her name was probably not rose. she had changed her name so many times over the many years that i knew her that i could not recall her original name or if i had ever known it. i had known her since i was a kid on the rez. she was older. enough for me to see her as an adult. and almost every time I ran into her she was going by a different name. rose was just the first one i remember hearing. she wasn’t beautiful. her presence didn’t carry the weight that beautiful people do when you’re young. i once heard a guy her own age refer to her as pig face and that was pretty close to the truth. i did not feel the sadness that i do now on reflection that simply because she had not been born the lucky winner of the lottery of beauty that she was so easily dismissed, not just by others, but by me. she wasn’t particularly kind. but then I doubt that she was dealt much kindness in her life. she wasn’t funny or charming or crazy enough to be frightening. she was just this older gir...
There’s a sucker born every minute. Every single fucking minute. The wife doesn’t like it when I swear. She keeps a swear jar at home. I put money in every day even though we’re never going to have kids to give the money to. She’s a good woman. She’s entitled to her delusions, after all I put her through. I never mention that the jar doesn’t really have a point. Every day I put money in and it just stays there. It just sits there. We go to church every Sunday and she holds my hand, and I’m just glad that she stayed with me all these years. She knows who I am. She knows the kinds of things that I do. She knows all about me. I never lie to her. I don’t talk about the things that I do and she never asks, but I never lie to her. She knows. And still she stays. Still she loves me. So let her have her swear jar that gets so full of money that neither one of us will ever touch, that gets so full of money that I keep having to buy bigger and bigger swear jars, and ...
Why People Got Disease This is not a Mohawk story. This is a Cherokee story. It’s a good story though. An important story. It’s about when the first People showed up on Turtle Island. It’s about why we have disease and sickness. How when those first People showed up they got on the other animals’ nerves. How they didn’t respect the other animals and didn’t respect the earth, so the other animals got together around the sacred fire and decided to do something about it. We like to think that some People are better than other People but as far as animals are concerned People all have to be taught respect. People have to be taught how to behave. People need something to keep them from crowding the planet and doing nothing but harm. Back near the beginning of People they hadn’t learn to respect the earth or respect their animal cousins so all the other animals got together and decided to do something about it. They gathered in a circle around a sacred fire and passed...
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