in praise of beautiful women

mel & me

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

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

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

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

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

keynote patti digh

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

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

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

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

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

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

the gathering committee rocks!

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

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

Read More

view from the pew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++\

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

Read More

in a word

it's gonna be a great day!

Read More

Happy Birthday, Pamula

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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


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


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


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

Read More

sadness, but with hope, for a good sail

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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


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


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

Read More

of bachelors and buttons, and a doozy of a day

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

Read More

I could never fit into the dress anyway

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


Ok. You twisted my arm.  


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

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


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


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

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


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

Read More

on my kitchen window sill

"a wink & a smile"


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

Read More

Bright Lights, Big City

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

Turns out, I should have listened.

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

It didn't look as bad in the daylight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

everyone needs a fairygodmother

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


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


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

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

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

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

photo: Joey Sewell

 flowers artfully arranged

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More