Tribe

My Kentucky grandmother kept a small cedar box hidden beneath the lace ruffles skirting her bed. I found it playing hide and seek with my sisters, my stomach pressed into the dust-covered worn floorboards. I held it in front of my face with one hand, my chin resting steady on my other arm. Small. Simple. Square, sturdy, made of sanded wood and glue, painted dirt red. I lifted the lid and peered inside. A carved cedar owl with stubby wings and eyes like runny fried eggs stared me down, warned me to close the box, forget he existed. His eyes were my grandmother's eyes - large and almond, expressive, holding mountain secrets - and I felt my mind slide stray jigsaw pieces into a completed frame. I knew.


"Gramma! Gramma!"


I left my sisters searching moth ball closets and the row of anemic lilac bushes for me, ran down the street to the poor-lady beauty parlor where she sat, unfiltered cigarette in one hand, raven gray hair wound in tight pink curlers.


"Gramma! You're Indian!"


I emphasized the word "Indian" like it was a party word, a lightening rod of corn power and personal recognition. I grinned, my hands on my little girl hips, and I realized I had Indian hair, too - dark and fine and black river long. I'm an Indian. Me! Indian! I didn't notice the cold and quiet smog that swirled from the hair-do ladies, covered my grandmother in some suburban shroud.


"Shush, Birdie. We'll talk 'bout it later."


We didn't talk about it later, not that smoke down summer, not until I turned thirteen and the townie pothead girls started beating me up every day after school because I played saxophone and never bought school lunch.


"Gramma? Why do those stupid girls hate me? I don't have any friends."


I twirled the curly phone cord around my hands, pictured my grandmother smoking and drinking cheap beer out of a chipped coffee cup.


"Birdie, listen up, hon. Everyone has a tribe. I ain't with the tribe that I grew up in. I got a new tribe now. You collect your tribe during your life. God brings them to you. One at a time. Birdie, one at a time. You know your tribe when you meet them."


I repeated those words to myself during moments of desert heartache and time stamp fatigue. And just like my grandmother promised, my tribe arrived one figure at a time, arrived to save me from the lands of unbelonging - a prickly man with wild business ideas, a scarred woman my age who laid tile and loved motorcycles, a tall Turkish man who told me coffee stories, a quiet monk, a Hungarian swimmer, a bent-over cat woman, a man with no feet - an endless tribe of mismatched yard sale china people who wandered the border between this world and the next.


I told my youngest son, 8, this story when school kids teased him, pointed at his Star Trek science officer uniform shirt and laughed. Someday, I told him, you will meet your tribe members, just like I meet my tribe - one person, one moment at a time. He didn't seem convinced, just nodded his small head with a look of confusion and despair. What good are the words of old women when a boy wants to play marbles and make-believe in a world of game cube children?


Three weeks ago I fought San Diego traffic, my two young sons sweaty and wild with anticipation. We parked a mile from the Convention Center, and joined the swarms of people descending upon Comic Con. 8 wore his full Star Trek science officer uniform and carried a tiny wire-bound notebook for autographs. He held my hand, squeezed it in rhythm as we walked, while 10 strode four steps ahead, already past the age of Starfleet wonder. He looked side to side, hands stuffed in the front pocket of his hoodie sweatshirt, afraid that someone might see him with his geeky younger brother and dorky mom with the huge Star Trek communicator pin stuck to the left side of her chest.

You were like this too, I silently willed in his direction. I wish you still carried the grace of no pressure.


We wandered the halls of the center, gathered autographs and snacks and pins and posters. We weren't there long until it happened, there in the middle of the exhibition room. An arch of electric blue molded plastic rose high above a small platform. Colored lights blinked behind it, the site of the Sci-Fi Channel extravaganza, and hundreds of attendees walked around the archway, looking for celebrities and free shwag and information about their favorite time-traveling shows.


I stood for a moment and stared at the Stargate. No one dared step through, though the platform looked plenty sturdy and safe. Hmmmmm, I thought. Time to change dimensions or realities, or timelines altogether. I grabbed my sons' hands, prepared to tell them we were going to step through that portal, when 8 pointed his right index finger and yelled at the top of his voice:


"Mom! Look, Mom! Mom! He's in my Tribe!"


The area grew silent around us as people rubbernecked to see what the heck my son meant. A lone young man in his early twenties turned too, didn't realize he was the destination, a tribesman sent from some other universe to give my son hope. He wore the same yellow science officer suit, and from the wear on the elbows and along the seams, I knew this man held Star Trek dreams a long, long time. My boy waved, jumped into the air over and over, pointed at this poor man on some away mission, and called out once more:


"Excuse me! You're part of my tribe!"


I was afraid everyone would laugh, would poke fun at the man and my son, at their desire to belong to a future of science and peace and exploration. But they didn't. Some kind of murmur rose around us, a low earthy rumble like the sound of my own heart, and one by one old men and women and young stepped up to my son and to the lost Starfleet officer, extended their hands, and said with sincerity, Hey, I'm part of your tribe, too.


And as we leaped through the Stargate, into some unknown future, a line of fellow tribesmen ready to leap behind us, my son yelled once more, a holler of sheer galactic joy.


"I have the best Tribe in the universe!"