Summertime, summertime, road trip time, everything is fine!

Where did my picture go?  First time trying to write this from Ipad (in recent history.  Tried several years ago but didn’t work).  We leave in two days for our road trip and I’m hoping to blog as we go.  Heading east and south into head and possible hurricanes, because that’s where our children our!  Two of them are there, anyway, Garrett in North Carolina and Sulae in South Carolina.  Granddaughter Alyssa is in Florida, as are our friends the Sicard’s.  So all of that, then a jog through Delaware to Rhode Island, where old friends Carole and Steve and new friends Cynthia and Malcolm live.  That will complete my roster of 50 states visited!  And both sets of friends were met on our travels, Carole in 1970 and Cynthia and Malcolm on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in 2018.

STAY TUNED!

Summer Tales Coming Up

 Trying out accessing blog from IPad.  Hoping to blog as we jog (figuratively) along our road trip.

Meanwhile, here is a butterfly artist currently working in Korea.

SUMMER GIRL

SUMMER GIRL

   Crazy Horse kept watch for three days while the body of his daughter swayed in the tree boughs like a cradle.  He mourned her, then fought the whites with the ferocity and bitterness of a consecrated enemy.

    But I married the enemy.  My Ariel – silly name –isn’t dead.  She’s alive and half-breed, and living in Baltimore with her loving grandparents, whose tolerance embraces an Indian son-in-law but not his reservation life.  Not for their granddaughter.

   Crazy Horse named his daughter They Are Afraid of Her.  But I am afraid of them.  They have what I most want, and I cannot think how to get it.

                                                *********************************

   When I first saw Astrid, I thought she was way too beautiful to be interested in an Indian med student from Shiprock, New Mexico, even one who’d gone to Harvard.  She shimmered onto my horizon like moonrise over the mesas, stole my heart with her blue-eyed medicine.  We wed, we produced our luminous Ariel, her name courtesy of Astrid’s Ph.D. thesis, “The Uses of the Supernatural in Shakespeare’s Comedies.”  Then Astrid’s moon set on my horizon and rose on that of Clyde Trevor-Mathis, art historian and Shakespeare buff.

   Long after I was still gazing at the metaphorical moonset, Astrid and Ariel, my lodestars, had gone off to shine in Clyde’s heaven, and in his perfectly-appointed apartment.  Clyde’s neighbor, an attorney sharpening his claws for the long climb to the top, helped Astrid help herself.  She got the wedding presents, the community bank account, my mother’s buffalo nickel antique necklace, and sole custody of Ariel.  I ended up with my M.D., my grandmother’s Navajo rug (red and black didn’t fit into Clyde’s décor), and visiting rights – in Maryland.

 Now it’s Ariel’s sixth summer.  Astrid and Clyde are pursuing their muses in Europe, and Ariel, staying with grandparents Janice and Jim, is pursuing the life of an upper-middle-class white child in Baltimore.  Marie-Louise Odakota, my mother, has much to say about this.  She starts with her great-grandfather, who once outwitted Kit Carson and trapped him for three days in a cactus corral near Canyon de Chelly.  Unsatisfactory comparisons are made.  Great-grandfather would never have surrendered to an art historian.  Here Marie-Louise’s nostrils flare.  She forgets nothing, not her grandfather, not her buffalo nickel necklace, and particularly not her granddaughter.

                                              *************************************

      “Bye, Daddy,” Ariel says.  Then a pause, and she returns.  “When are you coming home, Daddy?  I miss you, and Mommy…..and Clyde.”

   A tomahawk straight to the heart, I think, from my Chesapeake Bay Navajo princess.

   “How would you like to visit me?” I offer.  This is strictly forbidden by the terms of the custody agreement that Astrid’s wily attorney had slid past me while I still dreamed of reconciliation.  I am just testing the waters. 

   “Gumma says I can’t do that.”  Clearly, Janice is monitoring our conversation and has shaken her head – NO – at Ariel.

   “Could I ride ponies?” my daughter asks quickly.

   “Every day,” I say.  I hear a scuffle as Janice takes the phone.

   “Say goodbye to Daddy,” she orders.  “Run along with Teresa and have your bath.”

   “Bye, Daddy, I love you,” my daughter calls from two thousand miles away.  “I want to ride ponies,” I hear her say determinedly, as Janice comes on the line.

   “Honestly, Chay, I don’t know why you do that.  You know you can’t take her out of Maryland.  Why get her all stirred up?”

   “She’s my daughter and she’s half-Navajo and she should know that about herself.”  I’m somewhat surprised at my own vehemence.  For so long I have kept myself from thinking about the girl who is, despite time and distance, a part of me and a part of my people.

   “You’re always welcome here, Chay, you know that.  But Ariel has a routine.  She’s already been through divorce.  Don’t upset her more.”

   I hang up without answering Janice.   I review all the reasons to work hard, keep my nose clean and my head low.  No time, no help, no room for a daughter in my life.  For a long time, I stare at my map of the United States, the thick red and thin blue lines running like veins and arteries across the body of the country.  The history of my life.

                                              *******************************

   For weeks I plot a kidnapping.  I dream up decoy phone calls.  I make escape maps.  I think up take names for airline reservations, new home, new job.  I plan how Ariel and I can live in hiding on the reservation.  Finally, I call my parents-in-law.

   “I want Ariel to live with me during the summers,” I say.

   “That’s not possible,” Janice says.  I picture her in pastel cashmere sweater set, gold chain and St. Christopher medal, trim wool slacks and expensive Italian shoes.  I picture Ariel in her exquisite dress from some Italian designer for children, a tiny St. Christopher on a delicate chain like her grandmother’s, black hair chic from L’Enfant Salon.  I want to see her in jeans, bareback on a pony with the other res kids, braids flying straight out behind her.

   “She’s my daughter, too,” I reply.  Janice hangs up.  I call Sam Arnaz, an attorney who represents tribal members in custody cases.

                                              ********************************

   Where do you want to spend your summers, Ariel?” the judge asks.  It is now Ariel’s seventh summer.  It  has taken a year to get my case together and a court date set.  Astrid and Clyde are again in Europe, trusting in the original custody agreement an in Janice and Jim’s impressive appearance to keep Ariel safely suburban.

   “With my daddy, in New Mexico.”  She is so sure.  “I want to ride ponies.”

   “All summer?  Won’t you miss your mother?” the judge inquires.

   “She’s in Europe,” says Ariel.

   A pause.  “Your request for summer custody of Ariel is granted,” the judge rules.

                                              *****************

   As we cross the waiting room toward the gate entrance, the P.A. system booms our names:  Mr. Chayton Odakota, Miss Ariel Odakota-Trevor-Mathis.  Poor kid.  Although I will not let Clyde adopt Ariel, her mother insists that she use his last name. 

  Not in New Mexico, I’m thinking.  I keep walking, holding Ariel’s hand firmly.

   “Daddy!” Ariel yanks on my arm.

   “Hurry up, honey,” I say, bending to scoop her up.

   “But Daddy,” she insists.  “Look!  There’s Mommy, and Clyde.  And Gumma and Gumpa.”

   Shit, I think.  Shit, shit, shit.  Palefaces on the horizon, again.

   Wary, I stop and wait.  Ariel wriggles until I set her down, when she runs to Astrid, who catches her in a hug.  Their war party marches up, my daughter once again in their clutches.

   “Let’s go, Ariel,” I say.  “We’ll miss the plane.”

   Her face falls.  “But Mommy has a present to give me,” she cries.

   Yeah, in London, I am thinking.  Outgunned again.  I am about to try the lure of the ponies when Astrid says, “Leaving without saying Goodbye?  Or Hello, for that matter?

   “I thought you were pacing the halls of the Uffizi, communing with Botticelli’s brushstrokes and quoting the Bard,” I reply gruffly.  “What do you want?  We’ve got a plane to catch.”

   “Clyde’s daughter Katie is very ill.  So we came back.”

   I feel a fleeting flicker of sympathy for Clyde; his daughters also live with his ex, who moved to Chicago.  Still, I scoop Ariel up again and turn to go.  Astrid puts her hand on my arm, not a forceful gesture, but a tentative one.

   “Wait, Chay.  I see how Clyde misses Katie and her sister, how he worries…I realized…well, you’re Ariel’s Dad.  She should spend time with you.  And I wanted to give her this.  It’s hers by right.  Maybe Marie-Louise can keep it for her, and explain the history of it to Ariel.”  She slips the buffalo nickel necklace over Ariel’s head.

   “Oh, it’s pretty, Mommy. Thank you!  Listen, Daddy!”  Ariel jingles the coins.

  “Have fun riding ponies, honey,” Astrid kisses our daughter’s soft cheek and Ariel clings to her for a few seconds.  Clyde reaches over to pat her shining hair, awkwardly, with an abashed but defiant glance at me. 

   Ariel pats his hand and says, “Bye, Clyde.”

   “I hope Katie gets better,” I say.  He nods.

   Janice and Jim stay back as Astrid and Clyde walk towards them.  Once again, Ariel wriggles down from my arms and runs to hug her grandmother and grandfather.  Janice’s face is wet with tears and Jim looks stern.

   “Sir,” the gate attendant calls, “your flight…”

   “Ariel,” I call anxiously.

    All five look at me.  Then Ariel breaks away and runs to me, her necklace ringing like bells,

or the calls of desert birds in summer.