I thought a lot this weekend about New Mexico, about time I spent there with my mother when she intended to write a book on the oral storytelling traditions of the Navajo Tribe. She interviewed extensively, listened intently, even when the man in question (her favorite interviewee) was sipping from a bottle of Listerine as if it were quite normal, because traditional liquor could not be purchased on Sundays.
I remembered listening intently to his story, as well, just as my mother was, scribbling madly in her notebooks, a story about skinwalkers, shape shifters, the Navajo equivalent of European werewolves. Except they were not exclusively canine. They could shift into birds. Or they could simply disappear altogether.
I remembered feeling frightened by his story, unnerved, rising to walk further up the promenade of Santa Fe’s Palace of Governors to smoke my first Marlboro Red pilfered from a Navajo boy who looked to be about the same age as me. His smile was warm, and he was even kind enough to light the cigarette for me. I walked further away, again feeling scared, feeling all of the spirits I suspected were all around me throughout my stay in that state, all around me, if not literally then in stories, yet entirely unseen.
I remember the smell of the first rain of the New Mexico monsoon season that began to fall minutes later.
I don’t know why I’m recording this. I don’t know if I’m trying to preserve my mother’s project of preservation, to preserve one of her favorite interviewee’s favorite stories, or simply to think about the man’s tale of skinwalkers in a slightly different way. Think of them as experiences that change us, as people who change us, as stories that change us. That, seen or unseen, change us on a daily basis, making us a sort of skinwalker, of shape shifter, as well. So that every person we’ve ever been is still with us to metamorphose into. So that every memory is still impressed on us. So that every experience, good or bad, gives us the courage to become someone new, take the past into the future, and jump into the abyss of the unknown.
I smelled it yesterday, by the way, the smell of that first rain of the New Mexico monsoon season. On the wind. In Hawaii. Another state full of stories and unseen spirits.
Immediately, I thought to myself, “It smells like Sunday.”
And it was.
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