Based on the Edgar Lee Masters’ collection, this one’s about a woman a half-continent away from Illinois. Rosario Cooper was the last speaker of her dialect of Central California’s Chumash language. She was interviewed and some of her language taken down by anthropological linguist J.P. Harrington who, I guess—from reliable sources—was a jerk. But her language survives, if only in Cal’s Bancroft Library.

Rosario was a midwife and healer—her people’s knowledge of wild plant foods, herbs and curatives was vast and remains amazing to me, as was their understanding of the wild birds, the rainbow trout, the mule deer, jackrabbits, mountain lions, coyotes and, until the late 1870s, the grizzly bears that were part of their daily lives.

A land dispute near her, in Arroyo Grande’s Lopez Canyon, resulted in a double murder and then a double lynching of the suspects just below Arroyo Grande’s Crown Hill in 1886. A decade later, a second feud, also over land rights, led to the beating death of a man whose body was discovered by a prostitute out for her morning walk along Monterey Street in San Luis Obispo. The prime suspect was acquitted, but some justice was carried out ten years later, when he went to Folsom for horse theft.

All of this would have bewildered Rosario, who was the granddaughter of a “Mission Indian” born in the 1790s in a rancheria, or village, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, near today’s Strother Park. Her grandfather may or may not have been a sailor; the marriage may or may not have been enforced by the Mission Fathers and the grandfather may or may not have been drowned at sea. So much was uncertain at the turn of that century.

The Chumash were acquainted with uncertainty: a terrible drought in what would become San Luis Obispo County forced them to become neophytes; it threatened to exterminate them before White men and their smallpox and cholera very nearly did.

Eighty years after the Mission’s founding, the City Fathers of San Luis Obispo hired a man and his wheelbarrow to cart the cholera victims up the hill that led to the Old Mission burying ground. His hard work is unrecognized, as are the human beings that were his freight. They are buried, in what must be compact stacks, like the soldiers’ bones in the Verdun ossuary, in a steeply-banked garden that faces the annex, the addition that gives the Old Mission a half-cruciform floor plan.

On the opposite side of the nave, in the Mission Gardens proper, the only legal hanging in San Luis Obispo County history was carried out in 1859. All the others, carried out by the 1858 Vigilance Committee, which has the dubious record of hanging two more men than San Francisco’s, happened facing the Mission, where a little bronze Chumash girl shares a fountain with a Grizzly. Given their propensity for carrying off rancheros’ bawling claves, the proximity of the little girl and the Grizzly might seem odd.

The statues might have made more sense to Rosario, who died in 1917 still understanding the fading natural world around her that was quickly being reduced to checkerboard ranches bounded by barbed wire. The events in Lopez Canyon, in her California, where men shot at each other over their barbed-wire fences—those White men events— would have bewildered her.

Justifiably so.

Note: The origin for this was a class I taught teens as part of the Central Coast Writers’ Conference. This was a model. The teens then chose a person from local history and wrote a “tombstone poem” for that person.

What amazed and pleased me to no end was realizing, years afterward, that I had taught two of Rosario’s great-great (great?) granddaughters in my history classes at Arroyo Grande High School.

McKenzie—with her little girl— and Hannah are beautiful, brilliant and generous young women. Beyond that, they are powerful in ways that I am sure are part of their DNA. I can’t help but think that Rosario would be even more proud of them than I am. I don’t doubt at all at the immensity of her love for them.

We are fixed on linear time: Rosario understood that time was cyclical, so she will watch over her babies, including McKenzie’s and including those not yet born. She will always be here for them. As we reckon time, Rosario Cooper died in 1917. I am convinced that the force of her life—one that gave life to newborn babies— endures.

She was born in 1883. As a nearly seventy-year-old who loves his sons but who’s bereft of daughters, I would have adopted her, given the chance. And had I a time machine able to go back to her time at about her age–perhaps twelve–I would’ve had a monstrous crush on her. The combination of overalls and pigtails would’ve been enough to reduce me to silly putty.

She grew up in a little farm town, Arroyo Grande, nourished by a beautiful creek which housed, in season, steelhead fighting upstream to spawn and, in another season, floods that once, in 1911, carried away a fourteen-year-old boy named Sam to his death.

She had the comfort of intelligence–a dubious comfort, admittedly. Both her father and her uncle were medical doctors (another uncle was a pharmacist) the sons of missionaries, born in Syria, whose homes, if her uncle Dr. Ed’s is any indication, were filled with artifacts from the Neolithic Holy Land and Chumash California; homes dense with books, homes full of creative energy inside. Her uncle’s, outside, was bounded by an enormous garden—in dirt her Uncle Dr. Ed found joy— to the point where her Aunt Clara added a bathroom that made it impossible for her husband to re-enter the house without a bathtub stop first. It was only the second bathtub in Arroyo Grande. Sometimes Aunt Clara would hear a soft knock at the door. The folks on the porch asked politely if they could come in and see Ed and Clara’s bathtub.

Ormie’s Aunt Clara, as the saying goes, was a piece of work. She was Arroyo Grande’s foremost schoolteacher; she arrived here in the 1880s and began a career that lasted forty years. She was the descendant of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, but she was an agnostic who just loved going to church. Ormie’s father was the medical director of Santa Barbara County who, in 1918, had the audacity to shut down the bars to stop the spread of the killer flu. He was not beloved.

Ormie’s cousin, Ruth was very much beloved. She became such a transformative teacher, of languages, at the Arroyo Grande Union High School (where her commute, atop Crown Hill, consisted of walking across the street) that they would decide to name a middle school after her. That’s baby Ruth, the little blonde. Possibly that’s her cousin Ormie, on the right. The group is posed in the yard of the Paulding home, one that still stands today.

The scene is idyllic, but life, in the 1890s, wasn’t always. Ormie had another cousin, a little boy, the one who was to be first-born, but he was stillborn instead. Her uncle, Dr. Ed, buried him in the garden where he would be close to his parents. Ed planted flowers that gave life to the son who was robbed of the chance to live his.

Ormie would move away from Arroyo Grande—but not very far, only twenty minutes or so today, by car—south to Santa Maria, where she would become a Santa Maria High School Saint, and then, years later, the high school’s librarian and then, after that, she worked for the Post Office.

She died in 1955. Here is Ormie’s tombstone:

Death be not proud. The Arrogant Male in me regrets that she lived her life as a “Miss,” but this is what she did with her life: She served young people, who, if you haven’t noticed, are sometimes insufferable, and maybe introduced one, thanks to the school library, to The Arabian Knights or Willa Cather’s My Antonia or—on the chance that the Santa Maria High School Library even had it on their shelves–The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. The power of school librarians is immense and compassionate, which is why the Far Right hates them so much.

And then she worked at the Post Office. Her obituary hints that even this seemingly mundane career gave her the chance to light up other lives. Post office patrons, it suggests, looked forward to buying a book of stamps from Miss Paulding. I think she had the power to reflect a person’s life back at him, in the instant of her look. You saw yourself welcomed in Miss Paulding’s eyes and so you were validated. I’ve known people like that. A friend who met the South African bishop, Desmond Tutu, a small man shaped, in his vestments, like a church bell, told me that he had that power.

In fact, her cousin, fragile and wheelchair-bound when I knew her, had the same kind of power, too. When I received communion at St. Barnabas, the Arroyo Grande Episcopal church, as a teenager, I would glance at the aged and fragile Miss Ruth Paulding as I returned to my pew. A smile from MIss Ruth carried the same freight as a priest’s blessing.

When World War II came, Ormie added a task not on her Post Office job description: She wrote hundreds of letters to servicemen overseas.

Hundreds.

The effort and the generosity of spirit implied in that task is a little overwhelming to me, living in a country where we observe a day—January 6—when patriotism and generosity were so debased.

Ormie’s generosity was boundless.

She loved animals. She was a charter member and a driving force in the Santa Maria Humane Society, and the lives she couldn’t save with letters, lives of young men lost in combat, she saved in the lives of the dogs and cats carelessly put aside. I can see her framing an abandoned mongrel’s face in her hands and looking into his eyes: the dog understands and looks back in the way dogs do, in absolute and unconditional adoration.

Hers was the same look that Ormie’s Post Office patrons saw.

And so she died a spinster—a terrible word—and I was born far too late to propose marriage to her, which I would have done, on the spot, when I was twelve. She didn’t need me. Women don’t need men to live lives that are graced by love, and filled by it, too. I think Ormie’s life was like that.

The life represented in that image, the little girl in overalls and pigtails, turned out to be more than a little miraculous. Women don’t need children any more than they need husbands. But without her knowing it—because I believe that kindness has the power to cross generations and so inform even unborn lives—we are, in a way, Ormie’s children.

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Bonnie was in my ninth-grade art class on Crown Hill at Arroyo Grande High School in 1966. She was so lovely and so kind that I was immediately entranced by her. Not in the way you think. She was another guy’s girl. What I felt for her was more in the line of admiration rather than romance.

Of course, that previous sentence was a baldfaced lie, but there’s more to Bonnie than that.

Some people have the gift of reflecting your own worth back at you. I was never convinced, growing up, of my worth, but Bonnie saw it and communicated it without words. Sketching beside her on big sheets of newsprint bequeathed the most immense sense of belonging, at fourteen, that I’d ever felt.

She came to art class one day fighting tears because she was just a freshman and was therefore barred from going to the Christmas Formal with her boyfriend, an upperclassman.

And then some time in the spring, Bonnie didn’t come to class anymore. She vanished.

I found out later that she vanished because she was pregnant. Other than the whispers, which lasted just a short time, Bonnie was never heard from again.

I missed her so much that twenty years later, as a history teacher, I talked about her, when teaching American cultural history, to my students. They were appalled by the way she’d been treated, which, in their disgust at cruelty and hypocrisy, is yet another one of the dozens of reasons for why I love teenagers.

When I was growing up, a three-times-a-year treat for my family was driving from Arroyo Grande to Morro Bay for fish and chips at Bob’s on the Embarcadero. My goodness, you could still get abalone and chips at Bob’s. It took up a full Sunday, and, for somebody who grew up amid the cabbage fields of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, Morro Bay was exotic and enchanting. Abalone steak dipped in Tartar sauce–we drove out to the Rock to eat our lunches and to watch the fishing boats surge over the breakwater–was sublime.

So was the smell of the sea. Morro Bay was doubly enchanting when local farmers had just added a generous layer of turkey fertilizer to the row crops of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.

It had to be than twenty years gone before I went back to Bob’s for fish and chips—the abalone, of course, was gone, but the calamari was wonderful—and this time it was with Elizabeth, my wife. I guess we’d gone there a couple of times before but the third time, I recognized the waitress immediately.

It was Bonnie, and it was twenty years later, when I had the audacity to use her as a Primary Source in my classroom, and there she was with her short waitress skirt and order pad and pen. I could’ve easily been appalled, as was a brilliant friend of mine, a classmate, now a lawyer, when she found me working as a liquor-store clerk in the years when I was recovering from the end of a career and the end of a relationship. Most of my recovery was not recovery at all; my life lay instead in the consistent and generous anesthetization that the liquor store’s stock supplied

So my friend, the lawyer, stared blankly for a moment at me, ashamed, behind the counter. “Oh, Jim.” was all she said.

I never saw her again.

But when Elizabeth and I saw Bonnie, she was radiant. She blushed, as I had in the presence of my lawyer friend, for just moment, but the weekend rescued her. It was Poly’s graduation and the child that had been inside her in ninth grade was later that day to graduate with an engineering degree.

She was just as beautiful as I remembered and I saw in her eyes the validation I’d remembered in ninth grade. She was proud of me and proud of us, of Elizabeth and me, as a couple.

I don’t remember, of course, the rest of the meal at Bob’s.

It would be many years later when I learned that Bonnie had died. The news hurt doubly, because I learned that she’d taken her own life, and we teacher types frequently confuse ourselves with Jesus. Surely, I thought, there could’ve been something I could have said or done. Or something I could have done without saying anything at all: Didn’t she see, in the moment before she took our order that day at Bob’s, how immensely proud I was of her?

When we got to the 1960s in my U.S. History classes in the years after that day, I told my Bonnie story again, but I added Graduation Day as the ending I’d never had before. A good teacher can sense when he or she has touched the students in their care; Bonnie touched mine. She inspired them.

As much as teenagers hate cruelty and hypocrisy, they love righteousness. Teaching history, after all, is really about teaching the future, and Bonnie’s story resonated because it gave them the hope that the future in their care would be righteous.

Bonnie resonates to me, too, because she died the same way my mother did. I spent many years in therapy after I lost my Mom until I quit it when the psychiatrist opined that my mother, in taking her own life, was a selfish person.

That’s the last word I would use to describe either my mother or my friend Bonnie. Nobody can understand the immense power of clinical depression and the seductiveness that self-destruction promises when it’s the only reasonable, rational way left for you to fight back.

A high-school administrator—my boss— once smugly confided to me that she could never imagine taking her own life. She was taken instead by cancer. I doubt that she could ever have imagined that, either. But clinical depression and Stage Five cancer are coequals when it comes to conferring death.

I keep a photo of my mother, holding my big sister when she was a baby, atop our mantle. She is breath-taking. So was Bonnie, in her white embroidered apron and red waitress mini-skirt and scuffed white tennis shoes, on the day that Poly graduated her daughter. I don’t know that there is a Heaven–I guess I’ll have to find that out on my own–but if there is, I want to hold my Mom very close. And then I want to ask directions.

Where is Bonnie?

And then, given God’s grace, I will hold her very close, and tell her, in a private voice just above a whisper, how much her life has meant to me. And then, given God’s grace, we will get the chance to sketch again, holding soft-lead pencils that drift noiselessly across the paper of big newsprint pads, We’re close together, sitting on high stools. Every once in awhile, Bonnie might look at my sketchpad, then look at me, and smile.