he said it only meant I shouldnât eat the meat unless for some reason I wanted bear dreams.
Once when I was fifteen a bunch of us were driving around one night near Skandia drinking beer and I scooped up a bear cub near the road. I was hanging out of the car with a friend holding me by the belt. It was June and the cub was real little. It cried like a baby and I rocked it and it quit crying and stared at me under the dome light of the car. I felt real eerie and then ashamed of myself. The mother was roaring around in the bushes and when I put the cub back on the roadâs shoulder it scooted back to its mom. K says that bears are distantly related to pigs. I can believe this because before my mother was taken away and we lived beyond the edge of town we raised some pigs. Holding a piglet is like holding a bear cub. You scratch their tummies and they calm down and look at you as if you might somehow belong together. When our daughter Clare was a baby and had colic and I rocked her there was this same feeling. There are bears all over the Upper Peninsula and people are never sure about their feelings for them. However, the traditional Chippewa are real specific about bears. I wonât go into this because itâs religious. I saw this evangelist on television and it embarrassed me that this man could talk about God as if he was a buddy next door. Before my mother was taken away to the Newberry State Hospital she told me it was best to talk to God in whispers or in your silent interior speech. She had trouble with sounds. She thought sounds were somehow alive. For instance, she could handle a screen door slamming or the hum of the hand-cranked creamseparator. We had a cow when I was young. But a truck passing out on Route 28 or an airplane could make her eyes fearful. We had a black-and-white TV but the sound could never be on. She was uneducated but she liked classical music just like Cynthia. I admit I like Mozart myself because if I have a problem the music will take me away from it. My mother amazed my friends because she could do an exact imitation of a cow mooing or a dog barking. You couldnât tell the difference. When she got worse she would moo or bark in the middle of the night or do frog croaks. Dad said her disease short-circuited her and she lost power over her behavior. Her own mother died when my mom was a little girl down near Bark River. My mom took to wandering out in the swamp thinking she might find her own mother. On their honeymoon my parents drove all the way to Detroit to see the Tigers play baseball. They had a roast beef dinner at a restaurant with a black couple they met at the ball game. They kept in touch but the man was killed by a random bullet during the Detroit race riot in the sixties. You canât really understand dying by a random bullet.
My dad always regretted that he didnât get to know his grandpa Clarence very well all because of his own stepfatherâs prejudices against Indian people especially when itâs known that the Finnish people are a type of Indian themselves. Cynthia quotes this poet as saying we were all Indians once by which the poet means well back in history. In grade school we were taught that America was a âmelting pot,â which was hard to understand when you were a kid because out in a shed we had a huge pot that was used for scalding pigs so that you could scrape off the hair.
My dad had a hard time with his emotions after Mother was gone off to Newberry. He took all of her clothes and stuff and gave it to her cousins over near Munising. He started living by the clock working for the Burketts and repairing boats in the evening and sometimes running a trapline in winter. He was saving for me to go to college, which never happened because we got married early though Cynthia later got her bachelorâs and masterâs because she wanted to teach. I just liked to work hard but now I wish I had learned more about how the world works.
Once when I was fifteen a bunch of us were driving around one night near Skandia drinking beer and I scooped up a bear cub near the road. I was hanging out of the car with a friend holding me by the belt. It was June and the cub was real little. It cried like a baby and I rocked it and it quit crying and stared at me under the dome light of the car. I felt real eerie and then ashamed of myself. The mother was roaring around in the bushes and when I put the cub back on the roadâs shoulder it scooted back to its mom. K says that bears are distantly related to pigs. I can believe this because before my mother was taken away and we lived beyond the edge of town we raised some pigs. Holding a piglet is like holding a bear cub. You scratch their tummies and they calm down and look at you as if you might somehow belong together. When our daughter Clare was a baby and had colic and I rocked her there was this same feeling. There are bears all over the Upper Peninsula and people are never sure about their feelings for them. However, the traditional Chippewa are real specific about bears. I wonât go into this because itâs religious. I saw this evangelist on television and it embarrassed me that this man could talk about God as if he was a buddy next door. Before my mother was taken away to the Newberry State Hospital she told me it was best to talk to God in whispers or in your silent interior speech. She had trouble with sounds. She thought sounds were somehow alive. For instance, she could handle a screen door slamming or the hum of the hand-cranked creamseparator. We had a cow when I was young. But a truck passing out on Route 28 or an airplane could make her eyes fearful. We had a black-and-white TV but the sound could never be on. She was uneducated but she liked classical music just like Cynthia. I admit I like Mozart myself because if I have a problem the music will take me away from it. My mother amazed my friends because she could do an exact imitation of a cow mooing or a dog barking. You couldnât tell the difference. When she got worse she would moo or bark in the middle of the night or do frog croaks. Dad said her disease short-circuited her and she lost power over her behavior. Her own mother died when my mom was a little girl down near Bark River. My mom took to wandering out in the swamp thinking she might find her own mother. On their honeymoon my parents drove all the way to Detroit to see the Tigers play baseball. They had a roast beef dinner at a restaurant with a black couple they met at the ball game. They kept in touch but the man was killed by a random bullet during the Detroit race riot in the sixties. You canât really understand dying by a random bullet.
My dad always regretted that he didnât get to know his grandpa Clarence very well all because of his own stepfatherâs prejudices against Indian people especially when itâs known that the Finnish people are a type of Indian themselves. Cynthia quotes this poet as saying we were all Indians once by which the poet means well back in history. In grade school we were taught that America was a âmelting pot,â which was hard to understand when you were a kid because out in a shed we had a huge pot that was used for scalding pigs so that you could scrape off the hair.
My dad had a hard time with his emotions after Mother was gone off to Newberry. He took all of her clothes and stuff and gave it to her cousins over near Munising. He started living by the clock working for the Burketts and repairing boats in the evening and sometimes running a trapline in winter. He was saving for me to go to college, which never happened because we got married early though Cynthia later got her bachelorâs and masterâs because she wanted to teach. I just liked to work hard but now I wish I had learned more about how the world works.
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