My thumb is out imitating my father. We are hitchhiking somewhere between Homer and Clam Gulch, Alaska and our trusty Toyota four runner proves not so trusty. My mother would never approve of this. A young girl and a grown man inviting the dredges of society, oft found on this great mountain framed, fireweed flowering highway. I remember the dread in my gut knowing this contradicted what we planned on this 60 degree sunny summer day. We went for a drive, I do not remember what we were after. Just the two of us. Maybe a fishing trip but I do not think so because we did not have fishing gear. Maybe I was accompanying my dad on an errand where he was giving a tool he made to a friend. But regardless, the errand now was to balance on the white line hugging the meandering road and take steps in similar length as my father. Step as in sync with him as possible. In my father’s shadow I am safe. Someone stopped to pick us up. It did not take long. No, maybe they did not. I wanted to say they stopped because who would not stop with a man and his young daughter but I do not think they did stop. The minivans, the dodge Durango’s, the untrusty Toyotas, none of them stopped. They could all hide in their metal frames of sovereign safety. They could avoid making eye contact with my dad’s tired eyes. They could not see me because I was a mime to my father’s box. If I stepped out of his sync maybe they would have seen me and maybe they would have stopped.
There are many things I do not know about my dad. My mother and I experience infinite strife. I do not wish to know of my mother today. I already know all I need to know about her. She is
A cup runneth over
When it comes to abundantly sharing her pain. Somehow the silent pain of my dad makes me want it more. I am wracked with wonder, curiosity and torment to know my father because he is in pain and he does not intend to talk about it. He spoke little of his childhood and subconsciously divided and sealed the chapters of his life into compartments,
Tight, like unto a dish.
Idaho chapter, Alaska chapter. I did not see a photograph of him as a child until I traveled to my grandparents’ house in Burley, Idaho. I was born not far from there, though I do not remember living there as my formative years were within the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska.
I was born in spring.
Probably tulips bloomed and lilacs hinted that I would be sensible, grounded and find ways When there seemed to be no ways
In a hospital like a majority of Americans.
In somewhat rural Pocatello Idaho.
They would have folded me into a tight bye-baby bunting blanket
And wiped the lanugo from my brow.
I was born without scoliosis,
Not even a trace which was unexpected.
I am a miracle.
I was born under the covenant,
Meaning my father and my mother, in addition, their mothers and fathers before me were married for
Time and all eternity, sealed in the new and everlasting covenant of God sanctioned marriage.
Their posterity is promised to them after this life. That covenant offers protection. Now I am not sure what that protection is of? The outside world?
The great and spacious building?
The others. Though now, I believe those others are not the others but simply additional people who may have been born on April 2, who also took home their babies from Bannock County Hospital. People with bills due, people who drink coffee in the morning, folks who drive into town for stamps, who voted for the other president.
Jimmy Carter was the president. President Carter attends a White House reception for the National Conference of Artists in the East Room at the White House during the afternoon. I imagine it would have been about the time I was born.
My country, blessed with hope in the arts on the day I entered. The rituals surrounding my birth were conservative, hiding the elephant in the room of how I was conceived. A baby shower with cupcakes and diaper pins instead of bows on presents would have been the symbols that brought my life. My mom repeatedly told me when I had my own babies that I should not be in any hurry to bring my babies to church, keep them away from germs and getting sick. Now, I would love that excuse to have a reason why I am not accountable to go to church but then, young and full of light and wanting my people to see my baby, my contribution to the world, I wanted to go back to church, and soon.
I imagine the day that my father blessed me with his father and my mother’s father in a circle, surrounding me dressed in a beautiful silky lace white dress- my blessing dress. It is in my closet and all of my three daughters were blessed in the same dress. The same lace eyelet holes did each of their French-fry fingers get entangled in. My father would have, much to my pretend-humble mother’s dismay, would have lifted me in his strong arms after
He gave me a name and a blessing,
Elevated, like a sacrifice being offered to the people. For my membership in the Mormon Church community would translate into a place where
Sealed in the new and everlasting covenant
My time, talents would be for the upbringing of the kingdom.
Let the community see me, let light shine through my two-layered sheer dress and see my innocence. Think of Jimmy Carter appreciating art across the country and look at me, being art within the country. Later I would write plays, poems, silly songs, and think my picture on the wall in the 4th grade was the most creative of the whole class. I would be filled with self-confidence and optimism and it all started with my dad displaying me in my white blessing dress for the Pocatello ward and henceforth,
The World.
He lifts me, in pride, not humility, for I am worthy of showing off. My mom looks down, dismayed to have her baby girl “shown off”…
It’s not proper.
Too braggy.
Is it bragging when you are wonderful?
When you are as wholesome and pure and worthwhile as water?
No.
My father and mother were always on opposite sides of the seesaw pendulum.
My father, directly proud of me.
My mother, indirectly embarrassed of me.
I was too showy, ostentatious and the older I got, the more see-through I became.
We are climbing in the Idaho mountains where there are no mosquitoes and no wild brush. Once, 50 years ago somewhere here my father’s treasure chest was hidden here.
In the box, in the mountains he hid an Indian head penny, real Shoshone arrowheads and $20. He hid it in the mountains before his mission. He left the Idaho mountains and was
Called to serve
On a two year mission in service of his church where the expectation was he would return brainwashed, straight arrow soldier
Enlisted ‘till the conflict was over.
He goes where he is called.
Many are called and few are chosen.
Jokes on them, he remained an independent thinker. I learned rumblings that sounded like a rock rolling down the mountain on a digital recording interviewing my aunt. She says my dad, her brother, called home when he would heighten anxiety. And talk to mom who would mellow him down. He was a young man of 21 years and in shape. He was a Karate black belt, disciplined and pursued the art to defend self and others. He had normal, excess energy that a 21 year old young man should. He would lift weights. He acquired gym equipment and exercised.
He should not have.
No, no, no he did wrong, and evil.
He shouldn’t call home.
He should not release energy.
His treasure chest waited for him, silently in the dust of the mountains,
In the cold of the summer, winter, fall, autumn, summer, winter, fall and autumn.
What should he do?
Return to the box.
The box was his.
Contained, certain, made of fine and unique craftsmanship.
Joints bound with precision and certainty.
Wood glue that sang between the finger joints like the meandering Snake River.
I wonder why he hid that box.
I asked him once.
He said, to hide it. To return to it. Or something grand like that.
Was there finer meaning in his staccato response?
A box contains the story.
He retrieved the box, in a solo trek up the mountain.
He found the coordinates only he had marked and dug the grey fertile soil and found it. Shoshone arrowheads, Indian head penny – the one he stole from his mother and she taught him not to steal. And the $20. What did he spend it on? A date with my mom? Root beer and a hamburger?
I am 18 and before I graduate my dad disappears often. Not uncommon but on my birthday, before graduation he gives me a shellacked Alaskan birch treasure hope chest he made with a machine he made that makes finger joint notches. The inside is lined with cedar.
What do I put in it? Then, a quilt from my great, great aunt, pink and white hand stitched, my country goose bookends. Now, stamps that I bought for my daughter’s graduation, leftover paintings in glass frames that travelled from the west coast to the east coast and I cannot recall what else. The latch is jammed from careless movers and I cannot open it. How long will it stay sealed?
Summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, autumn, spring summer.
And then my son –
Will go on a mission
For two years and what will his box be?
He will call home, though, he will be permitted to heft weights. Change is good. Progress is divine but the darkness, the unknown feeling in the box during the wait of why things are the way they are dims my optimism.
High On a mountain top a banner is unfurled. Ye nations all look up and bow to all the world.
If I was a mountain in my womb I would have my father’s metal box buried within me. It would be the compartment that Elijah, Sunny, Moses, Adrianna, Rainbow and Phineas inhabited. Elijah was named for my father, Elijah Kent, my father, Kent Jaye. My father buries his stories, his wounds and his words. Like a knotted tree that protrudes from the side of Lake Cleveland’s mountainside, its roots hold it in tact. There are few unsettling events here. Few earthquakes. Plenty of capacity to stay hidden, buried.
A family fits neatly into the family Christmas card. Each member receives 25 words injected with what it was each “enjoyed” and mentions of gardens that were grown, noteworthy mentions include zucchini, moose that ate the peas get greater energy than the wayward “liberal” daughter who wears fancy clothes now and does not use cash to pay at the local Nikiski oil field funded pool. If there was anything unsavory, traumatic, that will not be permitted in your word count detailing your year’s advent.
There will be an obligatory photo with fake ass smiles but you can see the swollen eyes of my drunk father.
I can see the Bell’s palsy on my mom. Her face betraying the carefully coiffed image of
All Is Well In Zion
She projects,
Sincerely, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Christenson’s
Who are presently glancing up at the Aurora Borealis. Strangers standing stoic aside one another. Devoted to giving you the jean jacket off their back. Guaranteeing your arms are full of rhubarb jelly harvested from the abundant garden Dad pruned and fertilized seeking solace from the rain, tin, clatter, datter sounding like reindeer rapping on the roof 10 years overdue for repair.
It must wait for there is secret booze to buy,
Decorations to emulate that Mom learned about from religious watching from you tubers.
$32 from the after Christmas sale spent on gift tag stickers, Russel Stover’s chocolates, a brillo pad and some kind of dangling contraption to hang, wishing you Happy Holidays.
Only happy holidays, no room for happy-day-after-holidays.
Can we talk about what makes us unhappy, makes us feel unseen and sad?
Why of course we can go there as long as we positively share it in 25 words.
Where is there?
There is the last jolt from a skipping rock on Rainbow Lake. Remember when we would drive endless north, even past Bishop’s Creek and finally we would get there? The car smelled like grease from Dad’s machine shop. There it smells open and liberating and like I have no more homework due. No writing deadlines exist. No polished product is at the end-gold pot. I wonder what it would be like to write and enjoy it. It might be like Grandma’s driftwood string mobile on the back patio. It came from a shop in Homer, next to the ham sandwich Subway that crisps of onion and sea salt. What understanding comes from observing and noting in written word what is on the edge of the sunset kissing the Kasilof Ocean? I became a woman, barefoot, playful and happy on that land. I love my land partly because my dad loved his land so it feels proprietary to love it the way he did.
I am finding, though, that my love of land is more in expression and less in retention.
Water seeps from a clam hole dent in the slick mud telling me there is more beneath the silty surface.
What is underneath?
What is there?
I am a bird with light downy pointing Indian arrow feathers towards the light
That you mustn’t go too close to
Like Icarus, the wax will melt
And make a candle from residue
Whose light shines closer
Whose heat warms the inside of my hand
And the glow of the flame
Glints in the sun
Like an arrowhead on the gray, blue Magic Valley soil in the Wrigley mountains
My dad bends over with the heaviness of 64 years
And with the youthfulness of his grandson, Phineas
He hands the trophy to him
What Phineas will do with it is up to him
For now it resides in a crumpled, crisp water bottle with obsidian flint flakes
It will be made into something to display
In our new home, someday, our home in the South
Where we know no one
Like Icarus soaring close to the sun we wonder and stargaze
Believing that sweet, southern hospitality
Will bless our little soul
I can see my father, my son, myself
But I cannot know my father, my son
I cannot be the sun that melts their wax
But I can smile in that warm, settling smile
I can
Shannon April Milliman…formerly Christenson – is a girl. She does not identify as a woman but as a fearless, fun, flying, freckle-faced, Chatty Cathy who has been kissed by sunshine, had dirt in her torn off nails and who asks her daddy too many questions. Her name is resonant of an Irish melody, imagine a girl frolicking along a grassy knoll, balancing on cobblestone and gingerly stepping on a rock fence. She was born in the springtime and she is a rebirth who gives new life to those in her path. She shines and people notice it. They find themselves cast in her shadow. At times they are jealous of her brightness. At times they wish she would stop singing off key about the Shenandoah River that she should have been named on behalf of, Shenandoah was not her name because Shannon’s mother thought that would be ridiculous. Shannon’s father knew it would have suited her soul just fine. But it is ok for she did not need a grand name. She had a grand psyche that was filled with jades, emeralds, gold and silver from her father who insisted she was
A beautiful daughter of Zion,
Convinced her she was disciplined, diligent and wonderful and meant for living like an angel, soaring, flying, flittering, taking shelter to write her impressions, to document her observations, to capture history and her story.
It is Shannon April Milliman’s life work.
She did not know she could or should have kept her maiden name – Christenson.
But she would have liked to know that the girl has experienced womanhood.
She would like to connect and claim her father’s line with a quick labeling identifier.
But as a girl
She lacked wisdom, and upbraideth not
And brushed aside such modern, feminist convention for expecting a simple, conservative life finding joy in baking bread and washing laundry would bring.
Milliman is her husband.
Who is she?
Where is her identity?
Her 7 letters starting with the sound of the ocean, the wind, and the rain, shhhhhh.
It is enough to move mountains, calm the seas and change the course of history.
Shannon is enough of a name.
That Shannon – breaking leaving her father when he couldn’t leave me. I did not know why or what and what parts of my father were severed.
She is 19 and she knows she is her father’s savior.
She saves him more than her mother, his wife.
More than the others.
But she does not have all the tools yet.
Or the words.
And even when she has them, she is so afraid.
She remembers dad squinting his eyes and telling me he would manage, would get along.
And between now and then there was a void.
Tell me about her.
She is happy.
She knows what she wants.
She is future.
She wears size nine jeans that dad let her pick out at Lamont’s.
The cute ones. The expensive ones. Who am I?
Innocent like Hidden Lake.
Naïve like Fuller Lake Trails.
Triumphant like jumping into Mackey Lake fully clothed with my best friend.
Unencumbered by garments that bind her crotch and roll up over her midriff.
She is full the way that the pathfinder is on a Saturday morning garage sale-ing with mom. She has two more years of college and a fiancé by her side. She lies about the bands she knows. She pretends she has a fresh perm and cat eyeglasses and will wear her Mother’s 70s style wedding dress. She doesn’t know yet that her shoulders have grown too broad, like her strong dad’s and it won’t fit. She doesn’t know yet that she will grow strong of core and temperament and outgrow her dad. Why is she even finding these details? What is she? She is calm, optimistic, pulsed by the ebbing and flowing of the tide by the moon. She has never pulsed, ebbed, or flowed to Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower with her lover. But she will. She has crocheted finger chains that decorate the nails halfway through her bedroom where the heart striped wall paper meets the stained wood her dad artfully secured. She lies on her country goose bedspread and looks up at the heater register thinking and hearing her father snoring in the bedroom above.
There is this picture of me. I think it is my birthday and I am wearing a floral patterned top with a lace, type embroidered collar and it has shoulder pads. One inch shoulder pads is a lot for a 12 year old girl with a wiry, snake-like frame. A girl who really is a girl, pre-pubescent. All the other girls are whispering about their periods and their bra sizes and I don’t want any of it but I want the street cred of being normal and looking like the other girls my age. I am a pancake and they are muffins. We get film developed every week or two. Mom looks forward to picking up the disposable camera she dropped off at Fred Meyer photo booth counter. She picked up a roll today and I browsed through the pictures. A few shots I smile at and one where my head is cut off. In this era, my mother, the usual photographer, always cut my head off, sometimes just an inch, sometimes my whole head. Making me think it must be extremely difficult to get such a grotesquely huge and gangly beast in the frame. Thumbing through the pictures, the glossy sheets stick to my thumbs. I remember the birthday cake and Clinton in the background doing a cartwheel. It was a good day. When dad comes home from work Mom tells him she got pictures developed. After he bathes the machine shop from his pores, one time or two the door wasn’t closed all the way in the bathroom and I see my large, imposing, hairy father. I can’t see everything but he has no clothes on. He is clean and dressed in his less dirty, still smells like metal red and black flannel shirt and ripped jeans. He sits down and thumbs through the pictures just like I did, only he does not smile. He stares and says to mom, nearby. I am nearby but I am invisible. “Shannon is starting to develop,” he says of that one picture of me in that floral shoulder pad shirt. I am not starting to develop. It is that shirt. It does not fit me and it presents a false positive and I want to be
Neither seen nor heard.
I want to un-exist. I want to act like that comment is neither portant or important. But it is. He could not tell from that shirt that my right nipple had buttoned and I was extremely worried that I would only have one nipple. What was the deal with the other side? Could I just go back to my 11 year old birthday party? I am sure with a little scrounging I could rummage through the Kodak photos in the kitchen cupboard and replace these photos with those. But in developing, you cannot go back. You cannot un-develop the light, reverse the silver from settling in the dark room. You have to let the toner do its thing and try to figure out how being visible is a good idea…
It’s the same old story. Me not understanding my father. Me realizing that maybe I do understand my father. In the twitter of the birdsong, a melody that sings when uncaged. My father said one Christmas Sunday that he cannot sing anymore because he is a caged bird. Over and over I turn the conversation in my mind. How I tell him what I knew, what I understood, that you have to apply meritocracy theory to the metaphor.
All you have to do is pull up those bootstraps,
Remember, Dad, it is what you taught me. I am self-reliant, you are self-reliant but what happens when all that resilience snaps. What happens when the shelf breaks and the meritocracy is not real? That you need to be a free bird, that you also, simultaneously need each other? Dad says he only needs the land, he doesn’t need people. With his boundless laugh that sounds like water rushing against glacier smoothed rocks and spring watercress he says, “Isn’t that funny, that I miss the land more than the people.” He says, of the land,
“To some it is everything, to others it is nothing.”
It is his profundity, what he has built his life around. But he left that land in hopes that the meritocracy was true. That he could leave and lay claim to an acre of land in Soldotna, Alaska,
Upon a hill, as a light unto a bushel
That house 1600 sq. feet started out as two bedrooms but
With the sweat of his brow,
It became four. And next to it he exercised animal husbandry with a sound chicken coop and created a 12 x 12 cabin from logs and a machine he built himself that fashioned finger joint notches. It took many shapes, Karate studio, Brent, my brother’s bedroom and place where, much to the dismay of my parents, his hiding place for drug paraphernalia, his abode where guitar was strummed and he played for thousands of hours. He toiled sunup to sundown, and dark up to dark down, in Alaska, where the midnight sun only comes out in the summer and in the winter it is a depressed lair of darkness. Now I know my father experiences what you would clinically call “debilitating depression” and then I only knew he was quiet, “a man of few words” and when he spoke, he spoke like a legend, a fable, and a moral at the end like an Amos tale. He, like me, wanted a happy ending, a reason for things. But there are more frequent than not, no reasons for things. There is no reason why his wife, my mother refused to drive. You could say she got spooked, had a phobia. All people would ask me and him “why?”- Why would they ask us? We had no clue. I ask her, she brushes it off with a nervous giggle and a side-splaining response. Much like the definition of gas-lighting you hear, these days. You ask and she somehow makes you feel that you are in error for existing, asking. So, in this mythical meritocracy it assumes all people have similar ability, income, and opportunity. The gospel of opportunity, progress.
You will be blessed for your righteousness.
But you won’t be.
God loves you.
And he has a funny way of showing it. And you hang on to some brittle and moldy philosophy that you must and will stay married to this woman for duty’s sake. You made a commitment. You are a man of your word. You will take your word to your grave. Only one time you let the shelf fall and you decided to speak from the grave, before the grave, and you told me, your firstborn, your secret, you, my father, put it on a document on a computer and learned to save the file to a usb stick and you gave it to me under bathtub rock at the City of Rocks and I accepted it like a priesthood offering. You told me, my father, wistfully, winsomely, that you had not breathed a word of this to another soul. I would be the first. You called it a Demon. You told me you tried to bury it but it boiled up the way secrets do, painfully, agitating, like the second round in the rock tumbler you gave me when I was 12 and I never completed.
I held your treasure and I wondered what it was.
I felt privileged; I would be the receiver.
I felt scared, unsure I would react the way I should.
Remember when you gave me on my 18th birthday a handmade, Alaska birch chest with cedar inside and you didn’t think I showed gratitude?
Will it be worse than that?
Am I ready?
No one is ever ready.