Word of the day: Calumet

n: a highly ornamented ceremonial pipe of the American Indians

When I was a little girl I used to have several different recurring dreams. Most of them were scary, like the one I had many times after my uncle died. I would dream that he was floating down the hill to our house and was going to take my baby brother back to the afterlife with him. I used to sneak out of my bed and creep stealthily through the house to the bedroom my two brothers shared and fall asleep outside their bedroom door to make sure he wasn‘t carried away.

Another scary dream I had stemmed from our summer walks from our house in the country to my grandmother’s house on that same country road on days when my mother wanted to visit with her mother. There were four of us following mom like ducklings, one behind the other. She hated that about us. She seemed embarrassed to have four kids so close in ages and she wanted us to gather in a close huddle when we walked. It was a “fer piece” for little kids to be walking, so we would lag behind when we got near Maw Maw’s house. There was an old barn about two city blocks length on this gravel road and when he got near mom would yell over her shoulder, “you’d better hurry up or the old mean man will come out of the barn and grab you!” That gave us all renewed energy to run and catch up with Mama duck and finish the walk under her safe wing.

The nicest dream I’ve ever had, though, was the dream I had about the Indian boy. There wasn’t much to it really. The boy was standing on the peak of a mountain so high that it looked to be an arm’s length from the fluffy white clouds. He looked down into the valley and across to the other mountains. There were no words, no thoughts, and no other people in the dream. Just the beauty ofGod’s earth from this boy’s view. It was understood in this dream that I was that boy. Maybe that is where my love and fascination with the American Indians began.

Over the years anything to do with Indians and the Indian ways and beliefs captured my attention, and I was quite the tomboy. Summer days were spent hanging upside down on the branch of the Maple tree on one side of house while “thinking“ about whatever young tomboys think about at 8 or 10 years old. I would make my own bows from sticks and dad’s fishing twine. My arrows were just sticks and twigs. Or I would sit in the shade of the big oak tree on the other side of the house with my back against the bark, reading aloud to my best friend, Sarge, a border collie that Santa brought to me one Christmas Eve. My thoughts always came back to the recurring dream of me as the Indian boy on that mountain, just standing and taking in the beauty, and I would wonder why I was always a boy in that dream.

The summer after I turned 16 proved to be my Indian summer. I worked as a curb girl in a little diner where you could drive up and be waited on and sit in your car to eat greasy burgers and fries. A gentleman used to come every weekend and one evening he asked me if I was of Indian descent. I wasn’t as far as I knew, I’d told him, and he said the reason he asked was because I walked like an Indian princess. That got my attention. Not the princess part, but that he thought I walked like an Indian. I was too shy to ask him what he meant. I didn’t think I walked any different than any other 16-year-old girl, but I loved that he thought I did. He might have just been trying to flirt with me but I didn’t get that feeling. He was a more fatherly figure and I didn’t get the impression at all of a lecherous old man trying to flirt with a teenage girl. I would watch for him so I could be the one to wait on him just so I could be near him. He was from the Shawnee nation and when business was slow he would talk tome about their customs. He invited me to some of their ceremonies, but my parents were very strict and would never have let me go anywhere with a stranger.

That same summer another Indian boy used to come to the diner. I had such a crush on him, and he did flirt with me. But I was intimidated because he was so strikingly handsome. I was very attracted to him, but I had a boyfriend already who was so jealous that I wasn’t allowed to look at or speak to another boy in his presence. If that Indian boy had asked me out, though, I would have dropped the boyfriend in a heartbeat. One night a car full of girls pulled into the spot next to the Indian boy’s car while I was talking to him at his car window. One of the girls got out and told me that she was pregnant and the baby was his. He was visibly embarrassed and insisted that was impossible. I don’t know if that was really true or if he said that for my benefit. But I walked away and let them hash it out in private. A few days later my boyfriend and I were at another little diner in Kentucky where teenagers hung out, and that same boy was parked next to us. He waved to me when I looked at him, but as I mentioned, my boyfriend was abnormally jealous so I was afraid to wave back. To this day I regret that because he was clearly hurt my rebuff and never came back to the diner again while I was working. I never saw him again. Toward the end of summer another Indian boy came into my life, and he ended up stalking me the majority of my adulthood. Not so much in a bad way, just annoying. My friend and I were hanging out at a small local amusement park when he and his friend came up to us and began flirting. With my fascination and attraction for Indians, it was love at first site….well, as much in love as a fickle 16-year-old girl can be. We began dating, which meant that I had to juggle two boys. He knew about my boyfriend but my boyfriend didn’t know about him. He was a Cherokee Indian with black hair and gorgeous dark brown eyes. He was a construction worker so he had a dark tan and it was an instant attraction. But he was 21 years old, 5 years old than I was, so I had to hide his age from my parents. One day he took me to the lake for a picnic. He brought beer, though, and I was not a drinker. Just a couple beers had me nearly fully drunk, and I had to work that evening. Long story short, my boyfriend found out and my dad found out, so I was forbidden to see him. He called me that night and my dad told him he would see him in jail if he came near me. He told my dad that in two years I would be 18 and he would come back for me, and then my dad couldn’t stop me from seeing him. I had a new boyfriend with a couple weeks and didn’t think about him again until three years later when I was 19. True to his word, he found me and expected to pick up where we left off. I was married by then and had just brought my son home from the hospital. That started an over 25 year long stalking history that followed me to every state my Navy husband was transferred to and didn’t end until the winter of 2006. But that’s a whole other blog and will have to wait.

I had intended to come her and talk about my family Thanksgiving, my new job shift, and other life things, but I got distracted with my Word of the Day. I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving with loved ones, that you have many blessings for which to be thankful, and that those blessings carry you through your life. Happy Holiday.