How to frighten your Director

Yesterday during my time at the RFTB&D, I was reading a book on creative writing that contained many excellent examples. I enjoyed reading this book, because I could really get into the material.

One essay by Louise Erdrich, an author of Ojibwa extraction, related that in the earliest records, women of the Anishinaabe nation (of which Ojibwa is a part) had names such as Walks with Wind, Lightning Proof, Speaks Well, and Walks Far. When the missionaries came, in an evangelical frenzy those names became Mary and Martha and other good Christian identities. Louise’s grandmother, who started life as Carries Sunshine became just one more Catherine.

Ms Edrich richly described what her later research uncovered about her grandmother's remarkable life as a creator and seller of native craft items and the prestigious place she held in the tribe, but her childhood memories of Grandmother Catherine was of an old woman who spent her days in a chair behind the door in her mother’s house. She lived neither in the present nor the past, but in a world all her own, and sat quietly day by day. But occasionally, some cognition would take place in Grandmother Catherine’s mind and she would get up and start home. Never mind that home was a thousand miles away and no longer existed, Grandmother Catherine would start out traveling unerringly to the East – across neighbor's yards, through creeks, across roadways – on her way home.

She would, of course, be returned to her chair, and until that idea faded from her mind she would have to be restrained in the chair, and the chair tied to the wall.

Now if you know me very well, you know that I did not make it to the end of this essay. I struggled with it a bit, then gave up and sat silently, tears in my eyes. My director, a novice teenager, stopped the recording, and then in a bit, wide-eyed, pressed the intercom to see if I was okay?

I told her that yes, I was okay, and if she worked with me much she would get used to these lapses. It may take her a while to understand, though.