Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.
He doesn’t hurt you because you’re the only good thing in his life. He doesn’t want to give that up. It’s the only thing he hasn’t given up.
Late at night I go out and listen to the wind. That’s all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books.
Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.
How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I’ve been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now.
You have to dream big to get big.
The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression.
I wasn’t afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.
Death is always incongruous.
Of course, she didn’t care about me. She mostly made fun of me. But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.
There is a good day to die and there is a good day to play the piano.
Junior talks about it – relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don’t do it to yourself. True.
Grief is scary and beautiful, too, I thought, but did not text.
But I don’t know how much joy she experienced while loving me. I don’t know how much joy I was capable of feeling or providing.
One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.
Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don’t understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.
I cry because I’m crying.
Son, things have never been like how you think they used to be.
I’m not an Indian warrior chief. I’m not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I’m not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I’m talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can’t handle it, you wimp.
So maybe they are mute with post-traumatic stress. Maybe they don’t know how to talk about Mike. I often wonder why I’m the one who remembers All the pain. Why am I the one who remains obsessed By the bloody nose, but rarely remembers any joy?