St Paul the Etch-a-Sketch, a Mis-Adventure in Time Management

Exactly one week ago, Brooke and I woke up, looked out our second-story bedroom window, and were quite surprised to see several inches of snow on the ground with more coming down from the grey sky. We were even more surprised to see that as the day progressed, it kept snowing! (As we found out later, some parts of the Twin Cities Metro Area got as much as 17 inches!!)

Since we have fallen out of the habit of checking the weather report on a regular basis, we are often surprised by the weather. Usually, it's in a bad way: caught in a downpour waiting for a late bus, a cold snap that kills the tomatoes, the silly belief that if we just hang in there one more day (without buying an AC unit) the heat will surely break... (Last July, after 4-5 days of 100+ degrees, we finally caved and were about to buy a unit for our apartment when we had one given to us.) Last week, however, was the best surprise the weather has given us in quite a while. Church was cancelled, snow was daintily falling, Brooke and I ate a luxurious breakfast and went for a nice walk outside... before we hit the books.

That's right. Instead of having a snowball fight, building a snowman, or making an igloo we sat inside our cozy apartment and worked on homework: me on my final project of my final education class, Brooke studying for one of her final tests in her first semester of nursing school. We spent embarrassingly little time outside. (My inner child was irate, but ultimately silenced.) Winter wonderland a certainty, cross-country skiing and other snowbird fun got put off.

Exactly one hour ago, Brooke and I woke up, looked out our second-story bedroom window, and were ready for what we saw. I had actually read the weather reports this time. A bleak day with warm 40 degree rain barely illuminated my yet-unused cross country skis. What had once been over a foot of snow now looked soggy, tired - barely a few inches. St Paul the Etch-a-Sketch, with some divine hand shaking furiously.

Something is chiding me, in the back of my consciousness, saying, "It's all a big living metaphor dummy! Live life in the moment! Don't put off the things that mean the most to you! 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone!'" I guess it's true though. The amazing snowfall of last week also brought with it over 500 automobile accidents, including a few deaths, I believe. And Brooke and I are sickened on a daily basis when we read about some new senseless gun violence on the front page of the paper: a grandfather shoots his granddaughter after mistaking her for an intruder, an older man executes two teenagers who were breaking into his house, a cop was ambushed and shot to death, a road-raged SUV driver fires two rounds from his moving car into another moving car... the list goes on, and this is just Minnesota!!! (the "nice" state as we like to brag...) I didn't even have any more tears left when I read about the shooting in Connecticut yesterday.

Life is fragile and fleeting. How can I justify any time spent writing some paper for school when I could be spending quality time with my wife instead?

I will try to end this post on more positive note. Last Wednesday, riding the city bus, I did make the most of my time and my surroundings. I was zoning out, drifting between doing my daily crossword puzzle and staring out the window, when an older American Indian man sat down next to me. He said hi, and I greeted him back, but kept working on my puzzle, content not to socialize. A few minutes later, he made another comment (about it being a special day: 12/12/12 and his youngest sister's birthday) and I had a flashing moment of clarity where I realized that this man saw a bus ride as an opportunity for interesting and meaningful conversation.

So we talked - about his childhood, his grandchildren, my nieces & nephew, his passion for riding horses, him getting drafted in Vietnam. Directly, I found out some interesting things: he is Lakota and a number of his horses & relatives were featured in the film Dances with Wolves; the film itself tells the story of a different people (the Comanche??), but the Lakota were used because they could ride horses and hunt bison (better for the cinematography); he was a public school teacher for many years - of Lakota language and middle school social studies; he is a direct descendant of the one of the Lakota men sentenced to die in the largest mass execution in U.S. history* (following the Dakota War of 1862); he organized what became an annual spiritual run from Ft. Snelling in St. Paul to Mankato, MN where the execution took place.

Indirectly, I found out something even more important - something that I already knew but sometimes forget: We're all the same underneath. Though our life stories may be drastically different from those of the people around us, we can all take pride in watching our littlest family members take their first steps. And what may come off as an inherently different nature to the culturally-isolated ("Why can't those Indians quit complaining about something that happened 150 years ago?!" or "Why can't they just get their act together and pull themselves up by their bootstraps?!"), eerily becomes your own mentality if you truly stop and ask yourself, "What would I be thinking, day to day, if I - no, my whole people - were so senselessly abused, betrayed, and forgotten??"

My time on that bus was invaluable as it was interesting. And it was time not wasted or squandered, but lived.

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*We are now 11 days out from the 150th Anniversary of this horrific event. Finally, though, it seems that the White Man's historic (and present, if we're being honest - Do we seriously still have a "Bureau of Indian Affairs"?!?) atrocities are being dragged from the closet of intentional forgetfulness, and these events are getting some press. Brooke and I highly recommend this piece of excellent journalism from This American Life. Additionally, though I have yet to see it, here is an interesting documentary looking at how present day Lakota are remembering the mass execution of the "Dakota 38". (As an interesting side note, the man who sat beside me on the bus turned out to be the very same "Native spiritual leader" featured in the documentary.)