say what you need to say

"I learned ... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness." Brenda Ueland

from an email sent to me by Lynn Jones Ennis, Ph.D. Associate Director
Curator of the Collection, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, North Carolina State University

say what you need to say

my friend lynn had a way about her. loved soft hats, that girl did. and clothes with such texture you could almost see the voice of the maker in the stitches. diminutive hands. soft in voice and countenance. in her best eastern nc lilt she would often end our visits with: i can't wait to see you aGANE. (caps my emphasis, pronunciation hers.) aGANE, like gain, as if every single time i saw her was her gain. i know it was mine. she used words like SWELL and sent us SMOOCHES by email. things like that.

every so often, an email would show up in my inbox from her, as she hoped to gather three of our friends and me for a seasonal meet up. and somehow we would merge five schedules into one night just long enough to share our stories and our dreams.

i don't remember exactly when we met, but yoga had something to do with it. my friend miriam had met lynn through yoga and introduced us, and somehow lynn talked this muffin top into participating. she assured me that the creativity would just pour out of me if i gave my mind an hour to settle into the ommms. my neighbor candy and i bit, but pretty much everything but creativity poured out of me after my yoga sessions. at home, after,  i poured my well-plied body into a soft chair and promptly fell asleep.

lynn and miriam and i, all writers, found other ways to gather, and in time, candy and diane — writers,too — joined us. we met for energy and support, not so much to share our work but to celebrate the fact that we had our work and our links to each other. lynn, an expert in creativity, softly encouraged us, aGANE and aGANE, and we encouraged her, too.

whenever we met, she would turn to us one by one and say: now, what's going on with you? 

when last we met, we talked about her work at the museum where she was curator, about diane's recent breast cancer and surgery, about miriam's plans to teach a seminar on cooking, writing, painting and eating. candy had finally landed an agent for her middle grades historical novel. all good. all hopeful. so good to see you aGANE, said lynn as we parted in the parking lot.

only i wouldn't. never again. no gain. only loss.

yesterday lynn died. all of a sudden, maybe as she stood at her kitchen sink and told her husband that the headache that had been plaguing her for the past few days had worsened. died. right there. in an instant. in the house she loved, with her tea cups and her plants and the pictures of her granddaughter nearby. 

it does not seem real to me. though i work at my church, i avoided going into the nave for prayer because it would become truth, then. i thought about lynn, who had come to my church in february for a gathering of creative women like herself, sitting not far from where i took my seat yesterday in the pew, there alone I prayed for her family, and for the gift of her life on this earthly walk.

the four of us left in our circle have talked on the phone, wept, wondered. two in our group have lost family members in the past two weeks. we are not in that closest of family friend circles, but we are connected, and so we hurt. 

last night i called my friend grace and said: you mean to world to me. i emailed barbara and my sister, said the same. and instead of television, i asked my husband to hold me while i cried. 

today i got my hair cut (too short) but... my hairdresser is an effusive Christian who wears his faith right out there, joyously, sometimes a little uncomfortable for me. as i told him about lynn, he said this: the Lord does not guarantee us a tomorrow. no. indeed.

after that, as i headed into work, john mayer came on the radio urging me to 'say what you need to say...say what you need to say."

You better know that in the end/It's better to say too much/Than to never to say what you need to say again/Even if your hands are shakin'/And your faith is broken/Even as the eyes are closin'/Do it with a heart wide open/A wide heart

Say what you need to say

say what you need to say. 

my faith is not broken, but i know i need to say what i need to say.

i love you. you mean everything to me. you did a wonderful job. thank you. thank God. i'm sorry. i should have done a better job. i will change. i hope.

 and thank you, lynn ennis, for being a part of my life.

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i'm a PEACE girl

On the eve of my 18th birthday, my parents and i turned the corner of New Bern Ave. and Wilmington Street. we sped past the n.c. legislature building and the museum of history i had visited in 7th grade, there she was. just over the horizon stood a great lady, her large white arms and red brick skirt drawing me like a mother welcoming her child home. though she stood at the end of this very old street, seeing her there meant a beginning for me.

hours later my parents would leave me in the lap of this great lady, and i would live with her for two years. she would nurture me and scold me, challenge and celebrate me, teaching me a lot about the world, about God, and about myself.

that afternoon i became a Peace Girl, with most of my belongings housed in a room with polished wood floors and orange and green plaid bedspread to match my roommate's, and a window that looked out over a green lawn and at its center a fountain that in those two years would take on great meaning for me. i'd packed a trunk with shampoo and toothpaste, my raggedy andy, yellow and green towels that coordinated with my bedspread, tucked in a bright green laundry basket i use to this day — and with it all a nutty unspoken dream of being a writer. and i was hoping this grand old lady would help me figure out how.

i live in the same city now, and every time i turn that same street corner and see those arms, though it's been 36 years, i feel the flutter of promise. 

i suppose every girl feels that way about her college, but i can only speak for myself. i chose Peace not only because my sister had graduated from there that spring, but because it was what back then was called a 'girl's school'. i'd spent 12 years in classrooms where boys pulled rank, scolded and ridiculed, teased and cajoled and frankly, i welcomed some time to see what we girls could do without them.

within weeks i was sipping coffee with my new friends in the crowded cafeteria and writing about that dream of mine in my journal. "i'd bet on that dream," my professor wrote on that entry. she actually thought i could do it? i still have the journal, and though the writing is pretty abysmal, it represents something crucial to me: my attempts to find my voice. like learning to ride a bicycle, the entries were my first real effort to do something i had long wished for.

on april 12 of my freshman year — my mother's birthday — just a few weeks before i would leave the grand lady's skirts and head for a summer at home, the editor of the literary magazine tapped me to take her place the next year. i had never even taken a creative writing class.

i have said before that when i did enroll in that first writing class the next fall, it was as if God had taken a can opener to my head, allowing all those things i had been keeping inside it OUT and into the world. i couldn't stop myself. i wrote on everything i could find — notebooks and napkins and the edges of the newspaper, event my textbooks — stories and poems i couldn't believe i was inventing — sharing them at a table of other student writers. in that class, i learned that not everyone had felt the love i felt growing up, and that it was ok to put it on paper and share it with the world. i learned that i had a few stories to tell myself, and though i was not the best writer at all, knowing there were others better than me made me a better writer. (though in tennis class i was always paired with a member of the tennis team, it never made me better at tennis.)

in that room i also learned how to encourage other writers, how to pull the story out of myself and others in surprising ways. it is a skill i use still, and often.

outside of class i watched my fellow Peace girls find their voices, too. in student government (one would later be leader of the grand old lady herself). in art. in fashion. doctor, lawyer, indian chieftress, you name it. they started to become their best selves because of these two years. i watched them speak up in class without fear of ridicule from a boy, watched them break the rules sometimes (well, often), watched them challenge each other at backgammon and basketball and politics.

and i learned a lot about God. and not because on my Old Testament exam i had to list all the kings of Israel in the little blue book, but from a wise man who spoke to us each week in chapel. (yes, back then, we actually went, pretty much every week)... it's there, in my journal, how on one of those Wednesdays, he talked about the three most important decisions we would make in life, and not necessarily while in the gathers of the grand old lady's skirts: our life's passion, who we would spend the rest of our lives loving, and what our concept of who God was to us. i thought about these three things a lot after that day. still do.

on the day of our final exam in New Testament, we gathered in the auditorium with our blue books in hand. our professor sat on stage seated on the stool in front of a grand piano, and when we had all settled into our seats, he began to play "Once I had a Secret Love,"

'Once I had a secret love
That lived within the heart of me
All too soon my secret love
Became impatient to be free'

and turns out, he was talking about God. our exam was to listen to him. that was all. to listen to his voice. and to continue once we left him and our lady, to keep trying to listen to our own. which of course was connect to that secret love of his.

not every day was grand in those two years. i was picked for the honors English program, but the thesis i wrote (i think it was on Faulkner... whom i still can't understand) was not up to honors quality. i will never forget how i disappointed my professor the day she told me i hadn't done good work. and how i had short changed myself. the grand old lady had believed in me, and somehow i had not believed in me. but this was something important to her, that i learn that i don't always make the cut.

and i also learned this: all those women together in one place sometimes can end up not being a good thing. i was sometimes not a good friend to my Peace sisters. not at all. and i am ashamed of that. sometimes they weren't so good to me, and there have been days in the last 35 years when both still cause ache.

but mostly those two years were ones of good and plenty, and when we gather every so often at reunions i am reminded of how much joy just being with them brings me.

at graduation, we gathered around the fountain in white dresses, carrying bouquets of red roses and sang our alma mater together and threw one of our roses in the fountain. it was a poignant moment for us all, because we would be leaving each other, most of us transferring to a four-year college or university to earn a degree. others married, got jobs. i was terrified to leave the lady who had been my mother mentor. (i recall when i approached the steps of the journalism school building at Chapel Hill for the first time thinking how unwelcoming those tall steps seemed to me.) 

in my two years away from Peace i floundered, losing my voice for awhile, except in one lone feature writing class. i longed to hide myself in those mighty skirts again, but there was no doing that. years later, when my classmate came to lead her, Peace became a baccalaureate program. and thrived. this fall, the daughter of my friend and classmate will be president of the student body.

several years ago i came back to the grand old lady, for a writing residency program where i was once again the student. we met in a classroom that had not been built when i was there, and among the dozen or so students in my class, i was the only alum. but surrounded by those welcoming skirts again, my voice came through more loudly than i had dreamed it could when i was 20. and though i had been a professional writer for over 20 years by that time, this time i was writing fiction, and i was surprised — my heart filled once again with promise — when the professor liked my work. my undergraduate professor was there, and in a moment i will never forget, she told me that the novelist teaching me that week said of me: "she is better than she thinks."

last year a new leader came to Peace. in the past few months, there have been a lot of changes. faculty and staff fired. programs erased. more makeover for our grand old lady, who some think was too out of date.

and yesterday i learned online that the leader of the our lady has decided to change her name  — after 152 years of creating strong women — and open her skirts to men. MEN! the letter even referred to this: Alumnae(i) ... we have always been the feminine. it is a bit hard to take.


 a FB Peace Girls group has shown outrage, and though the majority of the posts point their rage toward the end of the tradition we knew as students, (a very few) others say it's change or die. both i think have a point.

i don't know, honestly, how i feel. i mourn the future chance for a girl like me who won't have the experience of a woman's college like my Peace. no longer is she just a 'girl's school', but she is a college educating young women to be thinkers, dreamers, leaders. but it is a different time now, and young women have changed much since 1975. i know because i have raised one. still, i know having the choice of an all-female college should be there for those young women who want it. now, i fear, fewer of them will choose Peace. 

but this is what i know for sure: once i had a secret love. several in fact that lived in the heart of me. and Peace is one of them. i do wonder, what does this grand old lady want? has she, too, become impatient to be free? and free from what? i can't imagine it is from her feminine voice. no Peace girl would ever want to lose that. my prayer is that those who are listening most carefully will hear just want she means.

susan byrum rountree, class of '77

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this friday is so much better than last

.... everything came out ok, in the end, so to speak.

so we trudged through our week with temps over 100, the air so think in the morning that one of my friends posted on FB that it felt like living inside a cantaloupe. she was right on. the air, which smelled like smoke last week because of coastal fires and a wind shifting inland, smelled a little sweet now but can you imagine having your nose stuffed up against one of those cantaloupeon walls with no knife to cut yourself out? each morning we met at the end of the driveway and by the end of our 40-minute dog walk we truly felt like those cantaloupe seeds were stuck to our skin and we had no air.
but today i woke to 65 degrees. 65! and a breeze outside that felt like fall might indeed not have forgotten the way here when we're ready for it. but right now it's still summer, and we just want to be able to be outside. tomorrow, as some song says, that's just where i'll be.

the brownies are just out of the oven, and my dining room floor is covered with grocery bags filled everything my family will need for a week looking out over the crisp blue atlantic. towels and sunscreen, Fritos and Butterfly crackers, body wash for the outdoor shower and my husband's favorite black seal rum. 


and these. i grew them myself, all of them, plopped that plant in just the right spot and now here they are, ready to go with me to my favorite spot on the planet. by sunday i hope they find themselves in a pie or a blt or something like that. (the green one fell of the vine and even if he was a different color, it just didn't want to be alone.) he gets to ride along, and maybe he'll catch a few rays on the porch while we are there and be just right with a little goat cheese and some bacon and basilon the side.

we are celebrating, not just our annual vacay but the birthday of that book i wrote about this beach and blogged about a few posts ago. now that i am a paid writing hack, i have to be reminded sometimes that the dream i had since i was six actually came true 10 years ago this week. wow. and all because i have loved it here since my earliest memory.

but we are also celebrating family.

my daughter, cute in her bikini, will play her beach music, take in too much sun and shag in the kitchen with her dad (and me)... her husband will likely make the shrimp scampi (that is too spicy for me, but still — he's the only family member that actually lets me sit while he prepares) — and my son will fish and eat my marinated shrimp and have his beer and wax wryly about the people who walk across our path in front of the cottage and those who cross his path every day at work... and maybe by thursday, our boatless skipper will relax, finally. though he will miss the dog.

my father will sit on the deck and look at the ocean he's known since he was a child and think about things he won't share, and my mother will bring her caramel cake, along with a story, to share with us all.

i will read and wear my hat and get sunburned and maybe write a little and i will watch it all. w-a-t-c-h...breathe in the movement of my family, as changing as the ocean these days.

i first knew the atlantic when i was one, when we stayed in a cottage named the Coolamee in a second story room that stretched from streetside to beach. i remember feeling rocked by that ocean as the breezes blew through the windows, and how after a day on the beach, my sister and i would get our baths, then clean and warm in our clothes we would go back out and look for shells. i remember a pot full of crabs on the stove, my father using his pocket knife to clean the croakers on the porch and in my memory there was not a minute that i was bored.

and though i don't often swim the ocean anymore except to cool off on a hot day (the reason why is a story for another day) just listening to it and watching it fuels my soul. i have seen it calm as a kitten and as angry an an arching, growling bob cat... i can't explain it, but the rushing and the roaring and the calm gathering at the shoreline as all those angry waves almost hug each other somehow make sense to me. and i miss its absence in my life. but it'll be there tomorrow when i get there, changing, but forever the same.

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every party has a pooper, II, or of Jell-O shots and the long and winding road

Trust 30: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.”

What is one thing you can do that would make today worthwhile? What’s stopping you from getting started right now?

(Author: Jessica Dang)

editor's note: the story you are about to read contains unmentionables.

watching giada delaurentis make a tomato salad with corn and red onion is not a good idea when you're on a strickly Jell-O and clear liquids diet. even if it is for only a day, doesn't the guy who will be putting me to sleep tomorrow morning after a ghastly night of not eating and, well, you know, doesn't he know that it is high tomato season right now and even in my own paltry tomato garden they're turning ripe as we speak? thinking about those red, juicy, meaty morsels makes my mouth water.

i'm having a party tonight, but red is not invited. and though whenever i host a party, i make sure the necessaries are all appropriately stocked for my guests, this time, i'm the only one i'm stocking up for.

today i have eaten this: three Jell-O shots (sans any additive except food coloring) for breakfast. four for lunch. a JI-nor-mous decaf iced tea of my own making, a couple of glasses of cranberry/pomegranate juice (no wait, does that have RED in it?!?) and another Jell-O shot for a snack. all of the green variety. in another hour or so, i'll carefully measure out five 8-oz glasses of my favorite beverage ginger ale or water or something like that  and get ready for a downer for the next hour. down the hatch with the pills (20 in an hour, happy cocktail!), down the long and winding road, then down down down the drain. and down some more. i hope. and that it won't take long.

i've been carrying the instructions around in my purse for a week. taking them out, reading through them as if they contain the cryptic key to some way OUT OF THIS. i've pulled them out at the grocery store, carefully filling my cart with baby wipes, ginger ale, tp purchases to fill my necessary for the BIG D. today i have moped like a child who knows santa's coming in july because she's been so bad the first half of the year that he has to come when the switches are particularly pliable. i have convinced myself that i am the first person on the planet to ever EVER voluntarily go without food freshly ripe heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers and peaches for a full summer day, just so a stranger wearing latex gloves the doctor can have the pleasure of the  poke & prod my clean as whistle (what does that mean anyway?) parts of me to make sure they are, in fact, clean as a whistle.

oh, lookey here: the directions say no VEGETABLES, so technically, since tomatoes are a FRUIT, i can have just a little sliver with a little salt and pepper sprinkled on them, i mean it'll be digested and purged gone before i get there, so how will they know? even if i puree?

oh, but there's that red thing.

when i was in college, i got my wisdom teeth out on a summer day and had to do without tomatoes during peak season. i could only eat things like apple sauce. so after about a week of that, i came home and made the most beautiful beefsteak tomato sandwich on Wonder bread with Dukes i have ever seek, cutting it up into the tiniest of pieces and fitting it into my mouth around my swollen gums. i swear the vitamins hastened my recovery. i love summer tomatoes that much. and it's been two days since i had even the heel. imagine.

ok so i am a year or so little behind schedule. i have known it was an eventuality ever since i saw katie couric show how to right on television, though as i recall, she did not have cameras rolling in the necessary. despite evidence to the contrary, there are things even morning television won't show. i do know how important this is, and that's why, though i have been tempted all day to cheat, i mean really, how would they know if i ate a cracker, just one little pepperidge farm butterfly cracker wouldn't hurt a thing now would it? i have followed the directions very carefully. 

my walking friend succumbed to pressure worse than a hemorrhoid and got hers done over the winter, so she got to drink warm chicken broth when her time came. 'the procedure is nothing.' she said. 'i'm good for 10 years.'

this morning on our walk i wondered aloud if i could just call my favorite mexican restaurant and ask them for the chicken soup but could they hold the chicken, the rice, the onions, the tomatoes, the avocado just this once? it's the broth that makes it good, right? and then i remembered how last winter, after trying to swallow the ji-nor-mous amount of prescribed poo potion, my friend called me saying it was the worst thing she'd ever had to do. the worst. so of course i can't wait. there is such pleasure in company. but i opted for the pills, which themselves are of ji-nor-mous portions. choose your poo portion carefully.

giada is ending her party with peanut butter oatmeal bars, just in time for my party to begin. i'm getting hungry now, so guess that meas ANOTHER JELL-O SHOT. what flavor shall I choose?

even i, the doctor's daughter who hates to go to the doctor know how important this is. so there's no part time partying this time. one thing's for sure: no question about who the pooper will be.

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because you just never know

in march, she was caught by the fluid building in her lungs, unable to get out of bed or dress without assistance. they brought her home, found caregivers, knowing that at 93, her heart was slowing to a turtle's pace. wondered if at some point the ticker that had been ticking since the end of january 1918, would soon come to a full stop. I wrote about her then, about how worried we were for her.

but she kept on ticking, in the best john cameron swazye kind of way.

just a few days ago, we paid her a visit for our annual july 4th weekend with our 'fake family', and there she was, beaproned and standing in the kitchen making her special congealed salad which she makes every year for us. and on another day, she reached into the oven to check on her two perfectly baked lemon chess pies. she sat with us at the table as 11 of us gathered — for all 10 meals — laughing and talking, posing with her grandson, sharing a cocktail in the evening with granddaughters and friends, rocking on the porch in the heat.... sure she was tethered to her artificial breath, but still.

in our time together, we talked about how her unmarried uncle in the 1920s used to take she and her sister to town, dressed in fine feathers and spats to cover their shoes, driving them the 30 miles to the capital city, promising her a new car when she turned 16 so she could drive him instead.                 only he got married before her birthday, and she never got that car. 

she told me how much she liked my husband when she first met him 30 years ago. 'he was a good one,' she said, 'i could tell.' and don'tcha know for the most part, he has been? and he dotes on her, that he does.

as the holiday ended, she was doing this: talking into the face of an iPad, recording her voice into the heart Talking Tom Cat, laughing with her granddaughters at this new technology which was only invented when she turned 92. 

that night she watched The Bachelorette. THE BACHELORETTE. i have never seen the show myself, but apparently everybody spends a lot of time in the hot tub, and the bachelor in question kicked out the prettiest one. and as the fireworks flew and boomed outside, inside her room with the tv on nana comforted the three dogs (two of them large) who cowered at her feet. nothing gets this farm girl down. not a faint ticker. and not something as newfangled as a computer the size of a good book with a crazy kind of kitty on the screen who talks back, surely not that. because there is always something newfangled appearing out there in the world and it appears that nana's ticker is ticking around to see just what turns up next.

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