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I Hope She Still Loves Me

August 10, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

Jaci Dawn's avatarJaci Dawn

This one falls under Stupid Things I have Done. It is a classic tale told around the world by different authors and, unfortunately, in this tale, I am the author.

We lived in a little trailer park with a gravel road. Seven trailers, all small children about the same age. I was the stay-at-home mom to several of the working mothers. This did not involve babysitting in so many words and I want to quantify this with my opinion on leaving young children at home alone.

I was a latch-key child in the 1960’s, before “latch-key child” was a buzz phrase. It was not cool for mothers to work outside the home and nearly all of my friends had stay-at-home mothers. My parents agreed that my mother could work outside the home. She was light years ahead of her time and probably one of Gloria Steinem’s most ardent supporters (sans…

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Jackie and Jaci

August 9, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

I succumbed to a weak and unwise purchase when I was out yard-saling this weekend. It had everything to do with November of 1963. I had just turned 7 years old and was in the 2nd Grade. Mrs. Butts was my teacher. She came into the class after a brief absence, ashen-faced and red-eyed. We were being sent home.

I don’t know if I grasped the gravity of the situation at school or not. We left quietly, that I remember. There was none of the usual happy celebration of an unexpected holiday, only a somber feeling in the air as our young minds tried to take in what had just happened.

The strangest part of the day was that Dad was already home when we got there. Dad was never home in the middle of the day, and on a Friday. The television was on and the somber tone of the newscasters as they replayed the day’s events over and over and over again was unmistakeable. Something horrid had happened.

We were young, but we zeroed in on the heroine of the times, the woman who refused to ride in a bullet-proof car but who chose, instead, to walk along behind the hearse with her young children. She would not bow to terrorism. She would not give a terrorist the satisfaction of making her afraid. She was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, wife of the late President, mother of his children.

I am not a Jacqueline. My name is Jackie, after my father, John (aka Jack). I am almost a year older than Caroline Kennedy. I have a life-long fascination with the lady who walked out of the White House in November and into the hearts of the American people. I know she was flawed, blind in some respects, and extremely private. She was betrayed, disparaged, and the subject of many a tabloid – yet she remained a lady, always. She had grace.

So it was when I found this porcelain doll for $5, that I thought I couldn’t live without her. Well, I could, but I would regret it.

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“Any particular reason she is $5?” I asked the people at the yard sale. They looked suspicious. Should she be more? I admitted that I had no clue: I was only interested because of my age when her first husband was assassinated.

I brought her home, confessed to my husband, and then we debated her actual monetary worth. We decided it was around $30. She’s not an antique – there are bar codes on the box she came in.

I did look her up. She was sold by Publisher’s Clearing House and can be found on eBay and other auction sites for $37. One Goodwill site lists her at $10 (but with some damage). I’m confident that $30 is close to her actual worth – now.

I will keep her in the original box (or – if I find such a thing – inside a plastic tube to keep the dust off). I’m not interested in displaying her. She doesn’t actually look like Jackie O., anyway. I’ll put her in a carton with all the newspapers about the assassination – true, vintage newspapers. I kept everything from that day.

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Royalton Collection 1960’s Bride Jacqueline

I have followed her, cut out articles about her, mourned her when she died, and read her biographies. She was an enigma, a lady in the face of the most trying moments, and a lady in the face of the paparazzi.

I don’t really mind having spent $5 on her.

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Stray Cats and the Dad Factor (a Tale of Buddie J and Jassy)

August 9, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

Jasper came into our lives the spring I was 11 (going on 12). My friend, Trudi, lived on the very outskirts of Winnemucca. Their yard backed up to miles of sagebrush, dusty dirt roads, and Mt. Winnemucca. She could watch wild horses from her bedroom window.

The downside to that location was that people dumped unwanted animals along the dirt roads. Such was the case of the starving, blind, newborn kittens that Trudi and her brother rescued. The kittens’ eyes were caked over and they were much too young for anything besides a thin gruel of baby cereal and warm water. They couldn’t even eat from eye-droppers because there were four or five of them and no one had the patience to try to feed them that way. They lapped the gruel from a bowl, caking it in their fur, on their faces, and on their paws. One by one, they opened their eyes – and one by one, they succumbed to death.

It took everything in me to present my case to my mother, and then wait with bated breath while she presented my case to my father. To my surprise, he said I could have one of the kittens. I think he thought it would die.

She came home with me, then – the only tabby kitty in the litter, and ultimately, the only one to live longer than that summer. She was a tortoiseshell tabby, red-brown, grey, and stripped. I named her Jasper.

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She bulled her way into our hearts and even the schnauzer put up with her.

We moved the following autumn, just before my 13th birthday, and Jasper came along with us.

004She loved our new home: close to the sagebrush hills and a peak that rose stiffly above the ore train tracks. She used a culvert to travel from the back yard to the sagebrush to hunt. She even fended off the next door German Shepherd and the Gordon Setter mix. Jasper was in heaven.

She had three lives, not nine. Her first life as a kitten that ended in a dump along a dusty road, her second life with us that ended when she was hit by a car – rolled, really, but it did some internal damage and she wasn’t quite herself for months, and her third life which rolled into the summer before I turned 15.

I had a day job as a babysitter (the cute little girls next door who belonged to the big dogs), but I had to sub-let my job to my sister when I traveled to Reno for Rainbow Grand Assembly. The little girls greeted me when I came home with an announcement about my cat.

My family was waiting for the right time to tell me; the little girls spilled the beans. Jasper, still reeling from the car accident, had wandered up the hill and across the tracks. Only – she didn’t make it across the tracks. The ore train came. My sister and brother buried the two halves of Jassy Cat under a sagebrush, and built a rock cairn to mark her grave. I was crushed.

A few months later, a little black kitten wandered in to our lives. My brother coerced Mom to let him stay in the garage until Terry had built up his nerve to broach the subject with dad. Dad noticed that Mom wasn’t parking in the garage, however, and the subject came up after only three days of hiding. Dad knew he’d been had, but it didn’t make him happy. Speckos was allowed, BUT NO MORE CATS DAMMIT.

Specks had a few white hairs on his chest, but “Speckles” was just not quite the right name for him, hence “Speckos”.

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November 2, 1972. I rode to school with my brother, in his pink Willys Jeep. I met my best friend, Janet, outside the school. It was my fifteenth birthday, cold, and there was this adorable little black kitten mewling around. I wanted to put him inside the Jeep and keep him, but my brother put his foot down. Dad would kill us.

The kitty was gone after school and I returned home, a little sad that I couldn’t have a kitten for my 15th birthday.

MEANWHILE, the kitten was picked up by a group of grade school kids and carried off to the nearby grade school. My mother worked as a receptionist for an engineering firm next to the grade school, and my sister attended the grade school. What happened next was typical of my sister. She wasn’t very big, just a mite of a girl in the 7th grade.

A group of mean little children were tormenting the kitten and devising ways to torture it when my sister waded into the middle of them, arms flailing, voice raised, black eyes burned over. They would NOT torment any kitten on her watch!

She hauled the rescue over to Mom’s work and tearily told Mom what had happened. “Well, what do you plan to do with this kitten?” Mom asked.

“I’m going to give him to Jaci for her birthday.” Mom melted.

Dad hit the roof. I dug my heels in and moved outside. Alligator tears ran down my face as I hugged that dear little cat close. He was all black with amber eyes. Speckos had green eyes. I even named him: Buddie Jacopo.

Dad relented, and until my brother and I went away to college, we had two black cats.

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Buddie is on the left, a leaner cat with a long tail. Speckos was bulkier, with a shorter tail. They got along as if they were littler mates, although Speckos was older.

I don’t remember what happened to Speckos. Terry probably does. I think he just died of old age. I do know the rest of Buddie’s tale.

I went away to college and moved out on my own. Buddie took it upon himself to replace Jacob, and adopted Dad. Dad even taught him how to sit up and beg for treats. Buddie became the last cat Dad ever loved (although he tolerated Mom’s alley cat stray that he nick-named PITA). Buddie lived a full and normal cat life, dying of old age.

Footnote: Mom’s alleycat stray was never very tame and was originally named “Bob Cat” because of the bobbed tail. When Bob Cat had kittens, she became Roberta Cat. Dad just called her PITA (Pain In The Ass). Roberta disappeared shortly after Mom died in 1995.

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Chipper, the not-so-Rabid Ground Squirrel

August 3, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

Writing about the pets we had is not just about the animals. It’s about who I am and why I am this way. I was always hyper-sensitive (no one knew there was an actual personality or psychological portrait of a Highly Sensitive Person, and I didn’t even discover there was such a thing until I was in my 40’s). My brother, sister, and mother were all tender toward animals. Dad feigned indifference, always swearing off another pet when the last one died, or denying my sister and I our life-long dream of owning a horse.

The year was 1963. We’d moved from the rental on Lay Street into the haunted house on Minor Street, but the Game Warden was still Boyce Coffey. The Coffey kids were about the same age as the Wilcox kids: Matt, the oldest; Mark, my brother’s age; Crystal, a year older than me. (On a side note, my niece, Chrystal, was named after Crystal). We got into trouble that only Game Warden and Forest Service kids could get into, like the year my brother “rescued” a dozen or so barn swallows from under one of the bridges along the Humboldt River. (Another side note: I carry a scar on my face from that rescue, but the scar wasn’t my brother’s fault, or even the swallows’ fault. And we raised the swallows to adulthood, turning them loose with great big tosses into the air so they could catch the wind and fly away.)

Mr. Coffey, the Game Warden, killed some ground squirrels. This wasn’t – and is not – a crime. Ground squirrels can cause a lot of property damage, and they aren’t anywhere close to endangered (but don’t tell 8 year old me that).

I once shot a ground squirrel. My husband took me out rifle shooting and he convinced me it was OK to shoot at ground squirrels. I got a black eye from the recoil of the .7mm as I leaned across the hood of the car to shoot. The damn squirrel writhed on the ground and I began to cry. “I need to shoot it again and kill it. Would you please kill it?” My husband assured me that I’d hit the squirrel dead-on and that it was “just reflexes”. I refused to ever go squirrel hunting with him again even though I understood the terminology and that the squirrel was actually dead.

Mr. Coffey ended up with a nest of baby ground squirrels that his sympathetic children couldn’t quite bring themselves to kill. Mark sold one to me for a fifty-cent piece. (It must be noted that when our respective parents got wind of the financial transaction, the fifty cents was returned. However, the emotional damage done was permanent: I was now the proud owner of an orphaned baby ground squirrel.)

I named him “Chipper”. Dad built him a cage out of an old tin something and wire mesh (the same tin something that later housed the swallows and sliced my mouth open wide enough to receive stitches, hence the scar on my face). I was charged with keeping Chipper alive and healthy.

I was not a good wild animal mom. I’d go in spurts. I’d gather all the wild alfalfa from the ditch and deposit the fresh stuff in Chipper’s cage and he’d grow and thrive for a few days. Then I would forget about him and he’d near death.

Mom brought out the eye dropper and canned milk and she would nurse him back to life.

The cycle began again.

The summer waxed and waned and Chipper grew. He wasn’t exactly tame, but Mom could handle him when he was ill and I pretty much handled him when he was healthy.

My sister. Denny was…a liar. She was jealous of my pet squirrel, but she was also conniving. She went into the shop where Chip was kept, but not for the purpose of playing with him or feeding him. Instead, she got to playing with Dad’s tools. And she got hurt. Whatever tool she was playing with caused a cut on her hand that looked like two teeth grazed her skin. She bled. She cried. She claimed Chipper bit her.

Mom knew better, but the damage was done.

The damage? Denny turned Chipper loose in the shop and he disappeared. He was gone. Escaped. Winter was approaching and we soon lost all hope. The tin cage was set aside and I eventually forgot about him (as much as I could forget about him).

Years later, my mother told me the story.

Dad built a guest room on one end of the shop. Grandpa and Grandma Melrose stayed there one spring when they came to visit. One morning, a rabid ground squirrel appeared in the shop, chattering hungrily at them. Grandpa Melrose freaked out and killed the squirrel with the heel of his shoe wielded in his hand. Who wants to get rabies, anyway?

Then he told my parents about it, worried about how to dispose of the body. They looked at each other and then at him and said, “Don’t tell Jackie. That was her pet, Chipper. He wasn’t rabid – he just woke up from hibernation.”

Poor Grandpa Melrose went to his grave with that on his conscience!!!

I’m glad they waited a few years to tell me. I could see the macabre humor in it by the time they told me. I still cried.

I forgave my sister long ago.

I look at ground squirrels differently now, pretty much the same as I view moles and Gary, the Gopher, who has invaded our back yard. It was probably a bad thing for my husband to name the gopher. Eventually, it comes to a stand off between my prized peonies and the creature. My peonies will win, but I will mourn the passing of the creature we should never have given a Christian name to.

I loved Chipper.

 

 

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Lost Cat? I Don’t Think So.

August 3, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

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We owned three dogs and four cats during my childhood years. One dog died early in my childhood (Terry says it died in the backyard in Elko – that was Squeaky the Chihuahua mix). Butch was a dog who came to us and just sort of moved in. He died in February of the year I turned 10 (1966) and he gets his own post. Then we had the rescue Schnauzer, Mr. Tack, shown here with his best friend, my mother. Tacky deserves his own post, too, if only because he managed to humiliate me in 4-H.

But tonight, it’s about the cats. MY cats, specifically.

We had four, beginning with the black-and-white Tuxedo cat that followed my sister home one school day in the mid 1960s. John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmitz Radar-ears Wilcox. He had nine names, but I only remember the first five and we called him Jacob or Jake.

I know we have photos of Jake sleeping in the bathroom sink, but I don’t personally have them. He came to us as a half-grown kitten that followed Denny the two blocks from school, across one busy street. Dad – who claimed to hate cats – did not believe Denny. In fact, he went into one of his really angry modes and we decided it was best to obey without question.

**Dad had these “black moods” and when he went into one, he wasn’t so much as physically abusive as he was intimidating. We kids were terrified of him, but I think the worst that ever happened was getting grounded for two weeks at a time to “hard labor”, which meant weeding the yard for two straight weeks in the summer while our friends played nearby. Still, we walked on eggs during his tempers and we made a wide berth around him. He wasn’t bi-polar as much as he just didn’t understand children. Each of us made our peace with him as he aged.**

He made us carry the kitten back to the school and run home.

The cat ran home with us.

We didn’t run fast enough (Dad declared), so the next trip was with our bicycles. We had specific instructions on where to set the kitten down and how fast to ride home.

The cat followed us.

Dad hit the roof and we were sent off once again, with instructions to ride “really fast” home. Dad even stood in the drive and watched. We were terrified of him and we obeyed. We rode, really, really fast and we prayed silently that the kitty wouldn’t get run over crossing Bridge Street.

The cat followed us home. Dad threw up his hands and said we could keep him until someone claimed him.

Mom then ran an ad for two weeks in the local newspaper but no one claimed him. It would seem that he had chosen us – or chosen Dad, in particular, because it was Dad’s lap that Jake migrated to. Jake slept in the bathroom sink, opened Christmas presents, and stomped across the tin roof so loudly that you could hear him in the house. He tolerated dogs and kids. Jacob loved the old grouch, and often curled up in Dad’s lap at night, purring loudly.

The next summer, when Jake was an adult cat, the lady in the station wagon drove up and cornered Denny.. She had a carload of little kids and she confronted my little sister on the sidewalk, accusing her of “stealing” their pet cat. Denny burst into tears: Jake was her cat, and she’d stolen nothing. Jake followed her home; no one claimed him!The woman was pure evil. I tried to talk to her (I was probably 11), but the woman was a witch and her kids were just as mean. So I ran and got mom. The Big Gun.

Mom looked at her crying daughter who was hugging Jake with all her heart. She looked into my big eyes. She leaned into the station wagon and asked what the problem was. She listened. She nodded. She assessed the faces of the little kids in the idling station wagon. She told the woman that we ran an ad for two weeks the prior year – why wasn’t the ad answered. Lady didn’t get the local newspaper, but that was *her* cat.

Mom had a stance she would take. It was pure Scots and it was scarier than any “black mood” Dad ever had because it didn’t come on very often. You really had to be in the wrong to get the Scots up in Mom. “O.K.,” she said, eyes narrowing. “If this if your cat, then he will stay with you. Fair?”

Lady in the idling car said, “Fair.” I think she even smiled, because everyone knew that Lassie would choose the rightful owner, and she was self-righteously right about who the cat belonged to.

Mom knew exactly what would happen before she flung poor Jacob into the open window of a running car. The other mother never saw it coming.

Mom reached over, snatched Jacob out of Denny’s hands and tossed him into the lap of the kid in the front seat of the running car. “Here he is, then. If he stays — Oh, my! He didn’t stay. Must be our cat then!”

Poor Jake! He hated cars. He went into that open window and came back out with all claws and a wild look in his eyes. I don’t know how badly the kid in the front seat got scratched, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pretty. The lady in the station wagon had no choice but to put it in gear and drive away as Mom stood there with her hands on her hips. Denny chased after Jake to calm him down. I took notes.

Jacob contracted distemper one summer and wandered off into the desert to die alone. There were quite a few red eyes in our house after that and my father declared, “NO MORE CATS.”

If Only.

cat

(The photo is of Nimrod – Chrystal’s kitty – not Jacob. I don’t have a vintage photo of Jacob.)

Jacob at Christmas

P.S. – I forgot I had this photo. My brother took it and scanned it to me. You can see why he was named “Radar Ears”. Jacob, his first Christmas with us. 🙂

 

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Best Friends

July 30, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

My children – those for whom I am writing these memories – do not know much about Lisa. I think I’ve hidden her in my heart, much like keeping a Peculiar Child in one of Miss Peregrin’s “Loops” – timeless, protected, and – peculiar. I have not written much about Lisa on my blog because she is still living, and telling tales about the living is much more complicated than telling tales about the dead. The living can come back and be angry at you.

Not that I would ever say anything bad about Lisa, but some of the secrets we shared are… well, not so much “secrets”, but I don’t know how much she would like shared about her life. It’s sort of a judgment call. Do I write about inventing air guitar, writing plays for the librarian, or forcing our mothers – and her Nana – to sit through some inane play we put on in the apple tree? Our little world of “make-believe”? The dreaded “Blue Cape” (which will get a blog post all it’s own)?

Lisa is two years younger than I am. I was in 3rd grade and she was in 1st grade when we first played together. Her sister was a classmate of mine and my sister was a classmate of hers. In the 1960’s, there were social “rules” about playing with kids younger than you: it made you “immature”. It was a stupid social more. Lisa and I just had a bazillion things in common, more than any other person I have known in my entire life – including my beloved husband.

We drifted apart after I became a Christan, and more so after I got married. She traveled the world, read deeper books, and gained different friendships. I did a little traveling, was a free spirit, but ultimately, I married my soul mate and my focus turned to raising my children. I went without close girlfriends for a very long time.

I don’t know how to sort out and categorize and classify this friendship. Lisa is – and was. Together, we were strange kids. Apart, we were – what? Just as strange, but without each other. Ours was never a lesbian relationship, but I can see how it may have appeared to some – and how, given another set of circumstances (say, neither one of us liked men), we may have gone that path. We were both wired heterosexuals and that door never presented itself (although we were sometimes called other names).

Goddammit. We were GIRLFRIENDS. Best friends. Bosom buddies. We told each other our deepest secrets. We were the Divine Secrets best friends.

We played pretend, dress-up, air guitar, and hide-from-Jaci’s-little-sister. We wrote the weirdest plays. Our Breyer™ horses were in love with each other (actually, Blackie was/is a Hartford™ plastic horse; Kamie was a Breyer™. They were both Tennessee Walkers). We had a collection of little plastic animals we actually named (Jasper the cat was a green cat in the pile of toys; later I named my first cat after it). Lisa owned a grulla Shetland pony named Lollipop that we rode everywhere.

Lisa and I were sometimes bullies. There was a girl – MAL – who lived next to the Little Store and who was an idiot when it came to animals. When her German Shepherds were growling and wrestling, she thought they were fighting. Lisa and I berated her from the alley. MAL once showed us a very dead horny toad she’d caught and placed inside of a sealed coffee can. “YOU IDIOT!” we screamed at her, furious that she’d failed to think of air holes for the poor creature.

We took a 4-H class together for a few years: photography. We were the only members of the club and the local photography shop owner was our leader.

I lived at Lisa’s house, relishing in the Catholic rituals and the 6-o’clock on the nose dinner times. Lisa loved coming over to my house and playing until dark before my parents remembered anyone needed to eat.

Lisa was my Maid of Honor when I got married to Donald. I missed her wedding due to children, lack of cash, and a bazillion other stupid obligations.

It wasn’t just Lisa – but her entire family. I was part of them. Her dad was as much a father figure to me as my own. Her mother once looked at me and said, “Please call me Marie. You’re old enough that I don’t have to be Mrs. T.” Nana made me a quilt to take to college. I watched the Olympics – in color – at her house. (We had a black and white TV and I don’t remember my folks tuning in to the Olympics.)

Lisa had a running joke with my dad. There was a blackboard in the kitchen where Mom and Dad left us notes. To write on it was verbotten. One day, Lisa wrote a note – unbeknownst to me, or I might have stopped her: Krazy Kat was Here. My dad loved it and wrote her a note back. They wrote notes to each other during the years we lived in that house, much to the amusement of all of us.

Last story for the night – we were at the public swimming pool. Closing time. Everyone had been hustled out of the pool and we were in our separate changing rooms, trying to squeeze out of wet suits and into dry clothes. One of the lifeguards yelled down the hall, “Hurry up and change!!”

A tiny voice – Lisa’s – piped up. “Into what?”

001Lisa in 1966? with my mother’s Schnauzer, Mr. Tack.

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Indians

July 25, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

I write this some fifty years after the fact. I still do not understand all of the dynamics. I hope I never do. My eyes were innocent and I want them to always be.

One of my very early friends was a dark-skinned girl named Peggy Garfield. We walked to and from school together and played together in the Kindergarten playground. We always met somewhere on the trail to school that passed through the sagebrush. She usually took the western trail, the one we kids labeled “The Horny Toad Trail”, and I took the one just east of that. Somehow, we always hooked up together.

The Horny Toad trail was so-named because a person could always catch a horned lizard along the way. I didn’t know a single kid who had never caught a lizard: we all were adept at capturing the little flat creatures that resembled a triceratops in the most minute form possible. The Horny Toad Trail may have had it’s ending along the same trail I took to school, but it had it’s beginning in “The Indian Village”.

The Indian Village was a small parcel of dusty land that housed the Toms (a group of wild Shoshone boys that terrorized the rest of us school kids), the Garfields, and a number of other Paiute or Shoshone tribal members who chose – for work or other reasons – not to live on the McDermitt Reservation. I understood little of this. Peggy was my friend, everyone was afraid of the Toms, and noone talked about that little dusty section of town at the end of Bell Street and the beginning of the Horny Toad Trail.

Peggy once bragged to me that horny toads “would spit blood from their eyes”. I didn’t believe her and cited every evidence I could from my small, sheltered life. She was brazen and sure of herself, and she mocked my innocence. “You have to make them mad,” she told me.

Years later, as an adult, I witnessed a horned lizard “spitting blood” through its eyes. Damn! They really can do that!

Once, Peggy and I were both late for school. We hid behind a dust bank along the dry creek bed, debating what we should do. I was of the mind that we should curl up in a ball and just die. My parents would be mad and the principal would be mad – and Miss Smith or Mrs. Butts (First Grade teacher) would be mad. I couldn’t abide anyone being angry with me. Peggy, however, had a more pragmatic view of life. The adults would be angry, but we would survive. Therefore, we went on to school. And survived.

I asked her once or twice if I couldn’t just walk all the way home with her along the Horny Toad Trail. Both times, she looked at me like I was an alien. “You don’t know nothing,” she said. “You can’t come into the village. You’re white. I’m an Indian. That’s just how it is.”

I accepted that from her, but it didn’t stop me from wondering why. My 6th birthday was approaching and I asked my mother if I could invite Peggy to my birthday party.

My mother deliberately stopped whatever she was doing and looked hard at me. She seemed to understand what I wanted. Peggy was my friend, maybe my best first grade friend. But it was not possible. Even though Peggy only lived a block away on Bell Street, she lived a world away. She lived on the Reservation. I was white. Even if we were to bend the rules and invite her, her people would not reciprocate. Whites and Indians did not mix.

I cried. I did not understand.

Once, when I was walking home alone, along the streets instead of on the trails, I had the sense I was being followed. The Tom boys were behind me. I didn’t know their names. They were older than me, wore their hair in long braids, and they beat up white kids for no reason. I was alone. I was nearing the Dog Lady’s house – she had high red board fences that kept her wild dogs on the inside, but they always went crazy with barking when kids walked by. I never teased them – how cruel! – but she accused every kid on earth of teasing them. Tom kids approaching from behind and Dog Lady on the left.

Then they were beside me, around me, and laughing. One of them lightly slapped my back. They laughed. “Coup!”

Me? The slap was hardly a slap, more of a touch. Years later, I would understand they were merely counting coup. Young Shoshone braves trying to make sense of their world in an all-white world, counting coup on frightened white children. That light tap on my back erased every fear I had of the Tom boys. They weren’t so tough. They didn’t mean any harm.

Peggy and the Toms faded away after about 2nd or 3rd grade. I never saw any of them again, although my heart has searched for Peggy since. Maybe their families returned to McDermitt. I don’t know.

~~~

I was in 7th grade when Wanda Brown came to school. She was 16. She’d lived in McDermitt her entire life, and had dropped out of school after 3rd grade. She was as wide as she was tall. Shoshone or Paiute, she hated everyone who was white. Rumors flew. She kept a knife on her person.

She did, at that. She showed it to me. Strapped to her inner thigh. It was long and sharp, probably 4″ long. She kept it for “protection”. She knew how to use it, she assured me. I was 12. I was innocent. She liked me, for whatever reason. Maybe it was because I wasn’t afraid of her. I wasn’t afraid of her skin.

I let her know I wasn’t afraid of the knife. She wouldn’t use it on me.

She granted me that. I was too simple. Too innocent. She didn’t even try to taunt me, but she let me know that my innocence had a price – not now, but somewhere down the road.

~~~~

Virie. I’m not even sure I spelled her name right. She lived on the Duckwater Reservation and she was a poet. She received a scholarship from an Ivy League college. She was as wide as she was tall and she was beautiful. She was older than me and graduated in 1972? 1973?  I don’t remember. She liked me and I liked her. She had none of the hardness of Wanda or Peggy, but all of their wisdom. She was a Medicine Woman, if I were to guess.

~~~~

The end of this is that I wish I could have been real friends with Peggy and Wanda. 1960-1970 was not the right time for an innocent white kid like me to make friends with kids from the Res.  It still hurts my heart.

I wanted Peggy to come to my birthday party. I really did.

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Do What You Say You Will…

July 20, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

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I just spent two days playing “Boothy” at the Canterbury Ren Faire for my friend, Mary. I did this last year for the first time & blogged about it here.

All I brought home was one low quality photo of a Corgi in chain mail. (It’s a Lady, not a Sir, by the way – not sure why they put chain mail on her instead of a tiara!)(I took the photo for a friend who loves Corgis.)

Mary always comments about how I stay close to the booth and put my whole heart into being there for her, and – honestly – I don’t know any other way to be. I did take a couple of turns through the faire to look at other booths or to purchase a luke-warm soda, but I declined the offer to allow me to go watch the joust. I was there to work.

A hundred years ago, when I was in the 7th Grade, I volunteered for some menial job. All I remember about the job was that it was a class project, the “popular” girls were in charge of it, and I felt really blessed to have been “accepted” by them to do the menial little task. It had to do with writing or typing out a bunch of names for a drawing (I think) and bringing them back to school. I cut each name out so it would be ready for the drawing and arrived at school, excited to be included.

They were crowded by the main entrance. If you weren’t one of them, you know exactly who I mean: THE girls. The perfect ones, the chosen ones, the groupies, the future cheerleaders (with an apology to some really down-to-earth cheerleaders I have known). The girls who ran the school. The ones who could make you feel small. The ones who worked really hard at stepping on little people.

I overheard them as I neared the door.

“Do you think she even remembered?” “Do you think she did it?”

The ring leader, who I will call JC, sneered and showed her teeth in a fake smile, with an aside, “I bet she didn’t.”

By 7th Grade, I was So.Over.Them. I narrowed my eyes, pulled out the envelope, and dropped it into JC’s hand. “I cut them up, too. Just so you know that I not only did the job, but I thought ahead.” And I pushed them out of the way as I walked into the school. I could hear their collective jaws drop.

They didn’t think I had overheard them (although JC’s voice was sotto on purpose – hoping I would hear). They weren’t ready for the 4’8″ shy girl to come on the offensive. They weren’t ready to realize they weren’t the queens of the ball – or that they may not always be on the top tier of society.

That day settled something inside me: if I say I will do something, I will do it. Over and above. No one will ever – not ever! – again make me feel small.

I’m not saying I haven’t failed people in the years since (many, too many to count), but on that day, I had my backbone installed. I was pissed off, and royally. I determined that if a hated person asked me to do something & I went beyond the call of duty, then a beloved person would get even more of my friendship, service, loyalty.

Seventh Grade was my turning point. That year I challenged everything about popularity in junior high and anyone in a popular role in junior high. I decided it was time for this introvert HSP to fight back. JC, another girl friend, and the big girl – Big J, the one who everyone feared because she was not only popular but she was twice anyone’s size and she could WHOMP! you if she just wanted to.

I was with my close friend, Trudi. To this day, I cannot tell you what Big J said to me in the hall of the school, right next to the Home Ec classroom door. It was nasty, derogatory, mean, spiteful, and hurtful. It was meant to add to a long list of hazing that would keep me in my position as a preferred person to pick on. It was meant to elevate her in the eyes of her friends and enforce their status as the Class Elite. It came on the heels of the job I did but they didn’t expect me to do. It came on the heels of JC’s derogatory sneer in the entrance as I gracefully dropped the job finished into her hands.

What I do know is what I felt. And what came out of my little mouth. I turned on my heel and looked the three of them in the eye. I tipped my little chin up and I said, with as much venom as I could muster (pulling from my mother’s Scots’ roots), “Just because YOU are a big BITCH…” and I trailed it off there, turning on my heel and stomping away.

The hall went silent.

As we turned into the exit door for our lunch, Trudi punched me in the shoulder. “Did YOU just SAY that??” She was incredulous. My big, bossy, friend’s jaw had dropped. (It was in the mid 1960’s)

I smiled. “Oh yeah.”

We collapsed into giggles and hugs. Those girls never again approached me as a victim they hoped to offer up to the god of popularity.

Isn’t it amazing what bitterness can be turned into? (I no longer hate JC or the others. I think I gave tit for tat, and that’s that. We were all victims of Junior High cliques. I just used my victimhood to grow.)

(unedited. I’m too tired to edit.)

And I was wonderfully happy to stay until everything was accounted for. Because that’s what you do when you volunteer for anyone – and for a friend? Even more so.

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Paradise Valley Ranger Station

July 15, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

Paradise Valley Ranger Station.

We moved shortly after I started Kindergarten. It seemed like our new home was miles and miles and miles away – probably across country! It was, in reality, just another county over and up US Highway 95 from Winnemucca, then 20 miles off to the east. It is close to where we tossed our father to the wind in 2012, on the 4th of July. Mom was already at rest in the Santa Rosas.

The new house was the same as the previous three: white clapboard with green trim. The log cabin structure right next door was the Ranger Station, but it didn’t have bears living under the foundation. Maybe I was older, or maybe the addition of a little sister cum best friend had eased the terror.

There was enough other scary stuff around, like the white steepled church next door that boasted “Katty Kissin'” lessons. The house we lived in was haunted. There was a huge swimming pool in the middle of the yard that we couldn’t see in to or go swimming in.*

*It was a water reservoir for the pumper trucks and only used in case of a fire. Later, it would be empty and would be the final corral for Smokey, Dad’s favorite bronc. But that’s another story.

Denny and I clung to each other in the move. Terry moved on, making friends with the local ranch kids as easily as ever. I honestly have no remembrance of his transition (he will have to post a comment). I know he got his own bedroom upstairs and Denny and I got the other bedroom. I believe? there was a bathroom between us. There was a stair case to the living room with a long bannister and I sometimes hid on it, just out of sight of my parents, listening to the movie they were watching and afraid to go back to bed. I’d wet the bed or had a nightmare, or the ghost had awakened me. Sometimes, Denny sat on the stairs with me.

Caught, we were offered no sympathy. Only punishment from exasperated parents.

Once, I remember catching mom sitting up in the kitchen nook in the middle of the night. She was alone and teary. A 2-way radio was turned on beside her. I crawled into the booth with her and cuddled, asking why was she upset. I think Terry came down, too. Dad was off fighting fire. Mom was scared and worried for him. I was too little to understand the capriciousness of a wildfire. Later, when I read Young Men and Fire by Norman MacLean, I understood.

Hallowe’en came. There was a huge to-do in town, and one of the ranch mothers took all of us trick-or-treating in her car. It was so dark out and the roads were so long and straight! You could see ranch house lights twinkling in the distance and when we arrived, dogs would bark as children piled out of the car with paper bags in hand and little masks on their faces. I think mine was a teddy bear face. Then we’d get back in the stuffy car and make another long drive, until we’d exhausted all the ranch houses.

It was not fun. It was scary. It was long, lonely, and I think I was getting motion sick. I don’t remember getting ill, but I’m pretty sure the nausea began to play into my late night soiree.

The big party in town had a cake walk, booths to play in, and all the pumpkin pie you could eat (or so it seemed to almost-five year old me). I wanted a piece of that pie so badly! Dad told me I could not have it: last year, I didn’t like pumpkin pie and had refused to eat it.

Of course, I couldn’t remember the previous year and I was certain he was wrong, so I whinged. Pleeeeease. Pretty pleeeeeeease. I’ll eat it all this year.

I ate it all to spite him. (To this day, I love pumpkin pie.)

I turned five in the haunted house. I don’t remember my birthday (a cake and candles).

Best memory:

We were ballerinas. We had a little stool we could stand on and twirl on. The ceiling was low, with one of those old-fashioned light fixtures in the middle. Denny went first, but she couldn’t reach the ceiling and she was clumsy, at best. Me – I was a regular ballerina-diva-talented dancer. I pressed my finger against the little brass knob on the glass fixture and twirled away on the stool. Around and around and around. We sang. LALALALALA.

The brass knob came off and clattered to the floor, followed by the heavy, ornate, light cover. There was a crash and the sound of shattering glass. I looked down from my perch to see my sister, her legs sprouting bloody streaks. She shrieked in pain and fear. Dark blood spurted and dribbled. I stood, transfixed by the awful sight.

Mom burst into the room with Terry. DO NOT MOVE! She shouted at me as she grabbed my sister and rushed her down the stairs, wrapped in a towel. My dad was working in the log cabin and moments later, I heard him coming up the stairs. He took one long look at the room, at me in my make-shift tutu, the blood on the floor. Then he stepped through the glass and lifted me off of my pedestal, at the same time landing a hefty slap to my rear end.

I didn’t understand! I was being spanked?! I’d only been dancing! I didn’t make the fixture fall! I didn’t men to hurt my sister! I didn’t understand! My cries mixed the air with my sister’s pain-filled cries drifted up the stairs.

Denny and I laughed about it, years later: how I tried to kill her with my ballet routine. She carried scars in her legs from the shards of glass. Mom and Dad never did think it was very funny.

Oddly – they later paid for ballet lessons for the pair of us. Maybe they wanted me to learn how to pirouette without unscrewing a light fixture. Ya think?

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Pole Creek RS

July 13, 2015 by Jaci Dawn

We spent part of the summer at Mahoney Ranger Station and part at Pole Creek RS.  I have almost as many memories of Pole Creek as I do Mahoney and Jarbidge, but they are more scattered. The palomino was at Pole Creek, as was my father’s favorite horse, the outlaw named Smokey. Smokey stood an easy 17 hands, a blue roan with a wicked temper. Legend had it that you couldn’t hobble him – my dad would double hobble him and he’d still be a long way off from camp come morning. He was everything Mustang and everything that Will James wrote about in his own memoir of a similar horse, Smoky the Cowhorse.

It was the palomino I was drawn to. The flies got to it and he had a huge sore where the throat latch on his bridle had rubbed him raw. He was a miserable horse and it was left to my mother to doctor him when the fire crews and my father were away from the Ranger Station

My mother hated horses. She was afraid of them and she truly disliked the animal. The only way she survived the doctoring of the palomino was that she could do it over the fence and he was a willing patient. She lured him close with treats and then applied salve to the sore that protected it from the flies and helped the horse heal. She was completely baffled by my love of the animal and my insistence on being under her feet or hanging on the fence when the horse came over for his treatments. She never did understand my love for horses.

She rode a friend’s horse. It was a barn-sour old nag and as soon as they were turned back to the barn, it bolted and took the bit in its teeth. It felt like she was going a hundred miles an hour – straight for the clothesline where she would surely be decapitated. She managed to survive – maybe she bailed or maybe she ducked – I’ve lost that part of the story now. She never liked another horse. Ever. Nasty, conniving, half-ton animals with a hate for human beings.

~~~~~~

My brother ran into a moose at Pole Creek. He was five years old and going to the dump? He’ll have to correct me on that. I just remember he rocketed into the house with more ADHD energy than normal, babbling about the moose. It stood on the path, and he wasn’t going to argue with it.

~~~~~~

Granny and Gramps came to visit at the same time the Eastern Idaho State Fair was taking place in Buel. ROAD TRIP! Cotton candy! Carnival Rides! Yowza!!

002(Granny Wilcox, Terry, Me. Don’t know the dog’s name, but it belonged to Granny.)

Oh-my-gosh! I remember only one thing from the Eastern Idaho State Fair and that was the Kiddy Ferris Wheel. No kidding – they had a pint-sized Ferris Wheel for tots. It probably went 20 feet in the air and each basket held one child. I begged. I pleaded. I groveled.

Dad relented.

It was The.Best.Ride.Ever. I felt like I was flying! I didn’t get sick! I wasn’t scared! I could see the whole fair! (Well, it seemed like it).

I’m pretty sure there was a melt-down on the way home or two, but since I don’t remember that…

001I had a cool new pirate sword that my big brother drooled over. Yeah, baby.

(I like that photo because Gramps and Dad are in the background, under the hood of the car. I could have been Vinnie’s girlfriend from My Cousin Vinny, if only I had paid attention…)

 

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