you are what you leave us to read about you

my dear friend says that when she dies, she wants the following in her obit: her name (not her age), her funeral arrangements and her survivors. period. no mention of the fact that she knows how to castrate a bull — wearing her evening clothes under her coveralls if she has to — play a concerto and the showstopper from Mame with the same fervor, or though she dislikes most sports except fox hunting, she has been my cheerleader since the 8th grade.

i am a student of the obit. ever since i can remember — even before i became a journalist — i would scan the obits looking for interesting people. because in the paper, that's where they all are. not on the front page, not in the crime stories (however interesting those are) or on ET or any of those celebrity shows, but there, in the back of the B section, inked in black on gray paper that crinkles when you lean on it.

some days the obits make me chuckle. like one of my very favorite obits, which included the line: and she died with her favorite child at her side. Other parts of that now infamous obit include a father who was so distraught an invention of his had been stolen that he put his head in the oven on thanksgiving, ending his life. but the family ate the bird anyway. What. They were hungry. and this was not his obit, but his daughter's.

i remember being in the shower when my husband came upstairs and said: you have to hear this. (we are both obitophiles), and when I called AB to share it with her, she thought I had written it. (high praise indeed.) that one garnered what felt like dozens of letters to the editor, outrage at the newspaper for printing such a thing, (because the obit not so subtly implied that the unfavorite daughter was gallivanting around the globe while her mother took her last breath (really). other letters came from neighbors of the deceased, who knew her to be just the kind of woman who would poke fun at her own death, with the blessing of her children — favored or otherwise.

Sometimes the social announcements provide fuel for a chuckle, too. Like the couple who after 50 years of marriage, decided to renew their vowels. I saved that one because it spoke to me somehow. All those old vowels have gotten a pretty good workout over the centuries. It's about time somebody renewed them.

but in the obits, i have met some remarkable people. i wish i could tell you about them all. like the man who felt his lasting impression should be the fact that as a boy he got to view the car where bonnie & clyde were shot to death. or the seamstress who had made wedding gowns, setting every single seed pearl by hand.

just today, a woman named pearl was known for sending beautiful pressed flower cards to her friends. and barbara, bless her heart, made memorable icicle pickles. shades of aunt bea, (sort of)

last week, though, an obit touched me like no other i can remember. first of all, it was for a couple.

clem and mary crossland. self-described country mice, dr. crossland and his wife raised five children, among them the physician who would care for them in their end days. they died four days apart, dr. c, quite clearly, of a broken heart. the first line that struck me was this:

"they left as they lived — together, with the lady first."

well, that had me weeping.

and this: "they raised five healthy children whom they lived to see become educated and contributing adults, something that is denied to so many mothers and fathers."

about their mother: "throughout her life, our mother reminded us daily of the admonition from St. Luke: 'For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.'"

my mother never said these things directly to us, but she has lived it.

and then: about the good doctor:"he was an intellectually brilliant and personally humble man who was a superb diagnostician of conditions of both the body and soul."

well. but that is my father. plain and simple. beautifully said.

the obit ended with this:

"there are some debts that are so enormous that they can never be repaid in full, even in a small measure – and the devotion of one's family is one of those. In honor of our parents, we ask that each of you pay it forward by treating your own loved ones with dignity, kindness and compassionate care for as long as you have the strength and resources, for you will not regret a day that you do so."*

of course i was sobbing by then, handing the paper to my husband, who sat across the breakfast table from me, his eyes blinking. 

i found myself thinking all day, and the much of the next: what would my children have to say about me? 

dr and mrs crossland have not left me, not yet. i didn't know them, but i thank their children for giving me a chance to try.

read the full obit here 

dear me

i opened my trusty old mailbox that sits at the street and 

found among the junkyard of paper, three letters. 

letters. handwritten. stamped. 

all addressed to dear me.

all in one day.

letters from three of my favorite people, 

each thanking me for the small gesture of friendship,

on an early spring day

blueberries in hand, i visited two of my friends the week before,

for no reason in particular, except i had not seen them in awhile.

we sat, listened, laughed, remembered

and the gift was mine —

time to study not the clock but their faces, time to meet not a deadline but our minds, after an extended absence.

what treasures these friends are to me, i thought as i drove home,

unaware that both would that day 

set down on paper in their own scrawl what 

my gesture meant to them. 

and send it on.

the third note, filled with colorful squiggles 

drawn by my favorite three-year-old (and the pen of her mother) 

was in celebration of something good we had done together.

those squiggles on envelope and note tell me that  one day when that funny three-year-old can write words,

she, too, will set words to paper in 

her own scrawl, seal, stamp

then send it on, 

for someone dear to find 

in a rusty old mailbox at the street,

for no reason in particular

which is reason, well enough

 

sbr

oh, i can't help it...

I have been watching my peony stalks raise their red heads out of the warming early spring earth. They can't help it, that reaching for sun, any more than my bluebirds can help their nesting, the moon can help its phases, the dog help his barking when he hears a leaf drop. It is what they do.

At our retreat two weekends ago, we were asked to create a "takeaway" filled with quotes and images that captured our time, to take away with us and keep handy, to use for inspiration. Two of my cards speak to a similar thing: trust what you are led to do — and its flip side: what do I know is mine to do?

What.

Today, I was reading a very cool blog, and came across a quote by poet David Whyte: “We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.” 

::

I wrote to my friend today who created our takeaway craft — and who has just begun in the past two weeks to CREATE art, something she can't help, but has somehow kept herself from doing for a lot of years.

The quote: How beautifully said and exactly right, I wrote to her. “Sounds better than 'we are our own worst enemies,' ”  (which I tend to say a LOT.)

I look out at my peony stalks, now already close to 10 inches tall, find the nest already constructed in the bluebird box, and know what's coming. They can’t help the doing because they know nothing else.

The blogger said: imagine the energy it would take for a flower to try to keep itself from doing what it was created to do.

Yes, imagine. That's a whole lot of energy, and I have sometimes felt spent out just fighting myself from the same thing.

Imagine. That my Alexander Fleming peony  (I think that's what she is), which always blooms much earlier than any others in my yard, imagine if she fought with herself each day she was growing into something incredibly beautiful, saying: no! I can't help it, but I can't. I shouldn't brag. Or throw my scent around. And besides, I'm just not pretty enough and my stems are going to break under the weight of all that flowering and a late frost will probably get my blooms anyway, so I should just stop where I am and be done with it. That kind of thing. You've probably never thought those things yourself, but she has. And then all the other peonies will stand around laughing and blooming, saying why in the world won't she do what she is meant to do? It would be so much easier on her, on us. Us! And just think of how much happier the bees would be if she would just be herself.

How hard that is, sometimes. But what if we all looked at our creative souls and said: I love what I am created to do and be and I can’t help it!... instead of:  I'm sorry, but.. I can’t help it, I just don't have it in me — when we fail to create as we should? What if?

That is how I feel about writing sometimes, that I can’t help how the words tumble out no more than I can help my need to write — and when I don’t try to self-edit, they end up being pretty good words at that. Sometimes. But more often I say the opposite: I would love to, but I can't help it that this or that gets in the way of my writing at all, or writing what I really want to.

Though this has never happened to me...I imagine for some, whether they are born to create art, like my friend, or create relationships or children or a safe place for dogs or to save sick babies, to run or make great food or a garden or to heal or to sing or play the piano or help others — or to just help themselves — that they say: I want to, but I can't help the fact that I am not equipped. But I think just thinking they should but can't for some reason means they are. Already. Equipped. They can't help it. We, can't help it.

::

When I was in college, my friends and I loved a singer called Janice, flocking to see her whenever she was in town. One of the songs she sang had these lyrics: Oh, I can't help it, I just wake up smiling...

That's what I need to do. Wake up smiling, saying oh, I can't help it, I wake up smiling, just thinking of what I was meant to do. Can't help but trust the fact that I have been created to blossom — somewhere, in some way — if I would just look up at the warmth of the sun and say: help me grow.

sbr

something tells me...

a shoot

a bird

a flower

a celebration, each

ide-a-s of march

Reverb 11: If March 2011 was your last month to live, how would you live it?

The Honey Pot

When my husband was growing up, his mother kept a blue pottery cache pot beside her stove to store her bacon grease. 

Honey, as her grandchildren called her, was a master at bacon cooking, even when she resorted to the microwave. Crisp and perfectly brown, her bacon was third only to her Honey-baked ham and her toast. Try as I might, I have never, in almost 30 years of marriage, been able to make those Honey things for my husband, just the right way. Though he does admit to my discovering — if not a better way — at least an as delicious (and healthier), way to make her okra and tomatoes. She was famous for that, too. 

When Honey died, her only son got the Honey pot, and for more than 10 years it has been the place where we hold not our bacon grease (there is little of that), but sweetener for our coffee.*

I love this pot. Each morning when I come down to make my coffee, it is there, pretty much the same color as my kitchen, and more than once I have felt Honey's presence as I take the top off to sweeten my coffee. **


Yesterday morning, I came down to breakfast and found this:

(Forgive me, grandchildren, sisters-in-law, for not letting you know earlier. I just couldn't tell you.)


I looked at my husband, his head bent not over the newspaper, but looking up at me, and all I could feel for him was heartbreak. He had been wiping out the residue from an empty pot, and it had slipped from his hand.


I hope he will forgive me for saying that his only comment was: I almost cried. 


Me, too. 


This was Honey's pot. 


"Can we keep it?" he asked. 


Of course we could. Even in shards.   I stood there, trying to figure out what we might do with it, then I began slowly placing the pieces back together. A puzzle, it might just work.


Maybe we can find some really good glue, he said.


That morning at work, I consulted my friend Meta, a potter. Her advice: Super Glue, with a caveat: pots were not meant to last, but when they break, they can be used in other things. Biblical, she said. Shards can become something new.


As much as I know that, Honey's son is not ready to relinquish his Honey pot, which is not yet in shards. Perhaps that's for the next generation, to make something else of her pot, when it is no longer useful for storing his memories. It is one of the few things around our house left of her, beside pictures. She used it every day. As long as he knew her. ––No, we are keeping this pot.


Years ago, when we told my husband's parents we were planning to marry, Honey took her engagement ring off her finger and handed it to me. It had been his grandmother's, she said, and this was the tradition.


I cherished that tradition. We had the ring reset, got married, and the small diamond was the perfect size for my finger. 


One Sunday some years later, as I sat in church next to an older woman who always shared our pew, I admired (ok, coveted)  her GIGANTIC diamond, imagining what my hand might look like with the same. That afternoon, as I grated cheese for a dip for a party we would attend, I looked down, and the diamond that had been my mother-in-law's (and my grandmother-in-law's) was missing. ( I never make that dip now without thinking of that moment.)


We searched the garbage disposal, the trash, the dip... the diamond was never found.  I was heartbroken, and could not possibly tell Honey what had happened.


A few months later, guilt got the best of me, and I did tell her the truth. She looked at me, reached out her hand and said: It is only a stone. It is not your marriage... A thing. Not so important as what it represents.


Still. 


We love the Honey pot. And though it is a thing, it is a symbol for my husband of all the best in his mom.  Our Honey Pot may be a little bit broken, yes, but if you turn her to her best side, no one would know. Aren't we all like that? Hiding, on the good side? But turn us to our broken side, and well, that's where the story begins.


* the photo was taken after the pot was broken
** it is Oxford Stoneware, made in the 50s... not 'valuable' per se, but irreplaceable for our family.

in praise of beautiful women

mel & me

i met my friend melanie almost seven years ago, when her husband was called to be rector of our church. i was on the search committee, and when melanie came to visit, she brought with her a tiny baby girl she kept in a bucket. well, not really a bucket, but that's what she called it. the day they moved into their house, i arrived, offering to sit with sweet baby coco as her parents told the movers where to put what. 

mel was young, uncertain of her role as rector's wife. how would she do it? it would take time for her to figure out. coco is now in first grade, and two sisters have joined her, one of whom is my godchild. and their mother has grown, too.

mel played lacrosse at brown, was now refs for the acc and runs 10 miles on an ordinary day.  i played with barbies, and on a particularly athletic day in college, i might have run to krispy kreme toward the hot doughnuts now sign. but we are both writers, and so connected over words.

mel wears spiked heel shoes to church on sundays. i almost always wear flats because of my bunions. (bunions?) I dress like my mother. she dresses like nobody's mom. and yet, we have found common ground.

the wife of a priest is traditionally expected to champion some sort of ministry within the parish. kind of like the wife of a president. choose a platform and make that your baby. well, mel had three babies in five years, so it took a little while to carve out space enough to find her church passion. in between she joined our parish writing group, pouring her soul into beautiful words that everybody i know — and everybody i don't — should read. she needs a blog!

keynote patti digh

a few years ago, mel and i attended a women's event in richmond, va., where she lived before she came to north carolina. it was such an experience for both of us, that we dreamed of creating something similar at home.

and this weekend, we did. with the help of a whole bunch of amazing and beautiful women. and another 200 amazing and beautiful women who attended.

when she was welcoming all those women, Melanie said this:

Please take a moment to look around. In front of you, to the left, right, and behind. Tell your seatmates your name. We are here to share stories. To hear our own again. When we share, it becomes bigger than us. The Gathering was born out of a desire to do “inreach” to feed the souls of women who do so much for others, often placing our own needs last on the list. When we nurture ourselves, we nurture others. When we let our light shine, we give others the freedom — the courage —  to do the same. We got to this day by a series of “God-instances.” With each idea, we were shown a path. With each hurdle, we were given a gift. 

one of the gifts i have been given in lo these 7 years is just knowing her, watching her beauty, her joy, as she found her ministry, has done what she was expected to do, but with surprise. sure, she does the bake sales, prepares church suppers, but her calling is much deeper.

i have written in the past that in preparation for the gathering, we taught a class, one centered on four words we can keep in mind as we move through our days. one of many represented in the books of patti digh, was this: open doors for people.

the gathering committee rocks!

i can think of 200 women over the past friday and saturday — some of whom probably thought the door was firmly shut — who found it open for them, just because of mel's vision and her ministry. those of us involved in the planning have been opened to new friendships, new doors we thought had been locked long ago.

find a door. open it. Wide as it can go. let people in. do. welcome. it will be good for you.

view from the pew

i'm not a front pew sitter. left side, five pews from the back, right on the aisle is where you will find me on Sunday. But this weekend, at least for a little while, my view was from the front pew.

my friend melanie had the vision, and i joined her with a dozen other women to make it happen. We  planned for almost a year, to gather women in our church and their friends to celebrate story, the story found in each of us, as a way to connect to our God-created creative center.

and it finally happened. and  for two days we talked. shared. wrote. drew. listened. celebrated. sang. ate. wept. laughed.

patti digh, our keynote speaker, gave us challenges. one was to turn around to the person behind you and ask: what do you love to do? the young woman behind me looked lost when i asked her, had no clue how to answer this question. i'll tell you what i love to do, i said. make yeast rolls. get my hands in the dough. turns out she loved to dig in the dirt, and though the rabbits were eating everything she put out, we shared a love for peonies.

another exercise: look into the face of the person on the pew behind us. for two minutes. the woman behind me was elderly, my mother's age. as i stared into her green eyes, watched her eyebrows lift into sly smile, dip into frown, i pondered the story in her wrinkled skin.

then, patti said, said, close your eyes, think of your favorite childhood game, your first love, a place where you feel safe. open your eyes. see the woman before you. she has the same remarkable story as you. introduce yourself.

i asked carmen, my new friend, about herself. she is the wife of a retired priest, was there with her daughter, and when i heard of her husband's occupation, looked at her name again, something struck. could she have spent time my hometown, been friends with my mother? yes, in fact, she did. was.

and there were other stories. a young woman with colored dreadlocks came from south carolina to meet patti digh. when she left, she left behind beautiful drawings to remind us of her presence. mothers who came with grown daughters. cancer survivors hoping for a fresh start. mothers caring for young children. others caring for aging parents. all eager to renew purpose in their lives. to learn how to live their lives as art.

jill staton bullard, was one of our breakout speakers. she started a movement when she watched a fast -food company throw out good food because the day shifted from breakfast to lunch. Jill asked this question of her group: tell each other about someone who has changed your life. the room soon filled with babble. next question will be harder, jill said: now tell each other about people whose lives you have changed. we don't own that one, she says. other speakers talked of the angels in their lives, how God works in the garden (i hoped my gardening friend was in that one), feeling God's presence in art, in the pew, in the world around you.

the weekend ended with a eucharist, a celebration of all things woman, with kites and candles,  hymns and wine, bread and prayer.

as i sang, i looked around, at my friends mel and barbara and martha on the pew beside me, lee and linda and sandy and charlotte in pews or standing all around, nell and patti, a generation apart, singing in unison from their own pew. somewhere behind me i knew were grace and diana and katherine, dawn and lynn and sally, frances and diane, marty and laurie and countless other women who are important to my life, and i could not keep from weeping.

it was the kites i noticed then. two young women, sisters — twins — flailing dove and spiral above as  all our heads lifted, watching them soar.

+++\

please check back tomorrow, as I will post more pictures.

in a word

it's gonna be a great day!

Happy Birthday, Pamula

Pamela Jean Byrum was born on a February morning so foggy that my grandfather drove past the hospital entrance and had to turn around. My father was in the Navy, and my mother, great with child, was living with my grandparents in a tiny village in northeastern N.C. about 20 miles south of Suffolk, Va., when the big day came. Daddy came home shortly after, and from that day on, she stole his heart ... ( ok, so I was a twinkle in God's eye when she arrived and my brother already a reality, but I think all will agree that she is the fave. She dressed as my father for Halloween one year. I mean, who does that and does not win favor from somebody?)

While I was not there to witness her arrival, I imagine my sister made her entrance quietly, unlike my own, as a whirling dervish a little over two years later. And that pretty much sums us up as sisters. She is the quiet one, and I am the one who tries to get all the attention. Do I need to even say that she's not on FB?

Today is her birthday, and since she won't speak for herself, let me say just a few things about PamUla. (she will not be happy with me, but I promise, it won't be the first time.)
One thing to get out of the way: On her wedding day, the priest mispronounced her name, calling her Pam-U-la, and the name has become our affectionate moniker for her ever since.

I don't have any first memory of my sister, just soft images of the first room we shared. I think there was a lamb on the wall, and a doll bed, but I am not sure. Pictures of us show that we wore matching nightgowns, and in our crinolines, she looks a bit thinner, which would hold true through the years. Old home movies reveal when we walked down the sidewalk, she tried to hold my hand. 


Everybody called her the 'Pretty One' and me the Baby, and our identities have held true to that, too.  She is the steadfast to my mercurial, telling me much too often than I would like to admit that I need to buck up and get going. She has lived in Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri and Iowa, has set her stakes down in every place, and quickly. The first move took her on her wedding day in our childhood hometown to the Texas Gulf Coast, a hurricane swirling close by within a few weeks of her settling. Back then, she called me every day (when Long Distance cost a LOT of money), telling me how she had to take up the carpet, get the wet vac, take care of business, and move on.

She is like our grandmother in favor and demeanor, so much in fact that a photograph of my grandmother when she was a teen looks exactly like my sister. I have always marveled that someone could be so much like another, but two generations apart. 

My sister can fix a toilet, dance a mean shag, decorate a house, plan a beautiful party — be it wedding, 50th anniversary or birthday — raise remarkable kids, drive anywhere in inches of snow. This from a girl who once left her yellow Pinto on a hill on a major road in the middle of my current city because it was too snowy to climb. And she can do all this, with a certain fashion panache I have never been able to pull off. 


And this: what is the source of legend — She loved camp; I screamed til my mother took me home. ( She can get her own blog if she wants to rehash why, because I won't.)


When she was in high school, Pamela (never PAM) took her first trip in an airplane to California to visit the older sister of a friend. I had my birthday when she was gone, and I woke up sad that she wasn't there, but found a banner she had hand-drawn draped across the floor in front of my bedroom door. My brother walked by, saying "Happy Birthday!" and I didn't even think he knew what day it was. He had put it there for her, in her absence. She is that kind of sister.


Since then, she has taught me how to be both birthday fairy and leprechaun to my children, how to tough it up (well, sometimes) when things are not going my way. And the few times through the years when we have fallen out about one thing or another, have left me with my heart frayed at the seams.

In recent weeks, PamULA has become a patron saint of sorts, for The Gathering, which I have helped plan at my church. (She will probably not speak to me for awhile after this.) When we were looking for old photographs that defined the word "story," I ran across many, but one of PamULA, in a dress my grandmother (not the one most like her but the one most like me) made for her. She is pretty in pink, her hair curled just right, but for a dance she didn't want to go to — my brother's senior prom. A sophomore, she had been asked, not to go with a date, but to serve punch in white gloves, on the sidelines. When I showed the photograph to my friend, Katherine, the Great Designer, she was drawn to it. What girl hasn't had to wear a dress she didn't want to, to an event she would rather die than be attending? (hey, I made the picture very small)


So there was PamULA, suddenly representing the marvelous, conflicted, complicated story that is in each of us. To me, she fits perfectly in that role.

My favorite picture of her I took myself, at my niece's wedding a few years ago. PamUla is funny, and she loves nothing better than a good laugh with friends she has known for a long time, and that is exactly what she is doing here. Beautiful in her laughter. That is my sister.


When I talked to her the other day, I told her how her mug was now a LOGO. She can take heart that when we start planning our next event, she will probably be yesterday's news. Maybe. She might just become an ICON, which is what she is for me.


I hope she can forgive me if that happens.  Take a look at that first picture. She is still the Pretty One. And I am still the baby, trying my best to make a stink.


Happy Birthday Pam-ul-a, ... I love you so! 

sadness, but with hope, for a good sail

As I sit on a cloudy Sunday evening, I think about how I had the best intentions on Friday — to write about my weekly long walkabout with Ronald Reagan (the dog, not the president), and Saturday —about trying to squeeze the old muffin top into a new pair of pants — (didn't work). But there was napping to be had and dinners out and the Sunday Times, and a full moon, and I'm still trying to figure out that newfangled camera. 


But when I think about what I have been putting my mind to lately, it is this: four people in my life are either in the final stages of life, or are caring for people who are getting close to the end of their days. End stage. Hospice. That. And my heart is sad. Though I have witnessed life's end before with my husband's parents, with beloved animals, I am lucky. Both my parents are for the most part pretty healthy for people in their early 80s. And because of that, I can't know what my friends are feeling. And as the good Book of Common Prayer says, there is no help in it. Nothing left to do now but pray. For peace. For comfort. But that does not seem to be enough.


One of the people I love is the 93-year-old mother of my best friend since 8th grade. She lives on the farm where with her husband she raised horses and cows and a daughter to raise horses and cows and three children — raised all of them to be good citizens of this world. 


I know her phone number by heart. (Years ago, living in the country they had a party line, something unknown in my tiny small town. At my house the phone was always ringing because of my physician father. At their house, you had to know their ring to know when to pick it up.)


I last saw Nana for a quiet New Years. We shared a toast, a collard, pork and black-eyed peas — traditional talismans for a good year. She was tired, didn't stand by the kitchen sink chopping celery like she used to, but she was still Nana, telling us how to. 


She calls me one of her girls, and I think of the nights I spent in her rambling house in high school, sharing life secrets with the child she raised. How she welcomed me to her table, fed me her famous biscuits. How though I taught her to make my yeast rolls when she was 90, I never learned how to make the biscuits.


The day before I got married, Nana swooped into my childhood home and created beautiful flower arrangements for the chest in our family room and anywhere else she thought ought to feel fancy. I want to go to her, to make her feel a little bit fancy right now, but she is just not up to visiting. I hope she knows how much I love her. I know how much she loves me. In all of our meetings in the past few years, she has never, ever, failed to tell me so.


You would think that a 93-year-old is supposed to slow down, but Nana hasn't at all, at least not until the past year. She has watched the July 4th fireworks explode over the Albemarle Sound with us, raised a glass for birthdays, listened to my stories, asked me more than once to taste her potato salad to see if there was enough salt. 


When her heart began to fail for the umpteenth time a week or so ago and her daughter called 911, they asked if Nana was confused. No, she was in the bathroom putting on her makeup. And had just asked her daughter if it was the 7th or the 8th of February, to which my dear friend said: Hell if I know, and checked her phone to be sure. That's our Nana.
+++
Another of my friends nurses her husband as his own end looms. Her email this morning held the familiar: hospital bed, home health care, Hospice, the power of prayer. He has been given last rites, yet clings to life, so they wait.


My friend Pat, West Virginia strong with a shrewd wit, goes to my church, and when I first saw her daughter when she was young, I thought she could easily be mine, she looked so much like I did when I was the same age. Our daughters, just a year apart, have been friends since youth group. I used to teach essay writing in Pat's high school English class, to unruly teenagers who balked at putting sentences together to make a point about themselves. But they loved her. 


When Pat retired a year or so ago after teaching all of her adult life, she wrote that after so many years of teaching them, she discovered she didn't like teenagers so much after all. I could read between her lines. Though she really loved those unruly teens, what she needed more was to spend time with her husband. Her emails about their journey are scattered with her wit, and I know this has helped them all stay a little bit sane, in the midst of the insanity of cancer.
+++



My neighbor down the street has been fighting breast cancer for several years, and it has now spread further into the body that has been fighting it, valiantly. Her daughter and mine danced ballet in stiff crinoline costumes when they were in second grade. My neighbor played college tennis, was fiercely competitive, and I learned years ago that she and my sister had crushes on the same boy in jr. high school, though we lived an hour apart.


In the past year, though her body has been failing, she has resisted help, and so we send her cards, sometimes leaving flowers and casseroles on her porch, just to let her know we are thinking of her. And we send prayers. The last time I saw her was on April 18, 2009, the day of my daughter's wedding. The last time we really visited was in June the year before, when she asked me to help assemble programs for her daughter's big day. I was honored to be invited to sit at her kitchen table, to share in a small way in this passage for her family. How does this happen, that you used to see someone at least once a week, pass them in the grocery aisle, giggle as you watched your girls tiptoe across the stage? But living just down the street from each other now that your kids are grown, the times in between now turn into a year, even two? 
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My sister-in-law drove from North Carolina to Florida yesterday because her mother is dying. When I think of her mother, I see an beautiful woman always smiling. I think of her wedding gown, which my sister-in-law wore, scattered with soft flowers, beautiful.


She sends me a Christmas card each year, and I feel badly that this year I sent none. She had cancer before I knew her (over 30 years ago), lost her husband, moved from Delaware to Florida, made a new life for herself. Fought cancer again. Her daughter, whom I have always said brought color into our very beige family when she married my brother, does not readily show her sadness, though when I talked with her this week, I could hear it in her voice. She and my brother are expecting a new granddaughter in May, and everyone has been hopeful the two generations of women can meet.


Marti and my brother love Disneyworld. They took their children often because their grandmother lived close by. And in a couple of weeks, they have plans to take their 4-year-old grandson. They will still do that, they say, because that's what his great-grandmother would want, though she can't be there. Probably nothing will make her happier than imagining a new generation of her family spinning in those teacups,  watching the twilight world take shape below on Peter Pan's flight.


I like to think that dying, as God designed it, is supposed to be like Peter Pan's flight. Magical. That you have that chance to watch, as the little ones you love are tucked into bed, listening to a good story, and then you float through the window on a boat with a colorful, wind-filled sail out into the heavens, the streetlights below lighting the path toward your new, fuller moon. Then right toward that second star and straight ahead til morning.thx absu


At least it is my prayer. For all the people on my list.

of bachelors and buttons, and a doozy of a day

I had a whole lot of things I wanted to say about Valentine's Day.  That my husband hates it. That when I was younger I used to hang my hat on it, hopeful that it would be the day somebody important to my future would fall in love with me and say so. But here's what came out:


A bachelor I had newly met announced one day that Valentine's Day was for amateurs, those klutzy types who don't know how to show they love someone except on the one day of the year when everybody else does. It was not anywhere near Valentine's Day, but I supposed he wanted to be sure that if we were still together by then, I should not expect anything. He announced this right along with the news that he didn't really want children because all they did was scream in grocery stores and restaurants.


Confident, that if I had children with this man I would admonish them not to scream or else I'd get a baby sitter, I forged on into our relationship. Surely though I am a bonafied cry baby who did just that in grocery stores and restaurants as a child, my children wouldn't dare, would they? (For the record, they didn't, or at least not much.) And by Valentine's Day, I would have won his heart so completely that he would come around on that, too.


That first Valentine's together was a doozy. At my sister's wedding the June before, tucked into her bouquet were delicate blue Bachelor's Buttons, so those became my new favorite flower. I mentioned it (in passing, really), so on Feb. 14, the man who would ask me to marry him a month later over a Wendy's Single without cheese, stormed into the newsroom where we both worked, saying "I hope you are happy! Not a single florist in town carries Bachelor's Buttons?" Well. It really was nice that he tried.


For my birthday that year he gave me a pot full of silk violets. Silk. (They were blue, right?) Fresh flowers die and all of that. (I did keep those violets for a lot of years, until our yard started crawling with them and I could pick them myself. But soon, Mr. Valentine was scouring the yard with his spray pump. They are weeds, don't you know?)


I gave up on Valentine's Day after that. All that adolescent love hooey was not for this grown up girl. I understood where he was coming from, that the whole VD thing really was invented by the card and florist industries as an excuse to make money. Still. 

Some years later, my very first newspaper column appeared on Valentine's Day. So of course I wrote about the Bachelor's Buttons, admitting that the man of my dreams did pick some on a Georgia interstate one summer — at the risk of arrest — showing up at our house, wilted bouquet in hand. Which of course melted me right there. And that though he spent our 15th wedding anniversary in Paris, Paris! (I was home delousing our daughter's hair)... at 11:30 a.m. — the same time as our wedding — the doorbell rang, and there was a delivery guy holding a box of flowers. A box. Remember those? So Hollywood. 


I opened it, distracted from my lousy mission, and found a dozen beautiful BBs hidden deep within the bouquet of iris and whatnot. Paris? Who cared? This man knew me right to the calloused corners of my heart. But that was our anniversary, a day when he has to come through with something thoughtful. Though this was way better than I could have imagined myself, which is hard to do. And I couldn't even thank him appropriately, because I couldn't afford the overseas phone call.


But back to VD. The morning of that first column, as I backed out of the driveway, I spied something blue in the yard. Closer inspection revealed a giant BB, silk, tucked near my front door. By giant I mean a full foot across the flower face. Jack and his beanstalk couldn't have grown bigger.


"I know better than to give you silk flowers," Mr. Valentine said when questioned. "Especially when it might end up in the newspaper."


I was sure I had a secret admirer, someone who hung carefully on my every word. It took weeks of sleuthing to discover that the flower actually came from a male friend who had recently come out of the closet. I have it, still, as a reminder that you never know how thoughtful your words might cause people to be.


I don't ask for BBs anymore, on Valentine's Day or otherwise. Peonies and hydrangeas are my favorites now. Though every year or so Mr. Valentine will bring me a handful those pretty little blue things, provisioned on a summer day from a country roadside nobody cares to police. 

I think, after almost 30 years of living with this man, that he is softening his views on flower power, and maybe on valentines, too. This morning as I headed out to work, I found he had left me something. Tulips, white ones — pink or red would be too valentiney, I can hear him say. And way to amateur.

I could never fit into the dress anyway

When I first labeled my freelance writing business, I got a vanity plate: WRITEMCH. My father stood behind my car, puzzling over the letters.
"Does it say Write Me a Check?"
Well, that would work, but since so many writers I know will work for food have day jobs to support their art, I have never been too much of a check expector for my creative work.  The writing is its own reward, right?


That's why I harbor no resentment toward my husband, who long ago as a reporter for several daily newspapers racked up press association writing awards out the wazoo. But  I was a better writer than he was  Surely that was my editor's fault. Maybe she didn't nominate me. had only been writing professionally for a couple of years at that time. And the fact that now, in 30+ years I have never been noticed with anything framable for a single word I put on the page, no, that does not matter to me. I'm a big girl. I did get honorable mention once waayy back in jr high school for a short story I wrote in green ink. Does that count? If I still have it?   I know I'm good.


I have won a couple of things, but not for the word thing. Two tickets to Cats in 1986 in Atlanta, which, because I am not really all that fond of cats, I am a dog person, was exhausting. A house portrait, which I love, though I do admit to stuffing the ballot box on that one. And I though I never was even on the Homecoming Court in high school — my lifelong deepest desire at that point in my life — I did win one other prize (see #7, in the list below). And no, I didn't stuff the ballot box or give favors of any kind to the players. 


The fact is, in my writing life, I have been stuck in that grey middle area of award dumb award-dom, that place outside the red carpet reserved for the almost rans. Somewhere between "we just love you," and "we want to reward you for how much we love you, but.." And with money. 


My father always told me when people said: you are so great, that I should counter with, ok, so why don't you cross my palm with green? I think that was after I had gotten glowing reviews for my first few months as a daily newspaper feature writer, and then was promptly given a $9 a week raise. Oh, I know it was 1980, but still. My future husband at The Augusta Chronicle the same nameless newspaper, got at least $10 a week more than I did that year, or maybe even $20. Oh, yeah, now I can hear ya. He was a man more experienced than I. At what? Reading the newspaper? Probably. I'm a headline comics horoscope letters-to-the-editor reader but noooo, he has to actually read the news. And the financial page. After my non-existent raise, he had to pay my parking tickets buy my groceries a time or two because I was feeding him in hopes of winning his heart.  I honestly married him for his money. Wasn't that nice of him?


(I eyed him, scowling across the breakfast table from me this morning, his head bent over the News & Observer newspaper that held my mug — not mugshot, mind you —  once upon a time. It was my dream job as an essayist and netted me $150 a pop, once a month, though I did get hundreds of emails and a few dozen hand-written letters. But press awards? Mais non! Again, my editor's fault.


And that's fine. Really. It was enough to be nominated for that story waayy back in jr. high. And I treasure all those letters people wrote to me, only one of which was truly hateful critical of me.


So of course, just as I had finally rested on the laurels of my clip file, well, whattayknow? Seems the ol' reward fairy has finally done and caught up with me. Somebody out there in the blogland has given me an award. APPLAUSE IS APPROPRIATE HERE.


Let me be serious for just a few: It comes from Alana, whose eloquent writings about grief and hope after losing her baby boy in utero, are remarkable. I stumbled on Alana's blog in December, when I participated in Reverb10. Read her post about a moment in her year when everything shifted, and you cannot break away. Each of her posts shows her beauty as a mother, a wife, a woman, who questions the turns of her life, all the while celebrating the fact her life has turns, and that she has the voice to say something about it, for herself, but also for thousands of other mothers like her. It's a silent epidemic, and Alana is giving it a strong and steady voice.

Oh, and by the way, we have never even met. In person at least. But it seems that Alana thinks I am a pretty Stylish Blogger. Well, how about that? 


She admits in her own blog about getting the same award, that it feels a little bit like those chain emails that say: tell us a gazillion things about yourself we don't give a flip know, then forward to another gazillion of your friends and either a) see how much green crosses your palm what happens on the 11th day at 12:22 p.m., or b) risk a very bad horoscope day take your chances if you don't.


I almost always hit DELETE on those crazy things. I HATE chain letters, perhaps because way back in jr. high school, carried away that my honorable mention might have actually made me popular I may have sent one to my so-called friends and waited for all those books/recipes/dollar bills/younameits to come in the mail and none showed up. So there. Stopped me right in my tracks.


And yet. It feels pretty good to think that somebody out there in blogland thinks I'm stylish. And I don't have to fit into find the right dress for the red carpet to accept. Thank you, Alana. My muffin top thanks you.


There are strings is a caveat being a stylish blogger — I am supposed to tell you mindless minutia about myself nobody cares the least bit about seven things you don't know about me. (see, I told you so.) The fact that 99.9 percent of the people reading know me as a tireless self-promoter family/neighbor/friend, I can tell you nothing I haven't already put out into the world for all to see. I mean, I wrote about my husband's boxers, for heaven's sake. 


Ok. You twisted my arm.  


1) I can't fold a fitted sheet.
2) I sometimes often use my fingers to count.
3) I always in The Color Purple, when Celie and Nettie play the pattycake game in the field at the end. Something about sisters just gets to me.

4) I had a crush on Mickey Dolenz when I was 10. 
5) I hate to admit that my editors have (almost) always made me look better in print.
6) Once, in the middle of my Calculus exam in college, I left the room and begged the TA to let me pass the course. I did. Cross my heart no personal favors led to my grade.
7) I was voted Most Valuable Cheerleader, not because of my gymnastics acumen, but because I could shout the loudest from the bleachers. Anybody who knows me today would never believe that.


The final thing I am supposed to do, as per the terms of my contractual agreement with the people at Stylish Blogger  in accepting this treasured award, is to point you in the direction of five blogs I read and like. there is nepotism involved, I am no relation to anyone on this list. Well, only one of them.


1) Southern in the City
2) Mrs. Mediocrity
3) The Barefoot Heart
4) Shutter Sisters
5) 3x3x365

Maybe some of them already have awards of many kinds. But I just want them to know that I read them often and their creative efforts inspire my own.


Now, will somebody, somewhere, on this wide wonderful reading planet, listen for a second? My palm is wide open and waiting.

on my kitchen window sill

"a wink & a smile" sometimes  all we ever need  on a Monday  is the smallest  hint of what  soon  will one day  come

Bright Lights, Big City

When the Princess was 13, her Fairy Godmother and I took our daughters to New York City for the first time. I had never been myself, though I had seen it from the Interstate when I was teenager. As we walked together bundled against the December wind, my child who has loved being the opposite of me for as long as I can remember said: I can see myself living here. A lark! A daydream. Doesn't everybody see themselves living in Manhattan when they are 13?

Turns out, I should have listened.

February 2, I think it was, 2007. While the Princess was at work, that same Fairy Godmother and I settled her into her first apartment on the Upper East Side. The P couldn't be there because she as toiling away, trying to scrape enough money together to pay for half the rent.

It didn't look as bad in the daylight

The night before, she and her boyfriend took us to see her new place after our FG had treated us all to a wonderful Italian dinner. Bundled yet again against the cold, we ventured into the three-story walkup, the lobby — if you can call it that — splattered with so many fingerprints it looked as if it had been dusted for a crime scene. Each narrow stair dipped in the center, its edges worn to the nub.
Inside the apartment, which had about a dozen (well, maybe half that) door locks on the front door — the hardwood floors gleemed, though the side windows looked straight out into a brick wall. Arched doorways led the way into what was such a Carrie Bradshaw closet space I knew I had no argument.

She had found it herself, a fact in and of itself I could not imagine. Had found a roommate on Craig's List, had negotiated the contract, and though she had to use a lot of her Dad's money to secure it, had been handed the key. Just herself, by herself. At 23. Wow.

When we got back to the hotel, Fairy Godmother and I held hands and vowed not to tell Papa Bear or Uncle Fairy Godfather just how dim the den had looked. I cried myself to sleep, and not because my father, on our drive down I-95, had not let me come into the city at 16.

The next day, when FG and I met the movers on the street, things seemed a little brighter. 

The week before, I had packed the 12 boxes that contained the Life of My Princess to ship to NYC, and Dear Herbert, the Mover, had picked them up.  A day and 10 minutes later, he and his team deposited almost all she owned inside this tiny cubicle, the front windows of which looked out over piles of trash and concrete where dogs routinely left their day's work, right on the sidewalk.

But FG and I were too busy to pay attention. Inside, we turned on the radiated heat, locked the 12 (ok 6) locks on the door and set to work. While I wiped the inside of the two shelves in the kitchen, FG painstakingly cut shelf liner to fit perfectly. We unpacked my castoff honeymoon dishes, washed them, put them away in neat stacks. Made up the bed. Hung the towels in the bathroom. (Scrubbed the shower first.) Then because the PP needed something to hide her altogether from the street front, we took a cab in the late afternoon to Bed Bath and Beyond.

Which in Manhattan, is three floors tall. With escalators! For the carts!

everyone needs a fairygodmother

At first I was reticent, wanting to buy only enough to fill a bag or two. How would we get anything more back in a cab? But then FG, ever the eagle-eye shopper, saw a clerk on the floor taking notes. Need something delivered? BB&B delivers anything in the city for $15. Make a note of that. Why not fill up two carts?


Later, after we had said our goodbyes to the FG, I gave up my hotel room to spend the night in the new digs. I pulled out my famous spaghetti sauce — brought all the way from home —  from the small freezer in this tiny kitchen, as my daughter and her boyfriend headed down the street for salad stuff and wine for supper. 


Alone, I took a moment to pretend that I was the brave one, living in the middle of the biggest place I'd ever visited, and somewhere in the caverns of boxes was the typewriter I had yet to unpack.

The dream lasted just long enough for the real occupant to return. As I cooked, I saw more than once that she moved the things I had so carefully placed on chest, table and window sill, to suit her tastes. (She was always moving the Christmas Santas like that at home.)

That night, though I tried to sleep beside my very metropolitan daughter, sirens taunted, car horns blared, reminding me that I need silence more than energy from a strange city, to write. Knowing that if my mother had moved me to this town when I was 23, I would have called her immediately to send me a ticket home.

By Sunday, I was hauling my suitcase to the curb at 1st Ave., the PP flagging a cab, and suddenly, I was watching my firstborn in the rear view, making her way in a place where I knew no one who could rescue her should she have a fever in the middle of the night. She walked up the street to her steps without me, and my heart hung somewhere near the back of my eyes.

photo: Joey Sewell  flowers artfully arranged

But she survived. Learned the subway. Got a better job. Married that boyfriend, in green shoes no less. Moved two more times. Has lived there four years. I think she has had a fever once or twice, and has managed fine without me.

The Husband's (so she calls him on her blog) mom sent me a Christmas present a few weeks ago. A book called Mockingbird, an unauthorized biography of Nelle Harper Lee. Imagine my surprise to learn in the first few pages of the book, that my favorite novel was written largely not in Monroeville, Ala., but on York Ave., on the Upper East Side, near the corner of 81st and 82nd, not two blocks from where we had placed my own first dishes in that small row of cabinets for my child to use.  

I like to imagine that the muse I felt for just a wisp of a moment that frigid night in the first days of February in 2007, might have drifted toward me from my favorite author in the neighborhood, with the smattering of snowflakes swirling outside.

But that is the romantic in me. And this story is about another girl who answered her muse, however different it might have been from mine.

What I know for sure, as Oprah says, is that the child I raised up to be who she imagined, did just that. She now navigates the subways, chastises the cab drivers for taking the long route, works for a really cool company, walks her dog in the mornings, lately through more than a foot of snow. 

And I can't wait to see what her next lark will be.
sbr

architectural digest

Today in our little class, I asked the women sitting in the chairs circling me to do a couple of silly things. The first was to tell us the reason for choosing the shoes they had on today. The question came to mind when I saw the truly funky shoes worn by my new friend, the very cool Katherine— tall suede wedges that zipped up the back of her heel. I don't even know what the style would be called, I am so far away from trends, but I know I could probably not stand in them, they are that cool. And the zipper would just mean BLISTER for me. I am so not that cool.


Katherine had the first turn and admitted that she had hidden the shoes in her purse before going out of the house to church, so her husband couldn't see. She was supposed to be adhering to an austerity plan of sorts I think, but she just had to have those shoes.
Other shoes, other stories. Toes tired of standing in business woman pumps chose favorite boots instead. My friend Lee had on her very stunning 50th birthday kick-ass boots, because that's what she was feeling like today. Kicking ass.


Another woman, with very wide feet, talked of finding her first fashionable shoes at the Wide Shoe Warehouse, and how much better it made her feel to be wearing something stylish, rather than tennis shoes. Still another said she was wearing her mother's shoes — black paten loafers — shoes  her mother had given away because they were too wide for her slim foot. The mother of three girls, a set of twins and one other, preschoolers all, she said that trendy shoes for her were out of the question. I had seen this mother as I headed from the car to church — she trying to stop one of the twins long enough to put a bow in her tousled hair. One daughter cried the entire walk down the long sidewalk.


Most of the women my age (including me) wore low heeled shoes, while the younger women wore spiked heels or boots, so high I know would fall off them and hurt myself if I tried to walk in them. I have a narrow foot, and shoes have always been such a problem for me to find. Only the expensive Italian ones seem to fit my foot, so I tend to keep the shoes that do fit for a long time, wear them out. These days it's flats usually, and the fact that nobody anywhere is making narrow shoes anymore means that pretty much every pair of shoes in my closet does not fit me properly, except the old walking shoes. So of course I have bunions. 


My mother has a closet full of Ferragamos, all quads. She told me once that because I wore her size (my sister wears a 7.5 I think), she would leave them to me. I haven't worn a quad since I started pounding my feet, running after toddlers 28 years ago. I couldn't squeeze my big toe into my wedding shoes if I tried. (I think I finally gave them away last year.) Nor could I wear a single pair of my mother's shoes. (Metaphor intended.)


But what if I really want the antique corner cupboard or the silver or the wing chairs in her living room? Do I have to get shoes I can never wear?


The other silly question I asked was three-fold: What did you want to be when you were 10? Who are you now? And what would it take to be the person that 10-year-old wanted to be?


Laura wanted to be Farah Fawcett,to marry the boy who sat next to her in fifth grade.  Cool Katherine, who is very tall, wanted not to be. And she admitted to playing with Barbies (I played with them, too), and to spending time dressing them and fixing their hair so that now she tells her friends what to wear. Marty wanted to be Nancy Drew. Velma, the oldest in our group, said she just wanted to get out of the house. Which she did, the same year I was born.


I didn't share my answer. I couldn't think of anything I ever wanted to be, except a writer, and everybody already knew that about me.


And then I remembered: Once upon a time I wanted to be an architect.


When I was just learning to read, one of our reading books contained stories about a neighborhood being built. I remember in first grade, being fascinated by the houses, each one in a different phase of building. What drew me where the bones of the house, the stick built structures standing there before they got their skin. 


At 9 or 10, my friends and I drew houses. Using fountain pens  we sketched out family rooms with shuttered picture windows, balconied second-story bedrooms, carports with flower beds circling around them, curving staircases that always led to white-carpeted rooms. I loved in particular to draw the floor plans, carefully placing bay windows and walk-in closets — I might have even used a ruler to get the lines straight... I can't remember that now.


But then, math intervened.  I just wasn't good at it. I could do long division pretty well, but by the time I got to algebra, I got all mixed up with the abcs and xyzs, and though I did do pretty well in geometry, forget about calculus. 


When I lie awake at night, sometimes I think about the fact that a whole room stands above me, with all my daughter's trinkets held there, and I am grateful that I don't have to worry about that floor falling down on me, because I am confident the person who designed my house knew more about math than I do. 


Even today, when I walk into a house I admire or marvel at a skyscraper, I sometimes wish I possessed the vision and the expertise to design it. But the people who inhabit those buildings on a daily basis have to be thankful that I didn't try to fake it. To be the architect I dreamed of being at 10 would have been disastrous. For many.
So gosh, how can I connect the girl I wanted to be at 10, to what I have become?


Well.


There is an architecture to sentence structure, and a lot of it, when I think of it. And though I might misplace a metaphor or misspell a word or two, I doubt that even my favorite college professor would get so much as a concussion from reading what I write.  And as far as I have been able to figure, math is rarely if ever involved. Thank goodness for that. 


sbr

Do Something You Are Proud of/Jan. 28, 2011

Pre-script

With apologies to the five people who were reading my blog last year, I wrote this post then for my son's birthday. At the time he was living at home, looking for a job, working part time in the family public relations firm. In the year since this post he has found a job, moved out of the house, and started living that life he was only dreaming about a year ago. Though much has changed in his life and ours, much has not. I have revised some of it to fit this year.*  

Tonight(Friday) I will make dinner for his friends, at his request, and I might even throw in a homemade birthday cake. We are lucky to have him living close by, and when he invites us to share in the milestones of his life, we get to be right there. And somehow, at least today, I don't think he minds it too much. It was not always this way. I will take what I can get. 

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:

• Enjoy Silence
• 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. 

cutiepie

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,) tried 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) (well, in 2011, I have done that.)

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 24th* 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 to the day 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.

Graham at birth, of a sort

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, 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  from ZITS 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* (in 2011 I can!); 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), though his are way better than mine. Neither of us is without fault.

ok, so he wouldn't smoke Dad's cigar for a few years

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 24th* 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

Iron your own boxers

Twenty-four years ago this week, my mother came for a visit on the last day of January, and she stayed just about a week. I had just had a baby, my second — her fifth and final grandson — and she flew to Atlanta the afternoon we came home from the hospital, to take care of me.

She really came to take care of my house. The babying, and the mothering of my then three-year-old Princess Pea, she would leave mostly to me.

I remember these things about that day: we had a flat tire before we could leave the hospital parking lot. My childhood friend, Lydia, in town from New York City for the apparel mart, came to see her newborn godson during his first hours home. A church friend brought over a spaghetti supper for us. And Graham curled his tiny fingers around his new blanket that 24 years later is practically in shreds.

I remember these things about that week: Graham slept a lot. My mother kept my house meticulously clean. One day she stood in my kitchen (the wood trim of which the previous owners had painted Pepto-Bismol Pink), ironing my husband's boxers and said, "if you'd touch them up with the iron after you wash them, he'd feel so much fresher." Or something like that. And then she got the flu.

In my post-partum recovery, I was in no mood to hear about my husband's need to feel fresher. I was still nursing my episiotomy, for heaven's sake. 

At the time, I remember saying: Who cares? But I probably just looked at her, tears in my eyes, wondering how in the world I would manage to add this gigantic detail to days already too full with life of my own making, for me to manage alone. 

For the record, I have never ironed my husband's boxers. He can iron them himself, thank you very much, should he feel the need to be fresher beneath his outer layers. He might need to, iron them, I mean, should he find himself in situations where someone would chastise him for not keeping his shorts pressed. But it is his own job to be at the ready for such times. Not mine.

I had forgotten this story until today, when I sat with a group of women discussing the book Four Word Self Help. It's a simple book, in which author Patti Digh sets out how to make our complex lives less complicated by generating four-word phrases that help us slow down, so we don't drown in the details. And not one of the phrases contains the word "don't", but each begins with action verbs (oh how I love those.) Create your own tribe. Pay attention to little people. Let other people in. Tell them your story. Do work that matters. Take just enough baggage. Walk hand in hand. Blow bubbles more often. (Or something like that.)

Simple stuff. Good stuff. So we went around the room, talking about the state of being women with jobs and homes and kids and husbands and stories, about how we hate to say no to people, and how sometimes our mothers won't throw the rotten fruit away from the bowls on our kitchen counters when they visit, because they are our bowls and our mothers don't want to interfere.

And then, I remembered what will be forever known in my life as The Boxer Rebellion. My friend, Melanie, who was directing our conversation, sat with index cards in her lap and a marker in her hand, and as we talked, she wrote: Throw away rotten fruit. No, I'm blowing bubbles. And she handed them out, saying: These are your new bumper stickers.

After I told my story, Mel handed me a note card that read: Iron your own boxers. And as I thought about this, I couldn't help but think how, yes, this really does mean something to me.

I thought about the kitchen I had left in a mess at home, all those things I had promised myself would be done by day 23 of the New Year, or at least started, all those actions promised but yet to be strung together as DONE. And because I haven't done all those things yet, haven't carved out small moments in my day to take care of what needs taking care of, sometimes my inaction bleeds into the day of others. Which sometimes (often), leaves my life and theirs not so neatly pressed.

Yes, Mama was right, sort of.  

On the way to meet friends for lunch, I told my husband of my discovery of what my new blog post would be.

Him: Oh, I'm thrilled to know that my underwear has made your blog.

Me, in four words: Stories come from everywhere.

And there is a lot more to this story than a pair of boxer shorts that have yet to see the face of my monogrammed ironing board. (Yes, I did say that.)

To me, it's this: What if, instead of leaving our wrinkles to be pressed down in that never-approaching moment called "when I have the time," what if every single day, we took the tiny sliver of time it would take to press ourselves out, freshen our souls up underneath that outer crust, before we greet our daily world? Might we wear ourselves a little surer, be a little softer when we bump against someone else's day, if we were just a little less wrinkled at the start of our own? 

Iron your own boxers. And you don't have to tell anyone my mother told you so. 

Picture perfect

Albemarle Sound, Jan. 2, 2011

Some days I have a need 

to watch

how water 

mirrors its world 

Oh, How I Miss Reverb

Reverb 2010: Gift. This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?


Ok, so I skipped this one last month. Let's just say it is because I was holding out to see if my fairy godmother Merriweather would stop by long enough to wave her wand over me and say: Muffintop, be gone!


But however much I still want that to happen, she has yet to show. Maybe it was because it snowed on Christmas night and the inches were much deeper than she was tall. Or she got stuck in the ice storm the next week. Or maybe Princess Aurora finally started behaving like a true adolescent, leaving poor Merriweather with her hands full. Or maybe she did show, and her gifts to me in fact were the afternoon naps I was able to snag during all that ice and snow. She did give dear Princess A. her own longwinter's nap, after all. 


Truth is, I have been thinking about this gift thing for awhile now, and it is so hard to pin down one that has been most memorable. The writing? Yes, that's been a wonderful gift, something I felt I had lost for awhile, but now, my blog stats are falling in the New Year because I am not posting, and something tells me I have to actually keep it up. So this gift has come with beautiful ribbons tied so tightly to it that they are impossible to unknot. 


But what about something else? There was the pocketbook my children gave me, the charms I got from my husband, but I'm thinking, that though I love those things, it must a gift I haven't thought of. Tangible or emotional, the questions reads. 


Was it the hour on Christmas Eve, when I sat in the pew with my husband and all of my children — together for the first time in months — listening to the choir and the trumpets and the harp? 

Or our beach week, when I woke every day to the sunrise over the Atlantic, was able to sit with my daughter and know that we had space to breathe in the ocean air and laugh and dance and that at the end of our week, neither one of us would be leaving the other on a NYC street corner, crying in the cab?


Could it have been sharing a hot dog with my father at his favorite stand, knowing that he always orders a Chicago dog (mustard, chili, onions and slaw) and because it is his favorite place, it became mine, too, long ago, and my children's, too?


Might it have been the $150 in cash my rector handed me a few days before Christmas, and learning that someone in our parish gave — anonymously — the same to every single person on our staff, because of jobs well done?


Surely, wasn't it also watching my son walk out the door, suit coat in hand, headed to his first career job, knowing I had a small part in helping him find his path?


And then there were the times when funny three-year-old Cheney and her her super cool three-year-old friend Davis ran to me, their arms open wide, and said: whatchadoin' Sooze?


Or was it when we laughed til our hearts hurt at the dining room table with our friends as they searched their DROIDS for the best song ever — (how do you compare the Allman Brothers with Bill Deal and the Rondels, really?) —  and then sang it, loudly, with our grown children in the next room at the grown-up kiddie table, laughing at us. And later when my Pea said she hoped one day to have good friends like that? Was it that?


Couldn't it have been watching my mother make the turkey gravy at Thanksgiving with my grandmother's gravy spoon, worn on one edge because she always stirred, holding it just the same way?


Was it finding out that my sister, at age 6, skipped first grade one day, curling herself up in the gnarled old roots of a giant oak tree, after she crossed a highway by herself — by herself! — because her teacher had been mean to her too many days before? Or watching my husband and children open the paintings I gave them of the dogs... yes, that was a gift. Surely it was time spent with Boone and Martha, with Hilda Kay and Cloos' Club and in the purple room and sailing with my husband (though I didn't do it nearly enough), and walking the dog and reading in my napping room. 


Will all these things be the gifts I will remember for 2010? They each made my year memorable, to be sure.

But maybe it is this one, the one that brought tears to my eyes at the end of the year, given to me in a purple a bag by my purple room friend, with these words:  When I saw this I thought of you, because you have to be, to accomplish all you plan to do in 2011. It's the piece of a puzzle, and Lord knows I am that. One side just says: I AM. The other says this: BRAVE. I AM BRAVE.


Well. I am not, but my friend thinks I am and maybe I need to look back and see what I said I'd do this year that made her think so. 


No. I am not brave. Brave is our boy Ryan in Afghanistan. Brave is my friend with cancer. Brave is my first grade sister. Brave is that woman in Arizona who took the shooter's ammunition away. 


Brave is 'fessing up and facing it, changing direction even though the wind is trying hard to blow you a different way. Brave is ditching the excuses. Doing the harder thing. It is telling the truth to yourself before you try it with anybody else.


Oh...no, I am not there yet. Not even the tiniest bit close. But it makes me feel just a little bit braver knowing my friend thinks I am. I have been brave before, a few times in my life. But these days not so much. But could I be again?


Put the puzzle piece somewhere you'll see it every day, Lee said. So it's on my key ring. And a million times a day as I fiddle with my keys in search of the right one, every now and then that little piece of puzzle that is BRAVE will pop, reminding me that maybe I can be brave again, and that one day the piece of the puzzle that is me might just fit.


sbr