Friday with Daddy

daddy never went through the front door of our house.

always through the back, by the carport and into the utility room where he might scale a fish (much to my mother's chagrin) where the dog sat and scratched at the door during our supper, where he stitched up a rabbit my sister found injured in the yard. where one morning when he was in his 40s he collapsed into my mother, sobbing because his friend had died at home while reading the paper in his wing chair and daddy had to pronounce him dead.

the front door was reserved for prom dates and the rare trick-or-treater, for strangers stopping by. 

but when daddy came home on last friday — april 19 — they brought him through the front door. 

he came home the same way he left town way back in february, in a giant transport filled with fancy machines, a blue tulip-like flower emblazoned on the side. 

we had made the decision to bring him home two days before, my family and his hospital team crowded around his bed. he'd been asking to go home for more than a month, to leave behind the machines and tubes and take his rest in his bed at home. pat, my father's pa, carefully listed off the options for a man who could no longer breathe completely on his own. a long-term care hospital. palliative care or Hospice. 

when i heard the word 'home' i looked to my mother, praying she would choose that option. in a wheelchair herself, she would be going home herself the next day, to 24-hour caregivers my sister would meet later in the day. my brother leaned into mama, asking quietly: what do you want to do?

'home,' she said. 'let's take him home.'

a week ago now, the transport team pulled up in front of our house drew him out into the crisp spring air. and i was waiting.

'you're home daddy!' i shouted, and he looked around. home, his wish finally granted. i stood there— my family waiting just inside the front door — watching him look around at the sky. they wheeled him into our front hall where the Christmas tree stood in december, 

down the hall he had walked so many times in the middle of the night in his pajamas toward the back door and a patient waiting. down the hall, toward the linen closet, that when i was five i was convinced held a witch. they wheeled him to his room, to a bed he had last slept in on february 5, the room he had shared with my mother for 50 years. 

it felt like a long ride to me, down our hall. across the creaky floorboard that gave my brother's Christmas morning crawl away. past my childhood room. a mile it seemed, as they shifted the gurney to make room for this 6-foot-two man, squeezing him through the door into a room softened by carpet and soothing blue.

daddy brought with him a host of people. the Hospice doctor and two nurses. a respiratory therapist, Pat, who had been caring for him all these weeks. a priest who's liberal views challenged daddy's conservative ones, but in his years as their 

minister, the two had become good friends. 

the team to settled him, and my mother's caregivers helped her into place beside him. it was mid-afternoon.

by the time we gathered next to him, daddy wore his familiar pajamas, sat propped against his favorite pillow, talked to us. i took hold of his hand, and he said something i couldn't grasp... what, daddy?

he looked straight at me and said: your hands are COLD! he wanted chocolate milk, but we had only vanilla ice cream.  i spooned it carefully into his mouth, he swallowed, not seeming to care that we could not grant his original wish.

the day before he came home, daddy talked to all of his grandchildren on the phone. somehow, after all these weeks of quiet, he had much to say. it was a miracle, really. i talked to him, too, as did my mother and sister, all of us overjoyed at hearing his voice again. 

last thursday was her first day home as well, after her fall. we had fixed her crab cakes — the best meal she had ever eaten! — and watched as she pulled herself up on her bed, straighten out that broken leg, beginning the first steps toward her recovery.  

+++

when we gathered everybody around in the room, daddy said: we didn't plan for all these people.' for daddy, it has always been about the plan. each day i visited him in the hospital, he would ask: plan. toward the end, when we had no idea, i'd shrug my shoulders — one of his exercises — and say, 'who knows? that's the plan.' which seemed to satisfy him.

this time we had one. we all joined the priest for last rites from the good ol'

Book of Common Prayer

. and then daddy thanked everyone for coming. thanked them, which is so what my father would do. later on, he FaceTimed with my daughter and my niece. strange, that, this 84-year-old dying man saying when asked by his granddaughters how he felt, he said:'pretty good.'

++++ 

i will tell you that it's something, when your siblings gather round your dying father. 

my brother, a physician, is good with those who are critically ill. i have watched him with my father all these weeks. he leans in, speaks softly, but loud enough to jostle daddy awake when need be. this day was no different. i can't imagine how hard it is to be doctor, lawyer, indian chief, son, for he has been all these things since february, and again on this afternoon, our last friday with daddy. 

my sister brought the dog in, picked her up and put her on the bed with daddy, knowing just how long he had waited to touch her head.

we spent the afternoon and evening gathered around my parents, telling stories and praying and singing. 

After supper, i sat with him and read him the story of his life. 

we kissed him goodnight, leaving he and my mother alone in the room. 

she lay by his side the whole night, and ruby did for most of it. 

and then, a call, footsteps in the hall, my sister running toward the room where i had tried to sleep a little. 

it was over. 

we surrounded his body, talking and crying, naming all the dogs he was now getting to see. our grandparents. his friends. so many who have made this journey before him. 

and then we left the room, all of us, to wait for the next step.

in the wee hours, as we sat up and waited for the Hospice nurse and the funeral director to arrive in the pouring rain, we listened as mama told stories about him and their life together, their early years. Despite all the uncertainty and the trauma we've experienced these many weeks, what a treasure my father's last hours were to all of us.

dawn came, and we called all the children, made arrangements for them to join us in this new life without their Pop B. not one of us has wanted to go there, but at least we will travel together, his legacy to us that he was the magnet that drew us together, keeps drawing, even in his absence.

in the days since daddy died, we have heard a hundred stories from his patients and friends, many reflecting his wry humor, others his humble, caring nature. 

'he was quiet, but he was 

powerful,' the man, a patient, who has kept up our lawn when daddy no longer could told me yesterday. yes he was. 

my father was a great man, so many have said to us in the past week. but aren't all our father's that? 

"so with the sleight of his magician's hand, he will end the show,' 

i wrote back in 1997.

 and i don't know who will miss him more — his patients, or the doctor himself..."  those very words caught in my throat as i read them to him one last time just a few hours before he died.  words appropriate for retirement so many years ago, and, it turns out, for his last friday with us. 

i can't imagine now  how much i'll miss him. it still isn't real to me yet. but i am not alone, because i have a full family and a whole town gathered around me, and we are all holding each other up.

 bye daddy. guess it was finally your time to hit the road. be careful. and have a safe and happy trip. sbr

ps: thank you to all who have called and visited, who have sent food, cards and facebook messages, who had loved my daddy at times it seems as much as i did. your generosity toward my family is overwhelming. maybe now daddy understands just how much he meant to all who knew him. susan

read more about him here

susanbyrumrountree.com 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.

masters at it.

daddy loves golf. is not very good at it, but years ago, when a group of men formed a small country club a few miles outside of town, we no longer had him at home for Sunday dinner.

i don't know if he had every played before the club started up, but he played most weekends when he was off. i am not athletic, so i never took it up, but i remember playing once with him, taking about 30 strokes to get to the hole, then putting what felt like a long way to me to to the hole on the green, and sinking it.

but what i remember more was sunday afternoons when he was home, and i watched golf with him.

daddy went to wake forest when arnold palmer was there. they didn't know each other, but when i was growing up, Arnold felt like family. he was one of us, a demon deacon, about the same age as daddy, and whoever was playing in a tournament that week, well, we were pulling for arnold. it was just right.

daddy and i last watched the masters together with any vengeance in 1980.  i remember sitting in our family room during those final moments as seve ballesteros sank the putt that would win it for him, and i actually said to daddy: i wonder where i will be during next year's masters?

that master's for us was one more benchmark that another year had ended — the long winter over and new life just about to begin. 

that spring, i was hoping for some sort of new life myself. i was searching — just a year out of college — for i didn't know what. after graduation, i'd found a job at a small daily newspaper, but as a photographer, not as the writer i longed to be. so when the job grew stale i pulled together my pitiful resume, typing it out on my trusted olivetti, sending it out blindly to the n&o, the atlanta paper, charlotte, anywhere to get myself out of eastern north carolina. i'm sure if i could find it now i would be embarrassed.

that summer of '80, i called (yes, people actually called other people in those days) the placement office at the j-school at carolina, asking if they had anything — i might even scrub floors to get out! — i could apply for.

oh, yes, said the woman on the other end of the line. a classmate of mine was working in augusta as a feature writer, and her department was looking to add a writer.

augusta. my mind thought back to that sunday afternoon in april when i'd watched the tournament with daddy and it felt like fate. the azaleas! the green lawns! the clubhouse! what fun!

i whipped out the olivetti and banged a new resume out, pulling together the very best clips i could find. (aka those with as few typos as possible) put a stamp on it, dropped in in the mail and prayed.

some days later, i got a call from the editor. could i come for an interview?

three weeks later, there i was, a working writer on my first assignment. wouldn't you know the husband of the woman i was interviewing for my story had once been an assistant football coach in my home town?

(a side note, though this i not part of the story: i met a rakish reporter my first night there. a year later we married, celebrating at a reception in my parents' back yard.)

that next spring i found myself standing in the clubhouse at the master's, and there they were, all of daddy's friends: arnold palmer in his hot pink golf shirt, gary player, jack nicklaus. even sam snead. all of them close enough for me to touch. my job that day was to report the color of this storied golf tournament, and all i could think of was the story i would tell daddy when i got to see him next.

that afternoon at sunset, i sat with my editor on the front lawn at augusta national, gin and tonic in hand soaking in the sunset on one very pinch-able day.

+++

when the hospital speech therapist first put the speaking valve on daddy's trach she asked him what he like to do now that he was retired. 

'read. play golf.' he said. 

'what kind of golfer are you?' she asked.

'not a very good one,' he said.

on saturday, daddy and i watched the masters together again for the first time in a very long time. as the old guard — player, palmer, nicklaus — teed off to open the tournament and new names took their places on the greens, i asked him if he remembered that day in 1980 when we watched balesteros don the green jacket. he shook his head, and so i reminded him, then shared my story of the 1981 clubhouse crowd once again.

'i think tom watson won that year,' i said and his eyes told me he didn't believe i could remember it right after all those years, so google answered the question for us. 

on sunday, when adam scott sank his putt in the pouring rain to win this year's event, i was back at home, imagining daddy's eyes glued to that sudden death putt. it was among the most memorable tournaments in master's history, the pundits all said the next day, and it was indeed. but for very different reasons to me.

daddy's old clubs are collecting dust in the storage house that holds all of his tools and the blue wagon he used to tote the grandkids around in with the riding mower. though he has not played golf in a good long while and he has a newer set, these are the ones i remember. 

tomorrow daddy comes home, a place he hasn't seen for 67 days.

i think about his homecoming, and in my mind, i can hear the crack of the wood against the ball, see it soar through the air toward a perfect line drive. hear the whir of the golf cart as he heads up the fairway to take that next shot toward the green.

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.

i will always love my mama, she's my favorite girl

my mother sits in a wheelchair beside my father, her gloved hands holding his. she wears a brilliant blue dress just the color of her eyes, though it's obscured by the yellow gown we all have to wear now when we visit daddy. i watch the two of them, their eyes meeting as they nod to each other and speak a silent language only those who have been married for almost 61 years can understand.

she has been here at his side, most every day since that first day — february 6th. before the day that changed so much, i'd see her walking down the hall in her crisp denim pants and neatly pressed blouse or tailored jacket and i'd think: wow, i wish i could be that beautiful. in these weeks since daddy has been in the hospital, mama has seemed to grow more beautiful. she waves at the nurses in the hallway, the members of the lift team, the care partners —  by now she practically knows all their names and they know her, a quiet but kind woman whose beauty they see, like i do, in how she cares for my dad. 

now though, she can't get herself here, has to depend on others and on someone else's schedule to see the man she has been married to since she was 24. 

it seems impossible to think that they are now both on such difficult but parallel paths. daddy works each day to regain the strength he had when he walked into the hospital so many weeks ago. mama works to walk again, too, but for entirely different reasons.

in the middle of our day-to-day journey, there is something to celebrate. mama turned 85 years old today, and we had a party, just like we might any other birthday, with a picnic lunch in a side room and with yellow roses requested specially by my daddy, with cards. but we also celebrated by watching her learn to wheel herself down the hallway toward my father, so together we could cheer him on to lift his arms, shrug his shoulders, breathe on his own.

this might be a new challenge for mama, but it is not the first. 

betty jean mccormick byrum was born on april 12, 1928 and raised to be strong. to stand up for herself when need be, to fight back, even when she didn't feel like it. she has shown this to me over and over as i have grown up. when my father was sick and dying at 39 — and yet he didn't — when her family presented her with challenges — and especially right now. 

she. carried. on.

i wish i had gotten that from her. the pick everything up and steady the load and keep on walking kind of thing. she did a lot of that, the mother of three and wife of a doctor who was often with other people's families. she picked it— us — up, and gave us a pretty wonderful life.

i tend to leave life all on the floor — as evidenced by my bedroom closet and my home for the past few months — hoping someone else will come behind me and make everything all straight. usually mama. when i was a child, she usually did.

there have been moments in my life though, when i called on my 'mama' instincts and took care of the impossible. all by myself. picked myself up and moved through what i didn't want to, because i come from her stock.

now it is my turn again.

you know i am a storyteller. this comes sometimes much to my parents' chagrin. might i tell too much? in their eyes probably... i hope only to tell the important.

mama is not one to share many stories about her childhood. i can remember, though,  times when she shared a bit. how roosevelt died on her birthday. how she met my father at a medical school dance. (and my, was she beautiful.) how they lived their first married year with a

murphy bed

.

my favorite betty jean childhood story is the one when my grandmother sent her to the store to buy a loaf of bread, but wouldn't you know it? a new movie — "the wizard of oz" — was showing at the local theater. the 11-year-old betty jean rode her bike to the store, got the bread, and several hours later  — maybe she sat through two showings — she emerged from the dark theater, too late for my grandmother's sandwiches, but she was a changed little girl.

weren't we all changed by that movie? our grayscale worlds turned suddenly into color by the wind?

in these past weeks, it feels like the wind has taken our colorful world and upended it, picked up our settled family home with it and crashed it down so rakishly that we don't know which end is up. and the whole world has turned to grayscale again.

we are not alone. a church friend one day this week said her 97-year-old father had the same injury as my mom, her own mother already in 24-hr care. she wept, telling me her story, and all i could do was hug her. i understand. add her to my now pages-long prayer list for families like my own.

my siblings and i have often joked that our family is just so beige. to the outside world i am sure that's how it seems. we tend to cling close, though i am the one who puts the story out there. neither of my parents have been comfortable with my writing about them from time to time, but i hope one day they will understand why.

today is my mother's birthday. all the grandchildren called her, and one even came to visit. she sat next to the love her life and held his hand. and he told her he loved her, one more time. 

it was an honor to be with them as they shared their own private celebration.

today we celebrated my mother and my father. brave souls, both.

ps: a favorite college song was 'i'll always love my mama' by the intruders:

watch the video here  and dance!

susanbyrumrountree.com 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.

Save the last dance

They met in the hallways of Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem in the fall of 1951. Not long after, the skinny young man in the white coat asked the wavy-haired Florida girl if she would like to go to a med school dance with him. 

Two weeks later, he asked her a bigger question: Will you marry me? And on June 14 the next year, she did. 

And the day after that? He graduated from Bowman Gray School of Medicine. All the family was coming anyway, so what better time to get married than the day before you become a doctor?

My mother often said Daddy didn't want to go to Louisville (the location of his internship) alone. So she went with him, and two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, my brother joined them in their little apartment with the Murphy bed in the wall.

In those early years, the young Byrums would not often be together. Mama moved with my brother to live with my grandparents, whom she had really only met a couple of times. Daddy joined the Navy, spending his days in the cramped infirmary of a destroyer, tending to the medical needs of other young men his age. He has a certificate from that time that says he crossed the Arctic Circle.

When he came home, they moved to Newport, Rhode Island, then back with my grandparents. Daddy left again, and while they were living apart, my sister was born. 

When my father left the Navy, they looked around for a place to settle down and found a spot just an hour from my grandparents. Within a year, they had a house and another baby, me, Daddy tending to the needs of patients who would come to him for the rest of his career —almost 50 years.

I wrote about them last year here. Little has changed except they are moving a little slower, but I marvel at the fact that my parents continue to grow closer today as each day passes.

This week we have gathered — 23 of us —to celebrate the fact of them and their 60 years together, and that what seems to us to have been a hasty decision back in 1951 has turned into a pretty remarkable life.

Each day someone new has arrived to join our celebration. Grandchildren. Spouses. Great-grands. Earlier in the week, we even gathered in a nearby gazebo to toast the newest union-to-be, all of us weeping after my nephew proposed to his girlfriend. What a joyful moment for us all.

Mama has enjoyed sharing the story of how she met my dad with each new face. Daddy checks his watch and asks who is coming next. By this afternoon, we will all be in place, and we have a few special things planned for them to mark this day in our family history.

Last night, Daddy stood before supper and thanked us all for coming, and for being who we are. He said he was proud how we are living our lives, and though he and my mother could not take credit, they would like to. 

Well. 

"There was more I wanted to say but I have forgotten!" he said then, tempering the tears that had formed at the corners of all of our eyes with the subtle humor he is known for. I watched Mama sitting in the chair behind him, looking up at him, her blue eyes sparkling.

"Would you like to go to the dance?" he asked those years ago. My mother has never felt she was very good at dancing, but when my father took her in his arms that fateful night, somehow she stayed in step. For 60 years. Imagine.


Happy Anniversary B&Pop B. May the dance continue.



 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.

our light has come

ok, so i haven't written daily during december, at least not here at writemuch. but i have been writing a lot in my job and in my head. why just a few days ago, in the wee hours of the morning, i dreamed that i had found the characters and plot to the next harry potter (well, HP wannabe)... literally dreamed up the world and had actors taking parts in the screen version, even setting it up for the sequel.

if only i could remember it. in the middle of the dream i dreamed that i was thinking now this is a great story, so great in fact that it is unforgettable. apparently not so unforgettable that when i woke just minutes later, the whole thing had vanished more quickly than dear ol' harry under his invisible cloak.

and so i have vowed that i will wake myself up from a dream of this sort again and write the whole damn thing down (even if i can't read my own handwriting, which is hard to do in the middle of the day, much less in the wee hours with the lights off.)

sometimes, though, it's not about my writing at all. sometimes the joy of words comes through the people i love writing and reading their own stories — stories i admittedly helped pull out of them — but their words, their dreams, beautifully rendered on the page.

today was that kind of day.

each sunday during Advent, i've had the privilege to mentor a group of writers who share the pews with me at my church. we've been gathering for years, off and on, during sunday school, to put ourselves into the stories of the Bible and write our way out. i think we are in our 8th year, though we've departed the text and written about Lent from time to time.

it's been a remarkable journey. and i have grown to love and respect all the people who sit at the table with me, churning out their personal stories with great enthusiasm and humility. some of them have been with me for years, others new to the table, but all are searching for the role God plays in their daily life, in their struggles to be good people and parents, to work through their grief, to accept life when plans go awry. you can't know how much i admire how they put it right there on the table, when too often their instructor is not yet ready to do the same. they have written about their marriages, children and siblings they have lost, riffs in families and the struggles and joys that come with this busy season. they've written with humor and with grace, and we have made good use of the box of Kleenex that sits in the middle of our table.

and today, this group of writers shared their stories with the larger congregation. i felt like a mother watching her child perform, take her first steps or riding away from me with her back to me as she peddles away on her bike. in the words these dear friends read, i saw growth, too, as writers and as Christians who have come to understand that God is there, even in the middle of sadness.

it's funny. we set out each season with a set of readings and no idea what we will write about or if our stories will connect in any way to each other, as any good collection should. and every single year, as i begin placing the stories in our collection, it's a goosebump feeling, because stories set apart by circumstance, gender and generation are woven together as if from the same cloth.

this year's collection is all about light, the aha! kind of light that comes when we finally understand we are on the right road.

advent: noun. "coming into being or use."

i'd say that's what this year's collection is all about. but why don't you see for yourself? our light has come, and you can read all about it here.

but that's not all. this afternoon i sat in the audience to hear my mentor, poet Sally Buckner, read from her collection, Nineteen Visions of Christmas. i was sally's student almost 40 years ago at peace college, and one of the joys of the season throughout the years has been to receive a Christmas poem from her as her card. she has collected some familiar to me, and many not, and listening to the cadence and clarity of her words today reminded me of why i want to be a writer, and how much she has taught me about the craft. i can only hope i have taught my own students half as much.

what a joy, in the midst of this season, to be both teacher and student in one single day. but come to think of it, shouldn't every day be just like that?












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.

of spitfires and the written word

my friend nell, in her early 80s, and is a spitfire. widowed a few years ago — after having lived some 60 years with the love of her life — she's challenging herself to try new things. she's been to Russia, traveled the Seine and the Rhine rivers by boat, taken her turn at singing on the small stage, been in a mission trip.

and she is writing. i am teaching her how in a writer's group at my church, which is not altogether unlike other writing groups i have been part of in my career, except for the fact that most of the people in the group (including nell) proclaim quite loudly that they are NOT writers. i ignore them so we write anyway. and since we are a church class, we write about faith and doubt and just trying to be good Christians in a world that too often seems weary of the whole idea.

we've been on hiatus for the past year, and i have felt refreshed to see the regulars like nell take their seats on Sunday mornings along with a few new faces. among us are several professional writers like myself who nurture the newbies. nell is no newbie, but she is always reminding us that she is (this, having written poems and stories enough to fill a notebook.) our running joke is that the pros show up to class with no paper or pencil, while the newbies sit ever ready, a crisp clean sheet of white in front of them as we begin. (ever the school marm, i bring a box of no. 2s in case the muse should strike.)

in past years, our amoebic group produced books of meditations for the season —Advent or Lent — and have shared them with the congregation. few of the readers can know the work — and sometimes the boxes of Kleenex — it takes to complete each piece.

we've looked at Advent for what will be our fifth year now, and though we are all expectant and excited about Christmas, the work of the class includes coming up with something new to say that hasn't been said for a two thousand years already. so as we look look once again at Mary and Joseph, at Gabriel and the shepherds, each week we ask ourselves questions like: what would we do if an angel came to visit us and told us we would be the mother of God?

well. i for one would emphatically say that menopause means it's not possible, thank God, even by the power of the Holy Spirit. and if she insisted that nothing is impossible when the HS is involved, i would whine that i bet we put our heads together and come up with something else. (one year, melanie pondered not just the angel's words in her heart, but just how many 13-year-olds had to be asked before one of them said yes.)

on Sunday, the prompt was this: think about the path you imagined yourself traveling, but how God had a different idea.

Nell, it turns out, wanted to be a doctor. with an acumen for science and having had pneumonia half a dozen times in as many years, little Nell was sure of her path. though she didn't know any female doctors at the time, she was hopeful she would find the way toward her dream. and then she fell in love with the man she would care for years later as he faced Alzheimer's. and her course her new path was set. 

as she read — and later talked — about how women of her generation acquiesced to their men, i looked around the room at the other women present. melanie, who turned 40 this year, will run the Chicago marathon on Sunday and just completed a triatholon in the pouring rain. She is the mother of three girls under 8 and the wife of our priest and has never asked for permission to do anything. beth chose career over family years ago, and has discovered because of our writing exercise that she is really just fine with that choice, which was a surprise to discover.

nell is happy with her life, but she has always felt something was missing. and though she knows she'll never be a doctor now, she has used her resources to establish a scholarship for some young person who might well be. beth has never had to ask permission from anyone to accomplish what she has as a reporter and editor. and now she is moving forward on a new path, discerning what her role as a Christian might be.

it likely never occurred to melanie that she should ask anyone's permission. she just does it. what might her girls grow up to be like with a mother who takes charge of herself like that?

how different are these generations of women, and how rich it is that they share their stories and learn from each other. as i have learned from each of them.

i have always felt i was on the writing path. and though that path has meandered from newspaper photographer to feature writer to freelancer to teacher to volunteer editor to author, now all the tendrils seem to be gathered into one. and some days it feels as if that's God's doing.

there have been many times when i didn't think i was getting anywhere. but when it felt like i was trudging through the mud of it, my husband would do something really wonderful for me. like the Christmas, years ago, when he gave me a bright white filing cabinet — a place to keep my words in some sort of order. you'd have thought he'd built me an entire office from the way this small gift made me feel. and for a birthday some years later, he gave me a glitzy new IMac. then threw me a book party when i finally wrote that book. even tried to sell one of my books to a barber giving him a hair cut.

when he first started reading my stories and made comment, i would cry because i thought he was criticizing me. only later did i understand he was trying to make me a better writer. trying hard to toughen me up.

in truth, my own dream of being playwright or novelist or essayist has not been waylaid by God sending me off in a different direction so much as by my own sense of inadequacy — and maybe not listening to the voice whispering in my head.  sure there was that occasional editor who wouldn't return my calls, the project that fell flat, that great enemy of the written word —time (too much or too little.) but in the end, i'm the biggest unnudgeable boulder on this road of mine.

but i still have that filing cabinet. and writing friends who help lure the story out of me, even when i fight hard to keep it in. and the memory of my father's voice, telling me this is what i should be. and a class like the one that meets each Sunday morning, when i get to listen to the stories of other people's lives and in the process learn so much more about my own.