Creative Nonfiction Article Sample #1 Sarah's from Santa Fe

Here is my sample article for our blog.

Sometimes What We Carry Is Just the Size of Stout Dog, Shaped Like A Loaf Of Bread

Walking in the vast openness of the Santa Fe Trail on my way to the Wheelwright Museum, I
began to think:  What can really belong to someone? What is really ours? Just then, a plump
dog with an uncontainable wiggle bounded at me and then soaked my hand in kisses.

The first gallery space of the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is currently filled with
Melanie Yazzie’s odd but compelling bronze creatures.  I stood in front of one of the creatures,
a squat, blue and bronze pig-dog and let out a chuckle. Here, in blue and bronze,
skillfully cast by Yazzie for her series of sculptures based on her childhood bullies, was a
twin of the squat, affable heeler I had met on Sally’s Hill earlier that day.  What
luck to meet the same plump dog in two incarnations on the same day.

I love these little twists of fate.  They prick up my ears and brighten my eyes and give me
that hard to define but easy-to-know sense of recognition and order.

I studied Yazzie's bully, rendered canine.  Yazzie calls it “Simon Joe Benally is Looking for a Rich
Girlfriend”.  I took in its wide bulldog stance, its shriveled golden beans for eyes, and its
long tongue, lolling impossibly far behind him.  I also took in its beautiful layers of blue and
polished bronze that made up the solid form. Just as one doesn’t blame a dog with an extra toe,
or a dream that cannot be understood, this sculpture doesn’t seem to blame Simon Joe Benally
for the way he was and the parts of him that were flawed.  In fact, the sculpture was sort
of beautiful.

This was probably the same bully who Yazzie watched carefully from her post cutting carrots
or scraping dishes in her school’s cafeteria.  I imagine this Simon waiting for her, panting with
anticipation of whatever new way he had devised to torture the principal’s daughter. So I wonder,
how is it that this sculpture still has an underlying sense of tenderness and playfulness?  
How could she care enough about him to make a title that calls out poor Simon in the way only
someone who really knows a person can?

Tenderness is one result of hard circumstances, and whatever hard circumstances we have,
we will deal with them one way or another. C.G. Jung wrote, “That which
we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.”  Maybe this is the way that
Yazzie got free of that pain, of the blue bully who could not contain his tongue.  She did it by
holding it up in glittering bronze and then, importantly, letting it go. This way, maybe her pain
wouldn’t come back in that other eerie way, in a gesture of some man, or a fear on a walk home
that can also make our ears prickle with another sort of recognition.

I don’t even like dogs, and yet I am looking forward to seeing that heeler again on my hike
tomorrow morning.  I hope that I can pet her wiggling, zig-zagging mass of joy incarnate.
That’s the other thing, though. While we have to work hard to put down, to let go of, what hurts,
we can’t ever really carry with us what brings us joy.  

I will have to settle for working hard to step into the possible joy of tomorrow, unencumbered.
If Yazzie can leave her heartache in bronze and blue laughter, then I can too.