We were five or six years old when
our Great Aunt Izzie came to visit. She was sitting in the rocking chair and I
was playing with my cousin on the floor with Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. The
world we were creating was a cross between a science-fiction matinee and
Gunsmoke.
My mother took Aunt Izzie’s empty
teacup and started walking to the kitchen when it happened. First, the sound
was just a whispering. My mother turned around and dropped the teacup to the
carpet, as if she knew too well the melody and where it came from.
It seemed like nothing much to me.
The teacup crashing into shards appeared more curious. I wondered how we could
include their fragmentary shapes into our formless burgeoning contraption.
Everything is just a game for our amusement at that age.
But the noise was turning into
whoops. Aunt Izzie’s hand was drumming on her lips. She was turning Indian
before our very eyes. My mother ran into the bathroom fast as I remember ever
seeing her in action, slammed the door, and left my cousin and myself to
witness Izzie’s transformation.
She must have been past eighty then
and always seemed to be collapsing as if her bones were just unable to support
the weight of years. But now she straightened proudly with the posture of a warrior
and started dancing slowly on the edge as if the space our toys created was a
camp fire burning in a cold Algonquian night.
Her shouts were getting louder and
they moved her body up and down like popcorn as she continued circling there
around our world as if she were the light of all the prehistoric summers that
existed here before their death had been invented by the forked tongue words of
white men.
She stopped to look at each of us
and shined. We nestled in a world of toys and listened Fort Apache
style to every secret word she said. She spoke of black holes in another
constellation. She showed us light emerging from its winter cave. She tapped
into a maple tree and fed us with its lovely harmonies of sweet intoxication.
In a quiet burning voice, she speaks to me alone
and tells me what I am and asks me to forget each sound she makes to heal my
heart, predicting every year that follows from this moment is a slow
remembrance of exactly what I know right now—and what a cosmic trip it is from
our first pow to each succeeding wow.
