Life among the prairie parishes: Time reports

When my grandmother was born in Garniell, Montana during the Depression, she lived on a farm; the nearest actual town was Judith Gap, in the middle of the Montana breadbasket, and the nearest church was therefore about ten miles away. Her family had a choice of driving to Moore and be a Catholic or Methodist or go to the Gap... and be Catholic or Methodist. The nearest town with any other denominations were all the way in Lewistown.  My grandfather grew up on the other side of the Gap in a staunch Lutheran family.  I think they went to the Methodist church. 

These tiny parish churches and prairie chapels were sometimes a county apart and had only a handful of families in attendance.  Now, their numbers are shrinking as those families commute for services or stop going altogether.

Time ran this interesting short piece about the traveling pastors who serve these tiny farming communities in Minnesota. Apparently Blogger isn't fond of flash videos, but this displays remarkably well in full-screen if you choose.  In any case, the plight of these pastors is very similar to what we see in Montana and Wyoming as well...

Now there's a "Handsome Fella": Codes and Family Again

You know, after writing that last post, it's funny where I start thinking about code switching and my grandmother's codes for different kinds of masculinity-- and where those codes resurface.   I recently got back from Montana where I was helping to move my grandfather from his three bedroom  house to a retirement apartment complex in his hometown.  It's been a solid week of stress and tongue-biting as we have packed, re-packed, coddled him, begged him, and even browbeat him into doing everything he has to do for his own good, like leaving the house unlocked when the real-estate agent comes to show the house, or not swindling a relative in a car deal.  But, he's finally moved in, thank goodness-- the stress is over, and I'm happy to escape back to Wyoming for a few days before going back to Appalachia.

So, one thing we needed to do was to find and pack up all the family heirlooms and memorabilia before the estate planner came to sell the rest.  As my mother, aunt and I were digging down in the closet in the basement to get everything ready for a garage sale, we came across a box of old pictures.  Most of them were pictures from the Judith Basin of extended family now long since forgotten.  My mother and aunt looked through the pictures one at a time and tried to place faces.  "This is Mom's aunt's family, isn't it?"  Mom would ask.  "She looks like one of Edith's kids, doesn't she?"

Most were stiff, formal pictures of farmer's families and children taken in Harlowtown at the portrait studio in the next county over.  I have one of some unidentified second or third cousin from the twenties who is a dead ringer for my four year-old niece. 

One of the things we came across was this early photograph of my grandfather in his enlisted uniform, shortly before going off to the Pacific theater in World War II.   My mother laughed out loud as she pulled it from the box, and she and my aunt spent a lot of time reminiscing over it.  As they chatted about when it must have been taken and whether or not their grandmother was still alive at that point, I looked into those cold, blue eyes and face devoid of all kindness, and I felt a little queasy.  He might not swing a fist like he once did, but those eyes still burn with a cold heat that sears like frostbite.   And in every photograph I've ever seen of him as an adult, he never once genuinely smiles. 

Mom handed the picture over to me so I could have a closer look.  "Your Grandpa certainly was a handsome fella in his day, wasn't he?"  She asked.

"A real looker,"  My aunt agreed.  A handsome fella.  I suppressed a shudder at the coincidence of their words, and what those words actually meant to me.

Code Switching as I Learned It from My Grandmother

Although it's probably not typical of my generation, estate auctions made up a large part of my social education when I was growing up.  The women of my childhood were all antique collectors, and an important part of our social lives was spent at auctions at private houses and fairgrounds.  These are nothing like Sotheby's auctions where the so-called "auctioneer" is actually some Art historian with a faux continental accent and most of the bidding is by agents.  These are rowdy, fast-paced events in dusty front yards or livestock arenas, with auctioneers in cowboy hats calling off numbered lots of everything from tack and harness to bent coffee spoons a flutter-tongued syllabary of their own making.  A good estate auction is a social event where friends from around the state catch up, ranchers and wives eye their competitors, and buyers vie with one another in a cutthroat, symbolic contest of subtle gestures for the highest bid.   It takes time to learn that non-verbal language, and it's easy to be misunderstood; for that reason, my grandmother made me sit on my hands when I was on the auction floor until I was about seven years old. 

There's such a feeling of freedom once you learn to become a free operator, however, and you learn how to maneuver through codes at the auction house.  I blushed with pleasure the first time I had the winning bid on a lot when I was about eleven-- a beautiful old copy of A Child's Garden of Verses in maroon calico, which I outbid a dealer for and I still have.  And I have to admit, I also felt a little rush of superiority several years ago when my college in the Deep South auctioned off their impounded bikes and I was practically the only student there who knew the ropes.  I had to explain the codes to the young men around me as they scratched their heads, unable to follow the bids.

Why I'm interested in all this will take some time to explain; for the moment, let's just start with the basics on learning the social context of language use and where I first learned it existed. 

Derek Hopkins explains the Auctioneering trade on NPR, The Way We Work (via YouTube)

I'm headed home!

Well, I got the bad/good news just last week-- my ticket is bought and I'm going home to the Rockies in a couple of weeks.  My elderly grandfather in Montana announced to the family about a month ago that he wants to move into one of those senior citizen's communities and sell his house.  He's arranged for a two-bedroom apartment in town where he'll be surrounded by other swinging seniors and have a social life. (Heaven help 'em all.  He's such a grouchy old fussbudget.) 

So, I'm going to be the dutiful granddaughter and help my mother and aunt get him packed up and moved in.  This is going to involve a lot of packing of boxes-- and of Grandpa unpacking and repacking them again because he's O.C.D. and has to make sure all the labels on his canned goods are facing the same direction.

I expect this should go smoothly for the most part, until we get to the old brass bed my grandmother inherited many years ago from her parents and Grandpa no longer wants.  I might have to step in and referee the arm-wrestling contest between my mother and aunt to see who gets it.  ;-)

This means that me, my camera, and my audio recorder are headed back to Wyoming-- and I've decided to go back to Laramie for part of that time to do some research.  At first this seemed like the natural thing to do, given my academic inclinations and fascination with TLP, but I'm having a little bit of panic about actually talking to real live people about The Laramie Project.  I'll have to outline that in a little more detail later.

But in the meantime:  Woo-hoo!  I'm headed home, y'all!

A Sense of Place

One of the things that I've been pondering as I thought back on the local performance of "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later" was how utterly homesick it made me feel—how homesick I still feel. I've been staring aimlessly at my screensaver of pictures from Montana and Wyoming for three weeks now. This seemed strange at first, seeing that I only lived in that community for three years when I was in college. And yet, for me Laramie is my hometown more than any other place I’ve lived so far. My father, you see, was a second-generation oilfield hand, cut with the same geodesically etched face and cracked hands as my grandfather and half of my uncles, and we therefore spent much of my childhood chasing the oil. We started in Cut Bank, in the high arctic plains at the base of the Rockies, and we moved progressively south into Wyoming. Each move took us into another sleepy, suspicious community where nobody liked or trusted people who weren’t born on the same patch of dirt as them. It took until college to find the place where I belonged.

It’s one of the strange blessings of a university: you find yourself in the middle of an entire community of temporary exiles with whom you have nothing in common other than approximate age and loneliness. Laramie took me in and defined who I would eventually become: I found my faith there, while stargazing in a field a little over a mile from where Matt had died, and I was married in Laramie as well— in a tiny building most people only know as “The Baptist Church.” (I've never met "The Baptist Minister," BTW.) So for me, Laramie is my home, and watching the reading on October 12th made me realize just how much loss I still felt from leaving my home behind.