It comes together and then the pieces just fall apart as if the glue hadn't set and the wind was too strong.

I was only beginning to know the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver and settle in with her poetry, poems my friends have cherished for decades were becoming my new favorites, ones I snatched snippets from and quoted to others in ways of encouragement or words to inspire. She had written 30 volumes, and I was slowly turning the pages of the 3 gifted books which arrived this fall. Word was spread quickly on Facebook about her passing this last weekend, tributes were coming in between the tributes of local elders who would be buried at the same time in different places on the same day. There were lots of thoughts of loss, of people, but also the ages they had lived through, what they had all endured, the songs they knew together in their youth, the changes the world has made around the places they began and how each had seen their lives to the end.

So I waited all of 4 days to call my friend who had gifted the poetry books to me, to commiserate about the poet's death, thinking he would have had time to deal with the loss, but he had not known, I blurted it out, "she died." No, I did it, looking back even more bluntly, but as you and I have learned through our lives, there is no rewind no delete for words that leap out there and mess with someone's universe. Immediately spoken words can hang out there.
It can happen and you may have been the speaker, but also to hear a new truth, not wanted, not requested, as truth laid out there unattended.

Sorry would not begin to fix this. But look up her poetry and marvel at how easy she approaches the world around her. And somewhere in one of those volumes, this whole unfixable will be happening in nature, in the wind, found in the water. And therefore will be natural and as such forgivable. I am banking on it.

It fit so well with the book June Taylor had lent me months ago, Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The Wendell Berry who wrote much like Mary Oliver, about the nature that surrounds him and how change is coming and the must we have to pick up and carry to protect what is left of it. Jayber Crow is a novel and so far as I can tell his only one.

Reading through it, I was reminded of the world my mother grew up in along the river in Missouri, in the hills nestled with families getting by in the early 1900's hidden from the wider world. They made their lives full by doing what made their lives possible there. Growing and preserving what they grew to get them by through the winters, making enough to take to the store to trade or sell for what they couldn't produce themselves. Her family changed when the whole slew of girls were born, followed finally by the lone son. The girls would scatter as they will going to new families, creating their own. And the son, would stay and make it on the land as long as it permitted. But he too and his mother finally left the land when my grandfather died.

I grew up with the stories of that homeplace and the relations with the neighbors, the hills, the river and that setting was in my mind the whole time reading Jayber Crow who "liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day." My mother always said she pitied a person who didn't have a cold, clear river to enjoy.

We had a fabulous  Day of Service at LEAD Agency as we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A morning made full with the energy of the NEO Women's Basketball Team, fully engaged in activities we needed done to get us through the winter and into the spring garden season. We ended with quotes on banners, "I have a Dream" and another inspired by an experience one of the young women told.

That evening another man of service Harris Wofford passed away. You might not know who he was, but you have known his dream. He worked with Dr. King, was an advisor to President Kennedy and made the Peace Corps real. From 1995 to 2001 I coordinated Miami High School's Learn and Serve projects, while he was head of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Our school won a big award and Donna Webster and I went to Washington, D.C. to accept it. Mr. Wofford spoke before us so we met a man who knew the man with a dream as we went on stage. All of us are waking up and living the dream, doing the work that serves our neighbors, enriches our souls and improves this earth.

Our poets and writers have found words to inspire us to service, but Dr. King assured us that, "Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Oklahoma City is not on my usual route, never seem to get my bearings there, so I go only when it is absolutely necessary and that usually means it is a have to for the environment. Sometimes when you help a friend it can change up your plans. It just does. I had every intention of attending a meeting at the Oklahoma Water Resource Board on Tuesday morning. I was prepared to make comments about the changes to rules that agency was proposing to make to how our water bodies in the state will be protected, or not be protected by these new rules.

The meeting would be held in a room not really big enough for it, so the plan was to drop my friend off for a doctor's appointment, go quickly to that crowded meeting, wedge into the room and wait to be able to stand up for the environment and our state's waters, even while already standing, since that's what you do in a 'standing room' only space.

When we checked my friend in for her appointment we were told she would not be able to have her procedure if her "driver" was not with her when her name was called. Now who could leave? NOT ME. So we waited together and watched the time for the meeting come and pass. Friends are pretty special and to be asked to stand and wait for one, is pretty precious time, well spent. She survived and got up the next morning for the follow-up exam only to get the best of news on her results.

The brand new day allowed for time to make it to the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, a day late, but a day before the comments were officially do, to hand over in person written comments. It was my letter, but honestly most of the comments were written by Earl Hatley, our Grand Riverkeeper, who has been writing comment letters to every agency Oklahoma has and telling them 'how to' for decades, I just got to put my spin on his comments and sign my name.

It is a sweet thing to do what you came to do, even a day late. The last time I came to Oklahoma City had been for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Board Meeting and afterward I went to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and requested official records.

I am continuing to pour over pages of B F Goodrich documents from a corporation commission hearing that was held in Oklahoma City in 2012. It is a page turner. If only the hearing could have been held here in the gym at Will Rogers a block from the plant. It could have been open to the public, open for the residents, open for the former workers, their widows, their children to hear what was known and perhaps to have the chance to offer the missing pieces. The missing pieces of evidence of what happened, what was left behind so a for real cleanup could be determined. A cleanup that valued our community and the hours our fathers and uncles and grandfathers we never got to know tolerated unbearable heat and conditions we cannot fathom.

Through the documents, I have met scientists, researchers, field hands, lawyers, the corporate representatives who deny this chemical was used and call it by another name in the next sentence. Every way chemical waste could be disposed of is exposed in the documents, including, scouts honor in mine shafts on the property.

I have actually met some of the officials who work for the state who have been tromping through the muck and the asbestos filled spaces for decades. They have worked for us and been stymied by samples that failed to be collected, by conflicted recollections and the puzzle of how come benzene was where it was when the underground storage tanks were somewhere else. And the question of what really was held in those tanks and how many times the railroad cars carrying benzene spilled their whole cargo.

Our living treasures know some of these answers and for whatever reason have not been asked. I remember once in a while my dad would talk about his experiences in WWII, but he never told me about  the death and dying he must have seen. He told me about the funny things that happened and the friends he made for life. Some whose lives were shortened there in the war.

This is what we have failed to do with our Goodrichers. I have broken free lately and asked several men who have told me about their work, what they did those days and what it was like. My latest to recollect was Louis "Red" Mathia, who has been the LEAD Agency Board President for almost our whole existence.  He described his work, the heat, told some of the most tragic things he saw occur in the plant and went right into the fun and camaraderie  that filled in around those times, that made our Goodrichers practically brothers for life.

I hope you will come to our next LEAD Agency meeting January 31, or come especially at 6:30 pm, when we want you to have a chance to meet our board President. Let's start these conversations by listening.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

 
Meet LEAD Agency's
     Board President
  Louis "Red" Mathia

What will be the longest government shutdown settles in and those federal workers who are non-essential shift in place wondering what is not being done, how they will catch up on the work that is stacking up that the government thought was important enough to hire them in the first place to do. The paychecks they were counting on will not arrive and their bills go in arrears.

The government is shut down for political reasons.

This shutdown is not a strike. They are different. The workers have not walked off the job. It's been awhile but we have had strikes held in this area. 

In 1935 the mine workers in Ottawa County and into Kansas held a strike that closed the mines down. Our miners worked in some of the worse conditions in the country. They were hoping to improve their conditions by shutting down the mines and were led to believe the International Union would help get them by during the strike, but the help didn't come. Then the mining companies organized their own "worker's union" and hired only those who joined it. Work started back up, but actual safety and wages didn't improve, the men just got to work again. They were duped by the companies and made to believe the "other" union members were communists, creating a dangerous time for them, and drumming up loyal squads to hurt them with pick handles. It was a hard time that got harder and gained the workers nothing. In Union Busting in the Tri-State by George G. Suggs, Jr., I learned those times are much like these, we are asked to fear the "other" and put up with less.

The Dobson Memorial Center has clear photos of the B. F. Goodrich workers in front of the plant marching a picket line seeking better working conditions and better pay during a strike held there. For all of them the companies were shut down, work stopped by the workers to make their lives better with safer working conditions and higher wages.
Essential workers in this shut down are still at work. But not the non-essential. Didn't they all think their jobs were needed?

We don't have much contact with federal employees, but we do have farmers who cannot receive all the services they are needing, we all have known people like our neighbors who have lined up for help from FEMA. We do have a superfund site that will require funding. According to Gary Morton, president of the AFGE Council 238, representing  9,000 EPA workers, state programs aren't getting their funding and enforcement actions have stopped. He calls it a nightmare since the states and community groups can't do this work on their own, reminding us that they all took an oath to serve and protect the people.

There are people in our community ready to talk to an EPA investigator about additional information on where and how toxins at B.F. Goodrich were released. To get the cleanup we deserve we need to know all the secrets not yet told. To answer questions on why the benzene plume is where it is. These "old timers" are ready to speak up and that investigator is not an essential worker.

It seems like an essential job to me. Essential to you, too. Multiply this by the number of sites around the country and it is clear we need to get America back to work serving our people.

Another example of essential? It was essential to my general well-being to have time to sit and talk with Joby Taylor and his parents during his visit this week.

It was essential to my belief in the future to get to attend the rehearsal for the reading of Mary Sue Price's play Chat Rats: Oronogo. Having time with people who are depicting our stories with Jill Micka, who I am sure has had her health impacted by this place.

It was essential to the cleanup of our superfund site to see the Quapaw Nation's trucks still at work last week while Robin Meadows was visiting looking at the Tar Creekkeeper's watershed for the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Several years ago I got to go to the National Institutes of Health in what is called the Research Triangle. I walked by rooms full of rat brains and Petri dishes stacked on trays. These government workers have spent years looking for cures to protect our health and these are not essential workers and their research is at risk, and perhaps the cure for cancer.

We rely on the people who work in the federal agencies that do the people's work and they rely on the paychecks they receive, smaller in general than the ones they would receive in the private sector, but they have chosen to work for us instead. How long can we keep the best on hold?

The EPA investigator was coming to find out more about where the pollution came from at B.F. Goodrich. but we haven't heard a peep. This is a shut down for non essential workers. Personally I feel like the health and well-being of the folks living here matters.

I think breathing clean air is essential and protecting the water that flows and lies beneath us as well. This might be a shut down, but it does not mean we have to shut up.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim              

The director and cast for the Reading of Chat Rats: Oronogo with Rebecca Jim and Jill Micka wedged in among them

It was dark when the two bob cats crossed my path on the way home this week.   

Ga hay is the word for  wildcat in Cherokee, and they are known for always being hungry. In our world now, they seem rare. Many people have never seen them. But they help us clear away the little varmints, the mice, the rabbits and such can keep them fed but when they are scarce, chickens disappear from farmers' barnyards but fewer people keep chickens in their backyards now. And those large poultry houses filled to the brim with chickens truly have them guarded from predators. As a country dweller, the fewer mice in the field means the fewer in my house, and as a gardener, the fewer rabbits the better the garden.

These bob cats were in a hurry. It is bobcat season in Oklahoma and a hunter is allowed as many as 20. They could have been pursued, but I had the feeling they were the ones pursuing this time. But seeing two at once, the same size and coloring brought to mind during this season the 2 girls Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible who went missing from Welch. But their missing now twenty years, and knowing the grief of the families is ongoing, I feel now for the family and friends of Mark Rogers of Miami, OK who was reported missing recently. Just gone. As the bobcats rushed by. Where do they go? And where on earth are our missing persons?

My brother Clark Frayser came to visit and brought 2 prints by Murv Jacob an artist who illustrates the culture of the Cherokees and the landscape of the southeastern United States. I love his work and have one of his rabbits rowing a canoe bedecked in fresh water pearls and carved shells hanging on the wall above my newly updated lab at the office. While Clark was there I was able to show him the beautiful turquoise his friend Steve Ray had dropped by the LEAD office as a gift. Steve and his wife were married over 50 years and had the kind of happiness he appreciated every day of their lives together and more so now since her death. Steve and Clark became friends during the production of his play, "The Panther and the Swan" as a bi-centennial project held in the Quapaw's Beaver Springs Park, and have remained friends ever since.

Anyone who has been around me as I prepare to leave a building knows that moment when I have to search for my keys, coat, even my shoes to get to the bank or the post office before they close for the day. Those moments of missing these type things pass, so very quickly, but imagining the pain of waiting, for missing the person living away, incarcerated in some manner, or those waiting for the truly disappeared people in our lives to return, our best hope, but to be found in whatever manner a peace might come. The bobcats I had seen had somehow triggered these thoughts, and reminded me of the bobcats' search for food or sanctuary.

The feelings of lost and found with the objects in our lives is so very superficial compared to the losses we experience when losing a loved one, whether that be for a 6 month period, a deployment, a job that takes one away for a season and then that deeper feeling of true loss through death, or that yet unidentified loss of never knowing what happened and where and how to make sense of it.

As human beings the extent of our feelings range but it is this ability, gift or curse as that may be, that make us human. It is experiencing these sensibilities  when we prove to the Creator we are human and the Creator's gift to us has been to show within each of us the resilience we need to proceed on undaunted though wounded or scarred.
The American Psychological Association recognizes seven basic human emotions, including joy, surprise, sadness, fear and contempt, anger and disgust are expressed throughout all cultures and considered universal.

We have our basic needs as described by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs beginning with water, food and shelter, proceeding upwards to safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. And we all are in our own ways hungry for love, enough so, we find songs with that title.

In the U.S. there are laws to ensure we can have Clean Water AND Clean Air! Our human rights for all peoples and all nations have been laid out by the United Nations in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The art we have to develop is to know our own rights and then take that farther to accepting we all share those same rights and getting on board to protect ourselves and our teammates on this earth we inhabit together. Be kind, keep learning, speak out for wrongs and help us protect the precious resources that sustain us all.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim