Morrison's death, like so many others, I've been thinking again about what her writing meant to me.  (It's well worth reading what other folks are writing about this, for example, this wonderful column by Roxane Gay.)  I was introduced to her in college, when I took an African-American literature class as part of my English and Comp Lit major.  I remember that class as a turning point for me, for a lot of reasons.  All of them, though, boil down to representation and to the way that representation can de-center a dominant perspective, making space not only for other ways of seeing the world but, more importantly, I think, for understanding that there are other ways of being in the world, other ways of seeing the world, other experiences to be centered.

I spent ten weeks during which the only fiction I read was by Black authors.  And what I think is especially important about reading Toni Morrison's work in that context is this: she didn't write for me.  She didn't write for white folks, nor about the experiences of Black folks' relationships with white folks.  Her work centers the perspectives, narratives, ideas, and lives of African-Americans.  Period, full stop.  I love that about her writing.

Those ten weeks quite literally changed my dreams.  As in, the people in my dreams weren't white. Sometimes I wasn't, either.  Because every character of every book I read was, unless stated otherwise, Black, my baseline for "person" in my reading changed.  I didn't even realize what was happening until the next semester, when I sat down to read the first book for that term's lit class.  I sat there, scratching my head - for the life of me, I could not make the main character make any sense.  I couldn't figure out why he was doing or thinking the things that he was.  Had the acronym been in circulation then, I would have been thinking, WTF? 

And then it hit me.  I was reading Hemingway.  But I had picked up the book and visualized the main character as African-American.  Of course what I was reading didn't make sense!  If there was ever an author whose work assumes a white male perspective (largely by not even considering that there might be another one), it's Hemingway. 

And this is why representation matters.  Our baseline for "person" is determined in no small part by which people we are exposed to, not only in real life, but in all the other places where people are represented in our lives: in art, in television, in movies, in literature.  And also, in the academic literature that we assign and read.  When we only read work by men, or by white folks, or by white men, we reinforce the idea that those are the people who have good ideas.  We allow people's baseline assumptions about who a person is (in writing: white and male unless otherwise stated) to stand without question.  In my language and gender class, nearly all of the readings are by women, and I am working to diversify that list further.  By the end of the semester, in their essays, my students begin to make the mistake of referring to all authors as "she" (whereas, at the beginning, they are likely to make the opposite mistake, and refer to them all as "he"; the first names of these authors are stated clearly and are largely very gendered names).  Of course, what I'd love to see is an even deeper shift - that they make a point of figuring out who each author is, before reading or writing about them.  But it's a start.

To my mind, this is one of the ways in which language can help civilizations heal - by realizing that our civilization includes a tremendous, vital, and beautiful range of ways of languaging, and of voices speaking those ways of languaging into being every day.  And the only way we can realize that is not to know it at some intellectual level, removed from experience, but instead to get down into the rich, loamy earth of that writing.  To perhaps be uncomfortable with it.  To feel what it is to read writing not written for us, but nevertheless rich with potential meaning for us.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find Morrison's The Source of Self-Regard and get a little more of that beautiful language.

Day 28: Confirmed

By way of update, Tilly has cancer in her lungs.  So we're now in the mode of keeping her comfortable until the time comes to help her along.  We don't have a good sense of how fast this is going to go, but judging by the rapidity of the onset of symptoms, and by the fact that she's already working harder to breathe than she usually would, I don't think we have much time.  So, painkillers, lots of careful cuddling, diced up chicken (and even some lamb!), and time together.

(Me and my girlie, from a couple of Christmases ago)

Day 27: Derailed

So many things I thought I'd write about this week; also so many things I need to do.  But I spent yesterday at, first, the equine hospital with Disco (non-emergency, not the best news but not catastrophic), and then the afternoon taking Tilly to the vet.  Tilly hasn't been at all well the last few weeks, and she's been on a downhill slide in the not doing well.  When we came home from our weekend away, our greeting (usually an exuberant ten-minute (plus) round of barking and licking and running in circles) was a short bark, a little tail-wagging, and then she went to lie down again.  Hence the rush appointment to the vet.  They kept her overnight, and then let me take her home today.  At this point, I'm waiting on a call from the vet herself; her techs have said that she wants to let me know what's going on herself, which I read as very bad news.  Tilly is on pain meds, which are making her more comfortable (but really not actually comfortable).  Rick and I are thinking we'll cancel our trip this weekend, and I'll probably cancel the silent retreat I was going on next week, but we'll see.  Waiting is hard, and I find myself not concentrating all that well.  Hence the rather dump-like post.  Man, this sucks. 

Day 26: Toni Morrison

I woke up this morning to the news that Toni Morrison has passed away.  I was going to say "that the world has lost a truly great writer", but, thank god, she has left us words to savor and to roll around on our tongues and in our minds, and I am grateful.  There's a lot I want to say when I can, but for now, I'll let those words speak for themselves.

“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.”   - Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood