“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.
[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.
KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.
“The Complete Hank Williams” (1998)
The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child. It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school. When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale. My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had. They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over. There were two records of singles about Indian love. Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove. They lived on opposite sides of a river. Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown. Together forever. That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store. His love story is even worse. As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl. Dang, Indian love must be heck!
But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era. They hold withing them a plea for something essential. They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.
When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love. There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams. We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other. She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes. She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes. I longed to carry her books or hold her hand. I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album. But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself. I never told her how I felt. I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing. Because love is worth it. Love is necessary. And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time. I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river. I did find love. And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then. Life has a way of working things out eventually. But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.
Catch a Falling Star 
Consolation Hockey Night
Sunday was a bad, bad day for me. My football team, the Arizona Cardinals, were in the National Football Conference championship. One game away from their second trip to a Superbowl. But they not only lost, they were crushed 49 to 15. Not one morsel of goodness was left to a poor humiliated die-hard fan who has been waiting for the team to succeed his entire life. So, how do you recover from that? My wife decided to take me to a hockey game. Surely that would make me feel better. Of course, I was dying at the time of virus-related lung-mangling coughing fits and total lack of will to live. My novel that I have worked so hard on and was so proud of is in jeopardy of never being published. My sky no longer has sunshine. It is only natural that the Dallas Stars hockey team would help. Hockey is my real favorite sport, and I have loved the Stars as my second-favorite team since the 1960’s when they were the Minnesota North Stars.
It should be explained at this point that I love hockey in the same way that I love Mark Twain and the basic concepts of comedy and humor. It all stems from the same basic seed… ridiculous behavior lampooned by its own awareness of itself. Look at how it all started. The hockey gods, Dave and Rick, sat down together beside a frozen lake in Saskatchewan some time in the cold winter in the late 1800’s and decided to invent a national sport for Canada.
“Canada deserves a pretty cool national sport, eh,” said Dave.
“We gotta frozen lake right here, hoser,” answered Rick. “We can take some other sport and do it on ice, eh?”
“You got it, hoser,” said Dave. “What could be cooler than that lacrosse game the Iroquois and the Hurons play? With the whacking sticks and junk! Wouldn’t that look cool on ice, hoser?”
“They’ll never get a good hit in on anybody else’s head if they are slip sliding all around the ice… Let’s put ’em on skates. And we gotta make sure the game ball ain’t too big so they can whip it around with the sticks really, really fast.”
“Yeah, let’s increase the difficulty by taking the net-thingies off the sticks, and let’s make the ball into a little hard rubber disc. We’ll call it a puck. And people will die all the time in this high-speed multiple-projectile game with lots of whacking sticks!”
“Truly excellent idea, hoser. You are one really great hockey god!”
“You too, hoser… you too.”
So you can see by this carefully researched and verified origin story that hockey is not a sport to be taken lightly. Grown men with skates and sticks going around in circles really, really fast, trying to whip a puck past the goaltender into a net and at the same time trying to avoid all manner of collisions… though not trying very hard.
So my wife drags me to the American Airlines Center, the arena the Stars share with the NBA Dallas Mavericks. We get in easy enough, and then march all the way up to the three hundreds’ sections where all the cheap seats are. To get there, you must go up and up and up on multiple escalators, get to the arena roof, and take the stairs up higher still. This we do with Filipino friends in tow… who know absolutely nothing about this whacky sport, but they like big spectacles and the arena food. And I have the added benefit that they will believe absolutely anything I tell them about the game. Oh, it turns out it could be really fun after all! And I wouldn’t even have to lie to make their eyes pop out of their heads.
Of course, from the rafters with the bats, the game looks like a bunch of colorful ants scrabbling all over a big white postage stamp, but the new highlights screen makes it kinda like watching TV at home, except with lots of expensive snacks that you have to go mountain-climbing for and drunk guys that have had too much of the beer that vendors actually carry up into the stands. (One fight actually almost broke out in the crowd near us, three rows down, but the young guy got scared of the really loud and old fat guy who was yelling obscenities at him and scurried away faster than a drunk fat guy can follow.)
Of course, my wife never lets me bring binoculars to these things because I might lose them… and also because the Ice Girls who scrape the ice during time-outs wear skates and very little else. I have to look at the big hanging TV very closely during those times. Especially when those times occur while wifey is down the mountainside searching for affordable snacks.
And, of course, it is always a very welcome thing when the Stars win. As you have probably guessed, I don’t get to see my favorite teams win in front of me very often, and we have to savor those things when they occur.
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Tagged as consolation for losing, Dallas Stars, enjoying hockey, goofiness, hockey, hockey fights, hosers, humor