THE GIRL FROM ISLETA

“GEORGIA ABEITA OLIVER” watercolor by kayti sweetland rasmussen]

“What color would you call my hair?” I asked her once. “Mouse”, she quickly replied, so I made her a giant wire sculpture of a rat. We found that we could laugh at each other until the tears flowed down our cheeks, and not remember why. She was a girl from a village I never heard of and a culture I only guessed at.

I painted pictures of Indians I had never seen, in landscapes I had never traveled, until she became my daughter’s teacher.

On “Back To School” night I met Georgia Oliver, fifth grade teacher, and as my daughter had told me: “A REAL Indian”, as opposed to what I had painted.

Georgia Abeita, by photography class at University of New Mexico

Georgia and her husband, Emmett Oliver, became extended family over a period of time, and together introduced us to Native America. Georgia Abeita came from Isleta, a small pueblo in New Mexico, and Emmett, a Quinalt, from Washington state. Both became teachers and there are untold numbers of former students who are grateful for having had either as their teacher. Their son, Marvin Oliver, has carried on the teaching profession as Art Professor at the University of Washington, and has become famous as a North Coast artist.

A turning point cor me as an artist came when Georgia invited me to spend time with her at her home in New Mexico. From that time on, I no longer had to look for pictures to copy when painting an Indian.

More important, I found a very special friend.

ON SUNDAYS

ON SUNDAYS

On Sundays students who can afford to,
take English lessons to work

for parents who work
in English because English

is where the money is. But
she doesn’t teach English, Sundays

she walks two miles deeper
from the building, where she lives

with other teachers, to find
students weaving bamboo baskets

while watching younger siblings, then
walks between rice fields to

rice fields to find their parents.
And waits. At break or lunch

under a tree, she listens to them
say, the words don’t feed

the stomach. Yet she comes
so that by evening, when they arrive

home, they find her in the yard
drawing words on the dirt

while students work and watch
and say. Then they eat dinner.

Over rice and yam, boiled water
cress and salted radish, they find

other things that feed the stomach:
the height she’s gained with mud

sticking to her thongs; or, as the children
say it, their heads thrown back

in open-mouth laugh, the bamboo snapped
at her weaving; or the way “l”

is tall and skinny, and then “b”
is “l” with their father’s stomach. Soon

her students come to class
because the teacher is nice

and parents don’t want her
to walk so far on Sundays.

(Poem by Nhan Trinh)

CHECKS AND BALANCES

watercolor painting by KSR

Some years ago, when I was teaching at our local Community College, it occurred to me that everybody was younger and smarter than I was. They used cultural references I knew nothing about, they were up on all the newest movies, dance steps and music. (And they didn’t get out of breathe after climbing the hill to the art lab.) Suddenly my clothes began to look dated, and I started to wonder if I was going to be a frumpy old lady in a few years.

But we were into double-edged sword territory, so age wasn’t always a liability. When you’re older and don’t talk a lot, younger people often think you’re wise and they ask your advice about all kinds of things. I do adore handing out advice to people who might actually heed it. Besides it was my class, my rules. It’s amazing what you learn about the younger generation by just listening. I have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but when it’s not personal, the floodgates open, and no subject is out of bounds. It has been a grand education, and when you don’t know what you’re talking about, just keep your mouth shut. Make allowances for each others differences.

I remember the young man who showed up for my sculpture class in a wheelchair. He was a Vietnam veteran who had had his legs blown off by a landmine. The other young men were discussing their heights one day when he remarked in a soft shy voice, “I used to be six feet.”

Then there was the woman with a crazy, lopsided blond wig, which was always askew. She wasn’t a talker, but one day she told of having had cancer as a child and hearing a nurse ignore her by telling another nurse that “she’s going to die anyway.” Now her cancer was back and she was handling it in a crazy wig and good humor.

My friend Lory O. once wrote: “With age comes wisdom, and also forgetfulness of all those wise thoughts.” It’s one of the immutable laws of the Universe that we will all be a bit forgetful at some future time of our lives. I tend to blur out the major cataclysmic occurrences of the world. There are far too many to remember clearly.

I remember the quieter, smaller happenings in our own lives and in the lives of those around us that are personally momentous, while the rest of the world lurches on, oblivious. You become a personal historian. You can’t forget everything and everyone you’ve ever know, and the list gets longer with each year.

A SOLITARY MAN

I’m sure I would never have made the acquaintence of Percy Shelley, William Butler Yeats or any of the English poets if it hadn’t been for Mr. Lorimer’s second period English class. I was assigned to a front row seat, not because of any favoritism, but because of my nearsigtedness, for which I refused to wear my glasses.

We memorized and read aloud, then memorized some more, thus giving Mr. Lorimer spare time to correct papers, read, or play the stock market, while keeping at least part of the class occupied.

Franklin Lorimer was a small, grey, self-contained man, whose general detachment made you feel that perhaps he had not had enough sleep the night before. He dressed soberly and properly, in what I assumed was a rather English manner. You could pass him in the hall, or on the street, and never be sure you had seen him, he blended so well with the crowd.

If anyone gave him a thought outside of school hours, you never imagined that he had another life except for English class. But, in actuality, he lived in our house.

We lived in my family home, built by my Great-Grandfather, and owned then by my Great-Aunt Helen. The house had been converted into apartments, with Aunt Helen living on the ground floor, the second floor made into two apartments, and the third floor attic converted into a snug three room apartment. My mother and I occupied the third floor while my father was gone during the War, and my husband and I continued to live there for three more years after we married. For this we paid a walloping $30 per month.

My father’s cousin Raima and her husband lived in one second floor apartment, and Franklin Lorimer in the other. He had been the college roommate of another cousin, which might have made you think he may have shown me special interest when making out his report cards. However well I did, I had to do it on my own, since I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him or seeing him at any place outside of school. He was a quiet tenant, and I don’t think I ever passed him in the hallway while climbing the stairway into our attic. I never saw him go out, nor anyone visit in the five years I lived there.

His sole discretion came at precisely 10:30 each school day, when I was instructed to get him a paper cup of water, which he took to the open window and carefully poured out, hoping to hit the janitor, whose daily route took him under our window at just that time. I don’t know if he ever hit his target, or what he had against the poor janitor, but at least he had the possibility each day.

I pass the old house, now in other hands, and I frequently pass the school. I look up at the second floor window, and wonder what ever happened to Mr. Lorimer, and if he ever hit his target.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BETTE DAVIS?

Navajo Grandmother”, original watercolor painting, Kayti Sweetland Rasmussen

I met an young man of 17 today who made me realize how far out of the loop I really am.

He acts in his school plays wants to be a character actor, not a leading man, because they are more interesting to portray. We talked about movies, and I, an inveterate movie lover, had no idea what he was talking about! Apparently zombies are pretty big in the movies today, and his excitement in telling about these films was infectious. Out of the fullness of my ignorance I tried to enter into the conversation and tell him about movies I have liked in the past, but he had never heard of them. Incredible!

I began to realize that what the younger generation likes abut films today is more about special effects than story line. It took me a minute to appreciate his thinking. It was also more about looking at the film with actor’s eyes, and he’s right—seen in that aspect, they do deliver more punch.

When teaching at the college level, I used to feel part of the chatter, but the kids of today have jumped ahead at the same pace technology has moved.
Nothing lasts, and what a shame that is. Or maybe it is just that it make us antiques feel redundant. But if we are the “beta” generation, there is the realization that today’s kids will take their preordained place in line as well.

Where do all the yesterdays go? Tangled up in a heap in a memory folder. But tomorrows are filed under Hope.

Get back in the groove, Grandma!

GEMUTLICHKEIT

NOUN: WARM FRIENDLINESS; COMFORTABLENESS; COZINESS.

The sense of wishing to be known for what one really is is like putting on an old, easy, comfortale garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, ‘Here I am–just as ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous–take me or leave me.’ And how absolutely beautiful it is to be doing only what lies within your own capabilities and is part of your own nature. It is like a great burden rolled off a man’s back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own. (David Grayson, journalist and author)

It’s like being caught wearing no makeup, with shaggy hair, still in your pajamas, and answering the doorbell at 8 o’clock in the morning while restraining your over-friendly Jack Russell Terrier, yet feeling no embarrassment when your perfectly groomed neighbor stops by with a request.

It was like the feeling I had on the first day of teaching at the community college when I entered the classroom with shaking knees, and facing all those fresh young faces, when I realized I really did know more than they did.

SO YOU THINK THINGS ARE TOUGH NOW?

Alaska Bears  KSR

It has been said that nothing is so bad it can’t get worse, and I’m sure that is so.  The Great Depression was certainly one of those bad times for a great many people.  Having weathered  through that one, I can vouch for a degree of discomfort and a few stories my kids think are highly unlikely, but even so, we had it good compared to a lot of people.    The pundits seem to feel that the entire world will be having another Depression soon enough.  It has become serious enough to put a capital “D” on it already.  Since the first one was “The Great” I wonder what the next designation will be.

I remember two friends we met years ago in Washington state.  They were small town kids when they married in 1939 during the Great Depression, and in her words, they were “Depressionate”!  They were both teachers, but had to keep the marriage a secret in order to keep their jobs.  When World War II was declared, they quit teaching and both went to work at the The Boeing Company in Seattle.  She worked as an IBM operator on a “monstrous, enormous machine!” ( Times have changed, now we carry computers in our pockets!)

When the war ended in 1946, thousands of people lost their war jobs, along with Nonie and Jack.  They started out thinking they would like to work in fish and wildlife management for the government, but instead were both offered jobs teaching Aleut natives in Alaska. Within 10 days they were on a boat bound for tiny Saint Paul Island, in the Pribilof Island group of Alaska, in the middle of the Bering Sea.  The nearest land mass was 150 miles away.  Jack taught all the students from fifth grade up, and Nonie taught the third and fourth grade students.  Their one and only co-worker taught first and second grades.

Japanese fleets had been located within 15 miles of the island during the war, and Japanese fishing floats came ashore regularly. There was still a feeling of unrest about the people.  They were iced in in the winter, and had no way out and no communication except for telegram and short-wave radio or the emergency weather plane.  In good weather the wind swept across the island, bringing Russia’s icy chill.  The men hunted seals, and in the short summers Jack worked in an office counting seal pelts for the government.

The U.S. Coast Guard also had a station on the island, but only five boats arrived each year, not counting a supply vessel which brought in coal and large items once a year in the summer.  A lonely existence.

In 1948 , after having been there for two years, they returned to Seattle and  resumed their teaching careers in a small town in western Washington.   Another couple of survivors of the Great Depression.

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Emily Dickinson