Hokshila Waste

He Who Must Be Obeyed is working on his ancestral Norwegian Cowboy history again. Over the past few months he has corresponded with a man who has the most beautiful Palmer Method Penmanship I have seen since my own father's. Carl's hand is larger and looser than my dad's. Just looking at it I would think he was an open friendly guy with a heart for people and his surroundings.

He writes a beautiful letter. Not only is it lovely to look at but it is full of information and knowledge. I Googled him and sure enough he is on the Web. He is from Sitting Bull's tribe. My family and I lived on the reservation that he was born on, the Standing Rock at Fort Yates, ND, for three months many years ago when the children were small and two of them attended the Government Indian School there.

Today we ordered a book that his grandmother wrote called "With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History." I can hardly wait to read it. I just have to think he lives up to his Lakota name, "Good Boy."

Amadeus

According to The Writer's Almanac today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756.

It was the film, Amadeus, that brought his life, the time, and the music to life for me. It might be a good day to watch it again. Today we are still blessed by his brilliant mind and the music he wrote in his short 35 years; forty-nine symphonies, forty concertos, and a wide range of other works including operas. Mozart wrote: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together make genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

I enjoy listening to The Writer's Almanac because I find Garrison Keillor voice soothing in our world of harsh voices. In addition to noting the historic events of the day, he reads verse.

It is also the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, a relative modern, being born in 1832. He found he did not stutter when he talked with children. Through his imagination we discovered Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. One day, while on a tour of Oxford, the tree limb outside of his office window was pointed out to us; the very limb on which sat the Cheshire cat in Alice's Adventures.

"He was good at charades, he sang, he told stories. Soon enough, jokes, puzzles, games, questions-and-answers, tricks with numbers and with words, and mental exercises became for him a means of everyday amusement and for his family and friends source of fun and diversion. He also played traditional games - chess, croquet, billiards, cards - but his mind was not content with these, and he expanded, extended, and experimented with all forms and fashions, pushing traditional entertainments to their outer limits and inventing new ones. In the 1870s he created a veritable cornucopia of conundrums and mental challenges, brilliant additions to the store of magic and game playing ... He was so creative and so productive that his games and diversions fill sizeable anthologies."

Dodgson lectured and tutored Oxford students in mathematics and was a fine photographer. I have a book of his photographs, many of them children. I have discovered if a person has a lot of books, it is hard to memorize just where they are. Do old librarians keep their books in Dewey order? Not this one, who is more interested in the Chi of her surroundings. There is something to be said for Dewey and his Decimals.

Trying to Forget

Last night we watched a local access channel lecture from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one of the two teaching hospitals in Omaha. A person can get too much information. It isn't always helpful. Last night's lecture was on genetics, and our genetic predisposition to act like the parents we always said we would never be like. It cannot be helped, it seems.

This afternoon He Who Must Be Obeyed was acting a little too much like my father-in-law did, God rest his soul, and I told him so. He asked me for an example and I gave him one he didn't like any better than I did. "Why do you remember those things?" he asked me.

Why indeed I have no idea. Sometimes I feel like I never forget anything. My mother told me that I was born on the kitchen table of the homestead house of my parent's first home. That was way too much information. Do you think I can forget it? Never have, and probably never will.

It came back to haunt me again with an email inquiry from a grand-daughter who was doing an interview for a biology class regarding birthplaces and disease and vaccination. There it was again, the homestead table event. I didn't tell her that but I am sure I gave her more information than her biology class ever needed to hear. Youngsters don't even know what Whooping Cough is; but I spared her wondering what being quarantined meant.

Having the county health department slap a quarantine sign in the front window of your house is about as humiliating as it can get for a kid, whose only entertainment is the street out front and one's playmates. I probably was too young to even read then.

Actually, I am not up at this unholy hour pondering birthing tables, I am giving the devotional reading at a woman's luncheon next week and do I go to my many books? No, I checked it out on the Net and you would be amazed, as I was. Have you checked out the podcasts on devotions? They are certainly aimed at the hip and attractive. It makes me wonder if everything has to be tied to a television program or a movie today. Is that all people think about?

"Where Legends Live"

He Who Must Be Obeyed spent some time at the Adams Museum in Deadwood, SD a few days ago. He visited with the curator about a planned exhibit on his family that went into the Gulch in 1877, one year after General Custer and Wild Bill Hickock bit the dust as they say. General Custer actually "bit the dust" but Wild Bill just hit the floor of Saloon No. 10 which is still in operation. It was probably filthier than the dust of the Greasy Grass, which makes the dying no more comfortable.

Having families whose lives coincide with the history of the Black Hills makes for interesting writing and day dreaming. I am one of those individuals whose imagination has a way of filling in all the blanks between the dry facts. One can get carried away with the what ifs and the fancy thats.

It is nice to have the family honored at the Adams Museum. The stately photograph of the immigrant mother who endured incredible hardships and difficulties, and her spinning wheel have been the basis of the display. It is good to honor people other than the infamous and the wild women who serviced them. I am sort of relieved that we do not have HBO so I don't have to watch "Deadwood." Reading the history is about all the excitement that I need. Taking a college class on the Ghost Towns and Gold Mines of the Northern Black Hills brought those days to life for me.

My own quiet Finnish immigrant ancestors left the Homestake Gold Mine to take their families a hundred miles north to the short grass prairies to obtain land of their own. They were a quiet group, along with their neighbors, simply surviving the elements of the northern high plains, establishing schools, churches, and cherishing their tight knit neighbors. Maybe the likes of Calamaty Jane were just too much for them. She died in Terry, one of those ghost towns and gold mines, the year after they left to homestead.

Henri Nouwen

The Daily Meditation from HenriNouwen.org often compliments my thinking. Some wise words like those of today make me thankful that situations I have been in have somehow been lifted. Day by day I have realized that occasionally I feel a complete peace; and joy has replaced despair.

Today this little nugget sailed ethereally into my inbox:
"Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one," "the forgotten one," or the "discarded one." Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on." Henri Nouwen.

Life After Dark

Night Photography is enjoyable and so much easier with digital cameras. Years ago a son and I went near this spot, set up tripods, used plunders so as not to wiggle our ancient film cameras. There was nothing automatic about them so we counted the street light changes to estimate exposures. The photograpic image seems better with digital, but I forgot to take a plunger and had a wiggley tripod. This was my only decent image.

Nebraska: The Good LIfe

There was a time that I thought I would simply die if I didn't get to move back to the Black Hills. Being away from Harding County was agonizing. The older I get the more I realize that I had better get used to the idea of being transplanted in Omaha and I too have taken root, like the 35 trees we have sucking up water in our own yard.

He Who Must Be Obeyed put in a swimming pool about 30 years ago, built a nice redwood privacy fence around it and planted 13 Scotch Pine trees in the back yard. It is ever so pleasant, but it isn't the Black Hills.

There is something about planting trees and staying long enough to see them tower above the roof to make you feel you that you belong. I am not sure a person can own a tree. You can plant one and rake up the leaves and pick the pears; but other than cut a limb here or there, you can't really control a tree unless you cut it down. I think the tree really owns you. We found that out when we had to dig out the sewer line from the house to the street and discovered the tree owned that as well.

So we tried to make our own little Black Hills in the back yard. Pines, water, birds and a few flowers. It isn't. It is nice and I like it but it doesn't smell of petrichor when it rains, it just smells like earthworms.