This is my neighborhood, where the lawns are parched and the dogs are plentiful. A place where people who drive electric cars have stopped watering the decorative patches of grass on their front lawns so that they can do the right thing when wasting water is the wrong thing.

It’s a place where unhoused people live along bicycle paths that lead to the beach where children play in surf that sometimes glows red. It’s where the sand is pockmarked with syringes, condoms, plastic cups, tennis balls, and discarded mylar balloons that wash up with the tides. It is the edge of a continent in a country that I call home.

Independence Day is just around the corner. It is a day when America will once again celebrate its freedom.

When I was very small, I didn’t really understand what America was until the day my father brought me here. My mother, brothers, and I were not born here. My father’s country was a gift to us from him.

America was a great gift. It came inside a very large package of forests, mountains, and prairies. It was so large and so great that it didn’t fit inside the small history books. It burst outside the margins of the pages and right smack into my imagination.

I am an American; I was born American though not in America.

My father worked for the US Government in Europe. He was special and on a special mission to spread the good news about America to the rest of the world. I didn’t know what he did, but I knew it was so important that he couldn’t tell us. And when we found out that he worked for a secret place, with a secret plan to spread America like sweet frosting across the world, we were asked to keep that a secret too.

God was on our side.

The LIES were part of our secret mission for the greater good of America and the greater good of the rest of the world, even if they didn’t know it was good for them. We were convinced that what was good for America was good for the rest of the world.

God was on our side. God was on our money. God was in our pledge of allegiance to a flag with stars and stripes. And we believed it because it was good for America.

Before I arrived to the United States in the late 1960’s America was a story I had heard over and over. The story had a hero, usually a cowboy, a flag-waving US Cavalry man on horseback, or maybe a general with a pipe in his mouth riding in a jeep. The stories had large men, always men, because men knew how to win.

It was about winning. It was about winning battles and wars against Indians, and Germans, and wild women. It was always about taming — the environment and the natives. And about building things, railroads and highways and tall dams.

The American hero appeared to me on a technicolor wide screen.

He was John Wayne, the hard-drinking stoic man with the funny walk, who always got the girl, with a cigarette in one hand and a six-shooter in another. The Duke brawled in bars, destroyed furniture, slammed people’s heads against the wall then shot the bad guy from the hip. But, despite being a bully, I remember that the bad guy stayed the bad guy, and John Wayne was always was the good guy no matter how bad he was.

When little Audrey arrived here, she filled in the blanks to the story with bright, bold highlights.

What was America to me?

It was a large grocery store with rows and rows of food in colorful boxes.

It was Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch.

It was Toys R Us — Monopoly, Twister, and The Game of Life.

It was Barbi in a bikini and GI Joe in fatigues.

It was a purple Schwinn Stingray bicycle with a banana seat and white tassels.

America was s’mores and campfires and swimming pools at the KOA.

It was buffalo, black bears, Old Faithful, and the Grand Canyon.

It was cresting waves and jellyfish and earthworms on hooks.

It was fishing trips at the lake, sunfish, and catfish. It was toads, and snakes, and opossums.

It was the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

It was a land of dozens of television stations with soap operas after school, and game shows where people won cars and dining room sets.

It was Saturday morning cartoons and comic books named Ritchie Rich.

It was movie theaters and buttered popcorn in large tubs.

It was indoor malls with water fountains and air-conditioning.

It was Disneyland and Coney Island, Atlantic City, Bush Gardens, and zoos with panda bears.

It was station wagons and RVs.

It was clams at Howard Johnson’s and lobster rolls in Maine.

It was bagels and donuts, and Dairy Queen soft served vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate.

It was peanut butter and root beer floats.

It was baseball, shelled peanuts, and hots dogs with sweet relish. It was hamburgers and barbecues in the backyard.

America was flags and parades, military orchestras, and fireworks lots of fireworks, that lit up the night sky.

We are the land of the free and home of the brave.

America was all of that and much more.

America was the land where everything was possible.

It was where truth was told over the airwaves, on radios, and broadcast television sets by men named Cronkite and Reasoner.

Most of all, America was a dream come true where everything and anything was possible.

America was that because we believed in it. We were in this together. We could do it. We could always make better things. We made the cars larger, the buildings taller, the airplanes faster, and the bombs bigger.

We are the land of the free and home of the brave.

We are the home of the brave police officers who stormed into a 4th-grade classroom and shot the bad guy.

We are the brave people who learned how to integrate people of color and people of different cultures into our schools, into offices, into neighborhoods, and into the stories we tell about ourselves.

We opened our hearts to embrace anyone who feels oppressed by gender definitions and the restrictive nature of a patriarchal system.

We are the ones who let people marry whomever they love.

We let everyone have equal opportunities and ensured that no one person runs away with the prize because we level the playing field.

We value humanity over profits.

We are the Americans who bused people to the polls, sent everyone mail-in ballots, made early voting accessible, and held elections on days where every citizen could easily participate in democracy.

We are the ones who build houses for people so that they can live with dignity and possibility.

We proudly help those who were confused or mentally and physically challenged as we reached out to them with a helping hand.

We secured a universal system of healthcare so that no one would ever not be able to go to the doctor or dentist in fear of going bankrupt.

We made universities and vocational schools free of tuition to everyone.

We are the ones who knew how climate change was killing our beautiful country and the planet, causing fires and floods and unusual storms. And we took action and reduced our carbon footprint before it was too late and we lost America the beautiful.

We let women make decisions about their own bodies so that they could also dare to dream they could do anything and then do it.

We broke molds in order to let people live in freedom as we tell this beautiful story that is America.

We knew how important it was to get this right because we are Americans.

Because America is the greatest place you could ever imagine?

Or was I just dreaming?

I saw a man with a gun once. It was just the other day. He pulled it out of his pocket to show me.

“It’s titanium,” he said, “I carry it everywhere. I once showed it to a group of German campers and it scared the living daylights out of them,” he said with a smirk.

I can relate to those Germans because right at this moment I had to stop myself from dropping my jaw in disbelief. A guy with a gun was standing not six feet away from me. To hide my shocked expression, I turned away to look at the orange poppies growing under the Sugar Bush next to my tent. When I saw his gun, I was suddenly torn out of my comfort zone, out of my false sense of safety, right back into the violence that’s out there, a violence that should not be here with us at this quiet campground. The gun was a like foreign object tossed at our complacency while we were all having fun sharing stories and some beers in the great American outdoors.

My camping chair was just a few feet from a fire pit that crackled and snapped as the flames burst open the dried sap-filled logs. The campground burned down a few years ago, along with many of the multi-million dollar mansions in this part of Malibu, California. There’s still the presence of the raging wildfire right on the other side of a sycamore tree, right where everything was still charred by the inferno.

It was great to get away for the weekend. Sleeping under the stars while being lulled to sleep by the ocean swell that was breaking just a few hundred yards from where we camped, was my kind of idea of relaxation. This place felt far away from everything that was happening in this world, from the news, and from the flashing headlines telling us about the latest gun massacre.

I was glad to be far away from the barrage of information pumped out at us from the radio, television, and internet feeds. Away is what I needed. In my real life, I live inside those events. My day job had trauma and bad news written all over it. I was a television news producer.

“I think everyone should be carrying,” he said as he tapped the outside of his shorts’ pocket where his titanium handgun lived. “I would feel safer if everyone carried.”

His smile and friendly face hid a darker part of who he was and what he was saying. He was the good guy with the gun. He was a retired cop. I couldn’t believe my ears that an ex-cop would be saying this to us. He must know that guns in the hands of bad people kill people.

Maybe his life inside prisons and out on the hostile streets running towards that danger we all run away from made him fearful. Did those bad guys turn him into something I don’t want police officers to be, afraid of? If he was afraid, how should I feel about what I see out there?

I know one thing, I wouldn’t trust myself to have a weapon.

Me and guns? I don’t think so. I could just see myself now pulling out the gun to threaten my husband if he wouldn’t take out the trash. Perhaps I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger if I was triggered by the right situation.

They say many of the gun injuries and deaths involve domestic disputes. If everyone had a gun there would be more funerals than divorces.

I decided to challenge my cop friend.

“Answer me this question, why didn’t those cops go into the school?” I asked him. “What was that all about?” I said turning my camp chair in his direction and staring him straight in the eyes.

“I think they were afraid of the bad guy with the gun?” I smiled cynically.

He lifted his leg onto the picnic table. A hummingbird buzzed his neck. He swatted at it and it flew off to find a sweet wildflower to suck on hiding beneath the burned trees. My friend adjusted his black beanie that covered his bald 62-year-old head and said, “It has everything to do with Defund the Police.

What did he mean by Defund the Police and Uvalde? Didn’t the Uvalde police department have more armored vehicles and body armor with an arsenal of high-powered weapons than most small towns? They seemed fully funded.

“It’s really messed up how Defund the Police has changed the police departments in this country,” he said. “It’s affected them. I blame it all on Defund the Police.”

“Oh come on. You must be kidding me. You’re telling me that guys who are trained to run into the line of fire to “serve and protect” were spooked by that bogus slogan?”

Defund the Police was a fringe movement that was not supported by the majority of Americans. A majority of Americans had no desire to defund their police departments. I believe Defund the Police stayed alive as a political tool to get Americans scared that anarchy was standing at the gates. But how could it explain the actions of the Uvalde cops?

“The cops really can’t do their jobs after Defund the Police became a thing,” he said while he adjusted his shorts which were sagging with the weight of that handgun.

“All I know is that I am ready. I have a closet full of ammo, I’ve got thousands of rounds so I’m ready no matter what happens,” he said.

I knew I needed to stop right there or this conversation would roll off the rails of civility. Someone else should k up the conversation. But all the other campers were still stuck back at “we have an armed camper in our midst!” I was waiting for them to catch up yet and help me out but they all stared in the fire to avoid a confrontation with this guy with a gun.

My mind wandered away from this campsite for a moment. Why the hell does he have a closet full of ammo? I pictured this hall closet in his nice suburban home just east of Pasadena, and a wall of boxes filled with shiny bullets.

Then I looked at his neighbors and all their neat tract homes lined up in a row. I saw their groomed front lawns and two-car garages hiding a sinister truth. They all had closets filled with boxes of bullets. Their backyard pools were filled with bullets. There were bullets everywhere.

And my mind wandered across state lines. I saw the bullet casings of the Uvalde shooter’s gun covering the laminate floor of the small elementary school. The shells pilled up under the desks lay against blood-covered green high-top tennis shoes and on top of canvas backpacks, and, the pool next to the bodies of the children who would still be alive if it weren’t for all those bullets.

The flames were subsiding now it was ready to cook our brats and open another beer.

I stood up and bent over the grill and threw the brats right onto the center of the grill. The cool dogs sizzled when they hit the iron grate.

I stepped over to the table and grabbed my sharp camping knife and cut into the fresh buns getting them ready to hold my grilled brats. I opened a packet of mustard. As I tore at the plastic pack some of the yellow sauce shot out and hit the bottom of my friend’s shorts right where his gun was hidden. I looked up at the face of this man with the gun.

He smiled and rubbed the mustard off.

“That’s alright, accidents happen. It wasn’t your fault,” he said as he adjusted the killing machine in his pocket.

Please Give Us Back Peace

Because all I hear is crying, can you hear it too?

Emotions are on high alert like the nuclear arsenal that Putin has put at the ready. War is living amongst us like an unwanted visitor.

The whole world is tense and living in a state of wide-opened mouthed disbelief that something like this could happen again in Europe.

As if war was a distant concept that lives somewhere else, in the deserts, and jungles, not amongst pine and oak trees, or on the streets with ornate filigree-crested facades of pink and yellow baroque buildings. War happens on dirt roads, not BMW-lined boulevards with outdoor cafes and shopping centers.

I saw a photo today in the newspaper of a smoldering tank, or maybe it was just an armored vehicle. In the photo’s foreground was the body of a soldier who looked like he was holding a rifle. The caption mentioned the city in Ukraine, Kharkiv, but nothing about the dead man or woman. The body was a feature that underlined the horror of the scene, yet there was no mention of what we were actually seeing.

I immediately felt horrible for his family. Someday he will be identified, and this picture will be something they will see. I can only imagine how they will cry over it, then fold it up, and place it in a drawer with other things of his — his high school graduation photo, his enlistment papers, his medals, and of course, his death certificate.

As I write these lines, my eyes well up with tears. I am triggered like so many millions of people around the world.

When we see these images, we remember — like the Vietnam vet who tries so hard to hold back his overwhelm as the shudder of combat memories shoots through his body; the Marine Corps Humvee driver who lost his legs in Afghanistan in an IED explosion who turns his head away from his thoughts; the “lost boys” of South Sudan who’s scares are so deep they have no words for them, and the Iraqi taxi driver that drove me from Chicago’s O’hare airport to the city center the other day.

It was snowing, and the wind was blowing so hard the flakes were being pushed back up into the black night sky, like ashes floating above a fire. The quiet young driver had the radio on NPR low.

I asked, “Are you following what is happening in Ukraine?”

The lights of the Chicago skyline glowed orange. My windows were fogged up. My mask felt tight and uncomfortable as I spoke those words. What was I thinking? And why did I have a sense that he may have something to tell me?
“Yes. I cried last night.” the young man said.
“Where are you from?”
“Iraq. Kut, just south of Baghdad. I know war, so I cry. I know what crazy men like Saddam and Putin can do to people’s lives. I spent 2 1/2 years in a refugee camp in Saudi. War is bad. 8 years of depression. Very Bad?”

The flashing red brake lights ahead of us stopped the flow of traffic. The snow was falling hard now.
I felt caught in the conversation, like war was holding me close, straggling me. I wanted out of the cab. I wanted it all to be over. I so bad the warm comfort of Peace on this cold winter night in Chicago.

I don’t know war, but I know it very well. I grew up listening to the horrors of living through the bombing of Berlin at the end of WWII from my mother and grandmother.

I heard the stories of forced marches and saw the lash marks of torture on friends in college who survived Ethiopian-Eritrean as they were forced to hundreds of miles south to Sudan to escape.

An old boyfriend lost his mother in Algeria’s war for independence from France in 1961. She was falsely accused of collaborating; they imprisoned her, and she died in her cell, giving birth to his younger brother.

And as a journalist, I spent years and years covering the war machine and its destruction of people in the United States as we fought our wars against Terror in post 9/11 America. So I carry war with me so that I can talk about how bad it is and how we should avoid it at all costs.

Yesterday, an article in the LA Times wrote about how parents should talk about war with their young children.

• Should they openly talk about war? No. Have the children approach the subject with the questions. Hold their hands and answer them.
• Should we hide the newspaper from them? Perhaps cover the photo that shows dead people? Yes.

I spend a lot of time deep inside each and every photo. Because I will not shrink from the truth that this evil called war is living in our midst again.

I will be present, even it is painful. I will hold space for those who need to speak about it. I will hold their hand if they need it.

I will listen to taxi drivers to hear the trembling voices triggered by the events of our times.

I will cry with the world.

And, I will stand with humanity and say, please, please stop dropping the bombs.

Please give us back our Peace so that we can go back to what is most important — family, friends, a decent job, a good meal, and perhaps even a good laugh. Because right now, all I hear is crying.

My attention lifts off my morning newspaper like the steam rising from my coffee cup. It floats out of my living room window and onto my quiet neighborhood.

She stands about 4 1/2 feet tall. He towers over her, his thin, lanky frame covered in loose-fitting green coveralls. He must be at least 6 feet tall. A steady beat of a smooth R&B melody drifting out of the large green garbage truck’s open door like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. The beat is subtle and steady, like a metronome for the moment.

The scene was familiar. Every week he comes. Every week she waits. Every week she hands him a plastic bag filled with things growing in her backyard, from her trees, some persimmons, or oranges, or maybe lemons, and pomegranates. During the height of the Covid pandemic they would wear masks when they met in the middle of her driveway. Today they bump elbows, but the masks are now somewhere at the end of the line, piled high on a landfill, no longer part of the ritual of their weekly meeting.

Today they bump elbows…She understands him. He understands her.

My neighbor is a Japanese woman at least 80, maybe even 90, years old. He, is a garbage man, a working man, who takes a moment out of his busy schedule hauling our weekly refuse to connect with his friend, the elderly Asian lady. When she speaks to me, I can hardly understand her through the thick accented English that lingers even after a lifetime of being an American. But he understands her; his smile is bright as the day is sunny. She nods and bows while gesturing with her hands. He nods and bows back. He speaks her language. She understands him. He understands her.
I don’t hear the words. I don’t need to hear the words. I see their bond through the canopy of my wisteria as I watch the scene outside my front window. I begin to cry tears of joy. I am suddenly filled with an incredible sense of awe at being an invisible witness to such a perfect yet, improbable connection between these two people.

I look back down at the newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. Drought, war, Covid -19 still ravaging communities, and billionaires getting their kicks flying into outer space. The headlines disturb me. The bathtub rings around the reservoirs, like rings around a fallen tree. How can this planet survive? Fish are drowning in the puddles of toxic waste. When will our civilization cease to exist in this overheated place? Water is life. Water is evaporating. Water is gone.

The next page has a large picture of people wading in a pool to cool off in a place called “Drytown” somewhere in California, where the temperatures hit 107 in the shade. They look like human water lilies bobbing up and down in plastic inflatable lifesaving rings in chlorinated man-made ponds with concrete walls to keep in the little water we have left.

…no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on.

I turn the page. I read no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on. I flash back to memories of attending five Olympic Games as a volunteer, a journalist, and a spectator. The roar of the crowds still resonates deep inside me as if it were yesterday. The collective energy of a universal love connected the watching and the competitors and the collective breath-holding as the athletes put their entire blood, sweat, and sometimes tears into pushing their bodies to the limit.
I close the paper, but the front page screams out at me. Images of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft successfully flying 53 miles above the earth’s surface. NASA says that qualifies for outer space. Why do this? Because they can. Branson said it was 99.9% beyond his wildest dreams. What are those dreams? A life-changing experience? Is it the price tag or actually the experience that is life-changing? People will pay $250,000 to take a flight above it all in order to look back down at us. Just imagine how $250,000 could give decades and decades of food and shelter to millions of people down here on earth.

The small perfect moments that I witness daily down here on earth have a big impact on my well-being…

The small perfect moments that I witness daily, down here on earth, have a big impact on my well-being, and many of them are free. Do I really have to fly into space when I can see a flower growing through the crack on the concrete sidewalk? Or I see my two dogs licking each other’s muzzle and smiling? Or the joy when I see a hummingbird feeding from the sweat nectar inside the orange bird of paradise blooming outside my bedroom window? Or when I witness the smile on the face of a neighbor’s 4 year old riding her bike without training wheels for the first time. Or when my octogenarian Japanese American neighbor bumps elbows with a tall, smiling black man.

The man in the green coveralls rolls her two garbage bins back behind her large gate so she can fill them up again. She closes the gate behind him. He walks to his truck and jumps back inside the cab and onto the driver’s seat with a smile and his bag filled with small things. He drives away with his humanity, and I close my newspaper.

The mother covered the long black braids with a weave of pink and green ribbons. She started with the green ribbon from the point where the braid descends from the girl’s small head all the way to the tiny tips of the ponytail. At the bottom, she tied a tight knot, then started weaving the pink ribbon crisscrossing over the green ribbon until none of the girl’s braided dark hair was exposed.

The mother asked her daughter, “Why do you like to dance?
Without moving her head, the five-year-old said,

“I dance to honor my people, my traditions, and mother earth.”

The mother moved around to the front of the folding chair where her daughter was sitting and kneeled in the tall green grass. She sat eye-level with her daughter. The little pink canvas chair was inches from the door of a red Ford F150 4 x 4 pick up parked on the slope of a field in the middle of the North Dakota prairie.

Her mother said, “And what do we say?” The girl knew that her mother was testing her? She hesitated because she wanted to get it right. The girl knew the answer? It was right at the tip of her tongue. But she waited.

The sky was big; the clouds stretched their arms around the green grass below, holding time and space for this moment, holding time and space for the little sat cross-legged child. The sky also held time and space for the young mother.

The girl had long thin legs, brown and bruised from her summer play. But, she loved being outdoors, she told me.

“Also, in the winter?” I ask.

“No,” she said, “I could freeze to death.”

The wind was calm, the sky a cornflower blue, the sun hot when it peaked through the paint brushed white laughing clouds. The girl’s left leg was swinging back and forth as it hung over her right knee. The girl seemed full of excitement that spilled out of her and over the wildflower field.

On her feet were golden sandals, fit for a little princess. Her eyes were dark brown, attentive, searching for focus, waiting to engage with her mother.

She understood her role as the inheritor of the ways of a proud people. She knew what will be demanded of her. She knew she had to make her mother proud. And, she knew she could do it.

The palm-sized beaded necklace, blue and green, a scene of sky and hills, hung heavy on her tiny neck. It hung like those responsibilities she has as a descendent.

A pencil lay next to her right foot, next to the eagle sage, the holy cleansing sage of her native prairie people. She wanted to learn everything about this place, about its nature, and about living on the spot where the hills roll over her dreams at night.

She knew she must learn before it is forgotten before the land is killed by the hand of the takers. The greed is all around her now. The takers had come to lift black gold from deep below the surface. She must learn everything to know before the air is too thick with black soot of toxic flames that shot into the prairie sky –

– and before the day when the water will be too poisoned, and the fish are gone.

She loves the fish. She waited at the edge of the lake for them to come to her when she called them. She caught the fish after she greeted them and asked them if it was OK for her to take them from their place in the water. She couldn’t imagine a world without her fish.

Her mother stared at her, smiled, and asked again, “You know what we say? Don’t you?”

The girl lifted her tiny brown right fist in the air and whispered, “Mni Wiconi,” and her mother asked, “And what does that mean”?

The girl stared straight into her mother’s dark loving eyes and waited.
The little girl’s mouth open ready to say something, as she lifted her left hand and placed it on her kneeling mother’s right shoulder and said out loud, “Water is life.”

The girl knew what she had to do. The mother was proud.

More about Ashly Hall and the – Descendants Alliance.

More about Water is Life and the movement.

Voices. Values. Identities.

More stories by Audrey Stimson on Medium

• Native Americans
• Oil
• Creative Non Fiction
• Non Fiction Story
• Culture

I imagine 

    their ancestral home lands, the soils of fertile rich other places,

    of coffee, of cinnamon, of nutmeg, of ruby red peppers and spice, 

I stand.  

and …I am not able to say anything.

I look again, I see 
the shades of our past, 
the shades of our truth, 

I see the shades of America, 

I see …

    my reflection in the glass.

    I read the name and the date and the place.

I stand. 

and…I am not able to say anything.

 The jars illuminate. 

Our focused attention

    on the horrors inflicted on bodies of innocent men,

men guilty 

    of being a shade of color darker, 

men guilty 

    of being the object of

    our greatest affliction 

    to inflict unconscionable pain and suffering on 

    another human being, 

men guilty of being 

    of these events, of these places, of these crimes against them

     that will always remind

us of what America was built on,  

    the backs, the arms, the legs, the festering wounds,  

    the shackled ankles and wrists,

    the cracked skulls, 

    the broken souls,  

    and the shallow graves of the stolen people.

I stand and…

     I am not able to say anything.

I walk,     up  the memorial path along the sacred ground, 

I walk,

        under the hanging brown rusted edifice,

I walk slow.

        looking up to see the place engraved in block letters,

         Montgomery Alabama, 

        Clarke Mississippi, 

        Cooke Texas, 

        Jenkins Georgia.

places hanging above me.

    hanging there to remind me of those that died.

I stop, I see, I breathe, my heart skips a beat

    I am again standing

a witness

of a history that cuts deep into my ability to say anything.

I am still.

I am quiet.

I am here.

I am overcome with the numbing sensation of this horrible truth.

and…I am not able to say anything.