The Test

In the beginning I knew my role.  Age 11, 6th grade at Old Orchard Beach Jr. High, I took an aptitude test in the home economics room. I can still picture the galley kitchen white stove and tiny sink across from where I sewed a Garfield pillow and put a couple buttons on a shirt.  The  test was administered. I bubbled with anticipation. My people were finally ready to recognize me. The adults in my tribe said the test measured my interests and strengths. It would generate a verifiable directions for my life. An occupation that would match my great gifts with my peoples societal needs.

My #2 pencil’s aim was true. I trusted it to hover over the question and be drawn to the targeted answer. The circles, unmistakably colored in, were  deep shadows of honesty regarding which of the four was my preference. Over and over again.

That night mother and I went to her library, like we always did. She manned the front desk. I went to the stacks and in the back settled into the deep leather chair, by the stereo. I often listened to the Grand Illusion, but not tonight. I was ceremoniously silent and focused. I opened the book that made sense of my life.  It was October 1976 so fake leather of “The Indians”, from the Time Life series the Old West, was cold through my favorite polyester paints, yellow flairs with brown swirly designs from a decade before.

I read about a culture that made so much more sense to me than the one I lived in. The Indians said, “our thoughts were mostly directed toward understanding the spirits”. Me too. I could not believe someone could articulate that.  Sure, they stole horses and killed their enemies, but they understood that there was a great spiritual force, they called it Medicine. I loved that. I know it wasn’t the medicine I got from Dr Candelore, who grabbed my sack and told me to turn my head and cough. This was real Medicine and they lived by it. Thank god someone did, it’s only the most important thing in the world.

Clear Sky

The other thing I loved is that the Indians could name themselves, based on understanding their gifts. I already changed my name. In my head, I quit being Christopher Barstow, I was Clear Sky. I believed the Indians that, “within every tribe certain individuals were considered to have exceptional abilities for dealing with the spirits,” and that “certain individuals were thought to be able to exercise strong supernatural powers on their own. These were the Medicine Men.”  That’s me, that’s the job I am cut out for. I am a Medicine Man, nothing in my life is more true.

The previous summer I read, Illusions of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach and was able to master cloud vaporizing. I couldn’t make huge black thunder clouds that filled the sky disappear, yet. But give me a small to midsized fluffy cloud, out over the ocean, I could sit on the beach and concentrate right through it. The blue sky behind the cloud would slowly come through. My clouds edges would vanish, then the body wouldn’t be there any longer, the cloud would leave. Skeptical at first, I picked clouds with other clouds as reference points, mine would leave and the others were still be there. It wasn’t so much making them disappear as it was identifying with them and shepherding the clear sky behind them to come through. That was my name, Clear Sky.

The aptitude test came back and my faith in my elders was high, they are teachers. Mr Grainy sat me down solemnly in the little kitchen. He said my scores were very very high in following directions, and wanting to establish order and punctuality. I wanted to talk about my strong relationship with the spirit world and cloud vaporizing, but I was sure we would get to that.

He said, “By all accounts, Chris, you should really consider being a truck driver.” Stunned by a blunt force, the trauma of ignorance. The words, “truck driver” hit me in the chest and pushed my back in my seat, because they represented an idea so foolish, so foreign I didn’t even let them enter into me.  He continued, “You know, you’de be great at reading a map, and probably satisfied filling a truck properly…”

I righted myself, found my seat, got my head and shoulders up, he said, “You know…” but because his words were meaningless he lost his person-ness, he was like the stove and sink, part of the kitchen. I looked past him, out the window where mother father sky explained it to me, many of my people are idiots.