*My grandfather’s 80th birthday is this week, and I think there is a sentiment in here that I have always been trying to tell him, but couldn’t quite find the words for, nor the courage to lay it all out for him. Instead, I’ll toss it out to the universe and see if the message makes its way to him on its own*
“Princess Sacagawea, do you remember the words?”
Of course I remembered the words, I had sung them my whole life, I had heard them sung to me.
“Princess Sacagawea, do you remember how to sing?”
Barely, it seems so long since we sang just to hear our own voices bounce off the water. It seems as if its been so long since I’ve heard her voice.
“Nanook, can we sing the songs of the north?” What I wouldn’t give to be able to sing one more northern song with her. To sing one more melody and watch the smile grow across her face with each note.
It breaks my heart that I didn’t realize how much she had shaped my life until well after she was gone. If I’m honest about the genealogy of it all, she was my grandmother. I always saw her as more of a sage. My first memory of her is as vivid as a photograph. I remember being a toddler and coming around the corner from the living room into the foyer and there was my grandmother, her 5’2 figure covered from neck to ankles in a white fur coat. She introduced herself as “Nanook of the North”, and the only part of that sentence that my 4 year old mind could muster to repeat back was “Nook?”. She has been known by that name to our family ever since.
Having Nook around wasn’t always the easiest. She was a proper woman of her era. She was the matriarch of the family, and expected a certain level of etiquette from her children, and in my case grandchildren. Holidays were always wildly extravagant when she was present, and as a child I never understood why we needed to wear dresses to Christmas dinner when we got to open our presents in our flannel pajamas. She lived in Savannah, where children were seen and not heard. Where we crossed our legs at the ankles. Where we drank tea in sun dresses on the deck before having dinner at the club.
The same woman was somehow transformed when we moved to Wisconsin every summer to join the family on the lake. She carried the same charisma of a woman who knew her place in the world and commanded a presence of people, not through her stature but through her ability to see that social order was maintained. The only marker of the change in the way this presence was manifested was that in Savannah I was “Rachel Hall” and in Wisconsin she always called me “Sacagawea”.
There was a pocket sized memo pad and a golf pencil that was always in her pocket when she was at the lake. It was our special notebook, just for me and her. At the end of the day when the motor boats were done on the lake, before the men would fire up the grill for the evening, we would take her Old Town canoe out on the water. Most days, before we got on the water, I would change into my pink moccasins and the Indian Princess dress that she had sown for me. There were 47 steps between the back porch of the house and the waters edge, and I almost always ran them two at a time, making it down to the shore just in time to grab the paddles out of the boathouse before Nook joined me to pull the boat off the rack.
I’d sit in the bow seat, paddling a little more every year as I grew up. She’d paddle in the back until we were out in the middle of the lake. We’d put the paddles in the middle of the boat, and I’d turn around to be facing her. Sitting in the front of that canoe, it would feel has if we had been transported to another world. She was there, with her salt and pepper grey hair and khaki skirts staring out over the water as it smoothed itself out with the fading light. It was only then that she would pull out the notebook. It was full of songs, some of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. I hate to admit it, but I don’t remember most of their names, and I remember even fewer verses and melodies. The words weren’t what made those moments so special. It was being on the water with her. Looking back now I can still see the look on her face as she looked out at the water and at the trees. This was a woman who had lived her whole life in a white collar society, but when she stepped out of that world there was something in the wildness of the pine and the water that stirred her. She could sing at the same pitch as the loons, and I would sit staring at her, absorbed by the wonder that was this woman who let the water drive her songs.
As I got older I was too busy for canoe trips out on the lake. I had moved on to other wildernesses, and was busy out stretching my own legs and voice across waters that she had never seen, and never would see. I guess in the back of my mind, I thought I could go back at any point and dig the blue and green beaded headdress out of the drawer and go down to the waters edge with two paddles in my hand, looking up the stairs and waiting for her to come down. I’ve justified it to myself by saying that she left too soon, and if cancer hadn’t been so cruel I would have had time to go back and sing with her one more time. I’ve said over and over again that it wasn’t my decision, I needed to find myself among my own lakes and trees, and that by not being able to go back it forces me forward, and that’s what she would have wanted from me.
Whatever the justification, the reasoning, the wondering was about what I should have done, instead of what I did, it’s all irrelevant. It doesn’t change the fact that the first time that I sat down at her grand piano, 5 years after the keys fell silent, I brought both my grandfather and myself to tears. She had left her hymn book open on the stand in the last weeks before she stopped being able to play. (Not that she needed a music book, she could play anything and everything by ear.) My fingers hadn’t been on a set of keys in years, but I played for close to an hour before my eyes were so bleary that I couldn’t see the music anymore and I was angry at myself for not having her gift of being able to pull music down from the universe simply by listening closely. My grandfather appeared in the doorway, and through broken sentences told me that he hadn’t tuned the piano since she died, yet it sounded perfect it us.
“I miss her”
“Me too princess, me too.”
It’s terrible, but all I wanted to do at that moment was yell to him, “That’s not my name! Sacagawea died with her! I’m just Rachel.” Or at least that’s how I felt, but I knew I was wrong. She will be eternal, as will the unnamed songs and verses that are held in the water that still ebbs from the lake to the rivers of the world.
I still go looking for her every once in a while. I start to feel like the world is crazy and that the road to sanity and order is too long to be undertaken. It is at those times that I end up finding myself standing at the shore of some vast expanse of water, just staring at the subtle movement on the surface. The fluidity is soothing and I can hear the songs that she used to sing, and I get just a little bit closer to being able to sing them myself.
