Remembering Squanto or Not Remembering Squat-o.

I'm blaming the wine. I saying that because I'm hoping it's nothing else. You know, like the early onset of dotage. It's going to difficult enough to find a job in this economy without having to use a damaged brain. It's was probably nothing.

There we were the four of us, having just had a really nice dinner up on the roof and somehow the subject got around to genealogy, one of my favorites. I was related how, even after ten years of research, neither I nor my cousin has been able to find the "crossing ancestor". That would be the first member of a family to set foot in the New World. I said we knew we were from Virginia and that we were here before the Pilgrims packed their bags. I went on to say that even though things were bad in Virginia, all the books contain a chapter entitled "The Starving Time", things were worse for the Pilgrims "until one of the weirdest coincidences of history happened."

The other leaned forward to hear the tale. I related how the Pilgrims had met an Indian smack in the middle of their little outpost territory who could, amongst other things, speak English. Seems the guy had been taken prisoner by English explorers around ten years before the Pilgrims landed. He had been taken to Spain, sold into slavery, then oddly was bought back by an Englishman, taken to England for several years and THEN brought back to New England via Nova Scotia just in time to act as interpreter and guide for the men and women in the black suits and dresses. I said they all must remember the part about him showing the Pilgrims how to put a fish in with the corn seed to make it grow. (Ah, Thanksgiving pageants!) Well, I said, that wasn't an Indian technique, the man had learned it from the farmers up in Nova Scotia.

"Hey" said one of the guests,"What was this guy's name?"

One of the more famous tape erasures of all time is the eighteen minute gap in the Nixon tapes. The gap in my brain's ability to recall the NAME of the Indian who saved the Pilgrims of New England from starvation is not as famous yet, but it felt like it. I was stunned. My mind had failed in remembering, after remembering all of the other pertinent facts, the fellow's name.

"Uh...." I said, "Holy cow, I don't remember. I want to say Sequoia, but I know that that's wrong."

There was a pause and we, thankfully moved on to other subjects. Cheesecake. Florida vacations. Dentist visits. I kept waiting for this mush inside my head to cough up the answer, but no, nothing, Nada, zilch.

They all left. I cleaned the kitchen, packed my bag for the 18 mile run coming up early next morning and I went to bed.

I didn't think about the situation at all.

About 2:18 AM, I woke up. My eyes opened. It was raining hard and I thought about setting the clock to go off too late to go run the run in the rain.
"Squanto" My brain said." Now go back to sleep."