86

i've been carrying around some cargo in my car the past few days, waiting for today, when i could clear the clutter, if you can call it that, which i really can't. what some might consider clutter are remnants of my father — sports coats, dress shirts and pants —that used to hang in his closet.

we've been waiting for the time when my mother was ready to give them up. these were not his favorite things, but dress clothes he may have outgrown, both in fit and usefulness, that now hung in the guest room closet, dry cleaned and ready for something. perhaps some other body to inhabit them.

so that's what we decided, after we'd stuffed ourselves twice over the turkey and whatnot: to gather these few things up and pass them on.

i actually didn't mind my bodiless passengers. every time i opened the door to the back seat, i'd sniff them to see if they bore any traces of him, but they did not. i tried to remember when i'd last seen him wear that tweed blazer, the navy sports coat, the striped button down, the several pairs of khaki colored slacks, but i couldn't recall. it was right to give them away.

today is his birthday, 86 he would be. so it seemed the perfect day to donate these discarded pieces of his life to someone else to use. after lunch with my coworkers, i headed over to

StepUp Ministry

, which recently has created

GG's closet

, a place where men participating in their program, which is focused on financial literacy, can shop for interview and career clothes. (though women have similar clothing programs all over the country, men's programs are rare, it seems.)

(Daddy went on only one interview in his life that he talked about, and that was for the job he eventually held for more than 50 years — caretaker of the people of my home town. (when he applied for a loan to start his practice, the farmers who ran the bank asked for collateral, and he gave them his career, though they were used to dealing in land and tractors, neither of which he had.) 

he never wore a suit to work, saving them for church, funerals and weddings. he did wear a tie, but those were not part of my parcel.

i parked my car, gathering as many of his things as i could and headed to StepUp's front door, my heart pounding. i'd made arrangements to meet the volunteer director, and when i asked for her, handing over the first of Daddy's coats to someone at the front desk, i felt the tears coming. i'll go back and get more, i said, escaping. what was that about?

by the time i reached my car, the tears came on full force and i could not stop them, thinking only: i need to call my sister, she will understand this.

i gathered the last things and turned, finding the volunteer coordinator, a tall woman i had met briefly at my church, her arms open to me and to the burden i carried.

'i didn't think this would be so hard,' i said.

'i did,' she countered, 'which is why i want to give you a hug.'

we walked back with Daddy's clothes, and i found myself talking, probably too much.

'he was a physician,' i told her. 'many of his patients were poor.'

'what better place, then,' she said, 'than to share his clothes here.'

somebody soon will dress in my father's old navy blazer and his striped button down, his khaki slacks and head off into their own job interview. what they will have, if not land or tractor as collateral, is history —  one of helping and healing. 

such is what they need. 

i wish i had thought to put a small card in each pocket— 

'this blazer belonged to 

Graham Vance 

Byrum, Sr., raised in Sunbury, NC, father, grandfather, husband and physician. loved Wake Forest and circus peanuts. adored his wife. treasured his children & grandchildren. was tight with a penny and loved a pun. what you wear was donated on his 86th birthday. go for that job, and wear it well.'

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.

days with daddy

my fridays with daddy have turned into mondays and other days. it is a roller coaster, and though i wish i could find a more literary term to describe it, that seems apt. how you begin the long slow crawl to what you think is the top, then all things ricochet, up down sideways and backward. then up, down again.

i remember the first roller coaster i ever rode, in myrtle beach back when i was a senior in high school. that trip, like this one with daddy, was all about uncertainty, and it did not end as i would have wanted. i was supposed to love riding the roller coaster, but i didn't. i was scared but i didn't want anyone to know it, so i got back on again.

that's what you do, isn't it? you get back on and see if the next ride will be different. at least that's how it is for me right now. i'm willing to ride again. because i keep thinking one of these days soon it's going to be a joy ride with daddy, and not the scary one we have been on.

years ago, my father and i took a joy ride. it was Ash Wednesday, and when i was little, daddy took wednesday afternoons off. my brother and sister were in school but i was 4, so the two of us set out in a cold rain to ride an hour or so to visit my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. as we drove north, the rain turned to ice, and before long, snow covered the road and the telephone poles leaned toward one another, held up only by the power lines.

i could hardly be a reliable narrator recalling a memory when i was 4, but when i think of that day, i see the wipers swishing hard as the whole world turned white, daddy leaning into the dash, his hands gripping the steering wheel. we didn't turn back. daddy kept that car on the road and somehow we reached my grandparent's house. when we arrived, the lights were out, and we found them huddled around a pot belly stove in an upstairs bedroom, trying to stay warm.

it would turn out to be a legendary storm, the Ash Wednesday Storm, a northeaster that battered the outer banks and caused damaged that took years to repair.

now daddy and i are in the middle of a different kind of storm, but in many ways it's the same: he's driving on icy roads, i'm holding on to the seat for fear of slipping.

on the first day of this week, i sit by his side, watching him breathe in and out, look at his blood pressure (good) and try to cool off from beneath the hot yellow gown and purple gloves i have to wear to guard against infection. he is hard to wake, though when i left him a few days before, he stayed awake for much of the day.

so the only certainty is that there is none.

except maybe in the cafeteria. my father has been housed in the hospital now for 47 days. and he has many, many days left. so sometimes when they say it's time to do this or that to him, i end up in the cafeteria, alone, watching, trying to eat something.

the man next to me speaks into his phone, which he lays on the table as he eats a very large salad. his words could be my own: sleeping mostly, i don't think he knows i'm here. concern. sleeping. update. all words i have used myself in the past day. finally he ends his conversation with 'drink plenty of fluids and get some rest.'

i imagine he is talking to his child, updating him or her on the grandfather's life now in ICU, or somewhere on the floors above where we sit. i say a prayer for them, quietly, because i know what he and his family are going through.

looking around, i recognize: the young woman wearing a beautiful Muslim scarf. she is on daddy's lift team, comes around every few hours to shift him in his bed and who now calls him Pop B, just like she is a grandchild. the hospitalist is there, the one when daddy first arrived those many days ago. he saunters up to the cash register, just as he did that first day to daddy's room... sauntered, hands in his pockets, posture that made me feel he didn't care very much about his patient. one thing my daddy doesn't do, never did, is saunter.

everyone else caring for daddy is engaged and concerned, wanting not to pass the time but to make this critically ill man better. and so i tell the nurses and the therapists and the doctors about where he practiced and how long, try to paint a picture of this man who to them is an very sick and aging man. a man can't speak for himself right now.

i know nothing of medicine, but the longer i stay here with him, the more i just want to somehow to story him well, if that makes sense. telling his story, somehow, has to make him better. right?

friday comes, and it is once again my turn to sit. when i arrive, they've shifted daddy's bed into a sort of chair, and he has the paper in his lap. he wears his glasses for the first time in these 47 days, looks so much like himself that i'm startled. i've brought him a soft ball to squeeze because right now he can't use his hands or arms very well, and squeezing the ball will help him grip the wheel again, navigate this icy road. i drop the ball into his hand and say 'squeeze' and he looks at me and does just that.

behind me, players in the ncaa tournament travel back and forth across the floor, tossing another ball, and every now and then daddy looks up. his team is not in the running, but mine is, and i pretend for a moment to be daddy's coach. we work with the balls, he nodding his head, squeezing and dropping, moving his arms just enough to show me he can. i hold my phone in front of him, showing him a picture of his newest great-grandchild and ask him to hand her the ball. he moves it over and places it in front of the picture, smiling at her, his lips forming the thin line i have known my whole life.

'remember the story of the little engine that could?' i ask him, and he nods. 'that book is as old as you are, daddy.' he was two when it was published. might have read it as boy.

ok, daddy, i think you can, i say, urging him to try one more task — to touch his finger to his nose. i'm allowed to lift his elbow but he has to do the rest. we try but he can't quite make it, so take a time out. a few minutes later we try again, and i say: i think i can i think i can... until his narrow finger meets that nose.

so much of his recovery now depends on this kind of work. this knowing that he has inside him what he needs to keep from slipping back down the icy road. what he needs to get well.

by the end of the day he can put the ball in my hand and pick it back up.

have to hit the road, daddy, i say, exhausted myself from being his coach. i'll be back on monday, ready to let him steer once again, while i sit holding onto the seat.


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.

good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

21 — a little ramble down the road

i remember the day i met my little niece, kendall. she was a newborn, lying on my grandmother's bed on a summer sunday, and suddenly i wasn't the baby of the family anymore. she didn't look like us — we the fair haired, blue-eyed blondes as babies — she, a  dark wisp of hair framing a pudgy face (now that was like me). As i studied her features, i searched for traces of my brother and sister, my parents in her face.

i remember watching my grandmother — her knotted fingers dancing over kendall's tiny pinched lips in hopes of sparking a giggle — wondering how this little baby with the brown hair and olive complexion would fit into the 'we' we had always been.

this was new to me. all of a sudden, our little family of five had grown to seven — with my sister-in-law, then eight with baby kendall — we would be 10 by that fall, as my second niece, susan hooks, would be born just six weeks later. In another six I would be married. how could it be that we had expanded so quickly, when we had been five for so long?

another five years, and we were 13, with the addition of five little boys and another girl, two of those children my own.

the three girls grew up and fell in love, had the whole fairy princess wedding thing only a few months apart. in between, one nephew found out he was a father of a one-year-old. blink, and our original five had multiplied ourselves by four. you would think we were rabbits.

laura gray

a week ago, we became an uneven number, as kendall had the second great-grandchild for my parents, a baby girl.

21. i seem to recall that my father used to say he wanted enough grandchildren to have a basketball team. now we have two starting lineups with a pretty deep bench on each. (baby laura gray, at 20 inches, is pretty tall, come to think of it.) we could have a whole tournament roster before we are finished with our expansion project.

about a month before lg was born, my parents came to town for a baby shower for her. the first thing my dad said when he walked in the door was that he wanted us to look at our calendars and find a date when he could show us the farms. my father rarely asks his children for much, and so we wanted to oblige.

we are not farmers. but my grandfather grew up with a man who farmed sometimes, and bigdaddy like land. i spent many sundays in my childhood in the back seat of his ford, driving down dirt roads, watching bigdaddy pick up a clod of dirt and throw it, pull a bloom off the cotton plant and crumble it in his fingers. from the back seat of his car i learned how to tell soy beans from cotton, to appreciate the beauty of a perfectly-laid field of tobacco, rows of corn not parched from summer sun. in his own garden, which was massive, i helped my grandfather dig potatoes from the ground, pick corn and tomatoes, helped my grandmother shell butterbeans on the front porch. i knew just about where my grandfather's small farms were — one down the road just north of their little village, the other on the way to nags head, near the great dismal swamp. but daddy, at 82, wanted us to know exactly. and so on saturday, we went.

the first i would call a field. it's where the man who rents it from my father and his sister used to plant a few rows of sweet corn at the edge nearest my grandparents' kitchen, so they would always have corn for Christmas. on one side is what used to be their kitchen window, on the other are their graves. 

bigdaddy chose this burial spot so my grandmother could look out at him, there under the cedar tree that shaded his headstone, as he waited for her to join him one day. the cedar tree is gone now.

on the day of his funeral when i visited my grandfather's grave i felt suffocated, for if ever there was a man all about fresh air, it was my bigdaddy... and there, stuck under all that ground, he couldn't so much as a wisp. an unreasonable thought i know, for if ever there is a man in heaven, it is him. just his body is under all that earth. but still.

there is a story, that on the day bigdaddy was buried, a man who had worked with him had shown up too late to view his body in the funeral home, so while the family greeted relatives and friends inside the church, the funeral guys surrounded his casket, opening it up, so the man could pay his respects. it was a glorious fall day, and 20 years later i think of that day and how my grandfather likely took a great, deep breath looking out at the blue sky above him, the clouds swirling by and was just at peace with God. and life. and death. nobody ever told my grandmother, but i know she would have liked this, his last grasp of air.

when i looked at his grave this week, i found a small blue flower growing next to his foot stone. life. again.

my husband and i drove with my parents to two other small farms that day, then ended our tour in a place i have never been. though as the crow flies not four miles from where my grandparents lived for over 60 years, i had never even seen — nor had known it was there — the family cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. my grandfather's parents. it sits behind my father's cousin's house.

now my grandfather was the youngest of 13, so my daddy has a lot of cousins. one of bigdaddy's sisters was named mildred minnesota— living in the northeastern corner of north carolina i know not why —  but aint (aunt) minnie is there. as is moses, my great-grandfather, and mary, my grandfather's mother.

my father at the family cemetery

moses died not long after my father was born. no doubt, since my grandfather was so much younger than his oldest siblings, moses knew some of his great-grandchildren. as i stood over my his grave this week i wondered what sort of man he was — born just 10 years before the civil war began, died just six months before the stock market crash of 1929 — he must have had a thing or two to say.

and he must have been a good man, because his youngest child certainly was a good enough man to require someone who respected him so much that he asked the casket handlers open it, one last time, to the open air.

on saturday, as i looked around this little family plot, eyeing the stump of a cedar tree that must have shaded ol' moses from the hot sun, i couldn't help but think that bigdaddy had chosen beneath the cedar tree as his resting spot because his father had done the same.

what does this have to do with little laura gray, you ask. well, i'm getting to that. 

my father, just the other day, asked my mother if she thought when she was young that she would ever live to meet her great-grandchildren. "I never thought about it," my mother said. Somehow I think my father did. His own father met every single one of his greats, those children of my siblings and my cousins who are now grown and making their ways in the world. Though daddy yet has not met laura gray, he will soon, knowing i am sure that he hopes he can meet all of the greats in his life yet to come.

great-bigdaddy moses didn't know me. he died just four months after my father was born. but if you start with his youngest child, add my grandmother, my father and his sister — their spouses and their children each...

i am number 21 on that list. just like little lg is on ours. 21.

maybe someday her grandfather will bring her to the farms, show her where her great-great grandfather built his house and watched over his bluebirds. where her grandfather grew up. maybe he will take her to the family cemetery. i hope, though he is not so much the family storyteller as i am, he will tell her a little something of the people whose names are on the stones, will tell her just how much it means that she is tied to them, and to their land, too.