Passage I

Fragile Contents

The book arrived in a disappointing package. It was small and narrow, wrapped in plain brown paper. My mother's faint handwriting covered the outside. Fragile, she writes next to my address and along each of the sides, I wasn't sure, for a moment, whether she meant to warn the postal workers or me. We had waited years for the publication of this book there were very few copies. It had taken months for me to convince my mother to send me hers. The contents of this package were indeed fragile, I thought, but not in any of the expected ways.

It was a handbook of the Miami language. Published by the Miami Nation of Oklahoma. It seemed too small, too light, to contain the building blocks of an entire language, one that had lain dormant for me for over thirty years. In fact, only a few of the oldest members of the tribe remember speaking the language at all. I had expected something larger and heavier, as substantial as my Webster's Dictionary. A folded note from my mother was tucked between the pages.

I glanced and looked through the pages. Then I read about the different parts of speech, about Miami vowels and consonants. However, it was when I began pronouncing the words to myself; that I felt the true weight of the book. As I spoke, I was immediately overwhelmed with images of my great-grandfather. I remembered the way he is used to read to me when I was very young. He would point to the pictures in my storybooks, and giving things their Miami names. I remembered him pointing to a tree, a cloud, a dog, and naming them in the Miami language, giving them back to me in the language of his own childhood.

After he died, it was a language I never heard again—nonetheless, until I heard myself struggling with the words he would use so easily all those years ago, his voice coming back as vividly as if he were next to me once again, pointing to the page, guiding me.