we're not in disney anymore: 54

i wish sometimes i lived in a disney movie. not because i want the happy ending... though that would be nice, but in a disney world, i would have a feathered pencil writing in the air what i was thinking, while i was washing the dishes or driving to or from work (no, i won't text while driving.. well, not often.) or watching the winds whip around the house.

i have not posted in over a week, but it's not without thinking about it. in the past week i have thought about much, but without that feathered pen hovering in the air to take my mind dictation, much has been lost, i'm afraid.

if i had that pen, i'm sure she would scrawl across the page in nice neat letters that i have, in the past week:

turned 54, felt an earthquake for the first time, been whipped by a hurricane (my 3rd or 4th), watched on tv as tides cut swaths and culverts in fairly good but vulnerable roads i used to travel. watched as irene took various members of my family hostage on the east coast from north carolina to new york. in this same week have walked the dog and bought groceries and picked up sticks in the yard and made supper for my neighbor and read a few chapters in a good book and finished a mediocre one. eaten homemade ice cream and met a new neighbor. watched a 9/11 special on national geographic HD and cried about that for so many reasons i can't even write about them all.

watched antique road show and found a lady who owns a table worth more than my house. seen pictures of trees i knew as a child felled in the street and on houses, warned a friend of an approaching tornado because she still has no electricity, offered shelter that wasn't needed and cooked at least four meals for my husband and me and one for my son and his friend. made pimento cheese. cried a couple of times i am sure and have changed the channel more than once, have scratched the dog's stomach and his muzzle and have thrown the ball to him. have missed my daughter. shown my bad manners. interrupted, though i didn't mean to. celebrated and consoled as two friends left their youngest at college. and have not heard much of what my husband has said to me, despite my hearing aids. probably irritated a few people though they have not said so.

i have, tonight, shared our last tomato with the man i've shared a life with for 30 years, lamenting instead of celebrated the fact that the dozens of tomatoes (and years?) we were able to grow are actually now gone. i have in the past three days stripped the bed of sheets, washed and folded them and i have forgotten to pick up no less than five pairs of shoes from the family room floor. i have forgotten at least one load of laundry in the washer that i'll have to wash again. i have lost sleep and dreamed of the misunderstandable, the embarrassing and the possible and have forgotten more than i recall.  i have been to church, on sunday/monday/ tuesday/wednesday/thursday/sunday and monday again, not because i am am that devout but because my job is there. i have shut the door of my office (which i almost never do) and when i have sat in the pew on the past couple of sundays i have let my mind wander too long. i have hugged two of my favorite three year olds, thank goodness.

and:
waited too long at a restaurant and listened while my husband complained. had too much artificial  sweeter in my unsweet tea, thought about our 30 years together and wished i felt more passionate about that fact. had a few hot flashes despite my patch.  have eaten way too much.

watched iron chef and understood that i really don't want to cook that way, made ina garten's tomato and goat cheese tart my own way was glad i did. wished i didn't have to count the calories in the puff pastry, but i do. started (and just about abandoned) a new morning exercise routine, have gone into work a full hour early and stayed later than i wish because it is that time of year.

listened and counseled and complained and kicked the copier. i have snooped and sighed (too many times), answered the wrong number but not called it. thrown away mail and kept newspapers, still have not picked up my dining room of all the clutter left there for three weeks. i have seen hummingbirds in the yard and wondered where my bluebirds went. found a tiny frog in the hurricane debris and wondered where his mother was. listened to the cicadas. given bad advice.

remembered that i was born on a thursday in the middle of the night, and though my father is a doctor he missed my birth because he was tending to another patient, that's ok. have celebrated the fact of my life twice with friends and once with family and thanked my parents and God for giving it to me all those years ago. have tried to help my dad learn gmail and have worried about both my parents when they lost power during Irene.

and more than once thought that if only i had that feathered pencil in the air i could actually finish one of the books i'm writing and still get my day job done.

i have wished and wanted, lamented, worried and complained, have given and got and tried to smile in the pictures, though i am never happy with the end result. torn ribbons and paper and laughed at cards until i did in fact wet my pants.

if only the feathered pen could be there for me, ever hovering, i could write it all. 

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susan hooks is here

my sister and i have never shared well. sleeping in the same room for forever, she inexplicably moved to the guest room when she turned teenager. and sometimes she would go into my closet and take a favorite t-shirt without my asking. (though younger, i was larger than she was so i couldn't steal her clothes without stretching them, and alas, getting caught.)

but then 30 years ago today, something changed.

i woke up to a phone call. 'hello susan!' pamula shouted. 'susan hooks is here!'

susan hooks. it took me awhile for this to sink in. my sister had just had a baby. a girl. and she had named the baby after me. (and my grandmother, but still.) wow. i called pamula daily after that, wanting to know who she looked like (her mom), did she cry (not much), how it felt to hold a baby in your arms that was your own. (one day I would learn myself.) in short order i was driving my mustang from augusta,ga to greensboro,nc, where my mother and my sister had spent the week babykeeping in a little house with kelly green carpet on the family room floor.  

the small bathroom in my sister's house had no vanity, as i recall. just a sink, and since there was no room to stretch out the giant baby bathing sponge, the first thing i saw on my arrival at the house was this: the two most important women my life dangling a tiny, wiry, slick-wet frame over the sink. and her eyes were WIDE open. freaked out, i would describe it. wet baby wet hands wet grandmother and mother... i was scared half to death that they would drop her. 

but they didn't. i am sure she was dry, dressed and fed by the time i got to hold her myself, looking into her large blue eyes, marveling at her chunky cheeks — she looked a little like Tweety Bird — counting her toes. a baby. a real baby. my sister's baby, and somehow — because she was named for me — by default my own. we were sharing at last. and something way more important than a t-shirt.

(my sister remembers this week not just because it marked the birth of her first child, but for the fact that beety jean, who thought that kelly green carpet could use a shampoo, sent my just-days-post-partum sister to the grocery story to rent a carpet cleaner — and didn't even help her get it out of the car. or clean the carpet. she probably did help clean it...that's our beety jean!)

being good Southern women, pamula and i started out calling our new baby susan hooks, but as she grew, just 'hooks' seemed to stick. two months later i got married. my sister moved our little baby to just outside St. Louis, but we talked every day about what raising her was like.

the next spring, i had become her godmother, and so i boarded a plane for illinois and her baptism. while i was there, we went to the zoo and the Arch, watched the roaring mississippi close up. and i took a lot of pictures.

on sunday, we dressed hooks up in her finest bonnet and headed to church. no other member of my family was there (another story: my brother's daughter was christened the same day, in a town much closer to my parents, so they were there.)

80s hair... what can i say?

i wish everyone had been with us, though. we stood in front of a congregation of strangers while the priest marked our baby as Christ's own. and then the choir turned to her and sang the most beautiful song i had ever heard, saying her name over and over, 'susan, susan...' as if she were the only one in the nave (and as if she understood). her wide eyes made us believe she did, for sure. I wish i could remember the other words, but pamula and i were both in tears and one thing you need to know about dear pamula is that she just does not cry.

i will spare you more of this story, which my sister describes as the happiest and saddest day of her life... how we drove all over Illinois look for a place for lunch and ended up in a dingy pizza parlor sitting all alone — pamula, her husband, hooks and me — celebrating the very fact of this baby.

when she was two, pamula called to say hooks had said the cutest thing. 'she asked me if a cloud sleeps. isn't that so cute?' that question led this writer on a dreamy literary journey that continues today. (to celebrate my tweety bird, i have been working on do clouds sleep, the bedtime book she inspired, much of the day). 

hooks grew older, gained a couple of brothers, and by then i had a baby of my own. 

hooks & her worm

she moved a couple more times until the fam finally settled in the Great State of Iowa. she came back to n.c. for school, where people just couldn't understand a name like hooks, so she started using susan. she met a tar heel boy (a demon deacon) who, oddly enough, had a nickname: worm. hooks & worm. there was nothing left to do but to marry him.

and now our little susan hooks is here and grown (though she is still little.) she looks like her mother and her great-grandmother (though she smiles much more than Hazel Estelle Hooks ever did.) and she is learning to make beety jean's caramel cake.

happy birthday, tweety bird. maybe by the time you have your own tweety bird i will finally be able to hand you your book.

can you tell they are kin?

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wild about that harry

on wednesday my son and i had a date. we met at an italian restaurant downtown, shared a meal and conversation, then walked down the block and into a dark theatre, just for the chance to put on some silly glasses and say goodbye to an old friend.


we have been doing this for years. (well, not the saying goodbye part), but sharing in a story we both love. 


we first pulled up to number 4 privet drive the year he was 10. i had been scanning the bookshelves of a small independent shop near my house, looking for something that might interest a boy who was not much interested in books. the bookseller pointed me to an odd little paperback called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. 'it came out in england,' she said, 'and this is the British version.' the American title, HP and the Sorcerer's Stone wasn't due out until the next summer.


i picked it up and read a couple of pages, wondering if this might just be the thing to spark reading in my child. it sounded good. boy wizard. i had one of those at home.


in my memory — which has been known to fail miserably — my boy and i sat together and read a few pages about harry, just his age, who lives in a cupboard below the stairs and who learns in chapter 3 that he is no ordinary boy, no not at all. it would be nice if all of us, in chapter 3, learned that about ourselves. maybe some of us do.


it wasn't long before my own wizard took the book into himself (don't you love when that happens?) studying the nuances of the sorting hat and the rules of quidditch, the magic of giants in life and of weasel(lys). we bought the american edition that next summer and he read it again, just waiting for the promised second book. the summer of the third book i had pre-ordered a copy from my bookseller friend, and my then 13-year-old sat for two days reading almost non-stop during our vacation — despite the pleading of friends and sister to join them on boogie boards in the ocean. harry was that important.


as the years passed, some mornings when i went into his room to straighten it up, i'd find he had been re-reading one of the books. and that the harry books had led him to Tolkien, Lewis. 


harry taught him much. that a few things you truly need in life are these: a handful of loyal friends, a teacher or two who will go to bat for you, a sense of purpose and of wonder. and a belief that you can change your corner of the world if you have a mind to. 


when the order of the phoenix came out, mr. g was 16 and driving, but not after 9 p.m. (nc law). once again i'd ordered a copy for him through the bookseller who had first introduced us to this remarkable boy. no copy could be sold until midnight, and though we were strict about the 'after 9' rule, we gave him the keys to the car and said: be careful. my friend the bookseller met him at the back door with his book so he wouldn't have to stand in line with all the little kids. safely back at home, he read into the early morning, witnessing painfully as harry learns that even a teacher whom you are supposed to trust can turn her back on you.


as i think of this, i realize, too, that this was the summer after my daughter's freshman year in college. it had been a hard year for us and for our boy. we missed the princess pea so much. mr g saw friends make wrong choices. he struggled with a teacher who appeared to want him to fail. (he eventually stood up to her.) harry had all this and more. mr g  found in harry's story some sort of strength inside himself i think. there will always be delores umbridges in the world. but they won't win if you don't let them.


a few of harry's friends died. mr g: two by then time he was a sophomore in college. harry lost at love. ditto mr. g. both my boys learned that though friends can make you angry you keep loving them anyway. people (including parents or pseudo-parents) let both of them down. and this too: there will always be horcruxes in the world that can lead to your destruction. the secret is to get to them before they get to you. and as a matter of fact, the whole thing is a puzzle you have to solve all on your own. and sometimes, sadly, you don't.


by the time the last book came out, i bought two copies — one for each of us —  because honestly i didn't want to share. Once again, we read it at the beach, neither of us talking about it until we had read the final page. 


a few weeks ago we convened oceanfront once again. this time my son bent his head into Game of Thrones, the first of a new series — like harry potter for grown-ups, he said. he first saw it on hbo then bought the book. attaboy. see the movie and want to know what the real story is. (i never knew harry was not for adults, come to think of it.)


my son is grown, like harry. works at a good job, watches his investments, tries to grow a beard on vacation. hasn't yet decided to open up his heart again. 


we share a town but don't see him often, so when i get the chance to sit across from him all by myself, even if i do have to pay for the beer and the meal, it is a treat. i look into his face and see pieces of me — eyes, jaw, nose — though to my knowledge now we are only externally similar. but at least internally, we are both wild about that harry.


as we took our seats in the imax theatre, i checked my phone. he does not read my blog so i feel safe in saying he doesn't know i'm following is hilarious tweets. on wednesday mr g had tweeted: 'harry potter with mum.' a gift to me, surely, to let his world know we were together.


we have been doing this, too, watching harry grow on the big screen. mr g actually waits for me, sometimes weeks after it's come out. another gift he does not have to give.


as we sat together in the darkened theatre, i saw more than just a story about a boy banished to a cupboard who finds his way out. i saw my son sitting next to me and how much he was like the cupboard boy, scraggly beard and all. a boy searching for himself, being a friend, battling some, grown into a man, somehow suddenly. but inside him is that 10-year-old, still. 


and so we watch the story end. applaud as voldemort becomes flakes of ash that seem to float toward our faces (we agree the 3-d glasses are not necessary.) watch harry in middle age and i think: what will that be like for my mr g? 

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