The Giveaway (i)

 Basement is a bit pejorative, I guess, isn't it? A basement is mostly storage space, maybe ping-pong or even a snooker table; but if it's living space it's often the habitat of a teenager who wants to create some distance from the rest of the family unit but can't afford to rent his or her own. Millions of basement rooms are luxurious, I'm sure, but still, if you ask someone where he or she is living nowadays and he or she says, "my parents' basement," they're only rarely bragging.

The title of this decades-old blog has always been "Stuff in the Basement," or, rather, Stuff in the Basement (I think I've been at it long enough to earn the italics). A thousand years ago, I thought it might be fun--for a while at least--to run through the "stuff" on my library shelves two houses ago, stuff I'd accumulated through the years and treasured enough to give a place in our home--and not just toss. We all have our mementos, right?  

If you could turn back the pages far enough--which you can't--you'd find me going on and on about "stuff," because there were so many things in that basement three houses ago, so many things that were there because they were worth more to me than they might well be to anyone else on the face of the earth, "stuff" whose stories I knew and wouldn't or couldn't forget.

Like that bright and beautiful quilted table runner up there at the top of the page created specially by a 99-year-old Lakota woman, along with a table full of other possessions, for a "giveaway" at her birthday, which I attended, having been invited. 

A "Giveaway" is a fine Lakota tradition passed on from the olden days, the idea being to make sure that the band doesn't develop pockets of the super rich. Giveaways happened for a variety of reasons, in this case a birthday; the idea was that my 99-year-old friend spend a ton of time getting ready, on her special day, to give away things she valued, not to "get" presents but to give them away.

A century ago, white folks squelched the ritual Giveaway, just like they outlawed the Sun Dance. It was, some believed, drawn from a pagan past and thus had to go. Native people were going to be Christians now after all, and farmers. The old ways had to die. 

Well, the old ways didn't, and there I was at a Giveaway, which resembled, for comparison, a raffle. Every last person at the party was given a number when we came in, and once the age-old ritual began, those numbers were called. 

For the record, I wasn't the only white guy at the birthday party, but I was most definitely a part of the minority. I wasn't interested in making a big deal out of being there and once the numbers started rolling out, I wanted to shrink away--this big old white guy for sure didn't want to have to walk up to the front to pick up whatever it was that might have drawn my number.

That gorgeous table runner was one of the most valued treasures--the biggest, as I remember, was an entire quilt. But when the star quilt table runner came up--was shown by the grandsons in the front, as if in an auction--and my number was called, I could have crawled into a hole. I won.

The people at the table where I was sitting, motioned for me to get up and walk to the front. 

[More tomorrow]