Having Everything Right by Stafford Kim; Pyle Robert Michael;

Author:Stafford, Kim; Pyle, Robert Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pharos Editions
Published: 2016-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AS HEROIC AGE

Heartbeat takes me forward, stories take me back. Waking on the midnight train, or wakeful in my bed at home, in orbit memory I hurtle past the houses where my people grew. I ramble the vagabond circuit, the foggy geography of time, and glance through windows lit by a pincushion on a table, a book in hand. In this Kansas house my father will live. At this Nebraska farm my mother will arise. Tornado wants them dead. Fear wants them sad. I batter with the moth on screen doors, sipping a rusty fragrance, wanting in. My wings dissolve, I wake. I travel locally. In Oregon back home, when we gather for tea, I listen hard. In stories from the Great Depression and the ribbons of experience it sent outward, my kin live simply. By their telling, hard times trained them to be happy. Their hardship stories work on me. Before dawn, alone at my desk, I try to sift it all, to give it all a shape. On this computer screen, my words spin green from light. How shall I live?

One winter day on the bus bound east through central Oregon, just as we dropped over the rim to the reservation at Warm Springs, I glanced across the aisle at a Wasco boy. He cradled a book that devotion had worn to tatters: The Incredible Magic of the American Indian. Late sunlight struck the page and lit his face, his eyes that hunted as he read. One seat back, in the hands of a ski bum about the same age, I saw Kerouac’s On the Road. He traveled the kinked road twice: once by body, once by mind. The bus geared down. Outside, the steep sage hills tapered into darkness. I put my hand to the heart-pocket of my coat, where I had tucked away a tiny notebook to write down what I heard and saw and remembered—my own chosen stories of magic and departure. Traveling alone, each of us carried a book as medicine bundle, as survival kit of stories, as possible sack of belief and remedy to help us through the world.

Late that night, when I arrived in Burns, I learned my shirts and socks and sleeping bag had all caught the wrong bus in Bend. Surely now they traveled toward Los Angeles. The woman at the station counter, sleepy and ready to close, would put a tracer on my pack, she said, in the morning. Her hand on the counter flicked open, then slowly folded shut to show her regret and her fatigue. Beside her hand, in a rusted coffee can, a spindly tomato vine still grew—her pet and a February miracle. Marooned in Burns, I would grow beyond my custom, too. I turned away, starting off for the all-night Elkhorn Cafe. Outside, wind pumped snow and newspapers along the street. When the station lights had flickered out, the stars shone bold.

When you lose everything, what do you lose, and what do

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