Thursday in Fairbanks

We ate moose soup and thick yeasty rolls with butter and blueberry jam. It was our lunch with the elders at Denakkanaaga in Fairbanks.

We are on a study tour of Alaska above the 65th parallel. The trip starts in Fairbanks, goes to Denali, then Nome, further north to Teller and then to Anchorage. We’re traveling with ten other people and two group leaders. All of us are in varying stages of being old.

After lunch, Anna Frank stood up, rested her arms on the back of a straight-backed chair, and with her hands folded, never moving, she described her life as an Athabascan woman. She did this as if speaking a special language of understatement. Nothing was trumpeted. Not her family’s moving with the seasons or her not being able to go to high school because there wasn’t one in her village. Her accomplishments were dropped softly like crumbs from her pocket. Her GED, her work as an educator and counselor, her community work, and finally that she had become an Episcopal priest. All the while she stood still, laughing lightly sometimes, like when she recounted her husband responding with “Go for it” when she told him she had been asked to become an Episcopal priest. “Only God could put such words in a Native man’s mouth,” she said.

I looked around at our group. How many of us would tell our stories this way, just lay out our quilt on the table and point to this square, then that one, and then decide when it’s enough and fold up our quilt and smile? Could I do that? Could I just be plain spoken about my life and not try to add fancy stitches and sequins? Just allow the facts of it to stand on their own?

Maybe, someday, not yet.