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By Root 377 0

people’s stories—those are the ones I crave. Not Adam and Eve, designated owners of the garden who get to plunder it and spit it out as they please. Not Noah with his precarious ark, who has set upon us the wrongheaded notion that preserving two specimens of something in a zoo somewhere is all we need of biodiversity. Not the stories I already know, but the ones I haven’t heard yet: the ones that will show me a way out of here. The point is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense. How is a child to find the way to her own beliefs, unless she can stuff her pockets with all the truths she can find—whether she finds them on a library shelf or in a friend’s warm, strange-smelling kitchen. The point is for playground slurs to fall dead on her ears, meaningless as locks on an open door. I want to imagine those doors not just open but gone, lying in the dirt, thrown off their hinges by the force of accord in a house of open passage.

Eddie Swimmer stood before us in the auditorium, dressed in moccasins and beaded clothes and a porcupine-hair headdress, explaining the songs and dances. “These songs might all sound to you like ‘Hey-ya, hey-ya,’ but they’re not. Listen. These are words in our languages.” Camille and I sat licking our fingers, which were sticky with honey from the Indian fry bread we bought from the concession table at the back. We listened to the singers and watched Eddie do a grass dance, which, in the old days on the plains, had the polite function of stomping down the tall grass before a powwow. Then we watched Derek Davis do the fancy-dance—a fast, difficult type of dancing popular on the modern powwow circuit. Derek’s elaborate costume had a beaded breastplate and headdress and showy feather bustles, all put together by members of his family. He pointed out the modern additions: metal bells instead of deer hooves; breechcloths made bright with commercial dyes instead of berries and roots. He was pleased with these improvements, unconcerned about a collector’s notion of authenticity. He is a living dancer, a young man in wire-rim glasses and a lot of muscles, definitely not a museum piece. The kids selling fry bread and soft drinks hooted their approval as he began to dance, and when he finished we were all out of breath.

On the way home I asked Camille again, “So, okay, tell me. Who are the Native Americans?”

We’d stayed until closing time, seven hours, a possible world record for museum-going five-year-olds. She spoke sleepily from a horizontal position in the backseat. “They’re people who love the earth, and like to sing and dance, and make a lot of pretty stuff to use.”

She was quiet for a while, then added, “And I think they like soda pop. Those guys selling the fry bread were drinking a lot of Cokes.”

Heaven and earth rejoice. Good enough for now.

POSTCARDS FROM THE IMAGINARY MOM

I live for this. Taxiing onto the runway. A craving for adventure afflicts my restless bones like some mineral they are missing. With my sleeve pulled over my palm I rub the airplane window so I’ll have a clean view of home falling away underneath me, once we’re cleared and my life takes flight.

Oops, better be careful of that sleeve. On this trip it’s mandatory that I stay presentable. I’m being sent out on a book tour, four weeks, a different city each day. And for what I’m about to do, I’ve been given one main piece of advice: Don’t check any luggage. If I missed a connection somewhere, my bag would never catch up but would have to follow me from sea to shining sea, one day behind, like a dogged Samsonite version of Lassie Come Home. Better to pare down to the essentials and have nothing to lose. All I have is my mind, and what I’m wearing: sturdy black jeans brand new for this trip, my shiniest cowboy boots, and a nice silk jacket that I hope will pass gracefully from clean, well-lighted bookstores to the Home Shopping Channel. It’s a big world out there, so I have a pair of backup shoes in my carry-on: my favorite sneakers, high-tops, red suede.

This is all fine with