Here is where the map should fold.
Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it
is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of
eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure
west, with brown grass and water scorings, and small outcrops.
John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley.
...
We ran one of our infrequent garage
sales last Friday and Saturday. Items sold well, and no large items
remained at the end to lug back into
the house. The large annual Indian powwow was being held, lots of
new people were in town, and residents put up garage sales signs all
over the twin towns. The reason: to get some of the Indian money, of
course. A steady stream of lookers stopped by our place on both
days, several being Indians.
I enjoyed visiting with one woman who
did something interesting. She was talking on her cell phone as she
looked at our wares, and it wasn't English she was talking. When she
finished, I asked her, “What language were you speaking?” She
answered right back, “Crow.” Sometimes a question like that can
turn sour if they think it's none of my business. But she visited
with me about it and told me she had been raised by her grandmother
who spoke nary a word of English. This lady, about 40 years old and
well dressed said, in fact, Crow is her first language. She'd rather
speak it than English, although she spoke it very well, too.
…
It's no secret I like frontier history,
and I ran into an interesting tidbit in the weekly Mandan News. They
always run a column named, “Those Were the Days,” going back as
far as 125 years to 1888. Last week this item appeared, “It is a
matter of regret that there are a few boys in town who can be
correctly called hoodlums. The latest development among them is a
desire to disturb a religious meeting in some way. Not long ago,
during a prayer meeting in one of the churches, a boy came quietly to
the door and yelled at the top of his voice 'Get the ____ outa here!'
and then ran away as fast as his legs would carry him. Such shocking
behavior would never have occurred here just a few short years ago.
Obviously, the parents of these boys are largely to blame for such
actions; lack of discipline at home is the cause.”
Having been in the school business, the
poor parents always got blamed when the kids acted up. I also know
that many hell-raisers came from very strictly disciplined
households. Things haven't changed in 125 years.
…
A few days ago our daily paper ran a
cartoon I couldn't help but clip and save. It's a single panel
cartoon showing Dick Tracy in the forefront looking at the
radio-thingy he always talked into. Now this was 60 years ago or
better when I started reading his cartoons. Anyway, here comes a
younger couple meeting him, both of them looking at the phone on
their wrists. One says, “Who's the old guy trying to be hip?”
Isn't there a line in a song that goes something like, “when
everything old is new again”?
