Learning to learn generosity of spirit

I have been reading Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resistance, by Monique Gray Smith. The book came from Richard Van Camp, who seems to have a talent for getting the right book into the hands that need it. It's too bad this fictionalized memoir, published just this year, hadn't been around when I was teaching Native students and Native literature courses on a regular basis. It might have given me a better window on the fuller range of things getting in the way of "success" for so many otherwise capable students--things like just plain fear and loneliness which are common enough for all first-year students, but come from a different history of exclusion and a different set of expectations about what "inclusion" means.

The story begins with Tilly as a child, not yet embarked on her years of alcohol abuse and recovery. She tells an innocent story of the day she went to her first movie, complete with popcorn, when the family was snowed in at Medicine Hat one night while trying to get from Kamloops to Regina on the way to visit family. That story of the movie woke me up to something I had forgotten about my own childhood--something so ordinary it was something to overlook and to take for granted. In Tilly's story, that would have been maybe 1974 or 1975, but suddenly I was back in the airbase theatre at Claresholm, in the mid-1950s.

Saturday afternoon matinee was a ceremony in many parts. It always began outside the theatre, with the rituals of the line-up outside the white two-storey wooden-sided theatre with dozens of other kids, If you let friends into the line, you had to let them in in front of you. If you let them in behind you, there would be a squabble from the ones behind.
           
The age demographic as I recall it ran from five or six years old on up to probably twelve. I don't recall any of the "teen-agers" spending their important time with us on Saturdays. Too many important adolescent things to do. Or maybe there were some parents of some of the littler kids around, so no freedom to play the role or throw their puny weight around.

The door would, and we would go our adult-supervised way past the ticket booth: 15 cents (just noticed--there is no key on this computer with a cents sign. Probably none on any of my computer keyboards. Just not useful enough to waste the space on, not when you can have a tilde.) Line up for the concession stand (as the candy counter was rather grandly called). Popcorn or a chocolate bar: 10 cents. Enter the hall--and leave adult supervision behind--no place here for grown-ups. Find an empty seat in the usual area with siblings and friends.

Wait for "the man" to walk down the aisle to great cheers to open the curtains. "The man" was sometimes my Dad, sometimes the Dad of one of my friends, since the movie house was operated by off-duty servicemen earning some extra cash or learning a possible trade for after their enlistment. Because Dad was the projectionist, Bobby and I got in for free (though sometimes the ticket man did not know that, so there would be an anxious moment as we had to explain the rules to the "New Man"). Because we got in free, we got only a dime each for popcorn or chocolate bar.

Watch the program, in a scene a bit like the kids' show scenes in Cinema Paradiso, though fortunately, Saturday afternoon matinees rarely featured a romance. Usually some kind of adventure movie--a western, a scary trip into some jungle, sometimes a Disney, but not often--we got mostly "B" movie offerings at best. To get Disney in first run, we had to go all the way into town (probably all of five or ten minutes away, but it seemed forever, that trip into town) to the local movie house.

The funny thing is, I can't recall pretty much any of the Saturday matinee movies, except for some comedies--Abbott and Costello Meet Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and one or more Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" movies. Imagine my surprise years later to catch up on some of these on late-night tv, and find out about Dorothy Lamour, who had been there all along.

But the movie itself was only part of the reason for gathering, and the final stage of the program. First was the cartoon. Probably Woody Woodpecker or some Loony Tunes thing. I recall one about an orchestra, playing some symphony. Doesn't sound great kids' stuff, but the musicians were all dogs, matched to the instruments. In mid-movement, a little Scottie came muttering in through the stage door, all bundled up, took of coat, gloves, scarf, muttered his way into the back row of the percussion, opened his little black instrument case, tingggged a triangle once, on cue, reloaded his instrument case, muttered his way off the stage, re-dressed, and left, still muttering, out the stage door. Hilarious, apparently. At least we all laughed.

Then the serial. This was usually something about a running battle between white adventurers and insidious African or Oriental heathens trying to protect some lost treasure from the collectors to whom it rightfully belonged. Or some crime-busting hero making the back alleys of the city safe for whatever one needed safe back alleys for.

Then the movie. On Saturdays, I seem to recall, the theatre dispensed with the traditional National Anthem to open the program and "God Save the Queen" to end it. We were probably making too much noise for "Oh Canada" once we saw "the man," and were already stampeding for the exits once the closing credits started to roll. We had been making some predictable racket all through--certainly at any of the dull parts. If anybody talked when the hero was doing heroic things, there would be a round of "Shut ups" ring the theatre: the first was aimed at the talkers; the next few were aimed at the "shut-uppers." If things got really boring (or mushy), then flattened cardboard popcorn boxes began to fly, prehistoric frisbee fashion.

But what were the titles? What were the actual movies? Can't recall. And that is curious, since they all, one way or another, formed my pre-teen world view, or tried to. And they must all, forgotten in detail though they may be, must still occupy some foundational space in my more recently un-accessed mental storage cells. If I am not remembering them, I might even be actively forgetting them, putting them and their simplified lessons abut good and evil away where they belong for now.

Getting back to Tilly.  Her first movie was not a western; it was something forgettable to all but her--The Apple Dumpling Gang, a predictable Disney comedy about three orphan kids striking it rich in goldrush California--but Tilly's upbringing seems to have been circled, wagon-train style, by fans of the westerns or at least of the anti-red-skin sentiments that they normalized. In spite of the lessons right in front of her of educated, professional and gainfully employed members of her own family, including a university-educated grandmother who nonetheless taught her all sorts of useful knowledge of traditional resources, medicines, Tilly had to walk a painful road to learn to appreciate positives in her own abilities and cultural background.

She had to learn those lessons partly to undo the damage from public insults like the snarled advice to her mother, "Goddamn squaw. Get control of your kid or go back to the reserve. Back where you belong. And stay there." The fact that the full-grown man had walked into the child and knocked the wind out of her did not seem to enter his calculation. That was in Kamloops in 1974--so that grown man would have been part of my generation, in all likelihood, albeit maybe a slightly older member of it. Raised in the certain knowledge he was in the right whenever two "racially different" citizens collided. Certain in the knowledge he had the right of way in any public space over anybody not like him--not white, male and bigger.

That seems to have been the lesson on any of those Saturday afternoons movie programs, one way or another: heroes were always white males. Of course, so were a lot of the villains--but they had black hair and five o'clock shadows, wore dark clothes, and hung around in dark places. Though I know for a certainty that girls were in the line-ups and therefore in the crowds at those movies, I cannot recall any movies or cartoons or serials that featured a female heroic figure. And if any were mushy girly films with lots of kissing, I certainly put them well into the vaults of locked-away memory. That's what boys learned to do.

But there is always something in the gifts Richard passes along--and the passage that resonated this morning was the advice Tilly got from her counsellor Bea, when, as a young woman, Tilly was heading to an International Youth Gathering in Ontario. Tilly was by then in AA, and unsure of her ability to function or have fun in a gathering of strangers--at least not if she were sober. Bea told her to go, have some fun and begin to get her inner wheel balanced: "Be safe on your trip and pay attention to everyone who comes along your path. You never know who'll have a teaching or story for you...or who might need one. Be generous in your spirit"  (105).

That's the catch for someone my age and in my profession--paying attention to what others (especially much younger others) might have to teach me, not what I have to teach them. It gets awfully easy to fall for the short office visit conversations over assignments, rather than to open up and listen to what the students really want to talk about. Maybe because when they do, I might have to face up to the fact that I do not have the kinds of answers they need, and the appropriate campus help groups tend to have pretty long lines already, when I try to make the referral.

Sometimes we just exchange stories. That is one form of "generosity" on both our parts. But then, it is also therapy. When I went through counselling for clinical depression, it was mostly in the form of telling and retelling my stories of a sense of failure to a psychiatrist who just mostly sat there and fed prompts to get the stories going, then would occasionally note a common theme or character across several and wonder out loud what the connection might be ?????

Prompts to bring the stories together.

Got to remember that one, more often.

It's a bit like what Keavy Martin, an Associate Professor of Native Literature, was lecturing about a week or so ago--going to Elders with questions (and a desire for answers) about Native cultural or educational practices or concerns, wondering about how or if to take up or carry on a practice. Then getting used to the answer: being told to work it out according to her own intelligence.

It's the spirit they are done in that goes a long way to establish the right or wrong of things.

Richard sets a pretty consistent model of generosity--and maybe hears questions from his friends before they think to ask them, which is why his stories resonate so widely, and he has so many to tell. He is also a pretty fair listener for one so busy.