Saturday, November 22, 2014

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I love Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries, which have been also made into an A & E TV series.  Set in Wyoming, they feature best friends Sheriff Longmire and Henry Standing Bear.  Henry calls Thanksgiving Thankstaking, and though he cooks a mean turkey is grumpy for reasons of indigenous rightousness.  I love that play on words, and it's right speech in that it corrects history and sets the record straight.  Who fed who?  Who was starving?  Who knew how to grown an abundance of crops?

A little humor in right speech takes the edge off anger and replaces it with irony.  Indians have been doing this for a few thousand years.  They play with speech, naming people and things and generally enjoy speech as an inside joke.  We like to tell a tall tale, but everyone is in on the joke.  And the butt of the joke is usually the teller, or a cousin who has a great sense of humor.  That's how we survive.

So I'm thinking, yeah, I like the meal, the whole nine yards, but I like remembering the REAL story as well.  And if they changed their minds after the first Thanksgiving and decided we were in the way, well, the joke is on them.  We're doing just fine, thank you very much.  Happy Thankstaking everyone.

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