Sunday, January 30, 2011

architectural digest

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Well.


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


sbr

Thursday, January 27, 2011

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

Pre-script

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

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

Do something you are proud of

Over 30 years ago, my aunt gave me a calendar for Christmas. It was the kind you keep on the refrigerator, and each date contains a simple instruction, that if followed, will improve your mental health throughout the year.  Put out by the Mental Health Association of Oregon, the calendar was evergreen — as applicable in 1978 when it was published, as it was some years later when I posted it eye-high to my children. Then we would look at the calendar together and see what we were supposed to do for the day. And try it. 
Here's a sampling from January:
• Enjoy Silence
• Answer a letter
• Break a habit 
• Get to know a neighbor's dog
Who couldn't (or shouldn't) do things like this every day?
Eventually, I packed it away in a drawer, thinking I'd pull it out again if I ever have grandchildren. 
cutiepie

A few weeks ago, in the middle of a day-long winter cleaning frenzy, (sort through things, I think was the task of the day) I found it again. And I posted it on my fridge in the middle of the clutter there. I wish I could say I have followed the instructions this year. I am re-reading a classic (Jan 16), have fed the birds* (Jan. 8,) tried to get some exercise (Jan. 27*). But I have not lost a pound (Jan.6), imagined myself living 100 years ago or really looked at the sky.* (Jan. 20) (well, in 2011, I have done that.)
Today's entry, for Jan. 28 says this: Do something you are proud of. Well. When I read that last night before I headed to bed, the corners of my eyes got just a tad bit damp. It is my son's 24th* birthday today. And he is easily one of two things I ever did that I am most proud of. (The other, of course, is the Princess Pea.)
Graham was born a year to the day after the explosion of the space shuttle. I remember, watching that launch with a friend as our toddler daughters scurried around us, wondering where I would be when that sad anniversary came around.
I was, in fact, scurrying around my house in my bathrobe with my alarm clock in my pocket. My daughter played in my closet, trying on all my high-heeled shoes, as I wiped up the floor in my bathroom and changed the sheets on the bed.  My mother would be coming, and everything had to be clean for her!
By the time my favorite soap aired at 3, I was heavily in labor. I remember worrying that I would not have enough love in me for another child, I loved my daughter so much. And then, there he was, a slick and wiry boy whose feet reached over half the length of his tiny leg. And my heart burst, making room for him in it.
Graham at birth, of a sort
We brought him home — already nuzzling a blanket that is now simply yarn — and brought him up, all 6 feet 2.5 inches of him, stretching (Jan. 1) to be a young man with integrity and a biting sense of humor, a guy who can fix just about anything he sets his mind to, and who can at least help bake bread (Jan. 31). A man who is a loyal friend, and he can even eat with chopsticks (Jan. 29). He is often the silent, but creative type, who sorts through things (Jan. 9,) and much to my frustration, does not always share his thoughts — or life — with me.
Oh, but I am proud of him. Fiercely so. 
One of my favorite comic strips is Zits. About a mother who drives her son crazy, and a boy, all arms and legs and angles, with his own peculiar view of the world. This week I cut a strip out  from ZITS and handed it to him, about mom asking son his plan for the day, but he didn't have one. This is so us. Hits a little too close to home, as my son reads the want ads (Jan. 24), and I share in the task (Jan. 14) scouring the web hoping to find just the perfect fit for him. 
He tolerates me. I sing to him badly in the morning if I wake him up (not on the Jan.calendar, but it should be); I can't hear anything he says* (in 2011 I can!); and I play with his hair (another thing not on this month's list, though the princess pea loves that.) We are alike in some things. He looks like me (isn't that supposed to be good luck for sons?); neither of us give away things we don't use (Jan. 11). We both love to nap. We can take a pretty good picture when we feel like it (Jan. 26), though his are way better than mine. Neither of us is without fault.
ok, so he wouldn't smoke Dad's cigar for a few years
And we are both ponderers. I just share my ponderings much more often than he does.
Mothers know their children's gifts, I think, and we don't do our job if we don't encourage them to daydream (Jan. 12) about what they might be when they grow up, to imagine their corner of the world in 100 years (to rephrase Jan. 3). I am trying to do that with him, and even though he is as resistant to my nudgings as he was to my rendition of Happy Birthday Baby this morning, I am trying to resist the temptation to criticize. (Jan. 22).
My wish for him, on his 24th* birthday— though to him the future might not look so bright right now, economy being what it is — is that he spend some time enjoying the silence (Jan. 2), and really, really look at that sky.
Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday baby, I love you so!
sbr

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Iron your own boxers

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

Yes, Mama was right, sort of.  

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

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

Me, in four words: Stories come from everywhere.

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

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

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

Friday, January 21, 2011

Monday, January 17, 2011

Oh, How I Miss Reverb

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


sbr


















Wednesday, January 12, 2011

What Must I Do?



Lately I have been doing a lot  of prep work for The Gathering, which I have written about in this space before. On Monday, I met with a group of women to pitch the event, hoping more than a few of them would sign up to attend. I talked about how we found Patti Digh, our keynote speaker, and the other women we have invited to lead breakout groups designed to spark creativity within us — in work, in community, in faith and daily life. Being part of the planning for an event we hope will help reshape the lives of many has been daunting, and so rewarding to me.


One of the many questions Patti asks in her book, Creative Is A Verb, is this: What is the one thing you MUST do?


We all have our daily "musts". Today, for instance, I must work, set up a new computer, create and distribute a weekly e-newsletter. I must have my Diet Coke, must finish this post, must check to see if I have enough money in the bank, must make the bed, clean out the coffee pot, walk the dog, write my Christmas thank you notes, plan supper. A long list.

But if I didn't do one of those things — or all of those things — the world wouldn't shake on its axis, and few, if any, would care at all. (Well, the dog would care, my mother would care about the notes, and my husband might not care about supper, too much.)


But this kind of must is different from the daily must do, something so imbedded in our souls that if we don't do it, we somehow feel a lost. 


So I asked the women, most of whom I know fairly well, to take three minutes and think about it. Write it down. What must they do, or they would not feel whole? Just one thing. 


Here's what they said:


Knit. Talk. Exercise. Organize. Connect. Be part of a church community. As they shared, I got a better sense of their inner lives, of what makes them who they are. And how their "must" connects them to those around them. Each of them, unknowingly, is creating art in her daily life, just by living within that must. The knitter showed her scarf. The talker talked of losing her singing voice to surgery, but of gaining her willingness to speak up. The organizer shared this: that hidden in that need to organize was her real need to connect people with each other, to find places where their talents can be shared.


As I listened, I thought: now this is one thing I "must" do. Pull the story out, particularly from those who think they don't have one. It gives me such joy to hear someone say: I never thought about it just that way before, when I ask a question and a story tumbles out of them that surprises. It's usually something they do think about but regard as so small, it is not worth sharing.


But of course it is the tiniest of things that can mean the biggest of things, when considered a new way. And what I must do, is capture those moments that bring meaning to the musts. 
sbr







Thursday, January 6, 2011

Departing the Text

The little town where I grew up has seen its share of tragedy. Those who grew up there know that death always comes in threes, and in the past 10 days or so, that adage held true. A young woman who as raised there to a tragic accident. An elderly woman whose husband owned a favorite hamburger stand in the 50s and 60s. Then brother of longtime friends to another accident. Add to that, damage done by a foot of snow on Christmas night to one of the few thriving entities in town. So we breathed a little. But today, comes another, this time the town optometrist, long loved by all. Dr. E. was once kidnapped by a prisoner from a nearby prison farm who had come to the office to get his eyes checked. When we heard on the transistor radio at school that a doctor in town had been kidnapped, I panicked, because I had been present when some of those prisoners came to my father's office across the street. I don't remember all the details clearly, but I seem to recall that the prisoner forced Dr. E. into the country, where he left Dr. E. shackled to a tree. But first, he took Dr. E's his clothes. Dr. E. lived many, many years to tell that story. 


But no more.


Thinking about this, it seems as though I need to pay tribute to my little town in this space. I did some years ago in the newspaper. In the years since, some of the landmarks I wrote about are gone. The town has grown smaller, sadder, poorer. I suppose everybody who has been raised up by a small town thinks of their world as special. I know those who hail from my town do. And when something bad happens, we are drawn to each other in hopes of saving what's left of it, if only in memory.


Anyway, sometimes things just bear repeating. Thanks, Doug, for the pics.

The Town that Raised Me
Copyright 1999 By Susan Byrum Rountree

“What this place needs is a GAP,” my daughter says as we drive down Main Street toward the house where I grew up. As we pass The Freeze — the landmark of my teenage years where they make the best Pizza Burgers in Eastern North Carolina — I try to see my hometown through her eyes.
There is a battered car wash, old buildings and empty store fronts in need of fresh paint. The Idle Hour Restaurant sign advertising “air conditioning” hasn’t been lit in years, and the Zip Mart stands empty, its front windows boarded shut.
This is Main Street, Scotland Neck, NC, how a passer-through on Hwy. 258 might see it. People who don’t know it and love it as I do might find little here but the remnants of a once-thriving farm town.
But I wish that my daughter could see what I see. Her view, when compared to the mirrored marble sidewalks of her Crabtree Valley Main Street offers little more than peeling paint and crumbling buildings. There are no khaki-clad mannequins artfully backlit, no sidewalk vendors selling the latest styles of silver jewelry, no clusters of teenagers sharing the latest gossip.
But my eyes see home. There is the old Pittman’s Department Store where I bought my first two-piece bathing suit and worked wrapping presents on Christmas Eve. Though it stood empty for a time, in what used to be the men’s department, waitresses now serve the breakfast crowd hot coffee and homemade biscuits.
I can still hear the creak of the Roses floor as we rushed to buy notebooks and pencils for school, recall the smell of the Post Office when I pulled mail from my father’s box, see the audience staring back at me as the curtain opened for my dance recital, feel the touch of newsprint between my fingers as I read my first byline in the Commonwealth.
Scotland Neck. The place with the funny name like the country and the body part. Folks new to North Carolina have never heard of it, but anyone who grew up east of Raleigh most likely knows someone or is kin to someone from  there. And that’s saying a lot for a town of just 2,500 people.
Sure it was the cliché, a mix of Mayberry and Maycomb, with a cast of characters no less colorful than Barney or Boo Radley. There were a couple of old houses we swore were haunted, a handicapped man who used to walk down Main Street on his knees, and every now and then, a murder or two, just to keep our attention.
We picked flowers for our teachers in a neighbor’s back yard without fear of a scolding, saw first-run movies at the Dixie Theater Saturday matinee, crunched on frozen Cokes like popsicles between Sunday School and church. And if your dog wandered the school hallways looking for you, nobody thought a thing about it, though you might be asked to take him home.
It was the kind of home town my city-bred kids will never know. Where everybody knows who you belong to, and where you ought to be. Where they know you had prickly heat, watched you ride your bike down Church Street to school, believed in you until you finally made a name for yourself. And they weren’t the least bit surprised. Folks from Scotland Neck have always done that.
We never had stoplight (still don’t) much less a GAP, but the eastern North Carolina town where I was born, raised a governor and a Congressman, doctors, lawyers and farmers, even a writer or two. Not so long ago, our former mayor was president of the National League of Cities. Imagine that, a sleepy little town in the southeastern end of Halifax County, one of the poorest counties in the state.
The population has remained stable most of my life. When I was 11, the headcount did swell for awhile, when over 11 million blackbirds roosted there. Each evening at dusk “The Birds” converged on the woods behind my house, circling for hours like a stationary tornado, until each one found a spot to perch for the night. They woke us each morning as they headed out, turning the sky black.  Their annual infestation brought some notoriety and national media attention, but it didn’t last. The birds, like many of the young people, found little opportunity in Scotland Neck, so they moved on.
For those of us who’ve left, there has always been a difference between “where do you live?” and “where are you from?” — we are always “from” Scotland Neck. Ask us about “home” and our first thoughts won’t be of the places we live now. Instead, we’ll tell you about the pink Crape Myrtles blooming in the middle of the street in July, or learning that All Have Sin from the Biblical alphabet Miss Lucy Wells taught us all in public school, or of baring our arms for Typhoid shots so we could swim all summer at the murky waters of the Scout Pond. It is a life I would go home to in a second, if it were still there.
Since I moved away from  “The Neck.” as those who grew up there call it, I’ve found fellow natives in the least likely places. Like Atlanta Braves games in the old Fulton County Stadium, sitting 10 rows behind me. Or as the contact for my very first interview as a new reporter in Augusta, Georgia. Be it on Sunday morning, the first time I attended my new Raleigh church 10 years ago, on an escalator at the mall, in the hallway of a Wake County elementary school, no doubt somebody besides me will be from The Neck.
World traveler that he is, my Atlanta-born husband has never  had a similar encounter. I moved to his hometown, and wouldn’t you know it, I soon found a friend from Scotland Neck. In time, Rick began seeing people he knows from Scotland Neck in his travels around the country. But not once has he run across anyone he knew in Atlanta.
I never thought myself disadvantaged because of my small town beginnings. The town limit sign may have separated me from the rest of the world, defined me as being “from” someplace, but it was never a boundary keeping me from discovering what was best in me.
Though I have lived in five cities since I left home 20 years ago, this tiny speck on the map is the one place I’ve always known I belonged. And it is in belonging that we define ourselves, know who we are and where we fit. I could not be who I am if I didn’t hail from this place, couldn’t look at the world the way I do without the growing I did there with the help of all the people who nudged me.
There are dozens of Scotland Necks in this largely forgotten corner of the state, in the “other North Carolina.”  Some are growing, some, like Scotland Neck, could use a coat or two of fresh paint. Not one will ever have a GAP.
But my friends who’ve stayed there are making it a good place, though different, for their children to grow up in. They’ve built a new town hall and a new hospital, and they keep nurturing the Crape Myrtles, their pink blossoms becoming more beautiful with each year.
And as they watch the communities around them fading, they’ve loosened the boundaries that once separated Scotland Neck from the towns nearby, their citizens mingling at work, church and school, in hopes of keeping the sense of community they used to know.
And they always welcome me back, proud of the freckle-faced daughter who likes to see her name in the paper. I hope they know how much credit the town that raised me deserves.



Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Me To the Core

I know we are five days beyond Reverb10, but I am still catching up...


Core story. What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world? (Bonus: Consider your reflections from this month. Look through them to discover a thread you may not have noticed until today.)Author: Molly O'Neill, Harper Collins Children's


A few years ago I got an email from the editor of a regional magazine I had been writing for, asking for writers willing to undergo a personal makeover for the sake of the story. I was 49 years old and in that space of life when, as I say in the story, we want Oprah’s people to call and offer to transform us into someone more beautiful than we feel. 


So, I jumped. A freelancer at the time, I was not about to turn down good money, even if it meant being subjected to bleaches and pincers and people poking at my particulars.  I imagined myself under the influence of Stacy London and Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, finally throwing out that aqua pique pantsuit I wore for my book tour 10 years ago, because you know,  I might just fit into it one day again soon. Stylist Nick Arrojo with his sexy Manchester accent giving me just the right cut, and makeup artist Carmindy (what kind of name is that, Carmindy? Could I combine my names somehow, Sustella? Stellusan?)... Carmindy telling me what I really need is a smokey eye. Oh, how I wanted a smokey eye.


What I didn't know was that the story required not only a hair/makeup/clothing makeover — which was hard enough — but that I work with a life coach. A LIFE coach! I didn't agree to anything about changing my life. But I had signed on, so I was in. For five weeks (FIVE WEEKS!) I spent time on the phone with my life coach, with my space organizer, with my clothes makeover maven. The organizer came to my house and transformed my office. (And because of her I now have wonderful built-in book shelves.) The clothes maven came to my closet, and I was embarrassed that I don't have a light close enough by  to see what I am trying to find. Even now. 


The final day would be with the hairstylist, then shopping for a new chic image. (Thank goodness the photos are lost to the magazine archive.) I approached each with trepidation. What did those women really feel when found on a NYC street by Meredith and Matt and Ann and Al and taken off for a day of transformation?


I would soon find out.


On the final day, before I was to have my physical transformation, I met with my life coach at a coffee shop. And OMG (though that expression didn't exist in the vernacular at the time) I was thrilled at the outcome of my little treasure map project. But she was not.



"All you have here are words," she said. "Where are the pictures?" Pictures? Well, I had a few. (ok, four.) But I guess the assignment was NO words. 


Imagine. 


When I thought about it, the magazine pictures of women smiling whom I had never met, objects I would never own.. they didn't draw my eye. What I saw before she pointed to the lack of pictures, was art— something I had created that reflected quite by accident the me at that moment, and probably the me of every moment since I could spell out words at all, on the chalkboard lines my teacher drew in front of me in first grade.


I remember that, how my teacher, Mrs. Pippen, used to write the letters out in yellow chalk, spelling plain old words across the chalkboard in fine block letters that looked like art to me. And she could take that old eraser, wipe it all away, and make a whole new sentence, all over again. What magic, that was. (Yes, I do realize how weird that is.) 


How wonderful, to be able to put one letter in front of the other to make a word. And then a sentence. A paragraph. A page. A story.


But according to my life coach, I had not followed the directions. I had made a C. Well, there you also have me. C. To the Core.


And so, in the beginning of my "finding" (my word for 2011,) today I revisited that treasure map, the one that didn't have (enough) pictures.  Looking at it now I am embarrassed at how much I haven't done, but heartened that it still holds the secrets to what I wish for myself, at my core. 


My purple room friend today took a look at the map and suggested I pick pieces of it to write about during this year. What a wonderful idea. My own little Reverb, she said. A goal I will set for myself. When I am stuck, and maybe when I am not.


What my 49-year-old self meant by the words "Sane, polished, and ready for anything," I have no idea. But I am just curious enough about her to dig out the old chalk board and eraser, to wiggle with the words enough, to find out.


sbr







Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Let Me Be Clear

I'm team-teaching a class on Sundays in January on the books of Asheville writer Patti Digh, in preparation for The Gathering, a women's retreat I'm involved in next month, with Patti as keynote speaker. To prepare for the class, and for the retreat, I am opening Creative Is A Verb randomly each day, reading the story and working through the creative challenges Patti provides. Today's impromptu opening revealed page 180, Embrace your Clearness Committee. (more on that later)


I haven't known Patti long, but on a frustrating day last spring, as we were struggling to find a keynote speaker for our event, I stumbled onto her blog. I liked what I saw — a fellow writer musing about intention. And creativity. And story. About living life as art, even if we have never felt like artists before. 


As much as I would like an entire weekend to be about ME and all my needs, I had to step back a bit and be (somewhat) unselfish. (Let's face it. All writers want ATTENTION.) Still, Patti's blog practically shouted at me to ask myself some questions. What was I doing in my life that was intentional, creative? Had I forgotten my own story? Might there be other people out there who could hear the shouting, too?


As I clicked further into her blog, I found the very language that we had been trying to define for our event:
  • What learning and significances are right in front of us, in the stories of our days?
  • How can we move beyond the limits of who we think we are into what we were meant to be?
  • In what ways can we relinquish our “role” in order to discover who we might be beneath the mask?
  • How can we live more mindful, intentional lives by saying yes, being generous, speaking up, trusting ourselves, loving more, and slowing down?
Oh, and she was funny. Very funny. She liked Bobby Sherman, and anyone who knows a thing about him has to have a sense of humor.Somehow I knew she would be the perfect choice for our keynote, not just for me, 
but for everybody else, too.


I told my friend Mel, The Gathering organizer, about her. She read the blog and liked Patti immediately. Send her an e-mail, Mel said. And write your heart out. And so I did, telling Patti of our a shared passion for "Julie, Julie Julie do you love me?" (ok, we were 13, so give us some slack...) And our small town N.C. roots. Not to mention that in one of her photos she is wearing a sailor collar dress like I used to have in first grade. I told her that I connected to the fact that she has sailed around the world because my husband has a sailboat, though we have as yet only sailed around Kerr Lake. I titled my e-mail: I have been looking for you all day. Which was true, since I had spent the whole day in a maze of Google searches that seemed to have no end, until I found her blog.

I said a little prayer. And then I hit SEND.

In 14 minutes, an e-mail from this woman who travels around the world and has written boocoos of books and speaks all over everywhere, showed up in my box:

My dear Susan -

Imagine my wonderment and delight to be sitting here at my computer and see your message come up. Anyone who shares my fondness for Bobby Sherman... and little did you know that my daughter will start NC State University in the fall, so Raleigh is very much on my radar and I am looking for excuses to come there.

I would be delighted to come. Let's find a way to make this work.

love, patti


Captain Who?
What I learned later is that Patti gets hundreds of requests in a month's time, and she never responds quickly, much less in 14 minutes. A quick response she reserves for her daughters, husband and maybe dear Bobby, should he ever figure out who has been Googling him. And maybe a certain actor with a penchant for pirate movies. My e-mail clicked, and well, whodaever?


Funny, funky Patti Digh
In the months since, Patti and I have had several conversations about The Gathering, and a few weeks ago, I attended one of her readings locally, wanting to meet this woman who is so honest about herself that she has started a new blog this week about wrestling with weight, trying to be a more bendable in body. She strikes me as being particularly bendable in spirit. She is soft-spoken and Southern and funky and funny and just like the self she projects onto the page. When she joins us in February, she'll talk about her path in hopes that we all might draw something from her life that will fit in our own. 


It's Patti's fault, really, that I subjected y'all to this blog during December. She challenged her Facebook followers to join her in Reverb10, and I just said why not? The fact that I haven't posted anything in several days tells you that I need the challenge ever-present in my in-box, and though keeping the blog going is part of my 2011 self-improvement plan, apparently I don't hold much clout with myself, at least just yet. But this is a start.


So back to the Clearness Committee. It's a group of people gathered together to support us, whose job is not to have the right answers, as Patti says,  but to craft respectful and supportive questions. Do we each have a such a group we can convene at the important moments in life, she asks? If not, we should find them, surround ourselves with such people, and at least a couple of them should have different perspectives on life from our own.


My answer would be yes, I do have a CC. And it's not just the people who say: you're terrific, though I do love those people. (Please keep it coming!) My CC is made up of those supporters, and those who aren't afraid to help me figure out when I have screwed up, have hurt someone, have fallen short of my potential. Those good folks who point out my typos, both literal and figurative. If I would only ask.


But am I open to the truth of me, and the truth as someone else sees me? My family (and a couple of people on my CC) would probably say no, I am not.


And, this: Am I on anyone else's CC? Have I shown my friends that I am the kind of person who can listen, who can ask respectful and supportive questions, who can give, as Patti says, "unconditional love with hopeful expectancy?" I hope so, but I wonder sometimes if I just take take take and don't give as good as I get. Yet another thing to work on. 


So as I count down the weeks to The Gathering, I plan to gather my CC for the weekend, too. And together I hope we will craft respectful and supportive questions for each other, and in doing so, retell our stories, challenge our creativity, and maybe even admit we all loved Bobby Sherman, once upon a time.