The narrator confronts the fact of his amazing grandfather (and culture, and history: “I had no idea we believed in reincarnation.”) while also dealing with a new job, not getting paid, and worrying about running out of weed and whatever’s going on with his mother’s boyfriend and the family homestead back home. is a small tale nestled within a larger tale nestled within the largest tale of all: who are we, what are we doing here, what does it all mean? Like many of Van Camp’s stories, the watching of E.T. was “a movie about a mushroom who helped a boy.”īut he’s still happy that his grandfather liked the movie, “because I felt like my grandfather had heard me. Later on, the narrator will learn that his grandfather thought E.T. The grandfather speaks mostly Tłı̨chǫ the narrator speaks mostly English, but they both cry when E.T. I loved nearly all of the short stories in Van Camp’s latest collection, but when I got to “Ehtsée/Grandpa,” I was actually kind of blown away. Watching E.T.,” Van Camp writes, in his typically understated and hilarious conversational tone. Richard Van Camp (or his fiction-writing alter ego) has a Tłı̨chǫ grandfather who has medicine power, who’s performed miracles, whose walk from the Mackenzie Mountains to the Barren Lands as a young orphan shaved two days off any known route.
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