We are each born for a purpose, each with tasks to accomplish. My aunt Shirley’s was to remember by heart and teach by rote, mine to learn by rote and remember by heart. With Shirley gone, one of these days the time will be right for me to become the teacher. I will choose someone who, like me, might not know, at first, why. When my daughters were still little girls and we lived in Mesabi, just about an hour from my cousins who lived at Mozhay Point Reservation, my aunt Shirley began to call me long-distance from Duluth, sometimes every couple of weeks, sometimes every couple of months, not much before the ten o’clock news, and after the kids had gone to bed. This was during the years that Stan thought I was the stupidest woman in the world, and so I worked at a series of jobs, sometimes at the hospital switchboard, sometimes at the drugstore, sometimes at the concession stand at the movies, and started to take classes at the community college, too, all to try to show him that I was not a complete zero, except for my drinking, and that wasn’t too bad most of the time.
