frantic
the piano tuner came on that thursday afternoon in 1996 as the wind whipped the oak branches around. off-key scales lifted through the house, and as i opened the front door to take a look, the door flew out, away from the house and i thought it might leave its hinges.
it's gonna be a strong one, the tuner said as he left, eyeing the sky. Fran.
 |
| Fran, 1996, when she hit raleigh |
that night i couldn't settle, worried about what this hurricane might do to us, as we waited in the night a little more than 100 miles inland from where she hit land. the kids were sleeping, and my husband told me to chill, but then a tree slammed our deck and shook all the windows, so we grabbed the kids up and headed down to the family room, bundling up and listening to radio reports of flooding and trees down all over town.
lightning flashed without sound through the 13 windows across the back of my house. i could hear my grandmother's voice: why in the world would somebody want so many windows in a house? transformers blew all night. pow. pow. trees fell. pow some more. until the winds calmed at dawn, and we finally slept.
lightning flashed without sound through the 13 windows across the back of my house. i could hear my grandmother's voice: why in the world would somebody want so many windows in a house? transformers blew all night. pow. pow. trees fell. pow some more. until the winds calmed at dawn, and we finally slept.
the next morning huge oaks littered our yard like so many pickup sticks, clutches of dislocated leaves plastered against the house and windows so we could hardly see out. down the street, trees lay on Grace's house as if God had set them down gently, knowing she'd already lost much to a tornado a few years before.
we were the lucky ones. power back in after only a few days, no trees on the house exactly. just everywhere we looked.
today i have been pulled toward the news about Sandy, which in just a few hours time will slam into the doorstep of the pea's building on the upper west side of Manhattan. this morning i sent them in email about making sure the remembered to charge their phones and iPads before turning one off for safekeeping, so they can still communicate with their worried parents. god, such a mom i can hear them saying.
sure. a mother who has lived through a hurricane's howl. one who never, ever in her life wants to be witness to that again.
be aware of the closest shelter, i said. do they even have flashlights? i imagine their reality tomorrow of walking the dog down 10 flights of stairs (and back up) in the pitch dark when rain and wind are still sweeping the streets outside.
i am worried. i am praying. they are thinking of where they can have supper tonight.just wind so far, says the text. well, it's the wind you worry about first.
i've known that sense of folly, when the tv folks cry what seems to be entire packs of wolves, so many that everybody ignores their pleas to provision, except to gather enough food and drink for a pretty good party.
i hope the weather guys are wrong this time, but all the while i hope, i see that nautilus cloud churning and churning her skirts closer to shore, not yet losing her shape.
 |
| sandy |
Sandy hasn't even left north carolina yet, but she twirls ever so slowly into virginia, maryland and new jersey — she is that big. she has lazily meandered more than 1,500 miles up the coast despite her modest cat 1 strength. has taken just under 100 lives so far, two of them, it appears, plucked from a sinking ship off the north carolina coast today. now, she is more like a steam engine as she heads into shore, finally, to all who sit in wait.
Fran, when she barreled into north carolina in 1996 was a brunhilde of a storm, ursula in the little mermaid the pea used to watch. but Sandy's girth — and her wind — add to my worry.
so we sit. we wait. we watch the skies. hope the weather guys are wrong. and pray for the safety of all.
ps: Tuesday morning: all is well on the Upper West Side, though much of lower Manhattan is under water. thanks for all the prayers and inquiries. We will wait to hear more.
ps: Tuesday morning: all is well on the Upper West Side, though much of lower Manhattan is under water. thanks for all the prayers and inquiries. We will wait to hear more.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
if the shoe fits
the flightaware tracker shows my daughter has just passed the chesapeake bay on her way north. she'll be back in the city in another hour, reunited with her husband who himself has flown over the pond today from france — and back into the caverns of the skyscrapers they call home.
i have a ritual. i always say prayers for safe travel (both in the air and in the NYC taxi), for her safety on the streets of this city she really does love. and i will never get used to watching her leave home. leave here. home.
when she first met her prince, the pea had a part-time babysitting job that paid her just enough money each month to afford a cheap ticket to the city, where he worked after college. it's a phase i told myself then, as i dropped her off at the airport that summer. but james had all things on her list including some she had never thought ought to be on it. he stayed and so there she went, too, after college.
six years later, they are still there in their 4th apartment (we really like this one) and it is home to her. a place not just to lay the head down at night, but where she put her first real rug and where she cozies up to the dog at night. every friday they head to Deans for supper, where the wait staff knows their names and their drinks and eats. and where friends keep the dog when they are out of town and where she feels safe enough on a thursday night to leave her apartment at 11:30 p.m.— when her husband has been gone all week to france —and grab a cab at the corner and head to a friend's house and return at 1 in the morning and not worry one thing about her safety.
good thing i didn't know about that until she told me yesterday. i do think her sweet dog was upset for me though. i have grabbed a cab myself at that same corner in the early hours of a monday morning, and it scares me to think of it. but not her.
i will never get used to this. the parenting of adult children. the fact that every decision they make no longer has my face in it.
my mother told me when i went to college that she would be looking in the window, so i'd best behave. there were times when i looked out my dorm room window and imagined her face there, looking, judging, but unfortunately it didn't stop me from all that college allowed. but i probably thought about what she said much more often than she imagined i would. (still do).
i told my kids the same thing. watch out for my face. i think they both turned into the room, though, not looking out so much until we no longer paid the way.
i am no longer looking in the window, though sometimes i wish i could, as they make their own lives. i'm just watching from afar, amazed at what all they do when they share some bit with me. (though i do give the old parental advice, to which they pay little attention. what do i know?)
flightaware now says 'arriving shortly', which means she is circling away from the skyscrapers and out, over the hamptons then back again because everybody else who needs to get into the city from a weekend away is now circling, too. (the husband is making his way (we hope) from a different airport (and a $50 fee) where he will likely be "home" before her and exhausted from a week of eating the world's greatest food.
home again. home.
my husband and i went to a wedding yesterday, that of a neighborhood beauty who married a boy she had known since kindergarten — though they had both traveled and seen the world and dated other people until they reconnected a few years ago.
at the celebration, i talked with a neighbor whose daughter was at first birthday party i remember giving the pea in the neighborhood. amanda lives in san francisco, has a great job, is thinking of moving to hawaii or south africa or whoknowswhere...wherever the job takes her.
as mothers, we talked about what we loved about our girls. and about the fact that the very thing we raised them to be — independent — at times breaks our hearts because they are doing the very thing we wished they would. leave home. see the world. be who we couldn't be in our own time.
+++++
i sit now at the kitchen table where i raised my pea to be the girl who was always wanting to see more. i look at the flowers i bought for the table because she was coming, think more than once about how i probably shouldn't have done my job so well, that if i had faltered, she might want to be closer to me.
++++++
on friday, i took her to a store i'd visited a week before alone, to get her opinion on a dress i thought didn't look awful on me. ('you need spanx' she said, and i was wearing them already but WHATEVER!)
she would have been honest with me and said no, mom. don't. but she didn't.
and this morning after church i donned another dress i'd bought weeks ago, asking for her approval, once again. as i modeled, i caught the face of my mother, not looking in the window, but looking at me, for the same validation not that long ago. does this look okay? do i have the right shoes?
there are some shoes only a daughter can fill.
++++
there was no special reason for the pea coming home. just every now and then she wants to, and we help make that happen. every now and then, all she wants to do is be here. sleep in her bed, scratch the dog's nose. shop with me. sit at the breakfast table. and that keeps me. for a good while.
i cooked. she did laundry. we broke bread with her brother. she saw her godmother and two great high school friends. she shared a breakfast biscuit and coffee with her dad. we visited a parade home (which she will have to explain to her northern friends) that had a closet bigger than her living room. which we laughed about. we talked fabric and whether or not we could live with that particular color of gray on the walls.
and our little family of four went to church, and i marveled that she remembered at least some of the liturgy.
and the only picture i took with her in it she is barely even in.
when we parted ways this afternoon, i didn't cry. we will see her again in a week at a wedding, and then again in three in the city, when the husband runs the marathon! (i refuse to call it her home.)
landed finally, she has no doubt walked the dog and reunited with the husband and gotten her gift from france, and tried on her new boots, bought at home.
and i miss her deeply.
those of us tethered to the South i think, know you live places but you are always from somewhere and that place is always called home.
homewritemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
i have a ritual. i always say prayers for safe travel (both in the air and in the NYC taxi), for her safety on the streets of this city she really does love. and i will never get used to watching her leave home. leave here. home.
when she first met her prince, the pea had a part-time babysitting job that paid her just enough money each month to afford a cheap ticket to the city, where he worked after college. it's a phase i told myself then, as i dropped her off at the airport that summer. but james had all things on her list including some she had never thought ought to be on it. he stayed and so there she went, too, after college.
six years later, they are still there in their 4th apartment (we really like this one) and it is home to her. a place not just to lay the head down at night, but where she put her first real rug and where she cozies up to the dog at night. every friday they head to Deans for supper, where the wait staff knows their names and their drinks and eats. and where friends keep the dog when they are out of town and where she feels safe enough on a thursday night to leave her apartment at 11:30 p.m.— when her husband has been gone all week to france —and grab a cab at the corner and head to a friend's house and return at 1 in the morning and not worry one thing about her safety.
good thing i didn't know about that until she told me yesterday. i do think her sweet dog was upset for me though. i have grabbed a cab myself at that same corner in the early hours of a monday morning, and it scares me to think of it. but not her.
i will never get used to this. the parenting of adult children. the fact that every decision they make no longer has my face in it.
my mother told me when i went to college that she would be looking in the window, so i'd best behave. there were times when i looked out my dorm room window and imagined her face there, looking, judging, but unfortunately it didn't stop me from all that college allowed. but i probably thought about what she said much more often than she imagined i would. (still do).
i told my kids the same thing. watch out for my face. i think they both turned into the room, though, not looking out so much until we no longer paid the way.
i am no longer looking in the window, though sometimes i wish i could, as they make their own lives. i'm just watching from afar, amazed at what all they do when they share some bit with me. (though i do give the old parental advice, to which they pay little attention. what do i know?)
flightaware now says 'arriving shortly', which means she is circling away from the skyscrapers and out, over the hamptons then back again because everybody else who needs to get into the city from a weekend away is now circling, too. (the husband is making his way (we hope) from a different airport (and a $50 fee) where he will likely be "home" before her and exhausted from a week of eating the world's greatest food.
home again. home.
my husband and i went to a wedding yesterday, that of a neighborhood beauty who married a boy she had known since kindergarten — though they had both traveled and seen the world and dated other people until they reconnected a few years ago.
at the celebration, i talked with a neighbor whose daughter was at first birthday party i remember giving the pea in the neighborhood. amanda lives in san francisco, has a great job, is thinking of moving to hawaii or south africa or whoknowswhere...wherever the job takes her.
as mothers, we talked about what we loved about our girls. and about the fact that the very thing we raised them to be — independent — at times breaks our hearts because they are doing the very thing we wished they would. leave home. see the world. be who we couldn't be in our own time.
+++++
i sit now at the kitchen table where i raised my pea to be the girl who was always wanting to see more. i look at the flowers i bought for the table because she was coming, think more than once about how i probably shouldn't have done my job so well, that if i had faltered, she might want to be closer to me.
++++++
on friday, i took her to a store i'd visited a week before alone, to get her opinion on a dress i thought didn't look awful on me. ('you need spanx' she said, and i was wearing them already but WHATEVER!)
she would have been honest with me and said no, mom. don't. but she didn't.
and this morning after church i donned another dress i'd bought weeks ago, asking for her approval, once again. as i modeled, i caught the face of my mother, not looking in the window, but looking at me, for the same validation not that long ago. does this look okay? do i have the right shoes?
there are some shoes only a daughter can fill.
++++
there was no special reason for the pea coming home. just every now and then she wants to, and we help make that happen. every now and then, all she wants to do is be here. sleep in her bed, scratch the dog's nose. shop with me. sit at the breakfast table. and that keeps me. for a good while.
i cooked. she did laundry. we broke bread with her brother. she saw her godmother and two great high school friends. she shared a breakfast biscuit and coffee with her dad. we visited a parade home (which she will have to explain to her northern friends) that had a closet bigger than her living room. which we laughed about. we talked fabric and whether or not we could live with that particular color of gray on the walls.
 | |
| that's a mighty big closet! |
and the only picture i took with her in it she is barely even in.
when we parted ways this afternoon, i didn't cry. we will see her again in a week at a wedding, and then again in three in the city, when the husband runs the marathon! (i refuse to call it her home.)
landed finally, she has no doubt walked the dog and reunited with the husband and gotten her gift from france, and tried on her new boots, bought at home.
and i miss her deeply.
those of us tethered to the South i think, know you live places but you are always from somewhere and that place is always called home.
homewritemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
nobody's fool
anyone who has known my husband for more than 20 minutes long knows he is no fan of travel. I say that with a caveat: it's the to and fro and not the destination that often finds us ready to change our plans and head to the nearest divorce court home. if we are driving, whether it's to church or to the peach state, he drums the steering wheel, tries to pass on the two lanes just where i know he shouldn't, fumes at drivers around him though the only person who'll hear him is me. flying can be worse, what with automated check-ins and tarmac delays, tiny aisles and arguing toddlers punching our seats from behind. (there, now, honey, don't blame me for the fact that you forgot your iPad!)
i'm thinking if only we could sail to where we're going, a thousand arguments over the past 32 years might never have happened.
sail. that's what i said. if we could close the back door and head to the dock, step on board and sail ... away.
well, that would be my husband's solution. i'd be busy searching google for the nearest five star hotel with a boat landing, spa and freshly-pressed sheets to break up the trip.
the skipper, as we call him, got his first boat some 15 years ago, and now we (he) mans boat #6. this last one we(i) named Fortune's Fool, because the skipper certainly has spent more than one fortune on his beauties boats and their many accoutrements. (i have used this information when i want to buy myself high-priced boots or cameras — i don't have a sailboat, i whine, and not once has he ever said go get one.) and no, i didn't really mean anything by choosing a name connecting my husband's prized possession to the world's most famous star-crossed lovers. really.
when i married him just 11 days shy of 31 years ago, the only boat this skipper had ever been on was my father's Boston Whaler, and in my memory only once... (my daddy loved that boat, and when he sold it, my mother threatened to lie down in the driveway to keep the buyer from pulling it away. so when the skipper said he wanted to buy that first day sailer, i knew what i was up against.)
i should have planned our wedding date better. he has spent at least one of our wedding anniversaries at the annapolis boat show, though i'm not complaining. really.
well, sort of. i thought that first boat would be the end of it, that he'd get the water out of his bones and take up golf. he sold that boat, buying a new one (slightly soaked) before the old one had even left the yard. and he kept on selling and buying until he had to hire a crane operator to put the last boat in the water.whether it was the skipper's naivete or the boats' fault, i was never sure. he kept saying he was buying bigger and better boats for me.
this, from a man who grew up landlocked. he didn't particularly like the beach, though he has come to understand my need to talk to the ocean from time to time. yet he drives an hour one way down country roads to get to his beauty, and onlyalways when i am along rarely does he try to pass the slow poke. he is that happy to be going.
i don't go sailing often enough for him. he brings his little cooler into the kitchen on a saturday morning and i count how manyhours i can nap chapters i can read in the hours he'll be gone.
i like sailing. once we are on the water and i have a cool beverage and friends to laugh with and cute cocktail napkins with sailboats on them to serve with my provisions ... i really do. it's the prep and the hauling to and fro and the sweating in the cabin on a very hot summer day that just spoils my outfit, face and hair. it feels like camping to me, which leads me to camp,the memory of which still haunts me, so more often than not, i've stayed at home.
but two weeks ago, i woke on a saturday to a stiff breeze and 60 degrees and it was just too pretty tonap read.
'i'm not going to take you if it takes two hours to provision!' the captain barked.
was stopping for a sub sandwich to put in an itty-bitty cooler too much trouble?
apparently not. i even took my new sailboat camera, hoping to take some pictures for myself him to show his sailing buddies. and as we sailed in the crisp wind, the skipper started telling me about the new mistresses boats he had his eye on. seaworthy. as in the atlantic.
oh dear.
the skipper has a big birthday coming up in just over 40 days. when i asked him what he wanted to do, i knew it would involve sailing. so we packed up our grips and headed to the airport (it was too early for anybody to be on the road, though as usual he couldn't get his card to work in the automatic check-in) so he didn't really grumble about ittoo much.
skipper jr was in tow, and the three of us met up with the pea and her princenot without major angst from the skipper trying to find the rental car place and a parking place along a crowded street on the aft deck of a restaurant in Portland, Maine, where all you could see anywhere was two- and three-masted schooners, sailing, sailing. we could feel the tension lifting just a bit.
we'd made a reservation to sail on a three-masted schooner in boothbay harbor, maine, at 5 o'clock — an hour from our current port o' call — and we were late. we zoomed ahead of the kids, the skipper weaving in and out of traffic again, me wishing i'd brought a life vest in the car tokeep my delicate skin from bruising as we cruised.soften the impact of the to and fro.
i texted the pea: where are you? knowing the skipper would be crushed if we missed the sail because of their dawdling. 'we are going as quick as we can' she wrote back, and though she didn't say 'dad needs to chill' i know she was thinking it.
we reached the boat with 10 minutes to spare. the kids and i sat, me promising our few days in maine would bring us a new man, now that he was on the water. i'd seen it happen just last year. i sensed they didn't believe me.
then we set sail (with a captain and first mate), and as the boat yawned, the skipper smiled. he talked. he chatted it up with the captain. he leaned on the rails. he laughed more than a few times, put his arm around me even, watching the water, the sails stretch, giving way to his love of this thing that only he can really understand.
the kids were amazed, that the secret to calming their father's stormy demeanor was as simple as water, canvas, wood and wind.
on our second day, we climbed aboard another boat, this one motor-powered, and headed into the vast atlantic toward a tiny island off the maine coast. the skipper stood on the bow in his yellow slicker, watching the swells and looking for all the world like a lobsterman scouting out his traps. and he was smiling, once again.
later and back on land, the skipper eyed a burgee flying with the colors of our seaside respite. that would look nice aboard the Fortune's Fool he said more than once.
taking the hint thinking ahead for once about his Christmas list, skipper jr inquired at the front desk as to where he could acquire said flag for his dad, but there was none to be had. a day later, i asked the same thing, and of course so had the skipper. i found myself wondering how we might have one made as a surprise.
it was spitting rain at checkout, winds skating over the bay at close to 20 knots. time to go home. but as the skipper headed into the the cottage for one last walk-through, i saw him toting the burgee. the innkeepers had somehow found an extra, so they handed it off for the promise of a good review on travelocity.
our week was, to use a boating term, quite yar — as katharine hepburn said in the philadelphia story. (My, she was yar...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot. ) and so was the skipper.
if you don't count the money we spent or squeaky floors of our cabin, or the fact that in the wee hours of our last morning, someonequite large and ungainly in
the adjoining cabin took a tub bath, and we heard every slap squeak against
the fiberglass tub wall. and the groan when they tried to stand up.
it's a rainy day, but guess where the skipper is? off to pat the fortune's fool, to mend her lines and set the halyard flying.
i'm hoping for a few more days of yar before the dry rot begins. and i'm searching my new iPhone maps to see if there indeed might be a way to sail wherever we are headed next.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
i'm thinking if only we could sail to where we're going, a thousand arguments over the past 32 years might never have happened.
sail. that's what i said. if we could close the back door and head to the dock, step on board and sail ... away.
well, that would be my husband's solution. i'd be busy searching google for the nearest five star hotel with a boat landing, spa and freshly-pressed sheets to break up the trip.
the skipper, as we call him, got his first boat some 15 years ago, and now we (he) mans boat #6. this last one we
when i married him just 11 days shy of 31 years ago, the only boat this skipper had ever been on was my father's Boston Whaler, and in my memory only once... (my daddy loved that boat, and when he sold it, my mother threatened to lie down in the driveway to keep the buyer from pulling it away. so when the skipper said he wanted to buy that first day sailer, i knew what i was up against.)
well, sort of. i thought that first boat would be the end of it, that he'd get the water out of his bones and take up golf. he sold that boat, buying a new one (slightly soaked) before the old one had even left the yard. and he kept on selling and buying until he had to hire a crane operator to put the last boat in the water.
this, from a man who grew up landlocked. he didn't particularly like the beach, though he has come to understand my need to talk to the ocean from time to time. yet he drives an hour one way down country roads to get to his beauty, and only
i don't go sailing often enough for him. he brings his little cooler into the kitchen on a saturday morning and i count how many
i like sailing. once we are on the water and i have a cool beverage and friends to laugh with and cute cocktail napkins with sailboats on them to serve with my provisions ... i really do. it's the prep and the hauling to and fro and the sweating in the cabin on a very hot summer day that just spoils my outfit, face and hair. it feels like camping to me, which leads me to camp,
but two weeks ago, i woke on a saturday to a stiff breeze and 60 degrees and it was just too pretty to
'i'm not going to take you if it takes two hours to provision!' the captain barked.
was stopping for a sub sandwich to put in an itty-bitty cooler too much trouble?
oh dear.
the skipper has a big birthday coming up in just over 40 days. when i asked him what he wanted to do, i knew it would involve sailing. so we packed up our grips and headed to the airport (it was too early for anybody to be on the road, though as usual he couldn't get his card to work in the automatic check-in) so he didn't really grumble about it
skipper jr was in tow, and the three of us met up with the pea and her prince
we'd made a reservation to sail on a three-masted schooner in boothbay harbor, maine, at 5 o'clock — an hour from our current port o' call — and we were late. we zoomed ahead of the kids, the skipper weaving in and out of traffic again, me wishing i'd brought a life vest in the car to
i texted the pea: where are you? knowing the skipper would be crushed if we missed the sail because of their dawdling. 'we are going as quick as we can' she wrote back, and though she didn't say 'dad needs to chill' i know she was thinking it.
we reached the boat with 10 minutes to spare. the kids and i sat, me promising our few days in maine would bring us a new man, now that he was on the water. i'd seen it happen just last year.
the kids were amazed, that the secret to calming their father's stormy demeanor was as simple as water, canvas, wood and wind.
on our second day, we climbed aboard another boat, this one motor-powered, and headed into the vast atlantic toward a tiny island off the maine coast. the skipper stood on the bow in his yellow slicker, watching the swells and looking for all the world like a lobsterman scouting out his traps. and he was smiling, once again.
later and back on land, the skipper eyed a burgee flying with the colors of our seaside respite. that would look nice aboard the Fortune's Fool he said more than once.
it was spitting rain at checkout, winds skating over the bay at close to 20 knots. time to go home. but as the skipper headed into the the cottage for one last walk-through, i saw him toting the burgee. the innkeepers had somehow found an extra, so they handed it off for the promise of a good review on travelocity.
our week was, to use a boating term, quite yar — as katharine hepburn said in the philadelphia story. (My, she was yar...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot. ) and so was the skipper.
if you don't count the money we spent or squeaky floors of our cabin, or the fact that in the wee hours of our last morning, someone
i'm hoping for a few more days of yar before the dry rot begins. and i'm searching my new iPhone maps to see if there indeed might be a way to sail wherever we are headed next.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
9/11 — last year's look bears repeating
we sat in upholstered chairs this morning in a small Episcopal church in mid-coast Maine. no kneelers,
just clear glass windows looking out over scrubby pines dotting the
landscape. save for one small stained glass window above the altar
depicting Jesus calming an angry sea, and these words: Fear not.
we shared our chair pew with four friends we have met in the past eight years. the six of us are in Boothbay
Harbor taking in the crisp air and celebrating 80 years of marriage
between us. at supper last night, we shared memories of our earliest
years as married couples, laughed at our naiveté and marveled at our sticktuativeness
if there is such a word. the oldest among us married at 22 and 23, will
celebrate 40 years together on Sunday. the newlyweds have been married
just 10, tying their knot tightly around each other and changing their
world as a couple, just 10 days before our whole worlds changed — 10
years ago today.
the
readings for today were about forgiveness, how when Peter asked Jesus
how many times he was supposed to forgive someone who had wronged him,
Jesus launched into hyperbole, saying seventy-seven (or seven times
seven, depending on your translation.) and then He talked about the
master whose slave owed him the equivalent of around a billion dollars
in today's world. a price he could never pay back.
'we owe God everything,' the priest said. 'just because we opened our eyes this morning, we owe more than we can ever repay.'
i
listened, waiting for the lesson about 9/11, and it was there, in the
middle of all that need to forgive. how personal forgiveness, which is
often the hardest, is based on the illusion that we might have had a
better life if the person who had wronged us had not done so. and how as
Americans living in a post-9/11 world, forgiveness is not so simple
anymore. it was no accident, he said, that our lessons for today — of
all days — were about this subject. chosen years in advance, this is
just how God works.
++++
in
the past week, my husband and i watched several specials about that
Tuesday 10 years ago none of us will ever forget. it was harrowing to
watch once again, as planes that seemed to come out of nowhere hit the
Twin Towers and forever changed our lives as Americans. as i watched and
listened to survivors and our nation's leaders tell their stories, i
said a silent prayer that nothing like this would happen again.ever.
our
daughter lives in NYC, and last week, she and her husband moved into a
new apartment. her Upper West Side home is far away from Ground Zero,
but as the anniversary of that day approached, i knew it is much on her
mind. when i talked with her yesterday, they were staying home. traffic
had been horrible since Friday, when the only news, it seemed was about a
new, credible threat.
she was a senior in high school the morning of 9/11, and i was set to teach writing to members of her class later that morning. at home, preparing for the day, i saw the second plane hit in real time. then the Pentagon plane. it was almost impossible to pull myself from watching to get to my work. a little more than an hour later, after both towers had fallen, and as i walked up the steps to the high school, i listened to a silence so absolute I could not remember a time when my world had ever been so quiet. a man i didn't know came out of the building and we stared into each other's eyes for more than the split second strangers allow.
she was a senior in high school the morning of 9/11, and i was set to teach writing to members of her class later that morning. at home, preparing for the day, i saw the second plane hit in real time. then the Pentagon plane. it was almost impossible to pull myself from watching to get to my work. a little more than an hour later, after both towers had fallen, and as i walked up the steps to the high school, i listened to a silence so absolute I could not remember a time when my world had ever been so quiet. a man i didn't know came out of the building and we stared into each other's eyes for more than the split second strangers allow.
six
months later my daughter and i visited Ground Zero ourselves with my
best friend and her daughter. we stopped in at the office of one of my
husband's colleagues, an Indian woman who told us the story of walking
across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home and how it took hours to get to
her little boy. 'the smell is gone,' she said as we stared into the
canyon that still seemed to smolder. it was not gone. she was only used
to it.
we were deeply moved awhile later by the thousands of fliers and bouquets of flowers posted on the fence that surrounded St. Paul's Chapel —the nation's oldest public building in continual use — which stands across the street from where the towers once stood. the minutia of the grieving, put there by families searching for loved ones missing when the towers fell. from September 2001 to May 2002, St. Paul’s opened its doors to firefighters, construction workers, police officers and others for meals, beds, counseling and prayer.
we were deeply moved awhile later by the thousands of fliers and bouquets of flowers posted on the fence that surrounded St. Paul's Chapel —the nation's oldest public building in continual use — which stands across the street from where the towers once stood. the minutia of the grieving, put there by families searching for loved ones missing when the towers fell. from September 2001 to May 2002, St. Paul’s opened its doors to firefighters, construction workers, police officers and others for meals, beds, counseling and prayer.
Doug Remer,
a former associate rector at my church and a family friend of my friend
Anne Boone, was a relief worker at the chapel and invited us in. we
knelt in pews where George Washington worshiped. we read some of the
hundreds of letters lining every pew and wall, written by children from
all over the world and sent to relief workers, thanking them for their
service.
this is not something you ever forget.
+++++
the priest today said people have approached him in the years since 9/11 saying: where was God in this? why did God cause this to happen? "i don't know what kind of God you believe in,' he said, 'if you think God caused it to happened." he did not believe in that kind of God. nor do i. i can tell you where God was. in every single fire fighter and police officer who entered that building. in the couple, as the priest reminded us, who jumped out of the burning buildings, holding hands, knowing this was something that could not be done alone. there, in the community of strangers who huddled together for comfort, in elevators, in stair wells, on the top floors unable to get out, in those airplanes as their fuselages broke the windows of the towers, my God was there.
the priest today said people have approached him in the years since 9/11 saying: where was God in this? why did God cause this to happen? "i don't know what kind of God you believe in,' he said, 'if you think God caused it to happened." he did not believe in that kind of God. nor do i. i can tell you where God was. in every single fire fighter and police officer who entered that building. in the couple, as the priest reminded us, who jumped out of the burning buildings, holding hands, knowing this was something that could not be done alone. there, in the community of strangers who huddled together for comfort, in elevators, in stair wells, on the top floors unable to get out, in those airplanes as their fuselages broke the windows of the towers, my God was there.
i
found myself weeping — i can't remember a sermon in a long time that
has made me weep — for the 3,000 souls gone, for the children of 9/11,
for my daughter living in a city targeted yet again by terror. and
closer to home, for the man sitting next to me, whom i have failed to
forgive too many times, but who never fails to forgive me.
10
years ago, i had not yet met the friends that occupied my pew today. we
were all in different places in our lives — Tim & Linda living
in Birmingham, Lee and David living on base at Fort Bragg, NC. Lee had
not even unpacked her belongings when David — who was supposed to be on
vacation — came home to tell her he would be needed at work. (last week,
as we recalled our 9/11 memories, several of us spoke of the quiet. Lee
could not help thinking of how at Fort Bragg, there was no silence at
all. just mayhem.
within five years of 9/11, the six of us would be brought together by church, and as Tim said over dinner last night, our connection to each other has changed us all.
within five years of 9/11, the six of us would be brought together by church, and as Tim said over dinner last night, our connection to each other has changed us all.
++++
after church we took a car ride to a beautiful little island and found a tiny church built in i think 1918, nestled in the pines and rocks, right by the sea. inside, i knelt, finally, and said my prayers, once again, for having safely arrived at this spot, on this day, with these people. for my children, husband, parents and siblings. for the world, and peace.
after church we took a car ride to a beautiful little island and found a tiny church built in i think 1918, nestled in the pines and rocks, right by the sea. inside, i knelt, finally, and said my prayers, once again, for having safely arrived at this spot, on this day, with these people. for my children, husband, parents and siblings. for the world, and peace.
this afternoon, we sailed in 12-knot winds aboard a three-masted 60-foot schooner. i braced my feet against the side as we heeled, her rails
almost into the chop, tried to take a few pictures. and i thought about
how to connect all the moments of this day: the church, the priest's
message, the friends, my marriage and this sail.
i
thought about the small stained glass window of St. Columba's,
depicting to me, Jesus calming the waters during the storm. "fear not'
read the words in one corner of the small window.
i didn't know until just now this about the window: "the theme 'fear not' was adopted (by the church) soon after the tragedy which we now know as 9/11. It
also takes into account that we are a seafaring town. the touches of
green signify the headlands of a safe harbor as the angel speaks peace
from a bruised and stormy sky."
well.
after 9/11, we are all bruised. though it's a gift to be married so
many years, sometimes it bruises us, too. as the priest said: God is in
the midst of them. and us. in our lives and in our friendships, in our
tragedies and our marriages.
fear not. angels speak peace from a bruised and stormy sky.
circles, all around
my purple room friend is a gentle prodder. she had not heard much from writemuch these past few weeks and was wondering what i was thinking. writemuch in fact was, too, wondering what i was thinking, as this, my double-nickel birthday week began.
it began in fact with circles. walking in circles, that is, which when i think about it, is pretty much how my mind works. i start out thinking i'm going to clean out the pantry but that leads somehow to the bedroom closet which leads to the tomato patch which leads to the kitchen window sill which makes me hungry which leads me back to the pantry. and on and on. or how my day goes. circle my block three times with the dog and his friend. spin the tires to work and back. move from desk to copier to kitchen to church and back again. circles.
back to walking. i don't know much about labyrinths or their mystical properties, but there is one where i work. sometimes i walk up through the grass to take pictures of it, but as of last week, i had not actually walked it in a good long while.
but my week began there, with my purple roommate and the others who occupy the work hall with me. our instructions were to walk in silence, and if we bumped into each other along the path not to worry about it too much. that's life, isn't it? distancing ourselves from each other, then circling back, bumping into, distancing again. oh, and we might recognize it as how we meet God on occasion. distancing, bumping into, circling back. letting God circle us sometimes.
i set out on the path and walked those circles and thought, thanked, questioned, petitioned — tried to listen to something more than the soft scuffle of my shoes on brick.
i found myself thanking God for all my years however poorly i have sometimes lived them. just to get up in the morning to begin the circle is a blessing. as i turned a corner down the path (which is really a yellowish sort of brick road) my thinking turned to my hope for my children, which is easy and hard to think about at the same time. both are at corners, each facing change that is unknown and surprising. and as my week began, it was hard for this mother to sit tight and watch, to wait and see.
another corner. another thought. the husband. the job. the community i work for. my own ability to do good in that world and the larger one. what people think of me. and who i really am. heavy and light. light and heavy, thoughts kept coming as gentle as the slow breeze circling me.
back in the office, one of my work friends said they noticed as they turned the corner each time, their thoughts turned a corner, too, their conversation shifted. just like mine.
when i started out my career so many years ago, i worked for a tiny daily newspaper, taking pictures of friday night lights and check presentations. i spent hours in a dark room wearing a shiny yellow apron, dipping my fingers in developer and fix, watching an image emerge from blank paper. the next job — my second one — lasted only one year, yet i wrote and wrote and wrote, made awful mistakes that somehow were forgiven and learned much from them. i learned how to lay out a newspaper, to tell a good story. that job led to this and that through the years, to the job i have now, taking pictures, writing, teaching, designing, questioning. a bit of every little thing i've learned in these 30 years. and last week i produced a little magazine for the people i work for, using all of those skills. circles.
that second job, too, changed me the most, set me on all sorts of paths. it's where i met my husband. got my first dog.
on thursday of last week, my son landed his second career job. oh, the hope i have for him. circles.
on thursday of last week, my son landed his second career job. oh, the hope i have for him. circles.
on friday, i headed home. if you are born in the South of course you may live anywhere but you are always from one place. on the eve of my birthday, i broke hushpuppies over barbecue and stew at my childhood kitchen table, listening to my parents talk. when i asked them if i was early or late, my mother said a little early. and i learned something new: i had been delivered not by the doctor who was my father's partner, but by the nurse who worked for him much of my childhood. Both doctors were busy with a patient when my mother couldn't hold me in anymore, so the nurse pulled my screaming head into the world.
my mother had a couple of gifts for me. one, a small pillowcase hand-embroidered by an elderly neighbor more than 50 years ago. miss applewhite was blind, and though we can't figure out how, she designed a perfect bouquet of flowers with circular centers, never dropping a stitch. i had used this pillowcase as a child. circles.
yesterday, i spent my birthday lunch over burgers with my boys, then we drove around the block to where my son's new office will be. my supper shared with "friendless" friends whose son shares his birthday with me. more circles.
back in the spring, i took part in an online writing community. each day for 37 days we were to answer a prompt. i was working on my novel at the same time, so on some days, i skipped the prompt, including this one on day 11: notice all the circles you see today.
i guess the circles were tired of me not paying attention.
as is usual when i start to write, i have no real notion of what something is about. just a little niggle in my head. blind-like, i fiddle with stitches that seem not to connect, until somehow something whole emerges, just like images from the developer in that dark room years ago.
as is usual when i start to write, i have no real notion of what something is about. just a little niggle in my head. blind-like, i fiddle with stitches that seem not to connect, until somehow something whole emerges, just like images from the developer in that dark room years ago.
circles.
like double nickels taped to a birthday card from my lifelong friend. a new camera and lens from my family. candles for my patio. a casserole dish decorated with a labyrinth of circles. the last of the season's tomatoes on the window sill. zinnias. the communion cup.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
that mouse, and whole cookie thing
I found this draft, though I’m not even sure how because I was looking for another draft of something that I couldn’t find. Which is the story of my life right now. But since I’m going to start writing about writing, I thought I might give you a glimpse into a typical writing day, though I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what year I wrote this! (The fact that there are comments below means I published it without finishing it! And 13 years ago. I can tell you that all these years later, my writing life hasn’t changed very much!
You can't imagine what you can do in a day when you want nothing more than to write a few new words on paper and you have sworn you will not spend one more minute on Facebook.
There is the walking of the dog and the search for tomatoes in the side yard patch (three, count them three times.) there is the worry over those bare patches in the back yard where the voles have taken their stand and eaten your whole fig bush and the listening for birds singing and there is the watching of the geese as they fill the front yard across the street.
And the wondering if the neighbors will bring the baby outside and the time it takes to eat a few of those tomato/basil potato chips you just bought at the store and then a flip of the channel to see what Olympic sport is taking place across the pond and of course the shower and the hair and makeup and all that even though you told yourself you needed none of this to work from home.
And there is all that checking of email, both the work kind and the home kind, and the tweaking of the work website (just a few minutes, you promise yourself) and then finally, you sit down to read the manuscript you've been working on for what is in truth now about 10 years, and when you've gotten about a third of the way through all those notes your kind and gifted teacher was so good to write on it, and you finally realize you really hate it so much that you are not sure you have another word left to write about the story and by that time, well, it's just about time for lunch.
And then after you have a nice salad of those tomatoes you found you tell yourself, well, I'll just sit back down with this awful book for a few more chapters to see if there is anything at all redeeming about it, and you pretend to underline the parts that need fixing in bright blue pen because you have an aversion to red pens used for any reason and well, then that whole process makes your eyes so heavy that you just nod off for a bit, to restart your batteries for writing later in the afternoon.
And then you get back at it, but while you are reading that same old passage for the 50th time your realize what you need to do is more research, so that takes another good bit of time away from the page. And better prepared from all that research, you sit back down with the characters, asking them what they really want to do about all this mess of a story, and then you start looking back at notes you wrote in 2006 (2006!?) when you weren't even 50 yet, and then you flip further back into the journal which you have never really meticulously kept and find notes you wrote even further back in 1997 (before said book was even in your imagination) for heaven's sake and you realize how much your handwriting has deteriorated since then from all the typing you've been doing at the computer.
But you look back at that first entry anyway just to see, and you realized that of the 16 goals you set down in your own old cursive you have accomplished exactly 6, and most of those are selfish goals, come to think of it. And then as you read on, you see that it's a gratitude journal you started way back before you had done anything professional really, and that your whole work life has happened since you wrote those things down. and then you see even more goals, things like learning to ice skate, which you have never done and wouldn't now because good heavens you might break a hip! But there are things like get the house free of dust, which you gave up trying to do long ago, and work on your photography, which by golly you have been doing a good bit in the past few years, and finding an hour to yourself, well, some days that's pretty much all you have, hours to yourself and yet you waste them.
And in these selfish lines you see the beginnings of stories you went on to write and somehow the journal has in just two month's time become less of what you haven't done and more of what you hope to do. And somewhere in there is something you hope to do for someone else. Imagine.
And you read on that you most fear as a writer is not being able to find the story, which, sadly, is still true.
And so you decide you need a change of venue from the kitchen table so you move everything upstairs to that office you fixed up for yourself at just about the time you found a job that would take you out of it. That same office with the books piled on the floor and the many drafts of that book you have been writing crowded around you like children waiting for story time, and you wonder if you should go back to the very beginning, to that now very tired first draft to see what all the fuss was about in the first place.
But first you need to empty that overflowing recycling basket, and as you reach the bottom of the stairs you smell the water you seasoned with Old Bay and for a second you think you might have ruined the shrimp you had intended for supper but you are relieved as you throw the basket down on the kitchen floor to see the pot on the stove is boiling over but the shrimp are sitting right where you left them, waiting for their fate.
So you start over and then the phone rings for the first time all day and while you are talking you go over to the TV where paula deen is cooking and you just have to switch channels to see what Kelsey finds essential on that hip cooking channel and then you realize that in about five weeks you have failed to put away themed cocktail napkins left over from your beach week so you keep talking and tuck them into an already over-flowing drawer in the living room chest and then you walk to the front door and peer out to see what happened to the storm that was brewing not 30 minutes ago but now seems to have disappeared without raining a drop.
And you feed the dog and look out at the bird feeder and then you climb the stairs again, back to that journal you wrote in with pink ink and you see that on April 23, 1997, you wrote about spending three days teaching writing at your old high school and you note how you thank God for your old English teacher and then remember standing in her classroom trying to teach her students a little something about writing, so you are thankful for her having hope in you 22 years before.
Then you realize that the husband will soon be home and you will have not accomplished a single word toward your 1,100-word goal in the whole day set before you when you woke before six. Not a word.
and so you start to fix the problem. And 2,687* words later, you have at least tried, even if all those words won't make it into your book.
*ps: When you look back over your work for the day, you realize that all those words, well you were overly optimistic about your accomplishments and counted them TWICE. 1,266 is more like it.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
mama said there'd be days like this
somewhere among the old picture frames and Candyland and discarded puzzles there sits an historic videotape. as in VHS. but the fact that it's an antiquated technology means nothing to me.
what i see is a boy — well, to be more accurate hear a boy's voice — as he narrates the story of his life on a typical day at home with his parents and his sister.
i'm in there, standing in the kitchen (thin, who knew?) making a face, not wanting to be on camera, even then.
"there's my mom," he says, "hey mom!" with an excitement i wish i still heard in his voice when he sees me.
his sister mugs, always has, moving around the house to make sure she is in almost every scene. little brother swings the awkward camera — carried on his shoulder, yes it's THAT old — around to his dad who is reading the paper. always.
what i love about this old tape is the boy's voice as he moves around our house recording life as he sees it. he even turns it around on himself, his blue eyes out of focus he's so close to it. what this boy couldn't have done if we'd had iPhones back in the 90s.
this same boy would go on to make other movies with video cameras we gave him as he grew older, gifts we hoped would be the spark to ignite what we knew was in that boy somewhere. a take-off on the day's news. hilarious 'ads' for prom, a mockumentary about squirrels overtaking campus that didn't go over well with his professor (guess she'd never seen Christopher Guest's work.) i dreamed he'd be the next Spielberg, but he wouldn't have a thing to do with my dreams.
but in the end, the boy got the college degree in broadcast, knowing after chemistry and geometry classes in high school that he had to take a different route.
he wanted to be behind the camera, he said, though he had a great distrust of tv news.
only those jobs not in news and behind the camera weren't so easy to find.
when i started my church communications job, i had an idea that we needed a video history of the church, so i set about scanning old photos and taught myself a little bit about iMovie, in hopes that my son could help me smooth out the kinks. i think it was during that project that i learned this mother and son really don't work that well together. when i asked him a question, he would often say: people (meaning him) get college degrees in this, mom. it's not supposed to be easy.
back in june, i tried again, doing all the front work for a video for my parents, hoping he would come in at the end and do his magic. at the time, he was working his regular job in internet marketing and spending nights and weekends helping his high school classmate john on a video project to promote a new app john and his dad had developed. it's a neat game you play to earn points for saving energy — and eventually money on your power bill.
so i knew he was busy. but family trumps, right?
one night in June we sat at the kitchen table, transferring my files to his computer. it was supposed to be seamless, (or so the directions said) but in the end, our two Macs weren't talking well with each other — could have been the people who ran them — and my carefully crafted movie wouldn't transfer to his Final Cut Pro. over the next few days he would work to recreate the story i had spent a month working on myself — i imagine the whole time he was thinking what an idiot his mother is. knows just enough to screw things up but not enough to fix it.
the day we were to present the video, he asked if i'd like to see it. so i sat in his beach house room and watched the story of my parents' life unfolding on the screen, to music he had chosen (i did have a say in it.) and the tears just came right on out of my head. there were a few hiccups only a mother could see, but i loved it, as did my whole family. we watched it over and over in the last days of our time together, marveling at what a 'pro' job he'd done.
and then we all went back to work.
all this time, for months really, my son had been using his off time, at least some of it, on the video project for john. is it ready? can we see it? we would ask. no, soon, he'd say.
soon came last week, in the middle of a crowded lunch spot as i sat with two good friends. i'd been telling them about the video i'd seen the day before on the app's website, a cute stop-action spot starring a couple of graham's friends, and i picked up my phone to show them the work he'd done.
turns out, i had the wrong video, because a new one had popped up, and i saw for the first time what the boy who started out at 7 years old with the camera on his shoulder was actually doing with that college degree. you can watch it here.
as we watched, my friends and i laughed, recognizing faces from my son's high school class, and then, well, i just couldn't stop watching. back at work, i showed it to everyone i saw. my son did this. isn't it good? i had, i hate to admit now, become one of those mothers. the ones who can't shut up about how fabulous their children are and how they are single-handedly saving the world.
i don't really expect my boy to save the world. just change your corner is what i am always telling my kids. the fact that he's a good friend and an honorable person (he even called up the power company to tell them they had credited him for paying a bill he hadn't paid)... is enough to make me pretty daggone proud to be his mama.
but how to describe the moment you know your child has found his professional calling? pride, of course, excitement for what lies ahead as he pursues it, hoping, expecting, he surely will. but it just feels so much deeper than that. it's your own understanding that what the parent saw way-back-when in the boy, well now the boy finally sees it for himself. and believes it about himself. and that, folks, can be life-changing. for both mothers and their kids.
the fact that he created this little commercial — with many, many helpful hands — and it had nothing do to with his day job seems a minor detail.
'i don't want to take my hobby and make it my work,' he told me when he graduated from college. why ever not? i said then, think now. why would you ever not want to do something you love doing every single day and make money doing it? it would make things so much easier. not that it's not hard work to do the work you love, but the finished product is so much more rewarding when you hang up your shingle at the end of the day if you love what you are doing while the shingle sways in the breeze.
of course, he wasn't listening to me then. maybe not even now. but last night when he came over to break bread with us, i could sense some pride in his own voice at what he'd accomplished.
'they say they want to do another one,' he said to us as he was leaving.
and this mama knows who'll they'll go to for that.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
what i see is a boy — well, to be more accurate hear a boy's voice — as he narrates the story of his life on a typical day at home with his parents and his sister.
i'm in there, standing in the kitchen (thin, who knew?) making a face, not wanting to be on camera, even then.
"there's my mom," he says, "hey mom!" with an excitement i wish i still heard in his voice when he sees me.
his sister mugs, always has, moving around the house to make sure she is in almost every scene. little brother swings the awkward camera — carried on his shoulder, yes it's THAT old — around to his dad who is reading the paper. always.
what i love about this old tape is the boy's voice as he moves around our house recording life as he sees it. he even turns it around on himself, his blue eyes out of focus he's so close to it. what this boy couldn't have done if we'd had iPhones back in the 90s.
 |
| the future director |
but in the end, the boy got the college degree in broadcast, knowing after chemistry and geometry classes in high school that he had to take a different route.
he wanted to be behind the camera, he said, though he had a great distrust of tv news.
only those jobs not in news and behind the camera weren't so easy to find.
when i started my church communications job, i had an idea that we needed a video history of the church, so i set about scanning old photos and taught myself a little bit about iMovie, in hopes that my son could help me smooth out the kinks. i think it was during that project that i learned this mother and son really don't work that well together. when i asked him a question, he would often say: people (meaning him) get college degrees in this, mom. it's not supposed to be easy.
back in june, i tried again, doing all the front work for a video for my parents, hoping he would come in at the end and do his magic. at the time, he was working his regular job in internet marketing and spending nights and weekends helping his high school classmate john on a video project to promote a new app john and his dad had developed. it's a neat game you play to earn points for saving energy — and eventually money on your power bill.
so i knew he was busy. but family trumps, right?
one night in June we sat at the kitchen table, transferring my files to his computer. it was supposed to be seamless, (or so the directions said) but in the end, our two Macs weren't talking well with each other — could have been the people who ran them — and my carefully crafted movie wouldn't transfer to his Final Cut Pro. over the next few days he would work to recreate the story i had spent a month working on myself — i imagine the whole time he was thinking what an idiot his mother is. knows just enough to screw things up but not enough to fix it.
the day we were to present the video, he asked if i'd like to see it. so i sat in his beach house room and watched the story of my parents' life unfolding on the screen, to music he had chosen (i did have a say in it.) and the tears just came right on out of my head. there were a few hiccups only a mother could see, but i loved it, as did my whole family. we watched it over and over in the last days of our time together, marveling at what a 'pro' job he'd done.
and then we all went back to work.
all this time, for months really, my son had been using his off time, at least some of it, on the video project for john. is it ready? can we see it? we would ask. no, soon, he'd say.
soon came last week, in the middle of a crowded lunch spot as i sat with two good friends. i'd been telling them about the video i'd seen the day before on the app's website, a cute stop-action spot starring a couple of graham's friends, and i picked up my phone to show them the work he'd done.
turns out, i had the wrong video, because a new one had popped up, and i saw for the first time what the boy who started out at 7 years old with the camera on his shoulder was actually doing with that college degree. you can watch it here.
as we watched, my friends and i laughed, recognizing faces from my son's high school class, and then, well, i just couldn't stop watching. back at work, i showed it to everyone i saw. my son did this. isn't it good? i had, i hate to admit now, become one of those mothers. the ones who can't shut up about how fabulous their children are and how they are single-handedly saving the world.
i don't really expect my boy to save the world. just change your corner is what i am always telling my kids. the fact that he's a good friend and an honorable person (he even called up the power company to tell them they had credited him for paying a bill he hadn't paid)... is enough to make me pretty daggone proud to be his mama.
but how to describe the moment you know your child has found his professional calling? pride, of course, excitement for what lies ahead as he pursues it, hoping, expecting, he surely will. but it just feels so much deeper than that. it's your own understanding that what the parent saw way-back-when in the boy, well now the boy finally sees it for himself. and believes it about himself. and that, folks, can be life-changing. for both mothers and their kids.
the fact that he created this little commercial — with many, many helpful hands — and it had nothing do to with his day job seems a minor detail.
'i don't want to take my hobby and make it my work,' he told me when he graduated from college. why ever not? i said then, think now. why would you ever not want to do something you love doing every single day and make money doing it? it would make things so much easier. not that it's not hard work to do the work you love, but the finished product is so much more rewarding when you hang up your shingle at the end of the day if you love what you are doing while the shingle sways in the breeze.
of course, he wasn't listening to me then. maybe not even now. but last night when he came over to break bread with us, i could sense some pride in his own voice at what he'd accomplished.
'they say they want to do another one,' he said to us as he was leaving.
and this mama knows who'll they'll go to for that.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
coming around again
i don't remember what year i first saw the movie Heartburn, but i know Meryl Streep singing itsy-bitsy spider to her little boy and the baby she held in the carrier at her chest spoke to me. and Carly Simon singing the words: ... pay the grocer/ Fix the toaster/Kiss the host good-bye/then you break a window/burn the souffle/scream the lullaby... well, that was right where i was at that minute in my life.
small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.
and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.
i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.
like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.
Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.
then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?
certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.
because that was more ladylike than the alternative.
in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life.
there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age?
and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.
maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him.
truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.
ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it.
but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my
dream right there in living color.
never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.
i guess what i have been trying to say in all of this is thank you to Nora, for showing me that even in the middle of living your life with all its bewildering twists and turns there is usually a pretty good story in there somewhere, a story with deep truths about human connection. and even in the sad parts there is always room to laugh at yourself. so thank you. for showing me that there is story in everything. it's just a matter of how close you look. and if you miss it the first time, it will be coming around again soon.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.
and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.
i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.
like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.
like the time tornadoes swept through downtown Atlanta (no, i'll not say like Sherman) and my husband worked for the power company (he was no lineman for the county, but a pr flack) and having been through a tornado myself before i got the baby and the dog in our little hallway and put our tiny tv on a kitchen chair so i could watch the weather. and when the lights went out and the sump pump stopped working and the basement thought about flooding and my husband didn't come home i put the baby to bed and somehow had the best night's sleep i had had in a year. things like that.
Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.
then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?
certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.
because that was more ladylike than the alternative.
in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life.
there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age?
and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.
maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him.
truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.
ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it.
but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my
dream right there in living color.
never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
oh i feel so very happy in my heart
when my kids were little, we used to ride to preschool to the tunes of Sharon, Lois and Bram. we'd turn up the volume and sing along to skinnamarinkydinkydoo, shouting the lyrics at the windows. as soon as the kids were out of the car, i would switch to beach music or top 40, craving a few short hours of semi-adulthood as i ran errands around town.
one morning after drop-off as i drove down a leafy street in Winston-Salem, i realized that instead of hitting the radio button, i kept hitting 'repeat,' so i could keep singing along, alone in the car. never once thought of the radio. the song — and i remember it so clearly — was "there's a little wheel a turning in my heart.... ending with a verse that begins "oh i feel so very happy in my heart, oh i feel so very happy in my heart...."
and i kept singing, even after i'd gotten out of the car to go to the store and come home to make the beds, do the laundry. the words had become a little worm in my head and heart... oh i feel so very happy in my heart. because i did. feel that.
i doesn't matter why, really. i just was. with my happy children on that bright day in that town where all the streets i traveled seemed so beautiful. at the time, there were parts of my life that weren't so happy, but in those few hours, i was not thinking about any of that. i was just feeling very happy in my heart. really.
on sunday morning of this week, i woke well before light and lay there, thinking about that song. that's what i was feeling again, that fullness, the heart so big it feels as if it might just burst open into something like butterflies or a brisk wind or a crashing ocean ...whatever it is that makes your heart feel just like that. a dirt road. a lightning bug. the lap of a grandparent on the back porch. a game of chase. whatever. i felt it. and i had not seen a single ocean sunrise (as is usually my beach week habit), or had the chance to sit alone just watching the surf (also my habit.) but the happy heart was there. in the middle of this very early morning on my last day of our family reunion at the beach.
this, i will tell you, was a surprise. i'd spent the last 9 days with my birth family and their many extensions, and i confess now that on day 1 i imagined that by the time day 9 got here i would feel nothing but relief. family gatherings for me in years past have been somewhat anxiety filled. as the old stories crop up of how much i cried as a child... teen... adult... or how i never stayed at camp always made me feel a bit of an outcast in my put-together family. in the days before we gathered, i found myself with teeth clenched, wondering just when the jokes would rise at my expense and how often i would spend with my head sunk in the pillow crying at the end of the night. (what do they say about self-fulfilling prophecy?)
maybe it was a sign to me when we checked into our rental that there were only three pillows in the whole place, (for 8+ people)— and i had forgotten mine. this time there would be no crying in the pillow.
9 nights with my sister in the house. i have spent no more than a night with her in the past few years, and really mostly just hours. i know now that we buy the same tea bags though not the same toilet paper (close), the same pre-filtered coffee when we go on vacation. the time with her reminded me just how funny she really is, and it is a gift.
watching my brother — sans 30 pounds — play with his one-year-old granddaughter in the surf. and for days, he just kept walking around smiling. another gift.
reading my nephew John's guest blog
walking to the beach with my nephew Jay, talking about his new job
hearing all the good news everyone had to share :)
taking pictures of nephew's Kip's surprise (:!) engagement
getting to know the new girls
shagging with my brother-in-law, nephew and son in the kitchen (stay in the box!)
walking the beach at dusk with my brother and sister-in-law
reading (one good book, though i usually read four on vacation)
having my five-year-old great nephew tell me he didn't want me to leave
watching my parents at a sunset photo session on the sound
walking through the grocery store with my mother as she fingered everything
watching as the whole family gathered to view the video my son made for my parents
listening to the grands and their jokes with each other
meeting my cousin for the first time in many, many years
watching my parents open the pile of cards people sent
lying in the sun with my daughter and rehashing all the stories of the week on our way home
hearing the stories of how much every one of us enjoyed being together
some sun, some rain
laughing, laughing, laughing
tiny spots of quiet to take it all in
my family is not perfect. maybe some who don't know us well think we are. but we have been touched by illness and scandal, by grief and by grace. and we are blessed to have each other and we know it.
my husband no longer has his parents. my sister-in-law has lost both of hers. my brother-in-law's mother is living, but he lost his dad years ago.
and the hug was tight.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
Save the last dance
They met in the hallways of Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem in the fall of 1951. Not long after, the skinny young man in the white coat asked the wavy-haired Florida girl if she would like to go to a med school dance with him.
Two weeks later, he asked her a bigger question: Will you marry me? And on June 14 the next year, she did.
And the day after that? He graduated from Bowman Gray School of Medicine. All the family was coming anyway, so what better time to get married than the day before you become a doctor?
My mother often said Daddy didn't want to go to Louisville (the location of his internship) alone. So she went with him, and two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, my brother joined them in their little apartment with the Murphy bed in the wall.
In those early years, the young Byrums would not often be together. Mama moved with my brother to live with my grandparents, whom she had really only met a couple of times. Daddy joined the Navy, spending his days in the cramped infirmary of a destroyer, tending to the medical needs of other young men his age. He has a certificate from that time that says he crossed the Arctic Circle.
When he came home, they moved to Newport, Rhode Island, then back with my grandparents. Daddy left again, and while they were living apart, my sister was born.
When my father left the Navy, they looked around for a place to settle down and found a spot just an hour from my grandparents. Within a year, they had a house and another baby, me, Daddy tending to the needs of patients who would come to him for the rest of his career —almost 50 years.
I wrote about them last year here. Little has changed except they are moving a little slower, but I marvel at the fact that my parents continue to grow closer today as each day passes.
This week we have gathered — 23 of us —to celebrate the fact of them and their 60 years together, and that what seems to us to have been a hasty decision back in 1951 has turned into a pretty remarkable life.
Each day someone new has arrived to join our celebration. Grandchildren. Spouses. Great-grands. Earlier in the week, we even gathered in a nearby gazebo to toast the newest union-to-be, all of us weeping after my nephew proposed to his girlfriend. What a joyful moment for us all.
Mama has enjoyed sharing the story of how she met my dad with each new face. Daddy checks his watch and asks who is coming next. By this afternoon, we will all be in place, and we have a few special things planned for them to mark this day in our family history.
Last night, Daddy stood before supper and thanked us all for coming, and for being who we are. He said he was proud how we are living our lives, and though he and my mother could not take credit, they would like to.
Well.
Happy Anniversary B&Pop B. May the dance continue.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
guest blog — runs in the family
today writemuch has its first guest blogger! john mccormick jenkins, my sister's youngest son, is a bit of a writer himself, though he claims not to have written since college. when he asked me what he should write about, i suggested he tell you about our week with all the FAM. i've enjoyed my few days with him before my own kids joined us for our first family beach week in many years. everybody loves john, especially me. we are like spirits. both of us spent the first few months of life crying (though he outgrew it way before i did), and i see bits of myself in him in how he looks at the world. i am honored that he wanted to post on my blog. enjoy! sbr
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The last beach trip I can remember was one of the many times I was jealous of my brother. I believe my mom, sister and I had driven to the Outer Banks to meet our family for the annual Byrum Family Reunion. My brother and Dad, on the other hand were driving from Iforgetwhere, hot off one of my brother’s AAU baseball national tournaments. I can't remember if I was jealous i didn't get to commute with the guys, or if it was the actual baseball tournament my brother got to compete in. Most likely, it was that my dad had bought the Cool Runnings soundtrack on cassette tape, and I was imagining them listening the whole drive without me.
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| john mccormick jenkins with betty jean mcormick byrum |
I actually carried some sort of envy for everyone I saw on our regular beach get togethers. I was jealous of my cousins Kip and Kendall for always seeming to have it all together, and I was jealous of my cousin Sam for making not having it together look so fun. I was jealous of my sister Hooks and cousin Meredith for knowing how to make everything fun, and of my brother Jay for just knowing everything. And finally, I was jealous of my cousin Graham, the closest to my age, for not really caring about what our definitely judging (but loving) family thinks about his every move.
This year, we are back together again, for the first family beach trip in a long time and though much has changed, a lot is still the same. There are a lot of similarities between the 8-year-old me and current-day me. Eight-year-old John could make the most of a rainy day by dressing like a robot, pirate, or whatever he felt that day. Yesterday, I must have felt like a rock and roll star. My cousin Sam and I jammed out on our guitars and gave a G-rated performance for our whole family. I think it went well.
A major difference is all of that envy is now transformed into admiration and pride. I am proud of my cousin Kip for still being well put together, this time with an MD behind his name. I am proud of my cousins Kendall and Sam for being amazing parents to their beautiful children. My sister makes just spending time with her in conversation fun. My brother still knows everything, but I am thankful now he shares his knowledge with me, and we can have pretty funny conversations instead of pretty brutal arguments. My cousin Meredith still bring fun to any day. She arrived today, but I wished she had been here to liven up our rainy day blues yesterday. And again last, my brother-in-age Graham. He does not always express it, but the guy can find humor in anything. Things that rile me up, he just shrugs off. I guess I am still a little jealous of some things.
I could have saved you all a lot of time. Instead of listing all of my cousin’s best attributes, I think I could have just described the reason we are all here. My grandparent’s, B and Pop B will be married 60 years tomorrow. They have a lot more than the characteristics I just listed that not only make them the best grandparents I could ever ask for, but they make all eight of us who we are. I look at Kendall, with her hands on her hips just watching
her daughter LG crawl around and imagine B watching any of her children that very same way. I see Pop B’s thoughtfulness in the proposal my cousin Kip made to his (now fiance) Mad Dog. I also see Pop B’s knowledge mixed with B’s ability of persuasion in Jay. B’s ability to just get stuff done is evident in my sister, who just now interrupted this blogging session to wrangle me to carry the groceries upstairs because they needed to be put away RIGHT NOW. Graham has Pop B’s subtle sense of humor that can infect the whole room with a glance or just a word. When I saw B giggling on the couch during our performance last night, I imagined Meredith wiping the tears from her eyes from a laugh attack. Sam demands the attention of the room without even trying, much like B can do, whether to tell a joke or hold a conversation —when either of them open their mouths, everyone wants to listen.
This year, we are back together again, for the first family beach trip in a long time and though much has changed, a lot is still the same. There are a lot of similarities between the 8-year-old me and current-day me. Eight-year-old John could make the most of a rainy day by dressing like a robot, pirate, or whatever he felt that day. Yesterday, I must have felt like a rock and roll star. My cousin Sam and I jammed out on our guitars and gave a G-rated performance for our whole family. I think it went well.
A major difference is all of that envy is now transformed into admiration and pride. I am proud of my cousin Kip for still being well put together, this time with an MD behind his name. I am proud of my cousins Kendall and Sam for being amazing parents to their beautiful children. My sister makes just spending time with her in conversation fun. My brother still knows everything, but I am thankful now he shares his knowledge with me, and we can have pretty funny conversations instead of pretty brutal arguments. My cousin Meredith still bring fun to any day. She arrived today, but I wished she had been here to liven up our rainy day blues yesterday. And again last, my brother-in-age Graham. He does not always express it, but the guy can find humor in anything. Things that rile me up, he just shrugs off. I guess I am still a little jealous of some things.
I could have saved you all a lot of time. Instead of listing all of my cousin’s best attributes, I think I could have just described the reason we are all here. My grandparent’s, B and Pop B will be married 60 years tomorrow. They have a lot more than the characteristics I just listed that not only make them the best grandparents I could ever ask for, but they make all eight of us who we are. I look at Kendall, with her hands on her hips just watching
her daughter LG crawl around and imagine B watching any of her children that very same way. I see Pop B’s thoughtfulness in the proposal my cousin Kip made to his (now fiance) Mad Dog. I also see Pop B’s knowledge mixed with B’s ability of persuasion in Jay. B’s ability to just get stuff done is evident in my sister, who just now interrupted this blogging session to wrangle me to carry the groceries upstairs because they needed to be put away RIGHT NOW. Graham has Pop B’s subtle sense of humor that can infect the whole room with a glance or just a word. When I saw B giggling on the couch during our performance last night, I imagined Meredith wiping the tears from her eyes from a laugh attack. Sam demands the attention of the room without even trying, much like B can do, whether to tell a joke or hold a conversation —when either of them open their mouths, everyone wants to listen.
Along with all of these things, B and Pop B do hold one thing I am an odd mixture of proud/envious about: the secret of finding the one you love and holding on to them the same way on Day One as Day 21,900.
Thanks B and Pop B for always being a great example for your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Any of us will be lucky to live a life even a little similar to y'alls.
Thanks B and Pop B for always being a great example for your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Any of us will be lucky to live a life even a little similar to y'alls.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
the glory and the power of it
my grandfather sold cars for over 50 years but he didn't believe in power windows. they would break too easily, he was sure, so i'm pretty sure as long as he was selling my parents cars, the windows had to be cranked down by hand. imagine.
one summer night when i was 9 or so, Mary Wallace, my friend Lydia's mother, drove up in the driveway to show us her new car. and oldsmobile. plush seats, FM radio (Bigdaddy didn't believe in that either,) and windows that moved up and down as if by magic.
'let's go for a ride!' she said giggling, her eyes as wide as her grin. we piled in and off we went, no doubt rolling the windows down and up in the summer air so much so that they might have broken. but they didn't.
Lydia's mother was fun like that. giggling at us girls as we made onion soup on her front porch from wild onions that grew in the yard, played dress up in her shoes. (we piled the onions in a tin bucket along with dirt and water and left our concoction on the front porch — which nobody ever used — to rot in the spring sun.) giggled as we created beauty parlors on her side porch, ate Oreos in her kitchen (no more than two.) crafted barbie doll houses with wall-to-wall carpet, new in the 70s don't you know, from scraps scavenged from her new house. the only thing that would warrant her ire was if we woke the baby. and there were always babies in the house.
birthdays at her house might mean traveling 40 miles to be on television... Lydia's birthday is in November, and so backyard parties like the rest of us had in summer were out of the question. in my memory, we rode across the miles for what felt like a day, then we marched behind WITN-Y the Marching Hobo, watching ourselves on the black and white screen, LIVE. now THAT was a party.
in first grade, she visited our classroom toting a harpsichord, then sat down with it in her lap and made music, playing the songs from our music book. whose mother could do that? i can see her fingers now, picking out the songs, her voice taking on the words like a bird singing on the clearest of days. the very idea that mothers could be something other than mothers changed me. i didn't imagine that as work, but joy.
she called me su-su. i don't cotton to nicknames, but this one made me feel as if i were part of her brood. she sang at my wedding, my favorite hymn. "Lord of all hopefulness, lord of all calm, whose trust ever childlike, whose presence is balm..."
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| betty jean, left, with mary wallace |
i remember standing there at the chancel steps as she sang the words i had so often sung to myself in the dark when i felt alone. in her voice, the words were balm to a nervous bride. she had known me all my life, and here she was, singing at my wedding. calming me, just because she was there.
Mary Wallace sang for countless brides, including her own daughter... and it was always an event. not to mention funerals— sending her husband off to heaven with a personal rendition of the Lord's Prayer.
she wrote me letters as i grew older, when i wrote stories she liked, and i still have one or two notes i cherish. she was proud of me, of who i had become. i could recognize her handwriting as if it were my own mother's.
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| mary wallace, left, sending sparkles |
three years ago, she came to my daughter's wedding. fitting, since my child had been in her daughter's wedding some years before. she stayed to the end, lighting sparklers and cheering the newlyweds on. i could not have had this special day without her. there Lydia is, too, in the checked dress in the picture there,
celebrating with her mother as we sent the Pea off with her Prince.
a couple of years ago i came home one day to a message on my answering machine. 'don't you call me back,' she said, but don't you dare take me off your Christmas card list!' (we routinely lampoon the standard holiday newsletter, and she loved the humor of it, knowing about my family, keeping up.) and i have kept her on my list, still.
this year, i won't get to. she died on Friday, and yesterday, we said goodbye.
if funerals can be great, this was. favorite hymns, stories that made everyone laugh and cry a little, and in the end, her own voice. the voice that celebrated and soothed so many, did all this and more for all of us gathered, once again to grieve for her. there she was, singing the Lord's Prayer, all the glory and the power of it, forever. and we were all blessed by it.
Lydia is not the crier i am. get up and get going, she would often say to me when i faltered. but yesterday, i had the chance to hold her up a little. after the service she looked at me with red eyes and said: "Mama would probably be upset with me, but i had to hear her voice in church one last time."
upset? i doubt it. just filled with joy to have a few last words for her brood.
Lydia is not the crier i am. get up and get going, she would often say to me when i faltered. but yesterday, i had the chance to hold her up a little. after the service she looked at me with red eyes and said: "Mama would probably be upset with me, but i had to hear her voice in church one last time."
upset? i doubt it. just filled with joy to have a few last words for her brood.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
three is good company
i'm a doctor's daughter, and that fact has always been a part of my identity. like blue-eyed, good with words, left-handed, i can't imagine who i might be if i had not grown up as doctor's daughter. hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night, watching my father come in before breakfast with pajama edges hanging out of his coat.
other fathers i knew ran farms, invented things. my father fixed things, but without tools holstered around his waist.
i loved the smell of his bag when i was a child, the sound it made when he opened it, like something important was in there. i used to pull his stethoscope out and put it into my ears to see what his world sounded like. i loved to hit my knee with his reflex hammer, to look at his prescription pad, his name printed out in neat letters, even watching as he wrote that name in letters i could not recognize at all.
other fathers i knew ran farms, invented things. my father fixed things, but without tools holstered around his waist.
i loved the smell of his bag when i was a child, the sound it made when he opened it, like something important was in there. i used to pull his stethoscope out and put it into my ears to see what his world sounded like. i loved to hit my knee with his reflex hammer, to look at his prescription pad, his name printed out in neat letters, even watching as he wrote that name in letters i could not recognize at all.
i don't remember when i learned just what his being a doctor meant. somehow, though, i knew my father was a healer, someone with the smarts to understand the human body transparencies in the World Book Encyclopedia — all those red and purple lines connecting sinew and bone — and he used his smarts to make sick people well again. most of the time.
in all my wonderings about what his life was like, i never remember wanting to be a doctor. for all the hero qualities my father had in my eyes, i did understand as i grew older that doctoring folks was not a pretty business. even the brand new babies lined up in the hospital nursery came into the world in a flurry of blood and gore and pain, and helping people through all that, even when the outcome was sparkling, was just not for me.
but for my brother, it took. and so he became a doctor, too, attending the same undergrad university as my dad, the same medical school. and he has the same name.
when my brother first became a doctor, i couldn't imagine it. how could he, the same brother who sang Beatles tunes when he was alone, whose favorite past time was to lie on the couch and order my sister and me around have what it took to become someone like my father? someone who listened. who knew what to do. but in 32 years of watching him from afar, i have come to understand that he, too, has that gift.
29 years ago, my brother had his first son. he named him for my dad, and i wondered then what he would grow up to be. he grew tall and smart like his grandfather and father before him, and before i knew it, there he was entering their alma mater.
on monday of this week, grandson graduated from the same medical school as grandfather — 60 years apart. and i got to be there, with my father (class of '52), my brother ('8O). what joy.
i sat behind my family during the hooding, when grandson Kip would step over the line from student to doctor. i captured pictures like i always do. near the end of the ceremony, a woman, a doc from the class of '62 stood and asked the newest docs to stand and say the physician's oath. and then she invited every doc in the chapel to recite it with them.
my brother stood. and then my father. and one by one, doctors of all ages and genders stood with them, reciting the words with the newest doctor in my family, and his fellow MDs.
"I will, under all circumstances, use my knowledge in the service of humanity," they said."These promises I make freely, and upon my honor."
upon my honor.
i watched my brother, wondering if he thought, as i did, that he might not have made it to this day if not for doctors who had saved his life in january. (he is 100 percent fine today and looks 10 years younger than when i last saw him in the hospital.) i looked at my father, his 6'2" frame stooping a bit, marveling at how much his life has mattered to the people he served. knew my nephew — whom i could not see in the mass of black and green and gold — had just joined what i think of as my dream team.
in no time i was weeping, thinking of all the times my daddy healed me, with a stitch (once) or a Band-aid (lots), with a word or a touch (too many to count). these are the same tools he used on his patients every day as he healed them with prescriptions, Penicillin and plaster casts, and in truth, he'd tell you that sometimes those hidden tools were all he ever needed to do his job well.
i wiped my eyes, thinking of my brother, whose patients — sprinkled in small towns all over eastern N.C. — often don't ever recover from the condition he treats. thinking of my nephew, and how if he is half the doctor his grandfather and father are, he'll be a pretty damn good one in my book.
some people might talk about how much doctors make in a year, how that's their only consideration — the money. but i know, even though i am no doctor, a little bit about what my family of doctors has been called to do. and how much they make is not the most important factor.
on my honor.
on my honor.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
hey y'all
the wine and beer are in the outside fridge, cooling down. the husband is in the yard, putting some touch-up on the lamp post. the vacuum is in the middle of the family room floor, and sheets we took off the bed two hours ago are gently tossing in the dryer. the dog sleeps pretty close to my feet.
the pioneer woman is talking to her viewer (me) about how easy it is to make her family's favorite pot roast and blueberry cobbler while homeschooling and driving her suburban across the wide plain toward the lodge she and her marlboro man renovated. i stop my party prep because she was cooking in one pretty kitchen and after the commercial break is taking steaks out to grill in another, more rustic spot and i just can't for the life of me believe she keeps up two houses. but apparently she does.
i can barely keep one, so it's a good thing nobody saw fit to give me two.
and so the next thing i know i'm exploring her blog and click on the link that says 10 things i learned about blogging. so i go there and the number two thing is blog often, which tells me that not only do i not have two houses, but i don't write in this space nearly enough, nor do i thank you wonderful folks for coming back to see if i have taken the time to say hey.
so hey. and thank you. i have no idea how many people read what's here or if it's just my mother coming back every day for 40 times but somebody is. and i thank you. my purple room friend said to me the other day that her husband said: we haven't heard anything from writemuch lately, and she hears me talk in person every day ad nauseum no doubt.
maybe i have been waiting until i felt i had something to say and i haven't thought i did. believe me, husband out there would disagree mightily with that statement.
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| just an ordinary saturday |
so as the dog sleeps and the laundry tumbles — which is pretty much every day at my house — i wanted to take a minute to tell you that my hydrangeas are about to bloom and one of my oak trees has something called slime flux which is exactly what it sounds like and there is no cure. and that though i don't have bluebirds for some strange reason this year, i do have two families of cardinals and at least two baltimore orioles and even a couple of rabbits. it all reminds me of the Paul McCartney song, "just another day." because that's what it is, just another day, and i am thankful for it.
this morning mothers i know are cheering as their children walk across the stage to accept diplomas. they are helping daughters set up rooms in new apartments in new cities for new jobs. they are getting ready to celebrate their first Mother's Days as grandmothers. they are missing mothers long gone and giving mothers still here the daily dose of whatever they need. and one of them is coming to my house in a few hours to toast her middle daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law as their family expands. just another day.
and a moment to say hey. and thank you. really, y'all.for reading and letting me know when you like what you find here. and to the PW, for the nudge to fill the blank space with what's on my mind on this saturday morning as i watch the world stretch.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
working girls
when my daughter was in middle school, i read an article about Take Your Daughter To Work Day. it had begun a few years earlier as a way to encourage girls to think about careers outside the home. i was a stay-at-home mom who had only recently found a way to be both mom and writer, staying at home and working mornings — a dream job, though not very well paid.
the idea intrigued me, showing her that what i did while she was gone was more than put order to my laundry closet. but my daughter had been witness to my work since she was four and she and her brother tangled themselves in the phone cord while i was conducting an interview on one of my first real freelance jobs. (i lost the call and had to call back, apologetic to my interview subject, who i was sure had never worked with toddlers in the house.) i thought scheduling the interview during Sesame Street meant i was safe for an hour. but i hadn't factored in a mid-episode need for peanut butter nabs.
as my daughter grew, i worked many freelance days, and when she came in from school, she found me sitting in front of the computer, typing away. or on the phone. though i tried to complete my work day before my children's school day ended, scheduling interviews while they worked away at math or language arts, fitting in volunteer times at their school.
when i read the story about taking her to work, i felt pulled to actually prove to her that i was a working writer. every day. what did that mean anyway? it's something i have long tried to prove whenever anyone says: are you still writing? of course i am. would you ask a doctor if she's still doctoring or an attorney if she's still lawyering, even if they don't make the news?
i didn't think so. but how to get my child to see what i do, and why?
i didn't think so. but how to get my child to see what i do, and why?
well, i had a story i wanted to write. (which i always seem to) a story worth publication,(aren't they all?) but i had to have a place to put it. (and therin lies the problem for the freelancer)... and i needed an editor who would bite.
this was 1997. if we had internet and email, it was infantile. so i actually picked up the phone.. i know, can you imagine it?.. and called the editor who had published my first freelance essay — my heart bracing for rejection — asking if i could set up an appointment with him to talk about a story i wanted to write. be kind to me, i said. my daughter will be coming along.
he said sure, and as i remember it, he was kind. with my child at my side, i spoke to him about my father, a soon-to-be retiring family physician who was the last of his kind. it was the story i'd wanted to write all my life. if i were successful, i would weave the family story into the universal one about his being the last of a generation. i had, as a college student, worked with my father, every day during one summer. my sister worked with him to. my brother had become a doctor because of him. so it would be a good story.
i remember my throat closing around my voice, so scared i was that i would miss this moment — not just to 'sell' the story to the editor (oh, how i still hate to sell a story), but to prove to this child who sat beside me that her mother could do more than bake a pretty good yeast roll, keep a fairly clean bathroom and read a good bedtime story. all that was part of raising her, yes, but i wanted her to know she could do this, and more.
two months later, the story ran. (under a different editor, but still.)
it was my first real story in print in years, in a newspaper i where i had longed to find my byline. and though getting it there is another post, i think my
daughter got something good from the work day with her mom.
that story led to another one, which led to a book, which led to an however brief personal essay column in that very same newspaper, where i was able to tell a few stories about my children, find a few readers. and another book.
that story led to another one, which led to a book, which led to an however brief personal essay column in that very same newspaper, where i was able to tell a few stories about my children, find a few readers. and another book.
though there hasn't been another book in quite some time, i'm still at it. working at writing. trying to get it right.
this week is take your child to work week. now it includes sons and fathers and grandparents and foster parents and my, what a good thing this is.
this week is take your child to work week. now it includes sons and fathers and grandparents and foster parents and my, what a good thing this is.
the real day is thursday, but my daughter happened to be home today from far away. so together, this morning, we got our coffee (and our diet coke) and i drove us to work.
and i set her up in a quiet room so she could pitch her own stories. and sit in on conference calls. while i did my own work just down the hall. and just because she was there i worked a little harder, a little bit better. i'm sure of it.
and i set her up in a quiet room so she could pitch her own stories. and sit in on conference calls. while i did my own work just down the hall. and just because she was there i worked a little harder, a little bit better. i'm sure of it.
we took a lunch break and met her brother, who used to join me in my home office after school and spill his day. who when i taught writing at his high school some years ago, had to endure his mom not only work with him but with all of his friends. so i guess i took both of them to work with me, one way or another.
my son tweeted our 'family luncheon' at one of his favorite downtown eat spots. together we talked politics and family and work and life, and as i sat with these two now very professional and of course to me remarkable young people, i could not help but think that despite the many times i failed them as their mother, thanks be to God i did something right.
when i asked today, my daughter admitted that she doesn't remember the day i took her down to the newspaper, and though that day matters to me, still, it really doesn't matter that she doesn't remember. she saw me work. and she knows how she and her brother were entangled in my work as they were my life, and in so many ways, i can't tell the difference between the two. though they are grown, my children still are entangled in all that i do, as we all move into this new stage — they my adult children, me as mom, remembering — and prodding — them onto their own first and future stories.
take a child to work. your own child. a grandchild if he or she is near. or somebody else's child. it really doesn't matter. show them who you are. what you do. why your work in the world matters. it will be good for you both.
and have some peanut butter nabs handy, if for a moment they get all tangled up in it.
take a child to work. your own child. a grandchild if he or she is near. or somebody else's child. it really doesn't matter. show them who you are. what you do. why your work in the world matters. it will be good for you both.
and have some peanut butter nabs handy, if for a moment they get all tangled up in it.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
choose happy
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| joey seawell photography |
dress, its skirt fanning out just like she had dreamed. check. photographers hovering, check. band waiting to warm up their horns. check. check. check.
she would be marrying within the hour. what to say to my child, on her way toward a new world with a husband? what a word. husband. in my mind she was still that baby who studied the lights of the hospital hallway on her way out of delivery. and in an hour she would have a husband?
i had written a note, taking time before daybreak to gather the words, mark them down for her because i would surely forget in the blur of ceremony, photos, party to come.
but what did i know about marriage, really? in the 27 years of my own to her father, i had only rarely felt like i knew what to do.
should i say:
• stay when you don't feel like it, when you are worn to the nub from anger, sadness, worry and fear?
• love when you may not get it back in the way you imagine? but look for it in the way it arrives?
• be kind? truthful? fair? had i been those things to the man who gave this jewel of a child to me?
• that it's hard work to make your life with someone, but so full of joy on those days when you both get it right? good work, worth the struggle, because of all those times you have stayed and stayed some more, worrying back through any pain to the joy you had in the first place, like the joy we both felt on a day such as this one? worth all of it.
in the minutes before we slipped the dress over her head, i handed her the note, hugged her, then took a step back, taking in every piece of my first born, thinking of that first hour of our holding together so many years ago, when i promised her just such a day as i imagined this wedding day to be.
she glowed, her brown eyes — just like her father's — hiding nothing of her joy.
choose happy, i imagine i said, though in truth i can't remember anything about it. just the color and glint of her eyes, the beauty of what lay beneath them, knowing that staying when i didn't feel like it meant here she was, standing next to me, listening to my words. i tried very, very hard not to cry.
after, when i walked into the church with my son on my arm, calm covered me like a blanket. i sat in the front row pew holding my own father's hand, thinking of that day so long ago when i let it go and clenched it with another, knowing even as my child was taking her husband's hand, i was still learning how to get it right.
choose happy. so easy to say, just two words. not so easy to do sometimes, but every single day you get the chance.
today marks three years since that happy day, and i can say for sure that my child did choose happy. and i have learned much from her and her choose happy husband, as they have made that happy life together in two small rooms.
cheers to three years, to my Pea and her Prince! may i keep learning how to choose happy from both of you.
ooxx
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
pick a little talk a little
my father was a busy man when i was growing up. one of only three doctors in my hometown, he was up and out early, and though he most always was home for supper, often in the middle of it, the phone would ring, or people would show up at the back door, and he was gone again.
i'm child #3, so my alone time with him was limited when i was little. i remember a walk in the woods one day (with my brother and sister), i think because my brother was working on a merit badge. and a day when he pitched the softball to me so i would not embarrass myself during recess. (it didn't work.)
but one of the many things Daddy shared with me in those times when he was home was a love for banjo music. i remember watching arthur smith and hee haw, porter wagoner and other shows, watching Daddy tap his size 13 foot against the ottoman as we clapped along.
and he loved Earl Scruggs. somehow back then i felt like Earl and Lester Flatt were neighbors, they came so often into our family room. i'd watch as fingers flew coaxing music with the strings and it was pure joy.
Daddy had a banjo, too, and every now and then he and i would sneak away into the living room while my siblings were bent over homework, and i would sit beside him on the dressed up sofa and he would play for me. i'd watch as his own nimble fingers plucked the stiff wire strings until Bill Bailey filled up the whole room. joy again, to have Daddy all to myself, for him to be singing just to me.
my kindergarten class had a play when i was five. it had something to do with Valentine's Day, and i played the role of "a girl." in the picture (which I will find somewhere and post i hope), i stand next do a boy wearing a cowboy hat and a sly grin as big as the waxing moon. i don't remember a thing about the play except that i had to stand next to the boy, and that he sang the theme song to the Beverly Hillbillies because he told our teacher, Lottie Smith Welch, that Earl Scruggs was his cousin.
this morning when i learned that the sweet man who used to visit with us often and play his five-fingered magic had died, i remembered that boy, and my Daddy playing for me, and how much banjo music meant to me once upon a time.
wouldn't you know that the brother of that boy is a facebook acquaintance? so the news hound in me couldn't resist asking if the story was true.
not true, exactly, he wrote to me. but his uncle played in a band with the legendary banjo picker Earl when they performed live for the radio. and wouldn't you know? he and his brother, along about the time of our kindergarten play, sometimes sat on the stage with Earl and Lester when they performed. so to a five-year-old, of course that means you're kin.
i've thought a lot about my banjo memories today and have even played a little Foggy Mountain Breakdown as i worked. i wish Daddy would play for me again, but the banjo is long gone i think.
if we could all coax our gifts out and into the world like the unassuming Earl, and even Daddy from time to time, what a wonderful world it would be.
-+-+-+
steve martin wrote this wonderful story about Earl for the New Yorker in january.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
i'm child #3, so my alone time with him was limited when i was little. i remember a walk in the woods one day (with my brother and sister), i think because my brother was working on a merit badge. and a day when he pitched the softball to me so i would not embarrass myself during recess. (it didn't work.)
but one of the many things Daddy shared with me in those times when he was home was a love for banjo music. i remember watching arthur smith and hee haw, porter wagoner and other shows, watching Daddy tap his size 13 foot against the ottoman as we clapped along.
Daddy had a banjo, too, and every now and then he and i would sneak away into the living room while my siblings were bent over homework, and i would sit beside him on the dressed up sofa and he would play for me. i'd watch as his own nimble fingers plucked the stiff wire strings until Bill Bailey filled up the whole room. joy again, to have Daddy all to myself, for him to be singing just to me.
my kindergarten class had a play when i was five. it had something to do with Valentine's Day, and i played the role of "a girl." in the picture (which I will find somewhere and post i hope), i stand next do a boy wearing a cowboy hat and a sly grin as big as the waxing moon. i don't remember a thing about the play except that i had to stand next to the boy, and that he sang the theme song to the Beverly Hillbillies because he told our teacher, Lottie Smith Welch, that Earl Scruggs was his cousin.
this morning when i learned that the sweet man who used to visit with us often and play his five-fingered magic had died, i remembered that boy, and my Daddy playing for me, and how much banjo music meant to me once upon a time.
wouldn't you know that the brother of that boy is a facebook acquaintance? so the news hound in me couldn't resist asking if the story was true.
not true, exactly, he wrote to me. but his uncle played in a band with the legendary banjo picker Earl when they performed live for the radio. and wouldn't you know? he and his brother, along about the time of our kindergarten play, sometimes sat on the stage with Earl and Lester when they performed. so to a five-year-old, of course that means you're kin.
i've thought a lot about my banjo memories today and have even played a little Foggy Mountain Breakdown as i worked. i wish Daddy would play for me again, but the banjo is long gone i think.
if we could all coax our gifts out and into the world like the unassuming Earl, and even Daddy from time to time, what a wonderful world it would be.
-+-+-+
steve martin wrote this wonderful story about Earl for the New Yorker in january.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
sooze in the city — or old hat, new hat, pretty little blue hat
just as my plane circled manhattan island, i thought of the first time i'd seen it, not quite this view, but far enough away to see the beauty in all that concrete and steel scraping at the clouds. back then, as a child, i wanted SO MUCH to get a closer view. to walk through the manufactured canyons, looking up and around. my thoughts on saturday of this week weren't so different, because this time i knew there was a piece of me already down there, just west of the edge of central park. my own blood and bone shaping the jawline of a beautiful girl who herself might just be watching the skies at that moment, waiting for me.
it feels a little old hat by now, these occasional trips into 'the city' to see my child. each year in the past six i have made the trip alone, with friends and family, wandering those canyons with her, seeing the city through her eyes. though we made a few mother/daughter trips together years ago, now — as she predicted what feels like so many years ago — this place to her is home.
she's lived in more than a few places in her years of working in nyc. last fall my Pea and her Prince, moved into the 10th floor of a pre-war brownstone on a busy thoroughfare on the upper west side. after a half-dozen visits to this side of town, i've grown familiar with the neighborhood, the weekend market by the Museum of Natural History, with Harry's Shoes, and what on every corner seems to sit a storied Italian eatery. (on this visit, we ate at two), but it was my first trip to this apartment. i'd seen pictures, so i knew that after almost three years of marriage, my favorite couple was finally beginning to make a home.
you remember that, right? how without even realizing it, you found yourself replacing the tiny, temporary breakfast table with a good wood one? how you hung curtains in the windows — mine where hand-me-down from my aunt, though the Pea's are new. how you arranged your books in a creative tower on the floor just like in the magazines you now browse (well, the 2012 version is Pinterest) and made neat stacks of your wedding gift dishes in cabinets lined with shelf paper, and hung monogrammed towels in the bathroom because your mother was coming to visit and you know how much she loves pretty, clean towels. and how you brought in fresh flowers for the mantel — green and blue hyacinths, which were your wedding flowers — because she loves those, too. and how you carried around fabric swatches in your purse because you never knew when you might run across a chair or a rug or a print for the wall that just might work with that window treatment. how you and your husband wandered through flea markets on weekends and found just the thing to hold all your good dishes in the back of a barn where nobody else had cared to look. that kind of thing.
she is doing all that. has started to make her home, finally, in this sweet space where in the night, as she nods off to sleep she imagines who might have inhabited these rooms before her, in the 100 years since this brownstone was built.
that is a gift of New York. that you live in three small rooms once occupied by those you can only imagine: the painter, the priest. the actress, the writer. the working mother at the end of her rope. the grandmother, the accountant. who knows what hats hung once in the little hallway where now maps of the places they love grace the walls? did someone like Peggy of Mad Men once live here, hopeful of what was to become?
but for now, the young woman who works in pr and the love of her life, who makes her laugh and loves her brother like his own... and the elegant Miss Bailey dog who sidles up to her grandsooze (who loves this, so very much) add their own history to this place.
when last i left her, my Princess Pea hadn't started all this, the collecting of the things that will one day find their way into other houses in her life with her Prince. their lives seemed temporary, disposable, like they were just biding time until the right thing came along. (the love seat i bought new for her first apartment found its way, somehow, into the place across the hall when they moved from there. a wicker chair that once sat in my sunroom for some reason met the curb, though she has kept the little desk that once belonged to my aunt, and another Santa brought her when she was 10.)
the right thing, for now, seems to be present in this house. and though it is just really three rooms, it is their house.
her father and i started our married life in two rooms. beautiful rooms, with hardwood floors and two fireplaces, a brand new kitchen and windows taller than i am. three weeks later we left them for other rooms, then our first house, houses where we began to do what my Pea is doing.
surely you remember that.
while i was in the city, the Prince stretched out on his new leather throne and in between ACC tournament games read highlights of the history of the neighborhood. later as we walked to dinner (at the first Italian place on the corner), he pointed out the gargoyle guarding their building just outside their living room window and the brownstones across the street that were the first ones to be built.
Matt Damon lives on their street somewhere, as does Robert Duvall. (way down toward the Hudson). Mary Tyler Moore used to. And so did Sara Jessica Parker (who shared an apartment with Robert Downey Jr.) Might it have been this one?
on Sunday, we walked just up the block toward Central Park to a little gallery to see a collection of hats on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. the Bard Graduate Center for the past couple of months has been home to Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones. (through April 15)
i've never been much of a hat wearer, but i love the idea. my mother wore them every Sunday when i was a child, and i often wished i would grow up to be as elegant as she was in her hats.
we were alone in the gallery, which itself sits in a refashioned brownstone, so we wandered through the collection, wondering what kind of heads had once worn such beautiful toppers. the Queen mother. FDR. Babe Ruth. Mick Jagger. and dozens of nameless heads as ordinary as a schoolgirl in a straw bonnet and as jocular as a jester, perhaps in King Henry's court. a bowler woven from the NYTimes. a cloche worn by Gypsy Rose Lee. but my favorite was a small brimmed hat made entirely of feathers, which reminded me of one my mother used to wear, arranged to resemble a painter's palette.
later, as we wandered the flea market in search of rugs and kitchen table chairs, we tried on netted fascinators just for fun.
early monday, as my Pea stood on the corner trying to flag a cab for me before the sun was quite up, i wondered if we'd leave each other this time just as we had so many others — in tears. the cab pulled up, and she opened the door, then hugged me tight, but when i looked into those giant brown eyes, they only glistened with happy.
and as i rode away from her, for the first time in a long, long time, it felt good to be wearing this particular new hat.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
she's lived in more than a few places in her years of working in nyc. last fall my Pea and her Prince, moved into the 10th floor of a pre-war brownstone on a busy thoroughfare on the upper west side. after a half-dozen visits to this side of town, i've grown familiar with the neighborhood, the weekend market by the Museum of Natural History, with Harry's Shoes, and what on every corner seems to sit a storied Italian eatery. (on this visit, we ate at two), but it was my first trip to this apartment. i'd seen pictures, so i knew that after almost three years of marriage, my favorite couple was finally beginning to make a home.
you remember that, right? how without even realizing it, you found yourself replacing the tiny, temporary breakfast table with a good wood one? how you hung curtains in the windows — mine where hand-me-down from my aunt, though the Pea's are new. how you arranged your books in a creative tower on the floor just like in the magazines you now browse (well, the 2012 version is Pinterest) and made neat stacks of your wedding gift dishes in cabinets lined with shelf paper, and hung monogrammed towels in the bathroom because your mother was coming to visit and you know how much she loves pretty, clean towels. and how you brought in fresh flowers for the mantel — green and blue hyacinths, which were your wedding flowers — because she loves those, too. and how you carried around fabric swatches in your purse because you never knew when you might run across a chair or a rug or a print for the wall that just might work with that window treatment. how you and your husband wandered through flea markets on weekends and found just the thing to hold all your good dishes in the back of a barn where nobody else had cared to look. that kind of thing.
she is doing all that. has started to make her home, finally, in this sweet space where in the night, as she nods off to sleep she imagines who might have inhabited these rooms before her, in the 100 years since this brownstone was built.
that is a gift of New York. that you live in three small rooms once occupied by those you can only imagine: the painter, the priest. the actress, the writer. the working mother at the end of her rope. the grandmother, the accountant. who knows what hats hung once in the little hallway where now maps of the places they love grace the walls? did someone like Peggy of Mad Men once live here, hopeful of what was to become?
when last i left her, my Princess Pea hadn't started all this, the collecting of the things that will one day find their way into other houses in her life with her Prince. their lives seemed temporary, disposable, like they were just biding time until the right thing came along. (the love seat i bought new for her first apartment found its way, somehow, into the place across the hall when they moved from there. a wicker chair that once sat in my sunroom for some reason met the curb, though she has kept the little desk that once belonged to my aunt, and another Santa brought her when she was 10.)
the right thing, for now, seems to be present in this house. and though it is just really three rooms, it is their house.
her father and i started our married life in two rooms. beautiful rooms, with hardwood floors and two fireplaces, a brand new kitchen and windows taller than i am. three weeks later we left them for other rooms, then our first house, houses where we began to do what my Pea is doing.
surely you remember that.
while i was in the city, the Prince stretched out on his new leather throne and in between ACC tournament games read highlights of the history of the neighborhood. later as we walked to dinner (at the first Italian place on the corner), he pointed out the gargoyle guarding their building just outside their living room window and the brownstones across the street that were the first ones to be built.
Matt Damon lives on their street somewhere, as does Robert Duvall. (way down toward the Hudson). Mary Tyler Moore used to. And so did Sara Jessica Parker (who shared an apartment with Robert Downey Jr.) Might it have been this one?
on Sunday, we walked just up the block toward Central Park to a little gallery to see a collection of hats on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. the Bard Graduate Center for the past couple of months has been home to Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones. (through April 15)
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| image from the Bard Graduate Center, West 86th Street, NYC |
we were alone in the gallery, which itself sits in a refashioned brownstone, so we wandered through the collection, wondering what kind of heads had once worn such beautiful toppers. the Queen mother. FDR. Babe Ruth. Mick Jagger. and dozens of nameless heads as ordinary as a schoolgirl in a straw bonnet and as jocular as a jester, perhaps in King Henry's court. a bowler woven from the NYTimes. a cloche worn by Gypsy Rose Lee. but my favorite was a small brimmed hat made entirely of feathers, which reminded me of one my mother used to wear, arranged to resemble a painter's palette.
later, as we wandered the flea market in search of rugs and kitchen table chairs, we tried on netted fascinators just for fun.
and as i rode away from her, for the first time in a long, long time, it felt good to be wearing this particular new hat.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
a month of Sundays
What happened to january, and then february? the first was a blur of loss and worry and work, Food Network and Glee. my brother made me swear i wouldn't write about him, and he is one of the reasons january was said blur. (don't worry grubby, your time will come.) i can't blame him for the february thing though. but maybe i can blame that on a book i was reading for my book club. dragged me right down into it, that story did, and just like more than one of the characters in it, i was at a loss to get out until, well, i'd read the last word. i have that tendency with books. give me a dreary winter day and my reading couch and there i selfishly sit, closing off the cluttered kitchen, the laundry and the skipper — who himself has been far too landlocked for either of our goods this winter, rainy weekends being what they have been and all.
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| from Google Images |
on the way to church last Sunday, the commentator on our local PBS affiliate that they'd be running a marathon all afternoon of season 2 of DOWN-TOWN Abbey. This incensed my husband, who has been watching right along with me as Lady Mary hides her true feelings for Matthew, as Bates and Anna sort out the whole ex-wife thing, as dear Sybil fights for independence from family and circumstance dictated not by her dreams but by her gender, and as Lord Grantham struggles with all that it means to be the master of his domain.
that afternoon i discovered in my e-box an invitation from my good friend ABSU who lives on a farm in a sort of manor house — though a few bedrooms short of the real Downton's 70 or 80. (the lady of that manor house does not even know the exact number)
lady anne invited me to take the carriage (or would it be the Renault?) over and watch the season finale by the fire. lady anne and her husband, the Earl of Edgecombe, would be dressing for dinner, even though apparently the prefers Texas Hold 'em to playing the Ouiji board with the downstairs Downton gang. but alas, snow threatened, and so the Viscount of Vestavia and i chose to stay in our humble hovel alone. and without a fire. (said Viscount absolutely hates building a fire. Sybil prompted me to build my own fire, but i chose instead to don my best Edith persona and pout.
lady anne invited me to take the carriage (or would it be the Renault?) over and watch the season finale by the fire. lady anne and her husband, the Earl of Edgecombe, would be dressing for dinner, even though apparently the prefers Texas Hold 'em to playing the Ouiji board with the downstairs Downton gang. but alas, snow threatened, and so the Viscount of Vestavia and i chose to stay in our humble hovel alone. and without a fire. (said Viscount absolutely hates building a fire. Sybil prompted me to build my own fire, but i chose instead to don my best Edith persona and pout.
downton has all the trappings of the finest of kind of guiding light — murder and mystery, lies and seduction, love and lugubriousness (oh, go ahead and look it up if you have to) — not to mention corsets (in the first season, Lady Mary should have kept hers on.)
confession: my lifelong goal when was 15 was to write for Guiding Light. i'd already been watching for a few years by that time, and i knew i could tell the story of reva and josh way better than the highly paid city writers because weren't the characters acting like a bunch of adolescents on every episode? as the years passed, i tuned in every day at 3, swearing at the writers' choices knowing reva as written by me would have never have cloned herself. and josh would never have married four for five women he didn't love if i had control of his words. funny thing though, not once did they face the tv and invite me to join them on the set.
though i would quit cold turkey 15 years later when my two-year-old wondered one afternoon what reva and josh were up to, i came back to it for a few years when i was in between jobs, and wouldn't you know, reva and josh were still up to it. (i did watch the finale a couple of years ago, weeping in the end.)
and now, there is downton.
i've read lots of commentary as to why it's so popular with friends of mine i wouldn't even think would care. and as i watched the final scenes on sunday night (no spoiler here for anyone who hasn't seen it) i found myself wondering not at all what plotline i might write, but just who i would be in this story, if somehow they would let me in.
confession: my lifelong goal when was 15 was to write for Guiding Light. i'd already been watching for a few years by that time, and i knew i could tell the story of reva and josh way better than the highly paid city writers because weren't the characters acting like a bunch of adolescents on every episode? as the years passed, i tuned in every day at 3, swearing at the writers' choices knowing reva as written by me would have never have cloned herself. and josh would never have married four for five women he didn't love if i had control of his words. funny thing though, not once did they face the tv and invite me to join them on the set.
though i would quit cold turkey 15 years later when my two-year-old wondered one afternoon what reva and josh were up to, i came back to it for a few years when i was in between jobs, and wouldn't you know, reva and josh were still up to it. (i did watch the finale a couple of years ago, weeping in the end.)
and now, there is downton.
i've read lots of commentary as to why it's so popular with friends of mine i wouldn't even think would care. and as i watched the final scenes on sunday night (no spoiler here for anyone who hasn't seen it) i found myself wondering not at all what plotline i might write, but just who i would be in this story, if somehow they would let me in.
i should have known an internet test would show up a day later to tell me. though i have taken the test a number of ways, i never end up as sybil. or anna, though i suspect anna isn't one of the answers. no way i could be sybil because i really don't like politics at all, and history has shown that though i come from a family of medical people, i will never make a good nurse no matter how much the country might need me. (though i do like very much the young Tom Branson.)
truth is, i can see a bit of myself in almost everybody, even the despicable Thomas and the disapproving O'Brien. (now admit it, wouldn't you be a little sour if your employers referred to you only by your last name?)
i can be as sullen as Matthew when he takes one for the team and accepts his fate, though i'd like to think i would be stoic like Bates. i have been known to be the vengeful little sister, though i have hoped, at times, to be known as kind as Anna. I am often as judgmental as Lady Violet, but i wish i was more accepting of all, no matter the circumstance, like Sybil. i can be as bossy as Mrs. Patmore, as particular as Carson, though i don't think i will ever be as altruistic as Isobel.
in the last few minutes of the season finale, i couldn't help but wonder if i'd gone through the last couple of months scowling at the world, just like Mary. many days in the past couple of months i have felt that scowl and i know it's not becoming.
suddenly, Mary smiles in such a way that lights her entire face, and there i was smiling with her, knowing how much prettier we all could be if we just wore a little happiness on our faces more often.
maybe that's why it's so popular across the pond and here at home. because we are in there, bits of us in all the folks who inhabit Downton, their deception, nobility, even lugubriousness making us feel a little less uncomfortable with our own.
this week, the associate rector at my church — a bonafide anglophile — left me a present in my mailbox. an entire book about the downton clan. (well, she loaned it to me, and i'm to hand it off to the next office downtonphile when i'm done.)
i can be as sullen as Matthew when he takes one for the team and accepts his fate, though i'd like to think i would be stoic like Bates. i have been known to be the vengeful little sister, though i have hoped, at times, to be known as kind as Anna. I am often as judgmental as Lady Violet, but i wish i was more accepting of all, no matter the circumstance, like Sybil. i can be as bossy as Mrs. Patmore, as particular as Carson, though i don't think i will ever be as altruistic as Isobel.
in the last few minutes of the season finale, i couldn't help but wonder if i'd gone through the last couple of months scowling at the world, just like Mary. many days in the past couple of months i have felt that scowl and i know it's not becoming.
suddenly, Mary smiles in such a way that lights her entire face, and there i was smiling with her, knowing how much prettier we all could be if we just wore a little happiness on our faces more often.
maybe that's why it's so popular across the pond and here at home. because we are in there, bits of us in all the folks who inhabit Downton, their deception, nobility, even lugubriousness making us feel a little less uncomfortable with our own.
this week, the associate rector at my church — a bonafide anglophile — left me a present in my mailbox. an entire book about the downton clan. (well, she loaned it to me, and i'm to hand it off to the next office downtonphile when i'm done.)
but an entire book? about a tv show? and after just two seasons? yes, yes and yes.
wouldn't you know that another book would keep me up at night.
but now that i'm finished with that, what's a girl to do? the silver is polished and the laundry done (and put away mind you), though i do have some pillowcases to press while i watch the Oscars tonight. but without Downton, my month of Sundays will be missing something.
and then i remembered: Mad Men. turns out i have just a month to wait until my new month of Sundays begins.
wouldn't you know that another book would keep me up at night.
but now that i'm finished with that, what's a girl to do? the silver is polished and the laundry done (and put away mind you), though i do have some pillowcases to press while i watch the Oscars tonight. but without Downton, my month of Sundays will be missing something.
and then i remembered: Mad Men. turns out i have just a month to wait until my new month of Sundays begins.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
dear Nell
on sunday when we heard the news, your fellow writers gathered around the large table and talked. about your yellow suit. we read your stories, finding particular meaning in your words, especially now. how in 2006 you wrote about how afraid you were to live alone when Mel's Alzheimer's required that he live away from you. how you loved nothing more than to do his laundry in those days, and found joy when for a fleeting moment he knew your face. how you used to be a 'ready, fire, aim' kind of person (your words), then one day you reversed the order of your day, placing 'aim' in the middle, and oh my, what a difference it made.
we heard about your trips, and how at 80 you took yourself on a pilgrimage to Scotland of all places, lugging your heavy suitcase across the whole country, it felt like, and then subway and ferry, to get to a place you weren't sure you really wanted to go. and even though your body didn't feel like climbing the rocky hill to the ocean, damn if you didn't do it.
and we got the metaphor, all of us wondering, could we?
at the end of your climb, you found a rock to throw into the ocean, the whole thing weighing you down. 'what rock will you throw away?' you asked us four years ago, and again on sunday. and we thought of how, not a month ago, you stood before us and told us all about other rocks. choosing love over science when you were young, but now that the love of your life is gone, you are giving back to science, and to a young man who wants, as you once did, to be a doctor.
'many blessings have come to me through my family, my friends, and especially my church,' you wrote this fall. 'what else could I possibly want and wish for? even though there are times i regret i did not pursue my dream, i see that God can bring many blessings out of disappointments and help us find peace as we take a different path.'
your words.
of course by then we'd heard the story. of the heart attack, and how, caught away from the phone, you dragged yourself across the floor to get to it. and it took you hours. and then, you got better, then worse, then better again, and we all knew come Lent you would be sitting in your chair to the right of me, writing only part of the story with the rest of us captured and waiting to hear the rest of it, as is your way. how many times did i say it: Nell, you have to write your story. or at least let me come and sit at your knee and listen as you tell it, and i will write it down for you.
we knew, knew, you were not done yet.
when we last spoke you told me stories of your life i had not yet heard. and i found myself thinking: will i ever be able to look at life as Nell does? will i ever stop mourning dreams i've lost and think, as you, instead about dreams yet to be?
you changed things. i remember the first time i knew who you were, when i walked into the room with the giant table we would gather around together for two years, searching for someone to lead our church. and you prayed a very Methodist prayer (which was not a bad thing at all, but different) and i wondered how you would get along with some of the folks in the room, how we would all come together to find one leader, but you implored us to approach the whole thing in prayer, and well, we did as you asked. and it worked.
i remember, too, how when our group of varied folk finally settled on that name, and he came to visit, climbing into the pulpit, you and i stood in the back of the church and you said: doesn't he look good up there? and just this week, you would have said the same, except this time, he spoke about you.
last year when all the women gathered for this new idea nobody really knew would work, you gathered the women in your age group and you stood in front of everyone, looking out at the 30s, 40s, 50s, the 80s and said: isn't this grand?
nell, you are grand.
and oh, you would have loved it. the whole thing. how every single pew was filled (even the new seats). two bishops, not as celebrants, but sitting there in the pews with us, missing you. how we sang O, God Our Help in Ages Past, which i have been singing since i was a child and know every single word. as i sang, imagining you singing with me, i looked up at that big cross that you sit closest to, thinking oh my, she is there.
and all the words said about you that were just right.
and that most beautiful Goodall arrangement of the 23rd Psalm which is not sad at all, but promising, and as i listened it was clear to me you were with us, too.
and all the words said about you that were just right.
and that most beautiful Goodall arrangement of the 23rd Psalm which is not sad at all, but promising, and as i listened it was clear to me you were with us, too.
i was sad, nell, we all were. we sang I Sing A Song of the Saints of God, a child's hymn, really, but you always considered yourself a child of God. and you have been a saint among us.
i watched as greg sprinkled dirt from the garden over the pall. watched as your handsome grandchildren clutched each other, wondering what part of you each of them takes with them, listening as just then, a breeze blew through the wind chimes in the garden and it just felt like you, all over the place.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.