Chemo Camp Finale — Letters from Home

Nov. 17, 2020

I have been thinking about y’all a lot lately. Who, you say? Y’all. All y’all, as we love saying in my Neck of the woods. Do you see that stack of cards there? (more than 250 of them) The flowers? The little gifts? These things have filled my soul these past 18 months as I found myself captured in Chemo Camp.

So I have been thinking about all y’all who got me through it. Re-reading your notes and seeing your faces as I did, thinking of the emails, too, and your visits (way back when those where allowed), the food (Lord, have mercy, the FOOD!) the walks and the phone calls and the quiet moments when we sat in silence and you let me cry as I tried to take it all in. Your laughter. Your donations to Susan G. Komen and the Walk for the Cure. Your telling me I looked beautiful without my hair (though we all know I didn’t) — and now when you tell me you like my new “look”. Every single one of these things that you did for me has made my life so rich while I waited for camp to be over.

November 12, 2019

I didn’t save any letter my parents had time to write when I went to camp when I was 9. I wish I had (maybe my mother has saved the no doubt thousands of letters I wrote to her in the three short days I stayed, though if she has, she has not revealed this.) I’m sure if I had save those letters from home they would have been much like yours: We love you, you can do this, think of all the friends you’ll make and how much fun you’ll have (well, maybe not that last idea for chemo camp.)

When I thought I was going home from camp last November and then found out a week later that my mother was not, in fact, coming to pick me up, and that I would be staying for a whole ‘nother YEAR — you stayed right there with me, sending cards, calling, walking, assuring me that I could stay as long as was necessary, and then I could go home. (No more meals, but alas, I had packed on the casserole pounds in the previous year and girded with such sustenance, I soldiered on through more camp activities.)

Like target shooting.

I remember my daughter did this at her week-long camp and could easily hit the mark, so much so that when she CHOSE to become a camp counselor while in college, (she must have gotten that DNA somewhere else) the camp assigned her this post. My daughter and I have never been the kind of twinsy mother/daughter team some people think of. I spent years teaching her how not to be like me, so I consider this choice as making me, finally, a champion.

And then I became the target shooter, with only one goal in mind: Get rid of the damn cancer.

And guess what I did? I GOT RID OF IT, with the guiding lights of my doctors and the nurses at the Rex Cancer Center, who finally LET ME GO HOME last Tuesday. All by myself.

Though my old pal Tim and my nurse Hope (who hugged me, despite all the rules) wished me well, I drove away, with only the shadow of a tear in my eye.

“She’s grown,” I could hear my mother say. “You have handled yourself admirably,” my brother actually texted.

That part, “admirably,” he quoted what my father might have said, if he were to have reluctantly shoved me off to cancer camp. He is right, Daddy would have said that, but I honestly don’t quite understand.

A friend of mine who had cancer just before me has said often “cancer can’t wait.” (It’s a tagline for a local organization raising money to cure every kind of cancer affecting women, not just breast.) And this is so very true. Sorting through all my cards the other day, I found an email I wrote to my Bible study on May 15, 2019, the day I got the news. I was to lead it the next day, and I told them, so niavely, that a cancer diagnosis would not disrupt the dozens of plans I had for my life in the year to come.

How wrong I was. A cancer diagnosis does NOT wait. Within minutes of learning you have it, you turn you life over to those caring for you and though you ask a thousand and more questions, not one of them is “when?” because the answer is always: “right now.”

One of the few things I remember about real camp is the swimming test. Everybody had to take it, no matter what. I remember looking at the murky river water with the tadpoles swimming in it and asking, “when?” and they said pretty much: “Now”. And I had only two choices: dive in and get it over with, or wade in and swim from one point to the next, as best I could. No bravery. Just truth.

The same is true for Chemo Camp.

On the first round, I dove, head first, not knowing much about what it would do to me (though they did tell me as honestly as they could.) The second time, I waded in, testing the waters a bit, though I knew I’d eventually I’d have to make that dive. And I did.

But despite what some have written me, I am no hero.

My doctor is a hero. She has done the hard work of puzzle master, her fine mind taking my own curious circumstances — three kinds of breast cancer — to task, until she found the exact cocktail combination to cure me. Did you get that? CURE ME. Which she did.

My nurses are heroes. They greeted me and all the other cancer patients as if we were the only one in the room, day after day, caring for us when some get our walking papers, and when some don’t ever. They are gracious and loving and champions for all.

And then they let me go. Tuesday a week ago. Just like that.

I was a puddle. Honestly. After a quiet day in the chemo room I was looking for the marching band. A raised pom pom or two. But when that did not arrive, I looked to Hope, who had nursed me on my darkest day, probably, when I was the most homesick I had ever been in my adult world.

“I wish I could hug you,” I told her. “I will never forget your kindness to me.”

“You are gettin’ it!” she said, breaking all the rules of COVID and giving me a hug I had not had from anyone except my husband in too many months. It was tight. And we sobbed. And I felt healed.

Back at home, family had filled my kitchen with pink. Two dozen roses, one dozen from my birth family and mother, and the other from my family by my daughter’s marriage. “Welcome home from camp,” their card said. Tickled me pink.

When you have cancer and get through treatment, you pick your ‘cancervesary’ as a way to remember it. Could be the day you are diagnosed or the day you felt healed or the day, through surgery, when cancer took leave of your body. That day, the day cancer took leave of me, was one year ago today.

So I take today to celebrate. And on this day before Thanksgiving, to be thankful to God for all of you.

I also want to honor all those who have gone before me in this camp. Who carved their initials on the scaffolding and in the bathrooms and on the the sheetrock that holds so many of these camps in place. I don’t know your names, but all ya’ll have come before me and I thank you for your service and your commitment to allowing doctors to study the disease in you, so that I might live. I honor hundreds of thousands of you, some of whom aren’t here any more, but so many of us are here and leaving our cancer days behind because of you.

I will not forget that.

Now back to the pile sitting in the picture at the beginning of this post. Thank you all for your letters and your love and for not letting go of me when I was taking the swim test at camp. I survived because of you, too, and I’m forever grateful that you cheered me on as I made it, finally, to the other side.

Much love,

Sooze

news to me

First column in 1995. Last column in 2019. I’ve written for the N&O off and on for years. Thank you to all who have read my stories and written to me about them.

News To Me

My first memory of a newspaper is that it was green. Not in the sense of being environmentally friendly, but it was actually green newsprint — holding mostly television listings (three channels!) and the comics, I think — inserted in the middle of the drab words my parents preferred. My brother — way older than I am by four years — remembers it quite clearly. 

When we’d read the green paper, my father, a bit of a magician, would roll it out on the family room floor, tuck the pieces into each other just so, make a few tears, pull at the top and presto! A tall, skinny green tree! From newspaper!

Irony, that.

I guess the rustle and crack of newsprint first drew me to it. How my father used a well-read paper to save the rug under his shoe shine kit, polishing his wing tips bright enough to see his reflection. Long after the words had been used up the paper became sink protector for scaling fish, box liner for baby Easter bunnies, foundation for science projects.

I didn’t know you could actually read a newspaper — much less write for one — until I started school and discovered the Weekly Reader. Again, the crackle drew me as I searched the pictures and words I could actually sound out. 

In those days, the newspaper drop at the highway punctuated my early mornings. My father rose well before light (if he had been asleep at all), bringing in the paper and sitting in his chair by the kitchen door, sorting through the day’s news while my mother fashioned oatmeal in her honeymoon pots. Daddy studied the news, his lanky legs crossed, not talking much. “You ought to read the paper,” I can hear him saying.

There was always something about it in our house. Never the “newspaper,” but “the Paper” as in “Did you see the Paper?” Or “the Paper is all about the Democrats.” 

The Paper to me was the comics — Cathy, B.C. and Peanuts. (Later I read Love Is and SHU and tried to understand Doonesbury, began to take in the Wizard of Id as Daddy tried to teach me the art of the pun.)

I worked the jumble, drank in the description of brides wearing their mother’s Alençon lace and honeymooning in the Poconos. I wish I could say I wasn’t so shallow.

I was a headline reader — still am to some extent — until there was a murder in my small town. Suddenly the Paper became an important source of news. I scoured stories of the Pentecostal Holiness preacher’s wife who followed her son on his paper route with her pearl handled handgun, shooting the black man who’d been harassing him for weeks. She was acquitted — the paper covered it back in 1976. My father, who had seen both the victim and the accused in the emergency room earlier that evening, had to take the stand.

A few years later I actually made the pages of the Paper, which has always been the N&O. In 1979 when I was a senior at Carolina, my professor assigned a personality feature about one of my favorite people, and I chose N&O columnist Dennis Rogers, whom I had long admired. (Unbeknownst to me, my professor, Jim Shumaker — the original SHU —  had also taught Rogers. I would not make an A on that assignment.)

After our interview, the columnist turned the tables on me and asked me why I wanted to be a journalist. I honestly had no idea. I wanted to write stories, and journalism seemed the way to get an actual (however paltry) paycheck. And I wanted one day to become a columnist like he was.

After graduation I woke in my childhood bedroom to neighbors calling — have you seen the Paper? You should read the Paper! My picture was in there, and Rogers had called me, (me! ) an upstart with ice-water blue eyes. (After our interview he had bought me a beer, too.)

I suppose that day was the beginning. Within a year I would become a journalist and two years later I would marry one. We have built our lives around the paper each morning at the kitchen table, trading stories that capture our interest (murder mysteries are still my guilty pleasure.) We talk obits and politics — I’ve been trying hard not to shout too loudly in the past two years, but it’s hard. In my column in the Paper, I’ve not been allowed to pontificate on politics, so I have looked toward the light in the world instead.

The paper drop still punctuates my mornings, so wedded, I am, still in the world of print journalism, and until someone says we can’t, both my husband and I will be.

It’s crazy to think that I’ve actually became the columnist I dreamed of being, thanks to the News & Observer and the editors I once knew there. I hope Dennis Rogers would be proud of his protégé, even if he didn’t know I was one.

Since the first story I wrote back in 1995 about my long-deceased dog, to the most recent about the play “To Kill a Mockingbird,” my stories, I hope, have touched readers. I’m no magician, but I’ve imagined — and hoped — that my words have been at times magical — wry and wise and lighthearted, and above all, personal. My goal has always been to find the small moments in life that create measurable meaning. I hope you have found that in them

It’s been my particular joy — a gift, truly, that one of my life’s goals at 18 was to write for The Paper — and I’ve done just that. I am humbled by the privilege.

But I won’t be writing for the N&O anymore. My stories, though popular, they say, don’t show it in the digital number that drive so much of newspaper content these days. I may not be in the Paper any more, I’ll still be writing, and I invite you to join the conversation. I’ll keep the Henry stories coming, and as our family grows in just a few weeks, I’ll write about that, too. I will also be sharing news of my recent kidnapping (stay tuned!) along with a few things that may surprise even me.

Thank you for reading, and for writing to me all these years. Thank you, mostly, for sharing your own stories and reminding me how much alike we all really are. 

That’s not magical at all, but is the beauty and the truth, that a shared story creates community. Thank you for being a part of mine.

Susan Byrum Rountree can be reached at susanbyrumrountree@gmail.com. She writes at susanbyrumrountree.com

keep the sparkle

note: i know, i know... i'm terrible at keeping this thing up. but i finally found a story yesterday when i wasn't event looking. so there.

i called my mother yesterday. it was her wedding anniversary, the third one since my father died, and i'd forgotten to send her a card or a flower. we get busy in our lives, i know, and as i thought about the note or the flower, i realized that the one thing she wanted i couldn't give her. my voice would have to do.

how are you? i asked.

'tired,' she said.

from what?

'i washed the windows today,' she said.

windows?

my mother is 88 years old. she lives in a beautiful home filled with windows that let the sun in, in the morning, where the moon casts a soft glow over the living room rug at night. and she does not like a dingy window — never has. 

'

i thought i'd start with the front bedroom window and just go along, one or two at a time, she told me. 'but you know me.'

don't i. i have a lifetime of knowing  the woman who would remake my bed if it didn't suit her, whose linen closet i used to stand and admire for its geometric organization, the same woman who scoured the whole house spring and fall so when we came home from school you could

feel

the sparkle. 

18 windows, she said. and she just kept going along until she had cleaned practically every window in the house, almost by accident. (her sunroom is literally filled with windows. to be fair, one window is safely out of reach.)

18. 

on a recent visit to her house i scanned her fridge for the latest comic, since there has been one there since my childhood. tacked close to one featuring a character not being able to hear was an article suggesting that a clean house for the elderly has a direct correlation to their mental and physical stability. as if she needed proof that all her years of home keeping was finally worth the work. 

she used to say she never needed to exercise because she vacuumed every day and that was plenty. and it was.

my mother's house is ever ready for company: flowers on the kitchen table, beds made up with soft sheets, pillows piled high and towels hung, waiting. even my son says it's the most comfortable house he's ever slept in. i don't know about you, but i will hope my imagined grandchildren will feel the same about mine.

do you know what day it is? i asked her before hanging up.

'yes,' she said. 'keeping the windows kept my mind busy.'

busy with memory, surely, of the years she and my father sparkled— and there were almost 61 of those.

my mother no doubt slept hard last night, as we like to say where i come from,  climbing between her own soft sheets, knowing her hands had touched every pane in that house and left it gleaming.

a lot has happened since my father has been gone. grandchildren married. great-grandchildren born and too many hoped for lost. we could have used his wisdom in the time since, which at times seem like years and others like just days. i'm sure it feels like that in every loss.

but my mother, as always, provides perspective. there still is a bit of sparkle left, even in my father's absence. for one full day she polished her windows to a spit shine, no doubt remembering as she washed each pane, the life she spent with my father, remembering their sparkle in the sheen.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Perfect Pitch

I don't usually post these, but I realize not everybody reads the News & Observer, where my columns appear once a month on Sundays. So here it is. It appears in the Feb. 21 edition of the Arts & Living section.

Perfect Pitch
Though I began my career slugging out words in a newsroom, for more than 20 years I worked from home. I loved the freelance life, leaving the office long enough to search for a story or meet with writing students, but I also loved that by the end of the day I was home and ready to collect whatever jewels my children chose to share when they came home from school.
Then college happened, and my husband looked at me and said: It’s time you got out of the house.
Just about that time, my church called a new priest, a man so young I could have been his babysitter. (After hours, he plays bass in an indie rock band.) He set to work, and his youth brought a new energy to our congregation, and soon he began to build a team to help him lead our parish through what would be a time of tremendous growth.
Some of these wonderful folks already worked there. Others, like me, he found within the pews. When he approached me about joining the staff for communications, I was reticent. I cherished my freelance work (and my flexibility). I liked attending church and volunteering, and though I loved the people, working where I worship? I wasn’t so sure.
Then he took me to lunch and talked about that “call” thing, and well, that got me.
In those first weeks I sat in a tiny office filled with somebody else's filing cabinets, trying to invent a job no one had had before me. But soon I was sharing space with my friend Lee, who had a similar lunch and was now leading our newcomer program. Then came Charlotte for endowment and Abby for youth — the Episcopal logo tattooed on her wrist long before she ever thought about working for a church.
Today we are a baker’s dozen — working in music and finance, youth and children’s ministry, administration, preaching and teaching, forging deep friendships as we go, doing what I now know is God’s work.
I think too often when people hear the word “ministry,” at least in the Episcopal Church, they think of hands folded, voices low, lots of fancy language and all that kneeling.
There is that, of course, but there is so much more.
Our weekly staff meetings begin with prayer, surely, and with sharing plans of how our work will help bring our people closer to God. But sometimes our spiritual conversations morph into how popular culture competes with Church, and to mask our frustration, my boss might ask us about our favorite characters in stories as diverse as “House of Cards” and “Star Wars” to “Mary Tyler Moore.”
The Mary Tyler Moore thing grew from a discussion about the preaching rotation (or ROTA), which morphed into “Rhoda,” and of course for most of us, there is only one Rhoda. The entire staff broke out with the theme song, and as it ended, our newest priest, with us only a few months, tossed his collar into the air like Mary did her hat. (No irreverence intended, of course.)
Who does this at work?
Everybody, I wish.
We often leave our meetings laughing, ready to take on the sadness our parishioners sometimes share with us. We’re here for specific jobs — taking care of the building, planning the Sunday anthem, counting pledges — but we listen, too, as we make copies, share lunch and conversation, hearing our people out, even when they think we are not doing our jobs.
A few weeks ago, the collar-tossing priest answered a new call, and we’re heartbroken. He pulled our circle in even tighter, and we will never forget his ministry to and with us.
When we heard he was leaving, the boss opened our staff meeting by saying a friend had asked him what it was like to work with us.
“You know the last episode of Mary Tyler Moore, when they all gather for that group hug? That’s what it’s like,” he said. Later Charlotte posted that image on our Facebook page, and we all wept a little.
Yes, at my office, love is all around, and on most days we try not to waste it, knowing this perfect pitch may be tossed our way again.
++++
Susan Byrum Rountree is director of communications for St. Michael's Episcopal Church.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author. She can be reached at susanbyrumrountree.com

this christmas

this would be 

the 

Christmas 

that our children

gave us our past

in DVD without

our even asking.

we sat,

watching our 

younger selves

at just the ages 

the kids are now

maveling at 

how young we looked

and how rested,

at a time when 

we were not.

i had triangular hair

and 

I thought myself 

beautiful

though now 

it's questionable. 

at least i was thin.

it is also 

the Christmas

that the soul of

our 

family 

didn't make it.

and that happens

when december 

feels more like j

uly,

when weather 

and flight schedules

rule 

our plans.

our Christmas morning 

was not 

nearly as punny,

with him not here,

we just did not feel

complete.

it was the 

Christmas

that i was reminded

that my father 

once jumped rope

to please (maybe impress)

his grandchildren,

and it was a joy

to rewitness

his 

conversations

with me

from so many 

years ago.

it was a Christmas, 

when my boy brought

his bride-to-be

home 

and he gave me 

the gift o

f time

with him,

which is so rare.

and it was the one

when my mother

told the story of

how she met 

my father, and

of the dress she wore

on their first date,

and my daughter found 

the dress

in her closet and

brought it 

down for 

show and tell.

it was also 

the Christmas

when i was 

so busy cooking

i forgot to 

take a picture

of my kids.

so.

it is like

every Christmas:

some sadness.

some joy.

some Christmas.

yes.

and writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Like kudzu, come to think of it

sometimes the words i throw out into the world scatter and create new stories, all by themselves. sort of like children, i suspect. you raise a story up from that first uncertain word until it blooms into 700 or even thousands of words and then you nudge it out, into its own journey.

such is a story i published two weeks ago now

, about the farm i share with my siblings — though none of us could wield a plow if we had to. shortly after the story ran, the emails began, mostly from people who hail from Sunbury, the little village near where the farm sits. a cousin i had never met contacted me, as did strangers with my own last name, sharing their own memories of the place i had written about. as my quiet little story picked up steam, i lured in a couple of new blog followers, and six on twitter. #wow! 

still more strangers shared it on Facebook, on their own pages and even on a page dedicated to memories of Gates County. as the days passed, i responded to the emails, marveling at how connected people felt because of my few words about, well, connecting.

of course the email chain faded, as happens, and i set my sights on work and other things, wondering what in the world i'd write next.

a couple of days ago, a new email landed in my inbox, a delightful tome from a woman on the west coast whose Tar Heel sister had sent her my column. her own grandparents lived near our family farm, and she recalled her father's home:

"...a real crossroads with their house, an uncle's and across the street the country store and owner's house where my warts were wished off one Sunday afternoon."

her own family farm stands not far from ours but it is out of the family now. i wrote back, saying that we were practically neighbors, to which she responded: probably 14th cousins, several times removed. 

this is such a part of what i love about writing: readers who take the time to tell you how much your little story means to them. these comments are no small thing to me. 

we continued to email each other, unknowingly setting into motion a "whole 'nother story," as they say where i come from. 

as i learned more about her, we discovered link upon link to each other: our grandfathers were contemporaries. she grew up on one end of Halifax County and i on the other. she gave her sister my book a few years ago. she loves Nags Head as much as i do, and the beach cottage her family rented when she was a child? owned by her "Cousin Joe Byrum," who was my grandfather's brother and married to her grandfather's first cousin. can you follow? i might need to diagram it.

(wouldn't that make her a cousin to me by marriage? maybe 14th, several times removed?)

no people. you can't make this stuff up. 

photo copyright Watson Brown. Used with permission.

this morning, i found myself lured back to my Sunbury connections on Facebook, when i stumbled upon a photograph of our farm, taken last year by

Watson Brown

, the exceptional photographer of weathered old buildings and the beautiful landscape of eastern North Carolina. Another accidental connection.

I don't know Watson personally, but we have many mutual friends, and i've followed his work for the past couple of years, drawn to his images of home. there is a great beauty in the art he finds among the ruins. 

His calling is to document the fading history that connects all of us who call 'God's Country' home. he travels the back roads and dirt paths in search of life as it was once lived out.

browsing through his work, i image the voice of an aproned mother calling her kids across the field to home, the scrape of a father's boots on the back porch on his way in from a long day of fielding, the sounds and smells of something fried drifting out of the kitchen window toward the noses of those children, who turn and run, hurdling the rows of cotton, so as not miss a morsel of a summer supper.

my new friend on the West Coast and i hope to meet next time she comes this way. i have no doubt we'll find even more connections that link our families. in fact, i have a second cousin i'd like her to meet. his grandmother was her grandfather's cousin, Irma, so they are actually related. maybe we will share our family trees and see the many ways they do connect. 

if i've learned one thing in all my years of writing, it's that a story can take root and grow right where you sow it, standing tall and strong against the sunlight like a weathered old oak. but sometimes a story lifts itself up and spreads like kudzu all over the landscape, one thread leading to another until it's hard to tell if there is any beginning or end.

this is a story like that, i think, and i hope it will keep on growing. 

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

still the same, at heart

For the life of me, I can't recall what the story was about, but it involved Pinocchio, Geppeto, a mailman, a bunny, girls with hearts and Jiminy Cricket, and me — the girl on the second row, right end, scared to death of the cowboy next to me who claimed kin to Earl Scruggs. I remember I wore an itchy petticoat and white gloves (if you look closely, you can see them.) I am listed in the program only as 'girl'.

We were the Class of 1962 in Miss Lottie Welch's kindergarten — a tiny house in her back yard where she tried to teach our town's smallest to sit still, get along with others, sing songs and finish the puzzles we took off the shelf. We'd miss recess of we didn't, this I know because I'm guilty of it. 

And this afternoon, a baker's dozen of these kids will gather for the first time in 20 years.

Some of those little ones moved away and we lost track of them. Two of the girls died of cancer a few years ago. In the last couple of years through Facebook, I found out that the cowboy really is a 

distant kin to Earl Scruggs. 

I look at these small faces and see each one as a gift. One of us is really good at poker. Another at growing tomatoes. The pretty girl on the back row holding the big heart is a fashion designer. The boy in the middle of the first row in the striped jacket is a history teacher who is trying to preserve our town's history on Facebook, though few of us live there anymore. Pinocchio is a musician and will bring his tunes to us tonight. Jiminy Cricket is a successful businessman. I'm not sure what the mailman grew up to be, but I can't wait to ask him. There is a coach in there, and a hospital administrator. And the girl on the back row sitting with a heart in her lap is an artist, and she created my daughter's bridal bouquet.

I have known this group since I was that chubby freckled girl, some of them since birth. Six weeks ago, 'the girl next door' and Jiminy Cricket and I  chatted on a sunny Sunday morning and said, you know, it's our 40th year out of high school, so we ought to get something together. It is amazing to me in that short span of time we've pulled together a reunion of some of those pictured here, and some who joined our school from neighboring towns. There will be a few who didn't graduate with us and a surprise or two, and the chatter that this event has created over these past weeks has been heartening.  

Our historian will remind us that our education began in some ways, when an Air Force jet flew over our playground that year so close to the ground we thought it would crash on us. (It did crash just north of town, killing the pilot.) Our years continued with the Kennedy assassination our first grade year, took us through the walk on the moon, the Vietnam War, race riots and marches in our streets and the end of segregated schools, our soundtrack the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Spinners and The Temptations. Some of us lost parents to tragedy, others to old age, and a few of the lucky still have them both.

Browsing through old scrapbooks and yearbooks in the past few days, I have been reminded of what a rare gift it is to travel from kindergarten through high school graduation with some of the same people. These folks knew me before I knew myself, and I, them, and sometimes, sometimes, you just need to go back to that place before the world happened to you, and see if they — and you — are still the same 5 year-olds who graced the stage that day, some of them holding hearts in their hands.

(look for me in the News & Observer on Sunday, June 20, as I begin and new stint as an  Our Lives columnist)

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

car talk

for a girl whose grandfather was a Ford dealer for more than 50 years, i should think more about cars. but i don't. a car to me has always been transportation, surely, but a means to and end? a status symbol? a love? not so much. and i have not ever really thought much about the car in story — like some people might write about the trans am they saved up for and drove as a teenager or the '65 mustang they painstakingly restored.

a car gets me down the road and home again and i always feel pretty blessed about that. but i don't often think otherwise about the meaning of the box with pistons and throttle, brakes (unless they don't work) or gas (unless i am out of it), and though i should think of the people who created this great machine that changed the world as we know it, i don't.

or at least i didn't.

until i go a new(er) car. two weeks ago.

i have had my fair share of cars, though there is not one picture of any of them. the first, a pale blue maverick i shared with my sister. no ac, no power anything: brakes, steering or windows. a static-y AM radio. my grandfather didn't trust any newfangled gadgets like FM or AC, and though more than once my mother chose those options on family cars, her new drive often showed up in his shop without them. 

the Maverick took me many places, but i remember most driving down the back roads, windows down, headed to the beach for the very first time by myself. i think i was 16.

then there was the mustang — a blue 1975 4-speed my father let me pick out, not at all the collector's item as the '65 — that car moved with me to Carolina, to my first job in journalism. when my landlord found out i had a cat in my apartment, i threw her into a suitcase and into the back seat of the mustang and drove her home to my mother.

together the mustang and I moved all the way down to Georgia and into the-rest-of-my-life. we traded it for a harsh two-toned brown escort with an orange stripe down its side, a little car more suitable to carry the baby home from the hospital than the 4-speed upstart. that brown car was the only car i ever really hated.

then came mom cars. the wagons — a burgundy dodge and a white chevrolet, the dodge van with the fake wood on the side. the expedition that made me nauseous when i drove it out of the dealer lot it cost so much. then the jeep that took my children to college, the one i drove all around eastern North Carolina schlepping my first book. 

and then the last car — a used lexus suv. daddy thought we were living beyond our raising  buying a luxury car — even though by the time it joined the family it was already four years old. 

but it's this car that for some reason got me to thinking about the story of it. and the stories of all the other cars in my life.

people write whole

novels about cars

. (my friend Jane has written a slew of short stories and every one of them features a car.) one of the only twilight zones of my memory was about a car that talked back to its driver (imagine that!). what about 'my mother the car', apparently labeled the

second-worst sitcom of all time

and who can forget Car 54 Where Are You?

i don't write about cars or name them or think about them or tell stories about them, really. but then we found a new car, and before we were headed to the dealer to pick it up, i found myself thinking about all the places the old one had taken me.

100,000 miles. that's how many we trekked together. and as i thought about those miles i actually took a picture of the odometer, and thought, Lord, you are going crazier in tiny increments every day. a few minutes later, we ticked across the 114,000 mark, and it felt like a milestone.

when my husband said he had someone coming to look at the car, i went crazier still. found myself pulling out a note card and writing — as if i were the car itself — to the faceless new owners to tell them what the car had meant to me. seriously. 

I may look a little worn around the edges, the car wrote. I am 11 after all, (is that 33 in car years?) but i have been good to my family...

the buyer didn't show, and i tucked the car's carefully scripted letter in a safe place to wait for one who did.

100,000 miles. 

to the gazebo where the Pea got engaged and to her wedding, with her gown draped across our laps. to the vet with the dog, when we had to put her down, then home with her ashes. to my son's college graduation. to his first house, the back filled with new house things from Target. to my niece's house to meet her new baby. 

to my father's hospital bed too many times, the car doors and windows framing winter as it changed to spring, the steering wheel absorbing my many tears along the way.

that car took me away from my childhood home for the last time and to my mother's new house. to our favorite beach and our friends' favorite mountain respite. to the airport with the dog and to church and to the grocery store and back again on hundreds of regular days. we didn't cover a lot of the map, my old car and me, but we traveled far.

when we sold her last week, (did i really call her HER?) i forgot to put the note in the glove compartment, which is probably a good thing. no reason for the new owners to worry that they bought crazy along with a pretty good old car.

now i'm finally back in blue again. though it's three years old, my new drive still smells like the back of my Bigdaddy's neck ('new car' was his cologne of choice), and has two — TWO — manuals, a 300-pager for the sound system alone. 

and this: it doesn't even have a key! what in the world would my grandfather say to that?

and so we're back on the road. i can't say where my new blue car will take me, but i know somewhere along the way, that's where the story will be.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Hooked, Day 5 (lots of mixed metaphors in this one!)

imagine flying. 

bird-like, with a view of the ground from just above the treeline, then in a flash, soaring up toward the milky way and taking a right at that second star, then on til morning. flying.

the unencumbered and unchallenged kind of flying, the look-at-me-way-up-high, Peter-Pan kind of flying. FLYING!

ever since i was a girl and saw Mary Martin soar in her green felt suit across the television stage, singing that song, i have imagined flying like that, imagined flying free, like the boy Pan.

the idea of flying, only to be stilled long enough to never quite grow up beyond where you landed. now that would be something.

if i could choose a year i didn't want to grow beyond it would be fourth grade. at 9 you haven't really made any particular mistakes that you'll have to carry with you like you might, say, at 11. or 16. your parents still think you are pretty smart and cute, your friends love you completely, the acne hasn't yet landed on your face and though you may have a boyfriend, he never actually talks to you, so he doesn't matter all that much. gotta love 4th grade.

you still believe in Santa Claus (well, at least in 1965), still have not yet shaved your legs or started your period or felt the rising and falling of unexplained and unexpected feelings. you are flying. and high, hoping to land in that place 'where dreams are born and time is never planned.' and where nightmares can still be calmed with a lullaby.

at that age, i was not aware that i might one day make mistakes i'd carry on my back for years and could not flee, no matter how i might try to fly above them.

+++

i have always loved anything about Peter Pan, and years after the Mary Martin production, my son and i fell in love with Hook, the story of Peter as a middle-aged man who has forgotten what it's like to be a child. there are no special lyrics, no dance of Tiger Lily, but it's a wonderful examination of how quickly we leave childhood and move into the things that hardly matter. watching Robin Williams in the role of Peter, who eventually begins to understand the value of thinking and believing as a child, you imagine that this is a role he was born to play. i can't think of Peter Pan without thinking of this great actor.

+++

i thought about all this last night as i watched Peter Pan live. as soon as the stage opened to Wendy and her brothers, I felt much like a 9-year-old again, so absorbed in the story that by the time Tinkerbell needed me, I clapped hysterically to keep her alive just as i had when was was six.(my husband made fun of me on Facebook.) for a moment, even in fiction, i mattered, i was needed to bring about something important. 

there is something wonderfully freeing, flying-like, in abandoning all those burdens for a few hours, to remember what it feels like to be 6, or 9.

and to remember that years later for no explained reason, how you sang to your sleepy children words you had learned yourself as a child from Wendy, and Peter Pan.

how often, now ,does it feel like you matter. that someone's very existence depends upon  your clapping? 

and what do you think is around your bend, after you take that right at that second star? Morning, surely, but there has to be more.

sbr

Tender shepherd, tender shepherd, watches over all his sheep
one in the meadow, 2 in the garden, three in nursery, fast asleep.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.