We are lucky to live in a city where they have a dedicated children’s theater.  Plays are geared for littles but it has a grown-up feel.  Time is shortened for younger attention spans and my husband has often said he enjoys the kiddo shows over the “regular” theatre.  My little one LOVES pink.  She adores it.  She LIVES for it!  And the name of the last play of the season was called “Pinkalicious.”  Based upon the popular children’s book, Pinkalicious loves pink cupcakes.  She loves them so much she eats too many and gets “pinkititus”!  What to do?!  It proves one CAN have too much of a good thing.  For me it would be blue.  But it shows the importance of eating vegetables and other things and how one can still love pink.  It was a darling show and I think my baby doll had a blast wearing all her beloved pink.  We made it a girl’s night and I even wore pink in my hair, for which I got a lot of compliments, getting into the spirit of things and willing to have pink hair.  (It was just clip on pieces; not dye.)  Anyway, we had a great time and my daughter got a little more exposure to the theater, which was an integral part of my childhood.  I suppose my most memorable experience was playing Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” in the sixth grade.  A part of me wishes I had continued past a brief stint as Maria in “The Sound of Music.”  Who knows?  Maybe she will want to take up musicals as I did.  At the very least I hope she can respect and enjoy them as an adult.  American football player and coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”  I hope my daughter catches excellence.

I used to go to Pow Wows a lot while my father was still living.  Every time I hear someone white, covered in dead animals, saying their grandmother was a Cherokee princess I just recoil.  I realize they mean well and want to embrace a culture they may have some connection to but it rankles — and I am obviously not full-blood.  Yes, I am aware I have blondish/red hair and greenish/blue eyes.  But my father did not.  He had hair so black it was almost blue and eyes so blue as to nearly be unbelievable.  With his red skin personally I think he was unbeatable and I can certainly see why Mama fell for him.  Having German and Choctaw ancestry, he “passed” unwittingly for white with his deep blue eyes and Germanic last name.  Men said they envied his “golf course tan” even though he never played golf a day in his life.  With Daddy gone I am not sure how much of his story he would want me to tell.  But I will say this:  my world changed at 15 when my grandmother died — and so did Daddy’s.  I always knew Grandma spoke with broken English; I always knew she did not look white.  But it was never talked about.  Secrets came out at the funeral; stories of the family blood being Indian.  I always wondered how Daddy felt, at 53, finding all this out.  What a shock to his entire identity it must have been; how so many pieces of his early childhood’s puzzle must have finally fallen into place.  American society made it so shameful to be an Indian my grandmother took it to her grave.  NO other race of people has had to endure what Native Peoples have:  forced sterilization of women even into the 1970’s, baby stealing, mass genocide, concentration camps called reservations, boarding schools where children were beaten if they spoke their native language.  They had bounties placed on their their scalps, the U.S. government deliberately gave them small pox infected blankets, women and children were shot in the back and left to rot in piles, and their lands were stolen under the guise of “manifest destiny”.  Treaties are still being broken, and now there is nuclear dumping and fracking on Indian land.  When will it end?!  As a young teenager I immersed myself in my newly discovered heritage and Daddy seemed relieved to be encouraged to do so as well.  My mother loved us and embraced it with equal enthusiasm.  And so we we were warmly welcomed home into the American Indian community.  We learned together about Grand Entries and Flag Songs, and soon my father became a proud member of the American Indian veterans.  It’s so funny, he never could pronounce any other language but Choctaw just sounded right on his tongue in a way my more-white-than-red self could not achieve.  We learned about the Northern drum and the Southern drum; snake dances, corn dances, grass dances, and more.  We ate fry bread and suddenly Daddy began opening up about a life he lived but did not fully understand until this came to light.  He passed away when I was 28.  Simply standing next to my father people knew I was legit.  But now all I had was my tiny, red-haired, white, widowed mother who kept a love of her husband’s culture long after he had passed.  So imagine poor Mr. Birmingham, who looked me in the eyes with a forthright steadiness as I told him my grandmother was Choctaw.  (He was probably thinking at least I didn’t say Cherokee princess.)  He never revealed his own heritage but seemed to be summing me up somehow.  I asked if I could get my picture with him — something I had never done in my whole life.  I do not read the “star” magazines or watch the celebrity “news” shows, but I confess I was giddy to see him unexpectedly at a local pow wow.  I felt so embarrassed.  Embarrassed that I did not look Indian and wondered how many “wanna-bes” he had endured.  But I stood my ground and shared my heritage just the same.  To not have done so would have dishonored my father, and all those who came before whom they tried to wipe away.  I saw this picture in a time hop on Facebook and decided to write about it.  I have had full blood friends who were Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni, Choctaw, Seminole, Kiowa, Chippewa, Sauk and Fox, Winnebago, Iroquois, Lakota, Salish, and yes, Cherokee plus others who were mixed with several nations.  It saddens me to see languages, crafts, and old ways dying.  People know the dances but they’re not exactly sure of the meaning behind some of them.  They do things that were passed down but do not fully know why.  An Indian friend of mine who got shipped off the rez as part of a government “integration” program knew the American Indian activist and actor Russell Means well.  Among other things, Russell was the author of “Where White Men Fear to Tread.”  In his book he said:

“Golden eagles don`t mate with bald eagles, deer don`t mate with antelope, gray wolves don`t mate with red wolves.  Just look at domesticated animals, at mongrel dogs, and mixed breed horses, and you`ll know the Great Mystery didn`t intend them to be that way.  We weakened the species and introduced disease by mixing what should be kept seperate.  Among humans, intermarriage weakens the respect people have for themselves and for their traditions.  It undermines clarity of spirit and mind.”

We cannot go back, nor can we rewrite history.  One thing I know I CAN do is to not hide my heritage out of embarrassment — ironically not embarrassment of being Indian; embarrassment of not looking it.

We kicked off the first day of summer as I believe the solstice should be celebrated … with an homage to the great outdoors.  These two ran, squealed, shrieked and squirted each other with water, red faced and ecstatic.  They cooled down with Popsicles and my little one came home happy and exhausted.  Oh I remember the joy of a good night’s sleep after playing hard in the summer!  In that twilight time between bath and bed I would replay all that fun in my mind with the joy of knowing I had all summer to do it again:  the sound of cicadas, the smell of fresh cut grass, and the promise of long summer nights stretched out before me like a magic carpet.  It is hard to believe these girls have known each other half of their young lives.  I am not going to wonder where life will take them; I am simply going to enjoy the ride and the precious gift we have been given of time.  I am reminded of my favorite Shakespearean Sonnet (Number 18):

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I enjoy all four seasons but summer holds a magic all her own.  I hope my little one experiences all she has to offer and will carry wonderful memories of these times; continuing summer’s joy throughout her life.  I know I do.

There is nothing sweeter than the sight of two little girls giggling and playing together.  I had forgotten what it was like to want to whisper some nonsensical secret into a friend’s ear or show someone my room or my things.  Times are so different; play dates have replaced randomly running wild.  I recently read somewhere that children spend less time outdoors now than prisoners.  What a sad, horrifying thought.  I think I had an advantage growing up in an apartment because all the kids met at the playground.  We were a roaming pack that played tether ball, rode our Big Wheels everywhere, hung upside down from metal monkey bars and, if it was not a safer time, it certainly was a more naive one.  My mother said I could go as far as the sound of her voice.  And when she called me in for supper I ran like the wind getting home.  I had grass stains and bruises on my knees.  Now kids have sunscreen and insect repellent with plastic playgrounds.  My little one was thrilled when her friend came over and they disappeared upstairs to play.  When her daddy swept her up to take her home we were sad to see her go.  Look at the joy in this picture.  I want my little one to have the freedom to make friends and play without worry just as I did growing up.  The venue may have changed but the sentiment has not.  Mencius, the ancient Chinese philosopher, once said, “Friends are the siblings God never gave us.”

I have always known I was the stereotypical “crazy cat lady.”  It is a label I have accepted in part with embarrassment and in part with pride.  Why is it the compassionate ones are always labeled crazy and animal killers are considered normal?  I do not mean to sound harsh but I believe it is the absolute truth.  Obviously I cannot pass through pet stores and visiting shelters make me so despondent I have no words.  I suppose I am just not strong enough.  Anyway, I was minding my own business one day when these two popped up on my Facebook feed.  It was a last ditch rescue plea from a local shelter and I could have cheerfully strangled the friend who posted it.  They just haunted me.  First, if you are not a cat person and did not know this most orange cats are male.  I believe they used to be even more rare but current statistics place them at 80% male and 20% female.  Calico cats (three colors:  black, orange and white) are almost always female and tortoiseshell cats are as well.  (They have two colors; black and orange.)  So this little rare pair were both girls.  I confess I went for the kitten (a dilute calico) but her cries as she was taken from her mother will haunt me the rest of my days.  It was AWFUL.  Equally so was seeing her near starving mother reaching her paw out of the cage to her kitten.  Their cries echoed down and through the corridor and looking at the mother I KNEW she knew he was going to be killed.  In that instant I uncharacteristically ordered the mean, immune officer who had callously grabbed the kitten by the nape of the neck to put her back immediately with her mother where she belonged.  And then I announced I would be taking them both.  This haughty proclamation was followed by a texted plea to my husband not to divorce me.  His response was, “You got them both, didn’t you?”  And then I knew he was the kindest, sweetest man in the whole world; possibly the only one who truly understood and accepted me.  When we met I had seven cats.  Yep; seven.  And he loved them all.  Judge me; make fun of me; but they were my family.  I needed them just as much as they needed me.  And I do not regret one single rescue.  Returning to my story, I was not prepared to take two cats and one kind officer went and emptied out a box of printer paper so I could get them home.  I remember feeling ill carrying them, as the mother weighed less than four pounds and her kitten who even knows.  Something happened when I took the mother.  She knew I was keeping them together and she just seemed to let go.  I was afraid she would die because she had not been eating in the shelter.  I am sure it was because she could smell the death.  After leaving them to our bathroom upstairs with food and water something miraculous happened.  She started eating and gained enough weight to nurse!!!  Soon her little kitten’s tummy was full of Mama’s milk and they would lay together purring contentedly.  I began a sort of perverse reverse mental count of how many days they would have been gone contrasted with how well they were doing at the present.  And so I named the Mama cat Soleil which in French means “sun” and Giverny is where Monet lived when he painted his famous waterlilies.  Both kitties are rare in that you also do not see many dilute calicos.  Notice she is more gray and pink and white as opposed to black, orange and white.  Her muddled tones reminded me of Monet’s pond, which we had just visited.  They needed antibiotics and eye drops but flourished.  Giverny still remains tiny and our little one’s eternal “kitten.”  So if/when someone crinkles their nose when they discover our cats I remember the sound of them crying for each other that will haunt me as long as I live.  I will wear the crazy label; at least I know they were saved and are a loved, cherished part of our little family.  The renowned French-German academic Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life:  music and cats.”  Both have been a refuge for me as I have struggled with the loss of both of my parents.  So really I do not believe, in my arrogance, I “saved” these cats.  I believe they saved me.