let your heart be light

our young associate rector at my church is a born teacher. since he joined our staff last year, he's developed creative programs that challenge the mind and expand your faith. and for the second year in a row, on the last Sunday before Christmas, he goes "behind the music," giving the back story for some of our most favorite Christmas carols and songs. 

dressed up in a clownish Santa outfit, with a fire roaring behind him on a flat-screen television, Christopher shared with us the story of how Jingle Bells was written by the son of a Unitarian minister, gifted in music whose father asked him to write a Thanksgiving hymn for his church. as he sat in the living room of his father's house, trying to think of something, he heard sleigh bells in the distance and headed outside to see what was happening. he found sleighs racing through the night, and felt so joyful that he went inside and wrote the song that was all about about racing through the snow. later he had the song published, and before long it became an iconic Christmas song, though it doesn't mention anything about Christmas. (Racing and betting and going on dates with Miss Fanny Brice were more important apparently.)

we learned that O Little Town of Bethlehem was written by an Episcopal priest who visited Bethlehem in 1865. Inspired, three years later he wrote a poem and his organist back in Philadelphia added the music. he had been searching for a way to lift people out from under the Civil War.

when Christopher pulled up a picture of Judy Garland from the movie "Meet Me in St. Louis,"  he talked about how the lyricists for the movie wrote a dismal song that Judy refused to sing, for a pivotal, sad scene in the movie. it was the middle of World War II, and Judy had toured for soldiers over seas and knew they needed to hear something hopeful. so they re-wrote the song, which would be played for troops right before the Battle of the Bulge. though she battled many demons in the years after she sang that song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas was more important to her, Christopher said, than Somewhere Over the Rainbow. 

as the congregation there gathered — children and parents and grandparents and teens — began to sing  the song together, i looked around the room, seeing co-workers and friends and people i didn't know, and all captured by the beauty of this little song. i recalled hearing that after 9/11, James Taylor recorded the song just in time for Christmas, in an attempt to give listeners a bit of hope during such a sad time for our country.

every voice lifted, and together, we created a joyful noise that brought tears to the eyes of some. 

Christmas is a hard time for many, surely. those who are lonely, scared, ill, grieving, heartsick. but how magical that, no matter what our circumstance, we can all come together in song, forgetting our troubles as we sing along with others.

have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light. and this year, carry a tune along with your troubles, and may those troubles slip out of sight for a moment or two.

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.

a cure for dreams

lydia and i have been getting into mischief since we made onion soup from the wild onions in her front yard when we were five and promptly forgot about it. it was spring, and the sun beat down on the bucket of onions, water and sand until it was ripely rotten. the smell lasted for days. 

we sent love letters (she did, i was just her accomplice) to the boys next door, bathing our mouths in her mother's lipstick, planting kisses all over the envelopes, then we ran through the bushes to put them in the box.

we did something else that same year that i can't confess, even now, because my mother reads this blog and would not approve. 

we'd slip into the darkened Dixie Theatre with too much popcorn and drink in our hands and get the giggles. once we (she, really) spilled half her drink down someone's back in the row in front of us. 

one day when we walked home from town, Miss Hooker, an elderly woman who took care of her mother, ran out of her house toward us and shouted: help me! mother is dead!

i will not say that we rushed into the house, but we did go in, rubbing the old woman's legs until she moaned and we knew that she was indeed NOT dead. i remember calling daddy that day, asking if we had done the right thing. 

'as far as i can tell you did,' he said. years later, when miss hooker visited my daddy's office, she looked fondly into my eyes.

things like this always happened to lydia and me. i have used some of it for fodder in my fiction, and i will tell you that each episode makes for a good story.

as lydia and i grew older, we built huts out of wheat straw gathered from the field next to her house. we slipped on our rain boots and crept into the dark woods that by night were inhabited by millions of grackles and starlings swirling above our heads. by day we stomped through knee-high bird droppings, just because we wanted to see for ourselves what the whole bird story was all about. writing about it in fiction, i made it night, though it was pretty scary to go there by day.

when we were in junior high school, we got into decoupage and antiquing furniture in her playhouse, not knowing that we were ahead of our time. we sneaked scuppernong wine her grandfather made from the attic. we set up a beauty parlor on her side porch and i actually let her give me a perm, promising i wouldn't take the curlers out for 24 hours. hours! 

on to high school and boys and once, when we stood talking in her back yard as a storm loomed miles away, we watched (and felt and heard) as a beam of lightning shot down and struck the chimney of her house, sending bricks flying toward us. years later when we were together and a thunderstorm approached, i don't know who headed for the car first. we have not liked to be together in storms since.

in college, lydia lived right across the hall from me our first year, down the hall the second, and she was like my sister. applauding me when i did well, putting me in my place when i disappointed her.                                                                                      

when daddy died, almost the first person i heard from was lydia. 'i'm coming,' she said, 'and i'm staying, even if i have to put up a straw hut in the back yard.' and i knew she would do just that.

at the visitation, she came through the back door, telling the folks in the kitchen that she had never used the front door and would not start at that moment. she worked through the room, visiting with people she had known her whole life, and when all the visitors left, she took over the kitchen, pulling out homemade sweet potato ham biscuits (made just that morning), passing them out to all the grands, saying something under her breath like: lydia is gonna take care of things.

the next day, after we buried daddy's ashes, lydia called my cell. 'let's take a ride,' she said, and i said of course, sure. she picked me up, and we drove around the old hood, trying to name who lived where, though neither of us has lived there for more than 35 years. 

put two country girls together who have not been in the country for awhile, and they will surely take a ride, out, toward the fields, the open air. i knew where we were headed, a few miles out of town to the country club where our daddies had played golf for so many years. this trip was for lydia, i thought, to see a place her father had helped build.

as we drove into the club, i saw some men fishing on the edge of the pond and there it was in my head, the picture of the huge bass i'd caught with a cane pole, lydia next to me, so heavy that fish was that the two of us had to drag it across the ground up toward the woods. we had no net. we were maybe 13.

Lydia drove around the clubhouse, noted the wood fence post her father's business was known for years ago, still standing guard against the putting green. on we went, down the hill toward the tennis courts where she had tossed her first serve — this was still her trip, mind you... i never played tennis — toward the club house.

lydia plays golf, is married to a pro, so again we were doing this for her. her mother died just last year, her father a few years before, but they lived away from our town for years. and while the week for me had been catching up with folks i'd known much of my life, lydia didn't have that chance when her parents died. i was more than happy to share our grieving.

humm... she said. i'm thinking maybe i'd like an ice cold beer.

so we sauntered into the pro shop and she told me to put my money away. it was quiet, only a golfer or two on #9 next to the shop, another on #10 teeing off with his son. she asked the pro for two cold ones, and i asked his name. suddenly, i felt a tightness near my eyes and throat and said this: my father was dr. byrum.

'was?' he asked. 'i had no idea.' and then he told me that daddy always came into the shop, golf shoes in hand, and sat right in that chair there — and he pointed to it — to change his shoes. same thing every time. 'i knew he was sick,' he said. 'hadn't seen him in awhile.'

then we talked about how lydia's daddy used to bring her through a back gate on weekend afternoons when the course was under construction, how daddy use to bring me out, too, so we could watch it all being built. the pro showed us a aerial photo of the course being built, then talked about the hundreds of oaks felled during hurricane irene almost two years ago. then this:

'why don't you girls take a cart and go for a ride.' 

back outside, lydia hopped right in the driver's side and i took my place beside her.

we wove down the path toward the front nine and drove down that first fairway. and then i realized it. yes, this was her trip, but it was mine, too, for when daddy was not in the office or hospital or home, he was here, walking up the #3 par 3, across the little bridge and over the small pond to the green. i had done that very thing with him myself as a girl.

daddy didn't have much time off, but if he couldn't get to Nags Head to look out over the ocean to clear his head, he was here, swinging the ball, knocking it in, walking. thinking.

we looked out over the course and sipped our beer and made a toast to our fathers, cutting across one fairway after another, until we were back in place, both of us healed, a bit, from our short time with our daddies again. 

'lydia knows just the cure,' she said as we drove down the back roads toward home.

i don't see lydia often, and i miss her. miss the mischief, the giggles in the night over a spilled coca-cola or a secret wish shared only with each other. 

years have put life and distance between us. but on this day, we were at it again, our lives whole for a few minutes, despite all we have lost.

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.

angels, angels everywhere

When I was a little girl, Miss Lucy Wells visited our public school classroom to teach Bible stories once a week. She traveled from class to class toting a large felt board, her gray hair coiled around her head like a braided rug. Miss Wells taught us our Biblical ABCs: All have sin. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Christ died for our sins. Do all to the glory of God.

And she loved her felt board characters. Adam and Eve, cowering as they were banished from the Garden of Eden. Zaccheus looking down from his tree. Jesus praying in the garden. And angels. Angels everywhere.

Angels keeping watch by night in the lion’s den, sitting beside the open tomb, climbing up and down Jacob’s ladder in his dream. And of course, there was Gabriel, who with his elegant golden wings, shown the brightest of all.

I thought a lot about Gabriel as Christmas approached.  And not simply the glowing felt board figure kneeling by Mary’s side. The Gabriel of the Old Testament was the protector — of Moses and the Israelites as they made their way out of Egypt to the Promised Land. He (or she, as many think), was the interpreter for Daniel, the one who showed him the meaning of his dreamy visions. In the New Testament of course, Gabriel is perhaps at once protector and good news purveyor. Don’t be afraid, he tells Mary. Trust me. Believe me, he tells Zachariah, for your prayer has been heard.

One day recently my friend Nell stood in my office door and said: ‘I’ve been thinking about that Gabriel, but I don’t know much about him.’

So what could we do but Google him? 


Did you know that Gabriel has a blog? And he’s an angel of Hebrew, Christian and Muslim tradition? That in Islam, he was the medium through whom God revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad?

Gabriel’s Wikipedia entry refers to him as the spirit of truth. And though no reference to his horn can be found in the Bible, tradition holds that he will blow his trumpet on the last day to wake the dead. (If you’ve been hearing or using your car horn lately, that’s supposed to mean that Gabriel is trying to get your attention.) Some folks even think Gabriel invented coffee. I’d be willing to bet some kind of angel did.

And this: Gabriel is the patron saint of communicators.

I am a communicator. It’s in my official job title: “Director of Communications.” Though I am no Gabriel, maybe my job is similar to Gabriel’s in God’s corporate work chart. I have long known since I was a child that God gave me this talent to communicate. Through writing, by teaching high school students (and the writers in this book) to communicate a bit of themselves in essays, and through listening. To my friends and my children

and even, sometimes, my husband.

I even communicate in the car. I have, in fact, been using my car horn a lot lately.

Stuck behind drivers who would rather tweet than move through the green light has had me honking like a Manhattan cab driver on more than a few mornings, late on my way into work.

So is Gabriel trying to get my attention?

I wonder what it would be like to be one of God’s favored angels. To have God’s ear — and His message — tucked up inside you, a message that will change a life. Many lives,

in fact, thousands. Millions. It would be hard, it would seem, to stay humble.

And yet my picture of Gabriel is that of a quiet and patient purveyor, who knows the message is so much more powerful than the one who brings it. This Gabriel is not so worried as I am about descriptive phrases or the turn of the right verb. It’s the what of the message that matters more than intonation.

One of my favorite movie scenes comes from the film City of Angels. In the scene, an angel played by Nicholas Cage searches for Meg Ryan’s character in the public library. Angels in top coats line the halls and escalators, taking in the myriad voices of the patrons, each offering up prayers and worries to invisible ears, hoping somehow, someone will hear them — and the angels do.  It is a beautiful idea, each of us with our own private angel who hears our thoughts and prods our dreams. 

I have been a lifelong dreamer, both in my days and in my nights, and I can still remember one or two of my dreams from my Lucy Wells days. Lately, my nightly dreams have been littered with tornados and falling trees, of children lost and found again. And of skies opening up in the midst of chaos to a kaleidoscope of clarity. One treasured friend says these dreams mean I am on the cusp of great change. That has yet to be seen. If only Gabriel would come sit by me and say: I bring good news. Trust me. Don’t be afraid. Your prayer has been heard. Nothing is impossible with God.

— Susan Byrum Rountree


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.