Letting Go
Reverb10... writers out there, join me!
December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
I have been writing my whole life. When I was too young to know better, I imagined myself as a playwright or a poet but never told anybody. Never mind the fact that I didn't know any poets or playwrights, novelists or even journalists, really, it was my dream to string words together into something from the first time I took the storyteller's stool in kindergarten. When I got to college, I actually felt the dream dangling close enough in front of my eyes on occasion to almost grasp it. I wrote about it in my Freshmen journal... "It's that dream again," over and over. My professors said they believed in me. My father said he knew I had a talent and wanted me to go to college to learn how to use it. I can recall exactly where I was at that moment.
Through the years I have had a pretty good grasp of the dream at times. Most people would think that having a book or two published, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine bylines would mean I had finally caught up with the dream, grasping it as firmly as Harry Potter did his snitch, and I would say so, too, at least for awhile. But in the last year, it feels as if I have let that magical snitch go.
Oh, it's hovering... in two novels not fully abandoned but almost. In essays I thought about writing but didn't.
Why? No time.
But really, I'm afraid of finishing.
Afraid my words will not be beautifully strung together like the pearls I imagine them to be. That I won't have anything to say that matters. Afraid it won't matter to anyone besides me when I'm done.
But that should be enough, though, shouldn't it? Because it matters to me.
Taking part in the Reverb10 challenge is a start, one small way to get the snitch hovering in front of me again, teasing me along every day, at least for the next two dozen days or so.
I have always heard that you have to let your children go before you get them back. And so, perhaps, it is the way of dreams. And so I hope that this year's letting go will lead to next year's catching up, that the snitch will hover close at hand again, close enough to grasp it firmly in my hand.
December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
I have been writing my whole life. When I was too young to know better, I imagined myself as a playwright or a poet but never told anybody. Never mind the fact that I didn't know any poets or playwrights, novelists or even journalists, really, it was my dream to string words together into something from the first time I took the storyteller's stool in kindergarten. When I got to college, I actually felt the dream dangling close enough in front of my eyes on occasion to almost grasp it. I wrote about it in my Freshmen journal... "It's that dream again," over and over. My professors said they believed in me. My father said he knew I had a talent and wanted me to go to college to learn how to use it. I can recall exactly where I was at that moment.
Through the years I have had a pretty good grasp of the dream at times. Most people would think that having a book or two published, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine bylines would mean I had finally caught up with the dream, grasping it as firmly as Harry Potter did his snitch, and I would say so, too, at least for awhile. But in the last year, it feels as if I have let that magical snitch go.
Oh, it's hovering... in two novels not fully abandoned but almost. In essays I thought about writing but didn't.
Why? No time.
But really, I'm afraid of finishing.
Afraid my words will not be beautifully strung together like the pearls I imagine them to be. That I won't have anything to say that matters. Afraid it won't matter to anyone besides me when I'm done.
But that should be enough, though, shouldn't it? Because it matters to me.
Taking part in the Reverb10 challenge is a start, one small way to get the snitch hovering in front of me again, teasing me along every day, at least for the next two dozen days or so.
I have always heard that you have to let your children go before you get them back. And so, perhaps, it is the way of dreams. And so I hope that this year's letting go will lead to next year's catching up, that the snitch will hover close at hand again, close enough to grasp it firmly in my hand.
Sense of Wonder
I thought I had posted this. Didn't I?
Reverb10:
Reverb10:
Backtracking. Maybe it's better if I work backward, then forward again. Will I catch up?
Prompt: How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
By: Listening to my favorite two-year-old's giggle, coloring in the jack-o-lantern stamp on her little boyfriend's hand. Sharing my life in the purple office with Lee. Kissing my godchild, even when she doesn't want to, marveling at her sparkle. Watching my dog run through the snow (and not just today), taking pictures of the sunrise (a lot), of the peonies in my yard, of my daughter dancing with her dad in the kitchen, of my son, even when he didn't want me to. Walking the dog as he sniffs at the air, (watching him sniff at the window..why?). 
Looking at a friend I have known for a lifetime and wondering just what is really on her mind. Searching for a four-leafed clover but not finding one, hearing the world for the first time in a lot of years (it is LOUD), watching my mother stir the gravy with my grandmother's spoon.Watching my Dad sleep with his dog in his lap. Cheering as my daughter learns to make my rolls. Watching my dog with his friends. Watching the weather.
Hearing the people in my church talk about God. Seeing my friend Nell bury her husband (who had Alzheimers), and listening as she celebrates the joy of doing his laundry.
Remembering two friends who died this year, too soon. Scouring my kindergarten picture on Facebook. Reading. Anything. Absorbing the roar of the ocean in my skin. Singing a favorite hymn, too loud. Finding old friends and old boyfriends on FB. Praying with Martha and Ryan on the pew, four days before Ryan leaves for Afghanistan. Shopping for his Christmas package now that he is there, and celebrating that first phone call. And the next one. And the next.
Holding his hand while we sleep. Celebrating 29 years. (That's an old picture!)
Watching my niece's baby bump by email. Celebrating a baptism. Praying for a friend. Discovering a friend has prayed for me. Searching for the gift of surprise. Wondering what my children are up to. Smelling potpourri.
Walking with Grace in the mornings. Questioning God. Looking at the clouds, listening to Joni Mitchell, watching GLEE. Searching the stars, the grass, the dust as it swirls through my house on a sunlit morning.
Making my rolls. Remembering my dreams. Trying hard, to open my eyes. sbr
reverb2010
Today I accepted the challenge from a cool site called reverb10. The challenge is to write every day until the end of the year using one of their prompts. I have some catching up to do, since they're already on Day 3.
Day 1: One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)
Seek:
seeking my place, and end to the clutter, to find old friends, to keep new ones, to encourage, to confront, to create, to expand, to explore, to explode, to submit, to edit, to write, to begin, to complete, to make time, to waste time, to cling to my children and to set them free, to teach, to take in, to give up, to take on, to replace, to savor, to record, to volunteer, to dance, to sing, to feel better, to hurt, to celebrate, to admit, to prepare, to expand, to squirm (a little), to rant, to rave, to be quiet, to pray, to walk, to snuggle, to reconnect, to disconnect, to capture, to swim, to repair, to remember, to forget, to say good-bye, to say hello again, to listen, to hear, to knead and to need, to wander, (to Zumba,) to collect, to sort through, to toast, to warm, to feel, and understand. To love. To sleep.
My word for next year: too obvious: FIND
Day 1: One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)
Seek:
My word for next year: too obvious: FIND
My Daddy Doesn't Have FB
If only he knew. I grew up knowing that Daddy was one of those men in town who (whom? I never really know) everybody loved. The town "doc" for at first, 42 years, then again for another few. He finally retired for good last December at the age of 81. He spent his last few years as a physician holding his stethoscope to the chests of some of his oldest patients, who now spent their days in the nursing home. He had treated some of them for the entire life of his practice, and then after he retired in 1997, he was there to comfort their families when they died. So many folks missed him, he agreed to go back.
Though Daddy used to play some golf, his knees are bothering him a bit these days, so much of his time is spent in his favorite chair, napping and reading, watching Fox News, and holding Ruby, the King Charles Cavalier Spaniel my sister brought he and my mother all the way from Iowa a couple of years ago. (I will admit that this was the best present anyone has ever given them.) She is the best dog, cuddling close to him, happy just to sit, and he is happy to hold her.
Today is his birthday, and in celebration of all that he is to me, to my family and to the town that raised me, I'm going to try to post a story I wrote about him when he retired the first time. (It is a jpg, so it might take some adjustment to read, i.e: can your read sideways?) If you can't read it, email me.)
Daddy has a long distrust of journalists, despite raising one, so that fact required that before I wrote a word I had to submit my questions in advance, and for two days early in 1997, I sat with him, and with my mother, and talked to them about his years as one of three doctors in my tiny town. (In his last 10 years, he was the only one. ) What he didn't know was that I had been pulling stories out of him for some time. The result, I believe is my best work. Some of you may remember it. It ran in the N&O on Father's Day, and Daddy was so afraid of the backlash that he went all the way to Alaska to avoid being home when the phone rang. And he practically never goes anywhere. He would tell you that I fabricate. Of that, I'm sure. But perception has always meant the truth to me, so there you go.
At the time the story ran, people from all over the state sent him letters (back when people actually wrote letters, in long-hand.) Every day he received letters from friends and strangers, thanking him for his service, for being that breed of small town doc who cared for so many. "Why are they writing me?" he would ask when I visited. I knew, but he never seemed to figure that one out. One day, though, the letters stopped, and I think he was a little disappointed.
Some people wrote me, too.
One of his friends, Harry Carpenter, who died not long after the story ran, wrote this:
"Perhaps his family and friends can help him understand what a great man we see him to be, and perhaps we can show him how very much we appreciate his stewardship in taking care of ordinary sick folks. A few of these folks undoubtedly also appreciate the measure of the man, a great many more probably take him for granted, and a disoriented minority may have actually taken advantage of his good nature."
My brother is a doctor, and my nephew is learning to be one. On the day Kip graduates from med school in May 2012, he will be the third Graham Vance Byrum to have graduated from Wake Forest University, and from what used to be Bowman Gray School of Medicine. He has some very large shoes to fill, and I don't mean the size 13s Daddy wears (I think Kip wears the same or larger.) My husband, a pr flack, is already planning his pitch. And my sister and I will make sure our Daddy is there to watch his oldest grandson receive his stole. But my brother will tell you that neither he nor Kip will ever be the kind of "Doc" Daddy was. They just don't make them like that anymore.
Daddy doesn't have FB, but I posted happy birthday to him this morning, and so far a couple of dozen people have sent him good wishes. Carol, one of his former nurses who is about my age, says he does still come by the hospital to visit, and that they miss him. I think he misses all of them — his patients and office workers, his nurses, his medicine — as much as they do him.
Happy Birthday, Daddy.
sbr
Who's Looking at Boo?
Now in our 30 years together, my husband has given me hundreds of gifts. The first best thing was a dog I didn't even ask for, but who ended up loving me every single day for or 13 years, even on those days when I had nothing much going for me. The next two are my children, of course. But the book, well, when I opened this 35th anniversary edition, I thought, well, this is nice. My paperback copy was looking a little dogeared. And then I cracked open the spine, pulling in the smell of it, like new ink, smoothing my fingers over the pages. It wasn't until I reached the title page that I looked up at him, tears in my eyes, thinking this man really does understand me, thankful none of my tears dripped across the name carefully penned in black in on the title page. Harper Lee had held this very copy in her own hands, the same hands that had written a simple story that begins with a broken elbow and ends with all of us questioning if we really can ever love our neighbors as ourselves.
(Bird lover that I am, I admit that I have never quite understood why she chose a mockingbird. The Mockingbirds of my memory, though they could sing, used to fly up and down across the yard, pecking at my Irish Setter's backside because he'd gotten too close to their nest.)
I imagine I'm no different from scores of other writers from the South when I say the book changed me. I've read it now at least six times, the last time just this past winter, and as a writer in Southern Living said in July, each time I read it, I find something new. I read it for story and for structure, for character and plot. I read it to read between the lines about Truman Capote's friendship with Harper Lee. I read it to see — as my friend the writer Doris Betts told me once good writers needed to do —how Harper Lee kills her darlings. How she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary days of rural Alabama. And I read it to see if we have learned anything from the mistakes made by those good folks in Maycomb in the 1930s, which wasn't so much unlike my own home town in 1960. Or later.
TKaM turned 50 in July, and thousands of fans made pilgrimages to Monroeville, Ala., to mark the event, with parades and walking tours, readings and recitations. They talked to Katie Couric and read essays on NPR. But nowhere in sight is the reclusive Nell Lee.
I used to want to make my own pilgrimage to Monroeville, just to see if I might catch a glimpse of her as she fed the ducks or picked up her mail at the post office, as if just catching sight of her might shed a little writerly magic over me. I imagined standing on the sidewalk outside her house and being invited up onto her porch for some iced tea, to talk about our similarities growing up in a small town, both with a father who is respected, if not beloved by that town. I want to know who the model was for Boo Radley (my town had Lucretia). About what she's reading and what she is working on now. I want to talk about writing and why some stories really do make a difference.
Sometimes I'm asked the question: Are you still writing? Which feels like Are you still breathing? I would never ask Nell Lee that question, because even if she is not writing things DOWN, she is writing, still. In her head. I hope always to be the same.
In my daydream I imagine her inviting me in to take a peek under her chenille-covered bed where I imagine she keeps her manuscripts, the ones she won't let anybody publish until she's dead, because she's had enough of folks making such a fuss over first one. Aren't we all convinced that she has hidden the next great American novel away?
In my hunger to hear more of her voice, I read the few essays she wrote, all in the three years after TKaM was published. But now I read her silence.
What irony, that Nell herself has become her beloved Boo, walk by her house, leave notes in her mailbox, hoping they'll be the ones with the magic words that will make her her come out.
From whence commeth my help
My daughter has a blog post about her new favorite book, The Help. When she asked to borrow it from my bookshelf, I was a little hesitant... I wanted to share it first with my mother, who was a young mother just like Elizabeth in the book — in 1960 she was fairly new to a town where practically everybody is kin to everyone else, and she was trying to figure out the rules.
But I was also curious about how Meredith would view this book set during my childhood. Since reading The Help, I've found myself wondering so much about the black women in my life as I grew up. I am a Southern child of the 1960s, as are 99.9 percent of my friends, and we have talked about The Help over walks and lunch and over the phone, asking ourselves just which character we might be — and who might our mothers have been. It is not always a comfortable talk.
Of course I want to be Skeeter. The one who wants the stories from these women who have never been asked. When I read the chapters when she secretly meets with Aibileen and Minny in the night at risk to all, I can imagine myself, driving down the dirt road behind our church that led to the "colored" section and those yards swept clean of grass. I felt scared for the three of them because I knew the danger of it. I wished I were that brave a reporter. Now.
"Our help was like family," some of us say, knowing the irony of that statement is a major theme of the book. Though I did not grow up with a daily housekeeper besides my mother, we did have help. And more than a few of my friends had black women who minded them every day (even though only one of our mothers worked.) Louvenia and Peggy, Addie and Lucille, Hattie May and Irene were fixtures of my childhood. Odessa, a baby nurse who went from house to house taking care of my town's white newborns, is in my wedding pictures, a shadow in the back of the narthex as I entered in the church, her arms folded across her white uniform. And Addie, a rotund and warm woman who drove a yellow VW, took care of us when my father was hospitalized for weeks— two hours from home — and my mother spent many weekdays with him.
My mother just finished reading The Help, too. When I was born, we lived in a tiny ranch with one bathroom, and since bathrooms play a significant role in the book, I asked her where Odessa, who might have stayed all day when I was a baby, relieved herself. "I never thought about it," Mama said, "but I'm sure she used the same one we did."
When I was five, we moved into a larger house with two full baths and a small half bath off the utility room next to the kitchen. After reading The Help, I wondered: Was that what the half-bath was for? Our help? These are not comfortable questions. You don't have to write the checks to know the help wasn't always treated fairly. I always felt that Odessa and Bea and later Addie and Lucille — the women who worked for us and others — felt welcome, even loved, by my family. I hope that is true.
Full disclosure: Marjorine has cleaned my house one day a week for close to 15 years, and she is now 74 years old. I have asked her to slow down, to retire, but she won't, instead spoiling me by ironing my sheets to a crisp cool (one of her favorite things to do), and caring for my house when work keeps me from it. She says she wants to work, "loves to clean" as she says it, though I think that she, a widow whose grown daughter and four children live with her, needs to work. I worry that one day I'll come home and her car will still be here, and I will find her hurt, or worse. But she keeps coming, taking her time, admitting to me that she has recently felt the need to slow down.
The day I finished The Help, I asked her if, back in the day, any of her employers had ever mistreated her. She did admit in her own way that one woman was not always kind. Though as wise Marjorine put it, the woman, then young, had her own set of problems, but as she grew older, she also grew to trust. Silently I wondered if I had ever treated her badly, if she felt patronized by the Christmas gifts I give her, or the bags of clothes we can't wear anymore that I pass on to her. I always thank her when going out the door, but she can't know how many times, when she does a particularly good job, I think I'll call to say so and never do.
Marjorine raised 13 children and lost two of them, one — her first born — died on Christmas Day. In the past five years she has lost her husband and her mother, a sister and a son. Can you imagine that? She has seen one son go to prison, and another build a business from the ground up. One granddaughter (one among about two dozen total) will graduate from college this weekend. And she may be the first to in Marjorine's family finish college. I am certain, though she has not told me, that she has helped foot the bill.
Marjorine has never ridden in an airplane or seen the ocean. The mountains make her dizzy, she says, as does just thinking about that ocean, moving all the time, so having her feet planted in her garden suits her just fine. When her father died when she was a young girl, Marjorine left school to take care of her siblings so her mother could go to work.
When my daughter got married last spring, Marjorine dressed in her finest and came to the church. As I stood in the back, waiting for the ceremony to start, I could see her salt and pepper hair and cool brown skin in the middle of a sea of white. And while my friends all looked back trying to get a glimpse of the bride, Marjorine kept her gaze forward, toward the large cross that looms over the altar. She didn't stay for the reception, and I was sorry for that, but I understood.
She comes so early some weeks that my husband and son are not yet out of the house, so she sits in her car and reads her Bible. I wonder sometimes what her favorite Bible story is. I don't have to ask to know that Jesus is at the center of her world. When she does come inside, she always asks about my week, my children. One day she brought me the program from her husband's funeral. I never met him. A couple of weeks ago to told me my son could use a bigger closet for all of his clothes.
My daughter said on the phone the other night that when she was reading The Help, she pictured Marjorine. She is the "cleaning lady" my children have ever known. In the early 60s Marjorine would have been about my daughter's age, in the middle of raising those 13 children, working in tobacco on the farm she and her husband eventually would own, taking care of other people's houses, people who might have been a little bit like Hilly.
My good friend Grace teases me that when Marjorine dies, they'll ask me to be a flower girl at her funeral, something Marjorine has been for friends many times. And it would be an honor. In our 15 years together, we've talked about lots of things — raising children right, saving money, menopause and religion. Though I have gathered some stories about her life in the small moments when we are together in my kitchen, I don't know the color of her living room sofa, or if she even has a middle name.
When I was leaving the house on Tuesday this week, I wished her a Happy Mother's Day, then was flushed with guilt, because I had failed to get even a card for her.
But I was also curious about how Meredith would view this book set during my childhood. Since reading The Help, I've found myself wondering so much about the black women in my life as I grew up. I am a Southern child of the 1960s, as are 99.9 percent of my friends, and we have talked about The Help over walks and lunch and over the phone, asking ourselves just which character we might be — and who might our mothers have been. It is not always a comfortable talk.
Of course I want to be Skeeter. The one who wants the stories from these women who have never been asked. When I read the chapters when she secretly meets with Aibileen and Minny in the night at risk to all, I can imagine myself, driving down the dirt road behind our church that led to the "colored" section and those yards swept clean of grass. I felt scared for the three of them because I knew the danger of it. I wished I were that brave a reporter. Now.
"Our help was like family," some of us say, knowing the irony of that statement is a major theme of the book. Though I did not grow up with a daily housekeeper besides my mother, we did have help. And more than a few of my friends had black women who minded them every day (even though only one of our mothers worked.) Louvenia and Peggy, Addie and Lucille, Hattie May and Irene were fixtures of my childhood. Odessa, a baby nurse who went from house to house taking care of my town's white newborns, is in my wedding pictures, a shadow in the back of the narthex as I entered in the church, her arms folded across her white uniform. And Addie, a rotund and warm woman who drove a yellow VW, took care of us when my father was hospitalized for weeks— two hours from home — and my mother spent many weekdays with him.
My mother just finished reading The Help, too. When I was born, we lived in a tiny ranch with one bathroom, and since bathrooms play a significant role in the book, I asked her where Odessa, who might have stayed all day when I was a baby, relieved herself. "I never thought about it," Mama said, "but I'm sure she used the same one we did."
When I was five, we moved into a larger house with two full baths and a small half bath off the utility room next to the kitchen. After reading The Help, I wondered: Was that what the half-bath was for? Our help? These are not comfortable questions. You don't have to write the checks to know the help wasn't always treated fairly. I always felt that Odessa and Bea and later Addie and Lucille — the women who worked for us and others — felt welcome, even loved, by my family. I hope that is true.
Full disclosure: Marjorine has cleaned my house one day a week for close to 15 years, and she is now 74 years old. I have asked her to slow down, to retire, but she won't, instead spoiling me by ironing my sheets to a crisp cool (one of her favorite things to do), and caring for my house when work keeps me from it. She says she wants to work, "loves to clean" as she says it, though I think that she, a widow whose grown daughter and four children live with her, needs to work. I worry that one day I'll come home and her car will still be here, and I will find her hurt, or worse. But she keeps coming, taking her time, admitting to me that she has recently felt the need to slow down.
The day I finished The Help, I asked her if, back in the day, any of her employers had ever mistreated her. She did admit in her own way that one woman was not always kind. Though as wise Marjorine put it, the woman, then young, had her own set of problems, but as she grew older, she also grew to trust. Silently I wondered if I had ever treated her badly, if she felt patronized by the Christmas gifts I give her, or the bags of clothes we can't wear anymore that I pass on to her. I always thank her when going out the door, but she can't know how many times, when she does a particularly good job, I think I'll call to say so and never do.
Marjorine raised 13 children and lost two of them, one — her first born — died on Christmas Day. In the past five years she has lost her husband and her mother, a sister and a son. Can you imagine that? She has seen one son go to prison, and another build a business from the ground up. One granddaughter (one among about two dozen total) will graduate from college this weekend. And she may be the first to in Marjorine's family finish college. I am certain, though she has not told me, that she has helped foot the bill.
Marjorine has never ridden in an airplane or seen the ocean. The mountains make her dizzy, she says, as does just thinking about that ocean, moving all the time, so having her feet planted in her garden suits her just fine. When her father died when she was a young girl, Marjorine left school to take care of her siblings so her mother could go to work.
She comes so early some weeks that my husband and son are not yet out of the house, so she sits in her car and reads her Bible. I wonder sometimes what her favorite Bible story is. I don't have to ask to know that Jesus is at the center of her world. When she does come inside, she always asks about my week, my children. One day she brought me the program from her husband's funeral. I never met him. A couple of weeks ago to told me my son could use a bigger closet for all of his clothes.
My daughter said on the phone the other night that when she was reading The Help, she pictured Marjorine. She is the "cleaning lady" my children have ever known. In the early 60s Marjorine would have been about my daughter's age, in the middle of raising those 13 children, working in tobacco on the farm she and her husband eventually would own, taking care of other people's houses, people who might have been a little bit like Hilly.
My good friend Grace teases me that when Marjorine dies, they'll ask me to be a flower girl at her funeral, something Marjorine has been for friends many times. And it would be an honor. In our 15 years together, we've talked about lots of things — raising children right, saving money, menopause and religion. Though I have gathered some stories about her life in the small moments when we are together in my kitchen, I don't know the color of her living room sofa, or if she even has a middle name.
When I was leaving the house on Tuesday this week, I wished her a Happy Mother's Day, then was flushed with guilt, because I had failed to get even a card for her.
Need a Special Mother's Day Gift?
Here's a sample:
When I gave birth to my daughter on a frigid morning in December almost 20 years ago, I thought that meant I had become a mother. A baby to rock and coo to, that's what I'd wanted for so long. But it wasn't until a few days later that my transformation occurred. It happened when my own mother, who'd come to take care of us for awhile, walked out my my front door with my husband and said: "Give her a bath while I'm gone."
Now you have to know my mother to understand the power of these words. Take a bath, she was always telling me while I was growing up, and make it scalding. It'll serve to scrub away whatever ails you, be it headache, splinter, or broken heart.
She'd been right, of course. I'd even followed her advice not four days before. Tired of being swollen and perpetually in wait, I lowered my nineteen-months' pregnant body into a scalding tub and sat, knowing this was exactly what my mother would advise me to do. And believe me, it cured what ailed me and my baby. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the baby who would be named Meredith told me it was time to come into the world.
A week later, when Mama handed my daughter over to me as she headed out the door, she knew full well that "Give her a bath," was code for me — her own baby girl — instructing me to take my place among the mothers of my family.
I heard the door slam behind me, then stared at the tiny pink form in my arms, realizing for the very first time that my mother would be going home soon, and this baby was mine to keep. I thought about not giving her a bath at all, just saying I did. I mean, she looked clean enough to me. But after 20 years of living under the roof of the master of bath giving, I knew full well she would find me out....
Stuff dreams are made of
I had a dream last night that all the men in my house sailed on a cruise ship with a send-off not unlike the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. Parades of thousands. Dancing and song. Explosions even. I'm thinking about this on this quiet, early spring morning, as the washing machine begins its slow hum.
In real life, the men in my house have gone off to work, and honestly, I feel like having a parade, maybe even launching a few fireworks. Lately I don't often have the house to myself, and I miss it. Work and winter and a hundred other tugs have kept me from my kitchen window in the mornings, where I can watch my birds, see the blue, yellow-eyed pansies open their faces to the sun, check on my peonies just popping through that hard, cold earth. When I am home on weekends, that's where the boys are — a Saturday husband housebound by rain or snow or frigid temperatures, and a grown son watching Lost, drinking his beer, sleeping late.
But today, let the parade begin. In the past week, Graham has come downstairs before 8 a.m., dressed in his Joe Banks best, on his way to the job — in his career field no less — he landed two weeks ago. He likes it. Though it's in the town he's known since he was 2, the job takes him to parts he's never seen before, so every day he learns a new thing. My husband, who some days dawdles over the newspaper until 8:30, was up and out today, too, leaving me only the boy dog to take my attention. Tomorrow, the beautiful spring day will lure them all I hope to the boat that has been woefully neglected all these winter months.
And so dare to climb the stairs to the 'bat cave' where Graham has been spending his evenings. I throw open the windows, get out the ammonia, try to wipe away the winter blue that has consumed this house.
Take a Giant Staple
Karen and Libbett always held fort on the front row because they were short. Here they are in Miss Williams' 5th grade, Karen on the right in navy knee socks, Libbett (for Little Bit) to her left in the navy jumper. Betty Keeter stands between these two girls who never really got the message— as my good friend Anne Boone said recently about Karen — that they were short. They were together in their defiance, both of them growing larger in life than their frames portrayed. And now, at age 52 and 53 respectively, Karen and Libbett are dead, Karen from cancer in November, and Libbett on Saturday, from complications of a lifelong battle with juvenile diabetes.
This seems fairly impossible for me to imagine. Two girls I grew up knowing throughout my childhood — Libbett from birth and Karen from kindergarten, are not here anymore. Even if I didn't think about them as I drank my morning coffee or on my drive to work, they were there, somewhere. But now, how can it be that they are not anywhere, anymore? Except of course, in heaven.
Today memories flood my mind, particularly of Libbett, who lived just down the road, four houses from my own.
The fourth child— and first girl — in a family of three older brothers, she must have grown up fighting for her own space. I spent many a Friday night at her house, playing 'Murder in the Dark' with her brothers, down the long narrow hall of their house, scared more than half to death. In the morning, we woke up to Lon Cheney's Mummy on Sunrise Theater, watching the flickering black and white screen from the floor of the playroom of her house on the hill.
We didn't have a playroom at our house. But her house was all about play, from the playroom to the tennis court, from the horse barn to the handmade dough ornaments on the Christmas tree. Even the tenant house way out back where the maid lived with a daughter named Queen Ester was our playground. A real queen, living in an unpainted house with a wide front porch. Nobody else had that in their back yard. (I seem to recall the maid's name was Irene — I remember how she talked, in a low rasp that sounded like she had swallowed too much snuff — and that she was left-handed, which I am, and how she told me one day that her teachers wrapped her hand up so she would be right-handed, but she was ambidextrous instead.)
Saturday mornings in Libbett's house meant her mother would be in the kitchen, humming as she poured blueberry pancake batter onto a sizzling pan. After breakfast, it was to the bathroom to check her blood sugar with little strips of paper that turned color when dipped into the little potty she kept there. She even let me pee in it a few times. Her diabetes was as much a part of our lives as my left-handedness, a fact that made her who she was. I marveled, watching her bravery, as she stabbed herself in the thigh with a hypodermic. Who could do that at seven? Doctor's child that I am, I ran screaming at the sight of one, except in Libbett's little bathroom.
She was as creative a child as I was gullible — the tooth fairy lived in a tiny castle built in the woods that separated our houses with the teeth she gathered from beneath our pillows. Libbett said so. I imagined Tinkerbell, flitting about, a little dusty from the sandy soil, her toothy front door framed by tiny cotton boles gathered from the fields all around. But somehow we never found this magical home amid the stumps, wiregrass and kudzu in our woods. (Why the tooth fairy would want to live in a house made from missing teeth, I never understood, but she left a quarter under my pillow, so I dared not challenge her. Or Libbett.)
At the base of the hill in front of Libbett's house, there was a pond shaped like a footprint, and across the street in front of the old churchyard, another. Oh, the hours I spent trying to fall to sleep, imagining a giant strolling down the highway outside my house, deciding not to take that giant step in my yard but in hers instead — she was the lucky one.
And I will never forget the day she told me that Santa Claus was not real. My mother was ironing when I came home from her house with this most unsettling news. (I think I was probably 11 by then! He is who you choose to believe he is, my mother said, and so I have never really stopped believing.)
Born an artist, Libbett had the largest box of Crayolas in first grade that I had ever seen, the thin ones with violet and flesh for colors, and a sharpener on the side. The rest of us had the flat box of six giant ones to fit our nubby fingers. She drew full figures to our stick ones, girls with curled hair and eye lashes, window boxes when the rest of us could barely sketch a window at all.
And what a Barbie collection. I admit that I coveted her Barbie nesting mixing bowls. I believe — though I can't rely on my memory — that she had a Barbie mixmaster to go with them. And a kitchen.
Libbett's family had horses, and I learned from her not to go barefoot in the barn because I might catch hookworms. Sometimes we'd head out to the pasture beside her house, and she'd saddle up. She could ride, but I could not, and I distinctly recall her galloping down the dusty road behind our houses, as I labored, lopsided, to stay on the horse, scared that I would surely die that day. I wonder now if she failed to fasten the saddle on tight enough for me.
In thinking of what she taught me — childhood friends always teach you something —perhaps it is best to say this: to explore. The woods for the tooth fairy, the colors in the Crayola box, the complications of friendship — and ours was complicated. Sometimes we got into trouble. Sometimes we didn't get along. And sometimes I did stick up for myself.
But she is there in so many memories, at church, home, school, on the back road, in the old tobacco barn, in her room at night, watching the shadow of trees scrape across the window. Today, as I browse photos of her on her 50th birthday on the Facebook page set up for her by her family, I see something in there of the girl she was. I know nothing of what her adult life was like, nor she mine. I suppose we are both at a loss because of that.
She told me once that I could write about a paper clip and make it interesting. I don't know this to be true at all. The paper clip. If you filtered through my file cabinet now, you'd see that I favor it over the staple, though I am not sure why. It is a temporary fix, looping a hold on things that can too easily slip away.
I am thinking now that I want to staple myself to the people I am still connected to in the picture above by virtue of Miss William's fifth grade. I don't want to lose anyone else. We have a past together. I have kept up with some of you. But you can't know how often I wonder about the rest.
Bottom row: Mark Faithful, Woody Pridgen, Bobby Keeter, Johnny Hudson, Otis Cocker, Ralph Leggett, Libbett Gregory, Betty Keeter, Karen Todd; Second row: Robbie Mosley, Scott Allsbrook, Elizabeth Stallings?, Lydia Bray, Parks Boyd, Paul Oglesby, ??, George Johnson; third row: ??, :?? Sandra Coward (where are you?!), Betty Rufty, Susan Byrum, Toni Harrington (she had her hand slapped with a yardstick by Miss Williams!!); Charmaine Lofton, Billy Cook; back row:Douglas Pickette, Lanny Lawrence?, Ricky Payne, Bill Whitehead, David McLawhorn, Lee King. (please correct my memory if I have gotten a name wrong:)
(This is not our whole class. I don't have a copy of the one from Miss Holton's class. Miss Holton... now there's a story. She deserves a story all by herself.)
Do something you are proud of
Over 30 years ago, my aunt gave me a calendar for Christmas. It was the kind you keep on the refrigerator, and each date contains a simple instruction, that if followed, will improve your mental health throughout the year. Put out by the Mental Health Association of Oregon, the calendar was evergreen — as applicable in 1978 when it was published, as it was some years later when I posted it eye-high to my children. Then we would look at the calendar together and see what we were supposed to do for the day. And try it.
Here's a sampling from January:
Here's a sampling from January:
• Enjoy Silence
• Answer a letter
Eventually, I packed it away in a drawer, thinking I'd pull it out again if I ever have grandchildren.
A few weeks ago, in the middle of a day-long winter cleaning frenzy, (sort through things, I think was the task of the day) I found it again. And I posted it on my fridge in the middle of the clutter there.
I wish I could say I have followed the instructions this year. I am re-reading a classic (Jan 16), have fed the birds (Jan. 8,) try to get some exercise (Jan. 27). But I have not lost a pound (Jan.6), imagined myself living 100 years ago or really looked at the sky. (Jan. 20)
Today's entry, for Jan. 28 says this: Do something you are proud of. Well. When I read that last night before I headed to bed, the corners of my eyes got just a tad bit damp. It is my son's 23rd birthday today. And he is easily one of two things I ever did that I am most proud of. (The other, of course, is the Princess Pea.)
Graham was born a year after the explosion of the space shuttle. I remember, watching that launch with a friend as our toddler daughters scurried around us, wondering where I would be when that sad anniversary came around.
I was, in fact, scurrying around my house in my bathrobe with my alarm clock in my pocket. My daughter played in my closet, trying on all my high-heeled shoes, as I wiped up the floor in my bathroom and changed the sheets on the bed. My mother would be coming, and everything had to be clean for her!
By the time my favorite soap aired at 3, I was heavily in labor. I remember worrying that I would not have enough love in me for another child, I loved my daughter so much. And then, there he was, a slick and wiry boy whose feet reached over half the length of his tiny leg. And my heart burst, making room for him in it.
We brought him home — already nuzzling a blanket that is now simply yarn — and brought him up, all 6 feet 2.5 inches of him, if he is not stretching (Jan. 1) to be a young man with integrity and a biting sense of humor, a guy who can fix just about anything he sets his mind to, and who can at least help bake bread (Jan. 31). A man who is a loyal friend, and he can even eat with chopsticks (Jan. 29). He is often the silent, but creative type, who sorts through things (Jan. 9,) and much to my frustration, does not always share his thoughts — or life — with me.
Oh, but I am proud of him. Fiercely so.
One of my favorite comic strips is Zits. About a mother who drives her son crazy, and a boy, all arms and legs and angles, with his own peculiar view of the world. This week I cut a strip out and handed it to him, about mom asking son his plan for the day, but he didn't have one. This is so us. Hits a little too close to home, as my son reads the want ads (Jan. 24), and I share in the task (Jan. 14) scouring the web hoping to find just the perfect fit for him.
He tolerates me. I sing to him badly in the morning if I wake him up (not on the Jan.calendar, but it should be); I can't hear anything he says; and I play with his hair (another thing not on this month's list, though the princess pea loves that.) We are alike in some things. He looks like me (isn't that supposed to be good luck for sons?); neither of us give away things we don't use (Jan. 11). We both love to nap. We can take a pretty good picture when we feel like it (Jan. 26), those his are way better than mine. Neither of us is without fault.
And we are both ponderers. I just share my ponderings much more often than he does.
Mothers know their children's gifts, I think, and we don't do our job if we don't encourage them to daydream (Jan. 12) about what they might be when they grow up, to imagine their corner of the world in 100 years (to rephrase Jan. 3). I am trying to do that with him, and even though he is as resistant to my nudgings as he was to my rendition of Happy Birthday Baby this morning, I am trying to resist the temptation to criticize. (Jan. 22).
My wish for him, on his 23rd birthday— though to him the future might not look so bright right now, economy being what it is — is that he spend some time enjoying the silence (Jan. 2), and really, really look at that sky.
Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday baby, I love you so!
sbr
• Answer a letter
• Break a habit
• Get to know a neighbor's dog
Who couldn't (or shouldn't) do things like this every day?Eventually, I packed it away in a drawer, thinking I'd pull it out again if I ever have grandchildren.
A few weeks ago, in the middle of a day-long winter cleaning frenzy, (sort through things, I think was the task of the day) I found it again. And I posted it on my fridge in the middle of the clutter there.
I wish I could say I have followed the instructions this year. I am re-reading a classic (Jan 16), have fed the birds (Jan. 8,) try to get some exercise (Jan. 27). But I have not lost a pound (Jan.6), imagined myself living 100 years ago or really looked at the sky. (Jan. 20)
Today's entry, for Jan. 28 says this: Do something you are proud of. Well. When I read that last night before I headed to bed, the corners of my eyes got just a tad bit damp. It is my son's 23rd birthday today. And he is easily one of two things I ever did that I am most proud of. (The other, of course, is the Princess Pea.)
Graham was born a year after the explosion of the space shuttle. I remember, watching that launch with a friend as our toddler daughters scurried around us, wondering where I would be when that sad anniversary came around.
I was, in fact, scurrying around my house in my bathrobe with my alarm clock in my pocket. My daughter played in my closet, trying on all my high-heeled shoes, as I wiped up the floor in my bathroom and changed the sheets on the bed. My mother would be coming, and everything had to be clean for her!
By the time my favorite soap aired at 3, I was heavily in labor. I remember worrying that I would not have enough love in me for another child, I loved my daughter so much. And then, there he was, a slick and wiry boy whose feet reached over half the length of his tiny leg. And my heart burst, making room for him in it.
Oh, but I am proud of him. Fiercely so.
One of my favorite comic strips is Zits. About a mother who drives her son crazy, and a boy, all arms and legs and angles, with his own peculiar view of the world. This week I cut a strip out and handed it to him, about mom asking son his plan for the day, but he didn't have one. This is so us. Hits a little too close to home, as my son reads the want ads (Jan. 24), and I share in the task (Jan. 14) scouring the web hoping to find just the perfect fit for him.
And we are both ponderers. I just share my ponderings much more often than he does.
Mothers know their children's gifts, I think, and we don't do our job if we don't encourage them to daydream (Jan. 12) about what they might be when they grow up, to imagine their corner of the world in 100 years (to rephrase Jan. 3). I am trying to do that with him, and even though he is as resistant to my nudgings as he was to my rendition of Happy Birthday Baby this morning, I am trying to resist the temptation to criticize. (Jan. 22).
My wish for him, on his 23rd birthday— though to him the future might not look so bright right now, economy being what it is — is that he spend some time enjoying the silence (Jan. 2), and really, really look at that sky.
sbr
Grace happens
I work for my church. Most people who belong to any church do work for it, but as of a couple of years ago, I have been employed by the parish where I have been a member for 20 years.
This new job came with challenges, not only professionally, but what I call parishioner-ally... learning how I might draw the line between me as a parishioner, seeking a place to connect with God—and me as professional, using my expertise as a writer/communicator to help others find a place to connect with God. (not to mention learning that my parish friends are now my employers....)
It has not been an easy transition from parishioner to professional, but on some days, like today, the two collide/connect in ways that show me full well that God is the best communicator of all.
We are an Episcopal church, and anyone who has grown up in one knows that we are challenged to tell people about ourselves. Everyone should already know, we think, that we are the frozen chosen, and if you don't, well, it is your loss. Our joke is that if we invite someone to church once every five years, we get credit.
In my life, I'll admit that I don't invite people to church very often. In my job, though, it is my mission to bring people into our midst. I am not always comfortable with this role as Episcopalian/Episcopal communicator. I have grown up with the Book of Common Prayer, but doesn't everybody know it by heart? If they don't, us cradle Episcopalians think they should.
One of my church friends says she loves it when God is obvious, shows us that we are not in control. Today — case in point:
A young woman came into our lobby today, seeking a labyrinth, which our parish installed in the last year. She'd read a newspaper article in our local paper today about another labyrinth in the area, and because she was a labyrinth walker, she was seeking others closer to her home than the one she had read about.
An internet search led her to our website (which I maintain, however imperfectly), which let her to us. (A confession: it took me four tries to find it on our site myself today. :)
It has been a cold day today, and we are in the midst of construction (I know, I always write a long story)... so I offered to don my coat and take her to our labyrinth, now secluded behind construction and shrubbery.
On our short walk, I learned that she and I had once shared the same Georgia town (me 30 years ago, she not that long ago) and a profession — writing/editing and the like. She seemed stunned that I knew her former city, her profession, and as I questioned her, I found as a single mom she had not been well welcomed at some area churches here. I will tell you that this broke my heart. Twenty years ago and new to our city, I came to our church, and though I was not a single mom, I didn't feel welcomed, either.
Funny now, but it is my home.
I invited her to walk our labyrinth privately, then to return to the lobby, where I would be waiting. Awhile later she came, and I took her to see our children's chapels and gave her information about who we are,and what we are about, so she can decide if she'd like to come back. (I do confess, knowing she is an editor, to cringing about the fact that our most recent monthly newsletter has TYPOs!:)
"I never knew you were here," she said upon leaving.
"I hope you will come back," I said. And I have been thinking her since, how today, she was in search of warmth she hoped a labyrinth would bring on a frigid day — and though she had walked one often, she had not done so in five years — and somehow by Grace she found it. I know she was searching for more, too. And I hope by Grace, she has found that as well.
This new job came with challenges, not only professionally, but what I call parishioner-ally... learning how I might draw the line between me as a parishioner, seeking a place to connect with God—and me as professional, using my expertise as a writer/communicator to help others find a place to connect with God. (not to mention learning that my parish friends are now my employers....)
It has not been an easy transition from parishioner to professional, but on some days, like today, the two collide/connect in ways that show me full well that God is the best communicator of all.
We are an Episcopal church, and anyone who has grown up in one knows that we are challenged to tell people about ourselves. Everyone should already know, we think, that we are the frozen chosen, and if you don't, well, it is your loss. Our joke is that if we invite someone to church once every five years, we get credit.
In my life, I'll admit that I don't invite people to church very often. In my job, though, it is my mission to bring people into our midst. I am not always comfortable with this role as Episcopalian/Episcopal communicator. I have grown up with the Book of Common Prayer, but doesn't everybody know it by heart? If they don't, us cradle Episcopalians think they should.
One of my church friends says she loves it when God is obvious, shows us that we are not in control. Today — case in point:
A young woman came into our lobby today, seeking a labyrinth, which our parish installed in the last year. She'd read a newspaper article in our local paper today about another labyrinth in the area, and because she was a labyrinth walker, she was seeking others closer to her home than the one she had read about.
An internet search led her to our website (which I maintain, however imperfectly), which let her to us. (A confession: it took me four tries to find it on our site myself today. :)
It has been a cold day today, and we are in the midst of construction (I know, I always write a long story)... so I offered to don my coat and take her to our labyrinth, now secluded behind construction and shrubbery.
On our short walk, I learned that she and I had once shared the same Georgia town (me 30 years ago, she not that long ago) and a profession — writing/editing and the like. She seemed stunned that I knew her former city, her profession, and as I questioned her, I found as a single mom she had not been well welcomed at some area churches here. I will tell you that this broke my heart. Twenty years ago and new to our city, I came to our church, and though I was not a single mom, I didn't feel welcomed, either.
Funny now, but it is my home.
I invited her to walk our labyrinth privately, then to return to the lobby, where I would be waiting. Awhile later she came, and I took her to see our children's chapels and gave her information about who we are,and what we are about, so she can decide if she'd like to come back. (I do confess, knowing she is an editor, to cringing about the fact that our most recent monthly newsletter has TYPOs!:)
"I never knew you were here," she said upon leaving.
"I hope you will come back," I said. And I have been thinking her since, how today, she was in search of warmth she hoped a labyrinth would bring on a frigid day — and though she had walked one often, she had not done so in five years — and somehow by Grace she found it. I know she was searching for more, too. And I hope by Grace, she has found that as well.
2009 — Late, as usual
A childhood friend of mine used to be so perpetually late that when we planned to take her with us somewhere, we told her we'd pick her up 30 minutes — sometimes an hour — earlier than we actually planned. Sometimes even then she would be late.
About 15 years ago, this same friend sent me one of those Christmas newsletters we all hate — the ones about children who play the violin with Isak Perlman or who write best sellers at age 8. That year, angered by all the bragging, I put together my own little newsletter, Vol 1 of which promised to be "The only one!"
"And then there are the Rountree," I wrote in 1994. "Stumbling and fumbling along, our story is one of generally average kids, extremely minor achievement, tepid success and quite boring activities in keeping with our average pedigree... though we did remove the overturned, abandoned car and refrigerator from our front yard this year." Our children, then 11 and 8, "spent much of 1994 doing average kid things like burping at dinner and fighting over the remote control."
LBOTAT
My mother taught me to cook by handing me a pound of ground beef, a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee sauce and a frying pan. It was a Saturday, and spaghetti was often on the menu for Saturday lunch. (It would be years before I realized I could actually serve it for supper.)
Mama is a 'little bit of this and that' kind of cook, and a terrific one. I had watched her make said spaghetti many times, adding her 'lbotat' from the cabinet to the sauce, so that I thought reasonably equipped to do the same. I made the spaghetti, adding my own 'lbotat', and in my memory, everybody at the table ate it, and nobody — especially my mother — complained. In time, this became my Saturday duty (at least in my memory), and before long I had ditched the tired Chef Boy-ar-dee for my own concoction.
When I was newly married, briefly worked at a job I hated, trying to make an IBM Selectric typewriter format a simple newsletter for a company I couldn't name today if I tried. I had been working with computers for a couple of years, so a typewriter seemed ancient to me, and I could never get the hang of it. My ineptitude got me fired. FIRED! After only a couple of weeks. So I dragged myself back to our small apartment, wallowing in the fact that I would probably never, ever work again. But what would I do? And right away?
The one thing I knew I could do well was cook. But what? I'd read an article on making bread just that week in Redbook. I'd watched my mother make yeast rolls for years. It did not look that hard. So I went to the store, bought loaf pans, yeast, eggs, flour and milk, and set to work, actually following the recipe. No LBOTAT, because I did recall Mama saying that working with yeast could be a little tricky.
I'm sure I cried, which of course is the first thing any respectable writer will do when faced with failure. The second thing is to stick the fanny in the chair and figure out a better way to write. So that's what I did. Who cared about bread? Rolls were the bread in my family. So wrote my mother — we couldn't afford call long distance in those ancient days of the 80s — for her recipe.
Today I am somewhat famous for my rolls. I've been known to make as many as 30 dozen in one day, and even have tried to teach a few curious cooks just how I do it. My mother's recipe card is now practically illegible, splattered with melted butter, milk, yeast and eggs — the makings of the perfect roll.
A couple of weeks ago, my NYC daughter asked me for some recipes. She and her husband stayed in the City for Thanksgiving, and she is hoping to recreate her favorite meal in their tiny Manhattan apartment.
Married 7 months ago, she is learning to cook. She has watched me make rolls on our kitchen counter since she was two. She wanted the roll recipe. But though she's watched me, she has never wanted to learn how.
Mama is a 'little bit of this and that' kind of cook, and a terrific one. I had watched her make said spaghetti many times, adding her 'lbotat' from the cabinet to the sauce, so that I thought reasonably equipped to do the same. I made the spaghetti, adding my own 'lbotat', and in my memory, everybody at the table ate it, and nobody — especially my mother — complained. In time, this became my Saturday duty (at least in my memory), and before long I had ditched the tired Chef Boy-ar-dee for my own concoction.
Mama taught me how to make a lot of things that way, and today I'm a pretty good cook myself, though if you ask me what's in something, I find myself saying: A little bit of this and that. It's just too hard to measure.
When I was newly married, briefly worked at a job I hated, trying to make an IBM Selectric typewriter format a simple newsletter for a company I couldn't name today if I tried. I had been working with computers for a couple of years, so a typewriter seemed ancient to me, and I could never get the hang of it. My ineptitude got me fired. FIRED! After only a couple of weeks. So I dragged myself back to our small apartment, wallowing in the fact that I would probably never, ever work again. But what would I do? And right away?
The one thing I knew I could do well was cook. But what? I'd read an article on making bread just that week in Redbook. I'd watched my mother make yeast rolls for years. It did not look that hard. So I went to the store, bought loaf pans, yeast, eggs, flour and milk, and set to work, actually following the recipe. No LBOTAT, because I did recall Mama saying that working with yeast could be a little tricky.
I don't remember anything about making the bread, just the outcome. When the timer buzzed, I opened the oven to find four perfectly golden — and perfectly flat — flour bricks. I will never forget that moment.
What a failure I was. At everything.
I'm sure I cried, which of course is the first thing any respectable writer will do when faced with failure. The second thing is to stick the fanny in the chair and figure out a better way to write. So that's what I did. Who cared about bread? Rolls were the bread in my family. So wrote my mother — we couldn't afford call long distance in those ancient days of the 80s — for her recipe.
Today I am somewhat famous for my rolls. I've been known to make as many as 30 dozen in one day, and even have tried to teach a few curious cooks just how I do it. My mother's recipe card is now practically illegible, splattered with melted butter, milk, yeast and eggs — the makings of the perfect roll.
A couple of weeks ago, my NYC daughter asked me for some recipes. She and her husband stayed in the City for Thanksgiving, and she is hoping to recreate her favorite meal in their tiny Manhattan apartment.
So I sat down the other day, writing from memory my mother's recipe, careful to give her specific instructions about how long to scald the milk, how to tell if she has too much flour, how to add a LBOTAT to make them sweet like mine. And a little bit about that tricky yeast. I bought the bread flour and the right kind of yeast (enough for her to have three do-overs). And then I made some rolls, taking everything to her last weekend when they made a short trip to see the in-laws.
When she and The Husband called last night saying the couldn't find the Pepperidge Farm dressing mix on the salad dressing aisle, I was a little worried. But I do know, somehow, she will teach herself how to make my rolls. She is like that. Thought the first batch might not rise right, and the second might produce rolls that are a little too heavy, she'll do it. And one day when all seems wrong with the world, she'll pull out her measuring cups and her yeast and get busy, doing something all the girls in my family — from my grandmother, mother, sister, me — and now her — have learned how to do right.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Where the Wild Things Are
When my son was small, his favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. At night, after a difficult day together, we would bundle ourselves into the rocking chair, and I'd read to him about a place where in the quiet of his room, all the rules of the day would melt away like the walls and become a land of his own bidding. As he grew older, I would find the book tossed on the floor by his bedside when I cleaned up his room. Here's what I wrote about it years ago:
Last week the two of us had a movie date. We had planned it ever since the summer afternoon we watched the latest Harry Potter together, when we saw the trailer for the movie made from what had become our favorite book together. So on a rainy afternoon he drove me, and we settled into our seats among the other parents and children clustered to see what had been labeled by reviewers as a masterpiece.
My son is now 22, a good four feet taller than the other children in attendance. A spring college graduate, he is living at home, working as an intern for the 'family business', spending his nights searching for his future life on places called Monster. There, wild things indeed throw fire at him, luring him with their yellow eyes into sending them all that he is, in hopes that they will allow him to, just for a few minutes, tame them with his bag of magic tricks. Tricks he hopes will engage them enough to invite him into their den.
He does not yet know what he wants to be, but he is certain he will be something, somewhere, will make a difference in his corner of the world, and so are we. He, like so many people these days — young graduates, managers with years of experience, executives who've been let go — are hoping someone, somewhere will give him the chance. And he is tired of talking about trying to find a job.
And yet, he sends his written self out into what feels like a vast ocean, one like Max sailed across a year and through a day to get to the other side. Will it take that long for him? Sometimes the response falls dark. And then, one of the wild things responds: Come see us, but we will probably fill the job before you get here. He books a flight, but the job is gone before he lifts off the ground.
And then, another wild thing responds: Let us see your tricks.
His father and I, long distanced from the interview whirl, give him tips at supper: look them in the eye, shake their hands, ask good questions, reveal something of yourself. This is probably old school, what it was like Before. He nods, and I ask him if he needs me to iron the shirt he will wear with his suit.
The night before the interview I lie awake, thinking that wild things in the movie are more like the neurotic characters on The Office than the ones who brought him comfort all those years ago. Maybe Spike Jonze's interpretation is just the right training for this next adventure in particular.
During the interview, my son threw out his best tricks, a couple of which he felt might have tamed them. But a week later, we are still waiting, still hopeful. And we are grateful that they let him in for a couple of hours, at least. "Every interview is good training," we say, but our response feels a bit empty.
I have loved having Graham home with us the past couple of months. It feels as if he's come home again, after a long absence when he was rarely in touch. Each night we share a hot supper together, talking, which is something he rarely did he was in college. Though he does not ask us for much advice, I wonder, if one of these nights as I head off to bed, I'll find him scouring the old book again for clues as to what to do next.
Why would he pull out this old story now, its cover long gone, the pages scribbled on with purple crayon? He is 14 after all.
Perhaps he's searching for clues. He's he's headed for high school, and maybe he wants to remember how to tame the wild things he may meet there. Earlier in the week, we ventured into the catacombs of the school he'll attend in the fall. Watching him lumber through the halls with his friends, it was easy to forget that he is still that boy who loved the courageous Max and his wild friends. Towering over the others, my boy stands six feet in socks, his buddies flanking him like sprouts. All angles and lines, he is useful for pulling things down from high cabinets, but I know sometimes he feels ungainly. Standing in shoes my father's size, he is a man-child, wavering on the border of each age, a little unsure of which way to go.
Last week the two of us had a movie date. We had planned it ever since the summer afternoon we watched the latest Harry Potter together, when we saw the trailer for the movie made from what had become our favorite book together. So on a rainy afternoon he drove me, and we settled into our seats among the other parents and children clustered to see what had been labeled by reviewers as a masterpiece.
My son is now 22, a good four feet taller than the other children in attendance. A spring college graduate, he is living at home, working as an intern for the 'family business', spending his nights searching for his future life on places called Monster. There, wild things indeed throw fire at him, luring him with their yellow eyes into sending them all that he is, in hopes that they will allow him to, just for a few minutes, tame them with his bag of magic tricks. Tricks he hopes will engage them enough to invite him into their den.
He does not yet know what he wants to be, but he is certain he will be something, somewhere, will make a difference in his corner of the world, and so are we. He, like so many people these days — young graduates, managers with years of experience, executives who've been let go — are hoping someone, somewhere will give him the chance. And he is tired of talking about trying to find a job.
And yet, he sends his written self out into what feels like a vast ocean, one like Max sailed across a year and through a day to get to the other side. Will it take that long for him? Sometimes the response falls dark. And then, one of the wild things responds: Come see us, but we will probably fill the job before you get here. He books a flight, but the job is gone before he lifts off the ground.
And then, another wild thing responds: Let us see your tricks.
His father and I, long distanced from the interview whirl, give him tips at supper: look them in the eye, shake their hands, ask good questions, reveal something of yourself. This is probably old school, what it was like Before. He nods, and I ask him if he needs me to iron the shirt he will wear with his suit.
The night before the interview I lie awake, thinking that wild things in the movie are more like the neurotic characters on The Office than the ones who brought him comfort all those years ago. Maybe Spike Jonze's interpretation is just the right training for this next adventure in particular.
During the interview, my son threw out his best tricks, a couple of which he felt might have tamed them. But a week later, we are still waiting, still hopeful. And we are grateful that they let him in for a couple of hours, at least. "Every interview is good training," we say, but our response feels a bit empty.
I have loved having Graham home with us the past couple of months. It feels as if he's come home again, after a long absence when he was rarely in touch. Each night we share a hot supper together, talking, which is something he rarely did he was in college. Though he does not ask us for much advice, I wonder, if one of these nights as I head off to bed, I'll find him scouring the old book again for clues as to what to do next.
She Didn't Fall Far
My daughter has started a blog in the past couple of months where she waxes poetic about being a young, Southern twenty-something living in the Big Apple. I've been posting her entries for my Facebook friends to read, and one of them sent me the comment: She didn't fall far from the tree.
Well, in a way. Gravity did play a trick on us, as she found herself drawn northward, toward a city that I only saw from afar until I was 40 years old. My first trip was ours together, and at 13, she looked up into the glitter of the forest of skyscrapers and said: One day, I'm going to live here. Oh, surely, I thought, she'd rather find herself a nice grove of sugar maples, but mothers can be wrong on occasion.
"One day" came in May, 2005, when she packed her suitcase and moved into a dorm for college students, then set about finding a job that would pay her enough to eat. (We paid her rent that summer.)
The next summer she graduated, found an internship and became the itinerant boarder, finding places with friends of friends who were out of the city for the summer. By fall, she had landed a "real job," and though she could barely afford the rent, on a frigid February day in 2007 my best friend from high school and I moved some hand-me-down furniture and dishes into a third floor walkup on the Upper East Side. And I cried.
Warming the homemade spaghetti sauce I'd brought from home in her tiny kitchen a couple of nights later had me pretending this was my apartment, and that I was 22 years old, setting up house and my laptop in a city where I would one day write something remarkable. For just a few New York minutes, I was living vicariously through my child, hopeful for her, that her own new life would allow her to create something remarkable for her own self.
As we head into her third fall of living away from home, my not so little apple has indeed created something remarkable for herself. A new job, a newer apartment, and a new husband now occupy her own New York minutes, her days likely filled with the dreaming I once did when she was just a small blossom hanging from my tree.
She keeps, though, a slender tether to home, writing about the things she misses about North Carolina, and where in this swirling place, she can find small pieces of home.
I knew she could write, but I hadn't actually read anything she'd written since she was in high school, so I was surprised, a bit, that she chose to start a blog. It's a movement I would have so been part of as a young writer, just testing out my words. Now that I've written so many in my life, I'm not sure I have all that much more to say.
Worry Worry Everywhere
It was 8 p.m., and I head home from a meeting, the fingernail moon marking the road I would take. I wonder if I should call home to alert my husband of my whereabouts, gazing at the cars stopped next to me at stoplights, fearful. My mind wanders, the image of a bright-faced blonde coed in my head, saying goodbye to roommates who leave her alone for a party, or a bar, or someplace. The paper didn't say. As a mother, I can't help thinking about why anyone would go out at 1:30 a.m., on a Tuesday. And then I think again of Eve, the one who said she had too much studying to do to join them. If only.
Eve Carson. The president of the student body of my alma mater, who was found murdered in the middle of a quiet neighborhood street maybe a mile from the campus admissions office a week ago tomorrow. She was a year older than my son, walked the same brick pathways as I did 30 years ago, knew some of the kids I know.
Thoughts of Eve clutter my mind these days, as I think about those last hours of her life, and how likely a split-second decision led to the end of it. In my mind's eye, I see her rifling through a notebook, taking notes with a mechanical pencil, talking on the phone. She makes herself a cup of coffee to stay awake, realizes she needs to be prepared for the next day, copies for a meeting maybe, so she gathers her coat, cellphone, purse, keys, the few tools a young woman in college thinks she needs. She has done this so many times before, lives only blocks from the north campus quad, and she knows the parking lot at the Planetarium is well lit.
I imagine her indescribable fear when the boy who would end her life came into it. In the dark. As she climbed into her car? Had he been watching? Maybe at first she believed she would survive it — perhaps it never crossed her mind that she wouldn't — because from all reports Eve believed in the complete goodness of people. I watch too much tv, so I can picture what he might have said to her, how she told him her pin number, gave him the money in her wallet, anything he wanted from her, thinking surely that would be enough. She might have even said she'd help him, help find a way out of the life he had chosen for himself, because there is so much more out there. She had seen it, all over the world.
Then I imagine she thought of her parents, her little brother, and how they would take the news. Maybe she thought she would tell them about it later, that she would greet them at home over Spring Break and hug them tighter, vowing never to head to campus at such an early hour again. Lesson learned.
I imagine, then, at some point, she knew.
This morning, when I left the house for my walk before light, I slipped my phone into my pocket, for the first time since I began walking 13 years ago.
When I wake, I think of Eve's family, picture her mother purging in the bathroom. I teach writing, and I remember one student writing about his sister's unexpected death, and how all he could remember was the sound of his mother throwing up, for hours, after she heard the news; I know that's what I would do if something happened to my beautiful daughter or son. And in the hours before light, I pray that God will wrap his arms around Eve's family, and the hundreds of people who knew her and are also grieving — all those kids — and that somehow they will feel their way through it all, toward the light again.
And I pray her killer will be caught.
wtmch
Senior Moments
Yesterday I got an AARP card in the mail. I turned 50 in August, and I thought surely they wouldn't find out about my switch to a new demographic group. I'm afraid to open the envelope, for fear that I'll be drawn in to the triple coupon discounts and the special shopping days I have heard my friends talk about.
My husband, who is my senior, has long submitted to teasing about our August/November romance. Last summer, the mail brought him the newsletter of a retirement and long-term care facility just around the corner — in very large type. Turns out that several of our post-55 neighbors got the same mailing. I guess they want us all to know we never have to leave the neighborhood, but can live and die within one very large square block.
Signs of aging seem to hover everywhere. The other day, my husband called to say he had worn two different pairs of shoes to work. And yesterday he couldn't find his car keys. He has misplaced things our entire marriage, so I knew they'd eventually turn up, but both of us searched the whole house for hours, and the keys didn't turn up. Until he went into his closet to retrieve a belt. There they hung, on the belt rack. I am beginning to see a pattern.
When I woke up this morning, I said brightly: It's 7:30 a.m. Do you know where your keys are? He did, in fact, and grumbled as he packed up his boat bag and headed north, to where he keeps his sailboat. "I'll have the cellphone with me," he called out.
A couple of hours later, I climbed into my car, heading for a meeting, only to find his cellphone plugged into the charger in my car. Thinking he'd be back late — today is Daylight Saving Time — I was surprised to find his car in the driveway when I came home.
"It was not a good boat day," he said, not because of the wind, or the cellphone safe at home. But because he'd left to boat keys in the pocket of a jacket he wore last weekend when he sailed. He had driven an hour — one way — to his mistress, and he couldn't so much as turn the engine on. He sat in the cockpit, pretending to piddle, the wind whipping around him, remembering the time when he dragged our first boat four hours to the Outer Banks but forgot to pack the sail.
wtmch
For the Birds
This morning my husband asked me the name of the orange and white-breasted bird on the feeder. It was a towhee, the one bird who uses his feet to scratch at the ground for his breakfast, but this one seemed to prefer the Hot Bites we feed our backyard visitors.
I don't know when I first started learning to identify feeder birds, but my mother taught me the skill. We keep binoculars by the kitchen table, pulling them out to more closely examine the nuances between the Carolina Wren and the House Wren, or to watch the red-tailed hawks landing on the highest branches of our wintering trees. Years ago our backdoor neighbor was a retired doctor who spent hours, it seemed, sitting in a lawn chair, looking up at the warblers in his trees.
While I enjoyed birds then, two little children swinging in the back yard kept me to busy to look beyond them and into the trees. I'll never be so old as that, I thought. Well. I have been known lately to pull up the deck chair and watch.
Most of the birds are frequent visitors here, but occasionally I do see a rare sight: cedar waxwings devouring berries on a bush; a scarlet tanager whistling in the spring, a Baltimore Oriole who stopped to rest in our yard for a day or two. I set up my office desk so I can catch a flit or flutter here and there as I write.
Today, in the span of only a few minutes, one of the largest hawks I have seen in this area landed on a bed of leaves high in an oak that wavers in the February wind. He started picking at the leaves — a squirrel's nest — his wings flapping as his giant talons searched for a mid-morning snack. Down below, the bluebird couple that had been eyeing our house decided on taking a tour.
They might be the same couple who raised three clutches last year, the first eggs laid in March. I counted six eggs — fretting during the hard freeze that followed, then missed the fledg
ing. I fed them meal worms, Papa Bluebird watching closely from a nearby branch as I sprinkled breakfast on the top of the house. The second clutch was also six, the third five, and I was home the day the last three babies took flight, wringing my hands like a grandmother watching her grandchild's first steps.
I've been used to the fledgings of our house wrens, who each year tuck their nests of pine straw into the tight corners in our garage. Last spring mom made her nest in the nest of beach chairs on top of the fridge, eyeing me each morning when I came in from my walk. One of her babies flew into the house one morning when I left the back door open, ending up in my daughter's room on the third floor of our house, clinging to the curtains and trying to fly out of the skylights.
I love the activity, how the birds gather their colors in the dogwood to wait their turn at the feeder like party guests gathered around the dip table. The mothers nudge, the fathers feed, the babies fly away. Just like real life.
wtmch
Of Sons
This morning, my heart was heavy as I headed to church. A former neighbor of mine, I learned yesterday, was mourning the loss of her 19-year-old nephew, killed the night before in a car crash near his home. The son of one of my best friends from childhood is in his seventh week at boot camp at Parris Island. He wants to drive a tank. Another friend tries to work through her son's drug addiction. My own son just turned 21 a few weeks ago; already he's lost two friends, one to a wreck, the other to drugs. Good boys, good families all, families who have brought their sons up to have faith in God and hope for making a mark on the world.
I knelt in prayer for all of these sons of ours, some whose lives are so filled with promise, others cut short of knowing what that promise could be. Praying that God wrap his arms around all of these parents, comforting them in their losses, in their worries, and providing them with hope for their sons in the middle of all their uncertainties.
Then I sat, opening the bulletin to find that for our prelude, we would have guest bell ringers, a group of moms and dads, all of whom have lost children, but who have used their commonality to seek solace in the music, and in reaching others as they perform.
Among them was a member of our parish who lost her son 11 years ago at 21, in a college fire that is now legendary in North Carolina. She has channeled her grief into a crusade for sprinkler systems in college residences, traveling around the country, speaking before Congress. And she rings the bells.
I wept as she and the other parents rang their beautiful notes, their arrangement of "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," filling them — and the church — with such joy, as they honored the children who no longer sit at their supper tables. Two families who had lost two children each — two — a situation incomprehensible to me. My friend — pregnant with her third child due in a month — sat next to me and wept, too, the quiet grief of mothers who know that our tether to our children is so tenuous. We watched, as the mothers and fathers in our midst drew themselves through their grief and into that joy that surpasses all understanding, drawing us with them, until our hearts felt full, too.
Later, when my son called home for his weekly check-in, I found myself wanting to reach through the phone, tighten the tether, as close as he would allow. wtmch
The Benefits of Tears
I'm reading The Best American Non-required Reading for 2007, edited by Dave Eggers, and among the treasures I've found is a writing exercise worth trying.
Write your memoir in six words.
I'm trying my hand at it, but so far can only up with this: Crybaby wrote the why down, then stopped.
Only I haven't stopped being the crybaby I was born, and I have not stopped writing, either. But I tell my students that as a fairly legendary crier during childhood (and thereafter), I recall that one day someone — I wish I knew who — said "Susan, why don't you just write it all down, and hush."
I did, and writing appeared to give me a power crying did not. I seem to have been born with an acute ability to put into words what my crying jags never can convey.
I remember the first time I asked my husband (also a journalist by training) to read a story I'd written about our dog who had recently died. I wanted to send the story to the newspaper, in hopes that it would be published. He read the story, handed it back to me and said: I don't know why anybody would want to read a story about a dead dog.
Now he loved this dog as much as I did, but he is not an emotional man. I took the paper back, cried, then mailed it (with a stamp and envelope — this was a LONG time ago), to the editor, a faceless man who sometimes wrote columns about walking his dog.
Several weeks later when I hadn't heard anything from the editor, with pounding heart, I dialed his number. "I sent you a story a few weeks ago," I said, hoping he hadn't lost it in the piles of things on his desk.
"I'm glad you called," he said. "I was going to call you, but I had to wait until I pulled myself together to talk to you."
Hummm.. He ran the story, and in the coming days and weeks my mailbox filled with letters from people with their own dog stories, thanking me for mine. What followed were a series of personal essays, and later a real column with my photograph (that took up far too much word space.) But I learned that when I put myself words there, people did read them, and respond.
The other day, when I asked my husband to read the blog before I posted the first entry, he said: I don't know why anybody would want to read about a broken refrigerator.
I've grown up a little since that first story, so I just rolled my eyes this time. Maybe somebody out there has had a broken fridge before, and can relate.
wtmch