I SEE YELLOW GRASS AND I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK

Blog number 411 **** 30 August, 2010

I was driving home from Safeway, listening to music on the radio when the disk jockey announced, "And now, Blackfeet." I liked their music. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was of what the name of the band reminded me.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of books about American Indians. I read that one of the most dangerous tribes to settlers were the Blackfeet who inhabited the prairie of middle America. Later I read somewhere that they got their name from the color of their feet, which were black from walking through the black ash left after a prairie grassfire, which were very common due to the vast plains of grass and the common occurrence of lightning storms.

I don't know whether the story is true or not, but I like it enough to put it in my memory banks and savor it. Most of my memories are not savorable, so I am grateful for this one.