Stephen S. Lottridge - The Old Bison: Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life

The

Old Bison

Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life

S TEPHEN S. L OTTRIDGE

Copyright 2022 Stephen S. Lottridge

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 978-1-63860-742-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63860-743-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

T hreads of experience weave the fabric of a life. Some lend striking color; others provide background hue. Together, they form the outlines and patterns that comprise the rough texture of the entire cloth. While the scope of the finished work lies outside our comprehension as we weave our lives, engrossed as we are in our own daily endeavors and points of view, hints of the whole lie in the interwoven strands. How we interpret them, what they teach us, deepens and enriches the ultimate texture and offers meaning.

Some of the common threads in the fabric of my life recur in these essays: love of language and its ability to connect us and shape our experience; the power of the natural world and our kinship with it; the intensity, joy and pain of human relations; and the way our perspectives evolve as we age.

Persian carpet weavers purposely incorporate some mistake in their work, since only Allah can create perfection. In contrast, unintentional missteps and errors mark the fabric of the life I describe here. Most of them were derived from ignorance or fear. They cannot be unwoven. Understood, perhaps; forgiven, maybe; but not undone. Yet joy and consolation also abound, as the reader will discover.

Signal events and totemic beings surface and delineate themselves sharply as memory lengthens. All the moments and feelings evoked in these narratives lead to the finaland titleessay, The Old Bison.

The question must arise: Why write a memoir, either in discrete though related pieces or in continuous narrative? Who cares? Well, the writer cares, from whatever combination of motives too numerous to document. For me, the basic impulse arises from a desire to make sense of my experience, to lend it articulated form. It becomes a voyage of discovery, not of the facts, which remain vivid in my memory, but of their connection and implications in shaping the course of my life.

Fair enough, but why publish it? The motivation of self-understanding, of self-examination, while worthy and filled with precedent, remains essentially private. The desk drawer might seem a more appropriate repository than the public sphere, for the family to find after one has shuffled off this mortal coil and can no longer wince at reproach or beam at approbation.

Still, all of us want to tell our stories, to have them resonate, to have someone hear them, listen carefully, and respond to themand to usin some way. All creative work is an attempt at communication. Hello. Here I am. Are you there? Even artists who never publish or display their work share some bit of that urge.

Many memoir writers intend their stories to instruct the reader. They may have endured difficulty and believe their stories will provide guidance for others who struggle with similar problems. Others may hope to open a conversation about issues they have confronted and knowledge they have gained. While some of those desires to present an examined life underlie the essays in this book, my fundamental intention defines itself simply. I want something I have written to strike someone, somewhere, at some time, with a shock of excited recognition or discovery. If a reader exclaims in excitement, Oh, there you are! or, Ah, there I am! this book will have achieved its goal.

I present the narratives here in roughly chronological order. The first piece spans almost all my life. At least one other ranges over decades, and a few over years. Generally speaking, however, they run from my boyhood through my adolescence and youth, young manhood and middle age to the present.

For the most part, I have identified real people and places. Only a few times have I changed them to protect privacy. All the same, I harbor no illusions of objective accuracy. My memories would inevitably diverge from those of other characters in these narratives, were they to relate the same events. All of us are locked in our own beings. We all experience and remember the world from our unique, though sometimes overlapping, perspectives. Details, images and interpretations that stand vivid in my recollection may have escaped the attention of others and vice versa.

In a few instances, I have knowingly melded stories and events as I heard them secondhand and can make no confident claim to their veracity. My imagination occasionally stitched together the probable course of events, grounded in what I heard and understood at that time. Nowhere in the writing of these essays have I intended harm, criticism or censure. Whatever my feelings as they formed in the turbulent moments of my life, I now offer great compassion to all of usto all the people whose paths have intersected mine and to the person I was, and am. Gratitude to my fellow wayfarers for all my experiences, painful and joyful, propels this book.

Although family members recur in these stories, I originally wrote them with no thought of an organic whole. I have added, here and there, material to the separate narratives to create some sense of chronology. All the same, they remain discrete creations. Hence the subtitle: Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life.

I n Mullan, Idaho, on summer mornings in the mid-1940s, I woke up early, around five oclock. The house was still asleep, but light was already sifting through the windows as the sun started to come up. I eased out of bed, quick and lithe and quiet. In my pajama bottoms and bare feet, I padded into the kitchen. Moving silently in the still room, I crossed to the counter, opened the breadbox, took out the loaf of Wonder White, undid the bag carefully, removed one slice, reached over, dropped it into the toaster and pushed down the lever. I closed the wrapping back up and returned the loaf to the box. Then I leaned over to the refrigerator, opened it, took out the oleo (we did not have butter; this was during World War II, and butter was rationed), turned back to the counter, reached down, opened the utensil drawer noiselessly, lifted out a table knife and slowly closed the drawer. When the toast popped up, I waited a quick moment to make sure the sound had not wakened my parents in the next room. Reassured, I oleoed the hot toast, smoothing the melt out to all the corners and sides and letting it puddle a little in the middle. Then I softly laid the knife down on the counter, pivoted and headed to the back door, my bare feet inaudible on the linoleum as I moved, the slice of toast flat on the palm of one hand as the other carefully opened the door to the back entry. Once through, I closed the door behind me as gently as I had opened it, then flowed along the entryway and repeated the procedure with the back door. Outside, I stepped across the rough pine planking of the short, covered porch, past the entrance to the doghouse with its musty smell of old burlap and well-gnawed bones, over a short patch of sharp, dirty gravel and onto the dewy grass. I walked a few paces farther and angled to face the west wall where the birdhouse my father and I had built hung under the eaves.

I stood, the early air cooling my naked back, the first sun warming my thin shoulders, the dew chilling my bare feet. I could smell the grass, the nights fertile dampness, the musky odor of the compost pile. I could see the morning glories opening, the high hollyhocks stately along the fence, the first blush on the tomatoes. I could just hear the faint susurrus of water gliding down the flume behind the house. I took a slow bite, and tasted the dripping, oleoed toast, sweet and salty and soft in my mouth. And I heard the quick, sharp call of the adult swallows as they swooped and swerved, veering to pick off flying mosquitoes and gnats and midges in midair. With beaks so replete I could sometimes see bits of leg and antennae fuzzing their edges, the adults sliced full speed toward the hole in the front of their house and, braking to a sudden stop, they alighted on the peg that served as a perch just outside and beneath the hole, stretched in and emptied their beaks into the eager maws of their nestlings. I could make out the tiny, gaping gullets from where I stood, and I could hear the demanding cheeps of the young. Then back the adults would go, they, too, calling in short, sharp cries, their teal-blue iridescence flashing in the early light as they culled the fresh morning air for food, whipping and tilting and canting over my head.