STRACHANS ON THE PRAIRIE
Normally I’m solitary but on 9/11 when my neighbor burst in breathlessly there were three of us. The neighbor, a middle-aged woman at maximum arousal as she always was for an emergency, wanted to tell us to turn on the television, but I didn’t have a television. I deliberately got rid of it and only used the computer internet to access a few things.
My guests were my first cousin twice removed or third cousin or whatever one calls the son of my father’s cousin. He was an old man with a bad back, who knew he was secretly dying of cancer. He had insisted on coming to look through my father’s photos, which I had saved when death dispersed my birth family. I kept telling him that I was poor that I lived in a house that was as much an improvisation as a shelter, but he wrote me a check for $500 and said he was bringing his “friend,” a Cheyenne Indian grandmother who was presented as a nurse but was more likely an aide. He was vague about sleeping arrangements.
When the neighbor burst in, Gene finally realized what poor meant — no television. Along with no recliner and no proper mattress on the only bed — just a slab of foam plastic. But he was resourceful and went outside to search for signs of an aerial. “Come look at this,” he called, brandishing the end of the TV aerial wire. “I could fix it!” But I did not WANT television, even at that point.
I sat him at the computer and showed him how to bring up the news. There he was, riveted, for the afternoon. He had been an airplane mechanic in New Guinea during WWII and had fantasies of re-enlisting so he could fight Arabs on the beach. His “friend” sat nearby, a wet hen who had no concern for New York City doin’s, and neither did I — to be honest and out-of-step as usual. She had discovered that my relationship to Gene preserved the “elders must be obeyed” rule of earlier years and this gave her the license to demand. “I want coffee,” and “Do you bleach the floor of your shower daily?” I did not. So neither took a shower while they were here.
Holocausts meant nothing to her since they were the foundation of her existence. My version of poor didn’t approach hers. And I didn’t realize how frail she was. When she was the first to go to bed and the cat was delighted to curl up on her, she shrieked for Gene to save her from the weight. I was sleeping out in the shed I facetiously called my “bunkhouse” on an ancient mattress and rickety 2X4 platform that horrified other younger relatives. Until then I’d been proud of my ingenuity.
My feeling about the World Trade Tower was that it was another among a series of blind atrocities that kill people around the planet, merely unusually spectacular. The men who dove off the top of the highest building in Manhattan were like deep sea divers, taking a few soaring moments into an unperceived and instant destruction that left only what we had learned to call “pink mist” from the news accounts of war.
In a while we went back to examining the many shabby old albums full of dead people, some of whom we once knew. What Gene was looking for was the house his grandfather had built in South Dakota to homestead on the newly opened Brulé Sioux reservation. It was remarkable because the second floor had a mansard roof and Archibald Strachan, who lacked realism, had installed tall windows all around. A person up there had an excellent view of the flat prairie but it was the coldest and windiest (indoor) house anywhere.
Archibald Strachan, who brought his family with him from Scotland, had visions of being Thomas Jefferson. In fact, he brought his wife, two nearly grown daughters (one of whom would die in childbirth), and my grandfather, the oldest well educated son. Once they were located on a homestead, a small boy with blond ringlets was born — that was Gene who was now pursuing his memory of that tall windy house among all the other one-story tar paper shacks like the one my grandparents lived in. It was actually two shacks because they each homesteaded in the required one-room cabin on adjacent plots, so that when they married, they threw both land and houses together.
Gene’s parents were that little boy with ringlets, named Thomas, and a sturdy Scandinavian woman who provided the only happy memories Gene had. He found me a willing listener and told many stories about his oppression by a father who was as relentless as old Archibald but not even close to his success until later in life he became a county agent, an expert on forbes and grasses. I’d been accustomed to hearing only this high value version. Gene crashed into it as though he were an infidel airliner. Fascinating.
His companion wanted to go home. I was in favor, though I tried to provide $500 worth of Hamburger Helper plus a pile of pillows on the sofa to imitate a recliner, plus the labor of carrying the albums outside to be in bright light since Gene’s version of a scanner was taking photos of the pages. I didn’t have a scanner.
At the time I was fiddling with a theory of continuousness, maintaining that every seeming big climax in life was really a continuum of versions too slow and too small to be noted. Historical atrocities like that against the Cheyenne tribe or cancer that soon killed Gene were simply examples of hubris and ensuing destruction that were everywhere in the world. This is a dour and unpopular idea and I didn’t hang onto it that long.
The length and speed of human memory are what keep us from seeing the World Trade Center attack before it approached though an attempt to topple it had already been tried earlier. It keeps us from realizing the dimensions of the climate shift that we caused. So much is unknown. So much is love denied. Gene’s tales were the first I’d ever heard of the existence of his resourceful and embracing mother. His own only marriage was too short to create children. Some things were meant to end or even never to exist.
