Man on the Moon
I’ve been watching all the news about the moon landing, 50 years ago this week, with as much interest as I did as a child. And I’ve been watching the divisiveness in my own back yard — Eastern North Carolina — my home, a land I love deep in my heart but in too many ways, in too many people these days, I don’t seem to recognize. In 1969, we were divided as a country, too, but today those divisions have deepened beyond what I could have imagined even a few years ago.
The moon landing occurred when I was about to turn 12, and we sat up late, watching the fuzzy screen as man set foot on that orb for the first time. Just the Christmas before, we’d watched as men orbited the moon for the first time. It was a remarkable moment to witness.
I’m reposting this story I wrote at Christmas, to remind everyone that for a few moments in history, we forgot about what divided us and remembered that we are ALL Americans. Watch the coverage of the historic moon landing this weekend. Remember who you were then and how much our nation could accomplish when we served a common purpose.
From the News & Observer, Dec. 20, 2018.
Man around the Moon
When the movie Apollo 13 was released more than 20 years ago, I stood in line for an hour for tickets. I wanted to introduce my children to the heroes of my day — not sports or entertainment personalities — but astronauts, men who used their wits and slide rules to accomplish the unimaginable— reaching the moon.
John Glenn. Alan Shepard. Jim Lovell. Gus Grissom. Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong. We knew these names as well as any politician’s when I was growing up. We followed their careers as if they were rock stars, watching launch after launch, splash down after splash down, mourning when three of them died before ever taking off, cheering with each success. We imagined what the world would look like when viewed from the heavens.
The year I would turn 11, we got our chance to see for ourselves.
It had been a year like none other. Nineteen-sixty-eight. In the course of 12 months, our nation was immersed in turmoil: two assassinations, almost constance racial unrest, violent anti-war protests, and the election of a president who would one day resign from office amid political scandal.
That Christmas would be hard to top the year before, when my father, who’d been in the hospital since just after Halloween, came home on Christmas Eve. Though a friend had told me her truth about Santa, my father’s homecoming was all I’d wished for and proved Santa existed, at least for another year.
But maybe watching the news on Christmas Eve, 1968, when Walter Cronkite reported that Santa had left the North Pole and was traveling south, I was a bit wary of the myth. There was too much anger in the world, too much war and sadness, for someone as kind and giving as Santa Claus to really exist. (Truth, though, is that I’m still waiting for him to show up at my house again.)
We’d been following the Apollo 8 mission during Christmas week and knew it was the most important yet. If successful, the crew would be the first humans to leave the earth’s gravity, fly to the moon and to orbit it. Landing on the moon would be the next goal.
On Christmas Eve, we watched as Frank Borman, James Lovell and James Anders broadcast from space, giving us our first glimpse of what earth looked like from afar. They captured the earth rising in the moon’s sky as they flew from the behind of the moon, Anders taking a photograph that would become one of the most iconic images in history.
James Anders Photo
Everyone alive on that night in 1968 is in the picture. We are there, looking toward the moon and a camera almost 240,000 miles away looks back at us — a swirl of blue and white — and in that moment, there is no turmoil, only beauty.
As they orbited, the astronauts, with earth, the moon’s surface and the darkness of space as their backdrop, recited the first 10 verses of Genesis 1:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
The film is scratchy and old, the words garbled, but it is goosebump television, even today.
The next morning, we woke to presents, one of which was my first camera — a Kodak Instamatic with a flash cube on the top. With it, I began looking at the world through a new lens, one no doubt shaped by the events of that pivotal year.
Fifty years later, here we are again. Our culture — and Earth herself — in daily turmoil. This Christmas, as I set about ordinary things — working and worshiping, wrapping and baking —I’m caught by the extraordinary, how a single mission in a turbulent year 50 years ago tomorrow gave us pause to come together for a few startling, historic minutes.
That’s what I’m asking for this year. For a moment, at least, when we are all one.
-30-
Susan Byrum Rountree can be reached at susanbyrumrountree@gmail.com
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
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
the kind and unexpected thing
it's the day after Valentine's Day. my husband and i have been bonding for the past five days but not as valentines. on thursday he had shoulder surgery... not the awful kind that takes weeks to recover from, but traumatic enough that he has been unable to drive or lift or pick up things or put his own clothes on at first.
in all these years of marriage, he's only been really ill two or three times, so he is not used to me taking care of him. i'm not used to it, either, but it's just part of what we do for each other, part of the bargain we made almost 35 years ago, though he at times in the past few days has seemed surprised when i have willingly cut up his meat if needed or helped him slip on his socks.
i remember years ago when he contracted pneumonia and could hardly get out of bed, i brought up some canned chicken and rice soup one day for lunch, and he was overwhelmed at what felt to him like enormous generosity. and that was years before i began making soup from scratch! had i been that unkind to him that it was a new experience when i was not?
the day after the surgery he told a friend i was a saint. drugs talking, surely, and a couple of days later i'd lost my sainthood, as was expected.
i've been thinking about this a lot today, about how people care for those they love in all sorts of circumstances. three years ago it was my mother's turn, when after almost 63 years of marriage, my father contracted pneumonia himself and spent the better part of three months in the hospital. Eighty-four at the time, my mother drove to see him 45 miles (one way) almost every day, and as each day passed, she grew to be more beautiful. i know he saw it, too.
(my husband can't say that about me, because i didn't even shower today til close to suppertime — well, to be fair, neither did he.)
my mother never balked at caring for my dad, giving up her days (but not her hair appointment) to make sure he was getting good care.(maybe it was because of all the times he cared for her through broken hips and other bones, though i doubt that played a role.) he barely talked, yet he knew she was there and doing more than he ever expected of her, to the point that she ended up in the hospital herself. it never crossed her mind that she might ought to stay at home.
i suppose on ordinary days, i have stopped going out of my way to do kind and unexpected things for my husband, though somehow i expect him to do unexpected things for me. i know there have been too many days when i stand at the stove cooking supper that i think: maybe this will be the day that he does so and so for me, when in fact, his just walking in the door and kissing me hello should really be miracle enough. kind and unexpected enough. but i have not been appreciative, i know.
maybe that's why he has been so surprised at my attempt at care, that finally, in his hour of need, i have done that kind and unexpected thing. i am embarrassed, if this is the truth. i thought i had been more attentive to him all these years.
why is that, when you're married so long that you forget that the small, personal gesture is truly important? in the beginning of a marriage, it's all we can do not to do kind and unexpected things, to work at what we hope will be a lifelong love. But it's the lifelong part of it that when you're young, you don't quite understand. at least i didn't. it includes days when you don't like each other, and when you have to do small but important things for someone when you'd rather not.
love creates such tangled hearts.
in these few days when my husband has been a bit immobile, we did get out for a short trip to a dessert store so we could test a few cake samples for the rehearsal dinner
(i)
we
are planning for our son. my husband is the dessert fan in our family, so i made him go.
on the way home, knowing we might be stuck with ice or snow, we stopped off at the grocery store so i could grab some orange juice.
i go to the grocery store pretty much every day, which is neither efficient nor particularly enjoyable, but it's i what do. i made him stay in the car because he is rarely patient enough to follow me through the aisle searching for things i don't need.
on the way out, i recognized an elderly couple i've seen before. the wife shuffles, often unaware it appears of her surroundings, yet her husband takes her down each aisle as if she will be the one to choose Folgers over 8'oclock, decaf or regular.
on this day, they had not made it inside as I came out with my orange juice (and oranges and green onions). his back was facing the store, and he was pulling her along.
in an instant, another shopper and i saw her ill-fitting jeans fall to the ground, bearing her tiny wrinkled bottom to the world. we stopped, trying to help her husband pull her pants up, but it was a struggle. the young woman shrugged, assuming i had the situation at hand, though the truth was far from that.
as a diversion, i'm sure, i found myself thinking of my grandmother — though this couple was about the same age as my mother — and made an attempt to save her dignity.
she wore no belt, and her frail body would not, without one, keep the pants up. so her husband and i held her jeans as we moved her gingerly into the store, seating her on one of the motorized carts they keep for handicapped shoppers. naively, i thought she might stay.
'i didn't know she wasn't wearing a belt,' her husband said. 'she has Alzheimers,' looking at me as if i didn't know.
though i offered to shop for him while he waited, all he wanted was a rope to tie the loops of her jeans together so he could pull her along while he did the shopping. a clerk found one, and together we threaded the rope through the loops, she batting at my hands as i tied the loop into a knot so he could get on with his shopping.
'she's doing pretty good,' he said, introducing himself as Ralph.
'and how are
you
doing?' i asked, almost in tears.
'the best i can,' he said.
'family nearby?'
'yes, but always gone.'
always gone. like me? i hadn't seen my own mother in about six weeks.
i imagined this man at 58, my age, and how their love story had evolved into this — her sitting in the handicapped cart with mittens on the wrong fingers, her jeans stained with her own excrement, unwilling to accept help from anyone but her Ralph.
but he insisted i not stay. so i didn't.
at home, my husband and i made a pact that we would never allow ourselves to be this way with each other. maybe they could not afford help he said, which made me want to search for every Ralph in my extended neighborhood until i found them, so i could give them enough money to change things for them. but how?
later, when i couldn't sleep, i imagined what other kind and unexpected thing Ralph might be doing for his wife in the middle of that sad night. and i could feel how alone he must be, no matter how he loves her.
it's likely that this small woman did a lot of kind and unexpected things for Ralph as he made his career. she raised their children, and when they were the age of my husband and me, maybe he had some kind of surgery, and she took care of him, made him soup and helped him put on his clothes, and he is doing the same thing, in kind, and in love, still, and even though, he really, really, needs someone to help him.
+++
my husband is much better, though an ice storm has kept us homebound for five days, and so today we escaped to our corners and set to work.
later i made supper. he cleaned up. now he sweeps the kitchen floor, which for years has been his favorite thing to do when the evening ends.
expected. yes. but a kind thing that does not go unnoticed on this night.
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
, 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.