that mouse, and whole cookie thing

you can't imagine what you can do in a day when you want nothing more than to write a few new words on paper and you have sworn you will not spend one more minute on facebook.

there is the walking of the dog and the search for tomatoes in the side yard patch (three, count them three times.) there is the worry over those bare patches in the back yard where the voles have taken their stand and eaten your whole fig bush and the listening for birds singing and there is the watching of the geese as they fill the front yard across the street.

and the wondering if the neighbors will bring the baby outside and the time it takes to eat a few of those tomato/basil potato chips you just bought at the store and then a flip of the channel to see what Olympic sport is taking place across the pond and of course the shower and the hair and makeup and all that even though you told yourself you needed none of this to work from home.

and there is all that checking of email, both the work kind and the home kind, and the  tweaking of the work website (just a few minutes, you promise yourself) and then finally, you sit down to read the manuscript you've been working on for what is in truth now about 10 years and when you've gotten about a third of the way through all those notes your kind and gifted teacher was so good to write on it and you finally realize you really hate it so much that you are not sure you have another word left to write about the story and by that time, well, it's just about time for lunch.

and then after you have a nice salad of those tomatoes you found you tell yourself, well, i'll just sit back down with this awful book for a few more chapters to see if there is anything at all redeeming about it and you pretend to underline the parts that need fixing in bright blue pen because you have an aversion to red pens used for any reason and well, then that whole process makes your eyes so heavy that you just nod off for a bit. to restart your batteries for writing later in the afternoon.

and then you get back at it, but while you are reading that same old passage for the 50th time your realize what you need to do is more research, so that takes another good bit of time away from the page. and better prepared from all that research, you sit back down with the characters, asking them what they really want to do about all this mess of a story, and then you start looking back at notes you wrote in 2006 (2006!?) when you weren't even 50 yet, and then you flip further back into the journal which you have never really meticulously kept and find notes you wrote even further back in 1997 (before said book was even in your imagination) for heaven's sake and you realize how much your handwriting has deteriorated since then from all the typing you've been doing at the computer. 

but you look back at that first entry anyway just to see, and you realized that of the 16 goals you set down in your own old cursive you have accomplished exactly 6, and most of those are selfish goals, come to think of it. and then as you read on, you see that it's a gratitude journal you started way back before you had done anything professional really, and that your whole work life has happened since you wrote those things down. and then you see even more goals, things like learning to ice skate, which you have never done and wouldn't now because good heavens you might break you leg! but there are things like get the house free of dust, which you gave up trying to do long ago, and work on your photography, which by golly you have been doing a good bit in the past few years, and finding an hour to yourself, well, some days that's pretty much all you have, hours to yourself and yet you waste them.

and in these selfish lines you see the beginnings of stories you went on to write and somehow the journal has in just two month's time become less of what you haven't done and more of what you hope to do. and somewhere in there is something you hope to do for someone else. imagine.

and you read on about what you most fear as a writer is not being able to find the story, which, sadly, is still true.

and so you decide you need a change of venue from the kitchen table so you move everything upstairs to that office you fixed up for yourself at just about the time you found a job that would take you out of it. that same office with the books piled on the floor and the many drafts of that book you have been writing crowded around you like children waiting for storytime, and you wonder if you should go back to the very beginning, to that now very tired first draft to see what all the fuss was about in the first place.

but first you need to empty that overflowing recycling basket, and as you reach the bottom of the stairs you smell the water you seasoned with Old Bay and for a second you think you might have ruined the shrimp you had intended for supper but you are relieved as you throw the basket down on the kitchen floor to see the pot on the stove  is boiling over but the shrimp are sitting right where you left them, waiting for their fate.

so you start over and then the phone rings for the first time all day and while you are talking you go over to the tv where paula deen is cooking and you just have to switch channels to see what kelsey finds essential on that hip cooking channel and then you realize that in about five weeks you have failed to put away the napkins left over from your beach week so you keep talking and tuck them into an already over-flowing drawer in the living room chest and then you walk to the front door and peer out to see what happened to the storm that was brewing not 30 minutes ago but now seems to have disappeared without raining a drop.

and you feed the dog and look out at the bird feeder and then you climb the stairs again, back to that journal you wrote in with pink ink and you see that on april 23, 1997, you wrote about spending three days teaching writing at your old high school and you note how you thank God for your old English teacher and then remember standing in her classroom trying to teach her students a little something about writing, so you are thankful for her having hope in you 22 years before.

then you realize that the husband will soon be home and you will have not accomplished a single word toward your 1,100-word goal in the whole day set before you when you woke before six. not a word.

and so you start to fix the problem. and 2,687* words later, you have at least tried, even if all those words won't make it into your book.

*ps: when you look back over your work for the day, you realize that all those words, well you were overly optimistic about your accomplishments and counted them TWICE.  1,266 is more like it.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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mama said there'd be days like this

somewhere among the old picture frames and Candyland and discarded puzzles there sits an historic videotape. as in VHS. but the fact that it's an antiquated technology means nothing to me.


what i see is a boy — well, to be more accurate hear a boy's voice — as he narrates the story of his life on a typical day at home with his parents and his sister.


i'm in there, standing in the kitchen (thin, who knew?) making a face, not wanting to be on camera, even then. 


"there's my mom," he says, "hey mom!" with an excitement i wish i still heard in his voice when he sees me. 


his sister mugs, always has, moving around the house to make sure she is in almost every scene. little brother swings the awkward camera — carried on his shoulder, yes it's THAT old — around to his dad who is reading the paper. always.


what i love about this old tape is the boy's voice as he moves around our house recording life as he sees it. he even turns it around on himself, his blue eyes out of focus he's so close to it. what this boy couldn't have done if we'd had iPhones back in the 90s. 

the future director

this same boy would go on to make other movies with video cameras we gave him as he grew older, gifts we hoped would be the spark to ignite what we knew was in that boy somewhere. a take-off on the day's news. hilarious 'ads' for prom, a mockumentary about squirrels overtaking campus that didn't go over well with his professor (guess she'd never seen Christopher Guest's work.) i dreamed he'd be the next Spielberg, but he wouldn't have a thing to do with my dreams.  


but in the end, the boy got the college degree in broadcast, knowing after chemistry and geometry classes in high school that he had to take a different route.
he wanted to be behind the camera, he said, though he had a great distrust of tv news. 


only those jobs not in news and behind the camera weren't so easy to find.


when i started my church communications job, i had an idea that we needed a video history of the church, so i set about scanning old photos and taught myself a little bit about iMovie, in hopes that my son could help me smooth out the kinks. i think it was during that project that i learned this mother and son really don't work that well together. when i asked him a question, he would often say: people (meaning him) get college degrees in this, mom. it's not supposed to be easy.


back in june, i tried again, doing all the front work for a video for my parents, hoping he would come in at the end and do his magic. at the time, he was working his regular job in internet marketing and spending nights and weekends helping his high school classmate john on a video project to promote a new app john and his dad had developed. it's a neat game you play to earn points for saving energy — and eventually money on your power bill. 


so i knew he was busy. but family trumps, right?


one night in June we sat at the kitchen table, transferring my files to his computer. it was supposed to be seamless, (or so the directions said) but in the end, our two Macs weren't talking well with each other — could have been the people who ran them — and my carefully crafted movie wouldn't transfer to his Final Cut Pro. over the next few days he would work to recreate the story i had spent a month working on myself — i imagine the whole time he was thinking what an idiot his mother is. knows just enough to screw things up but not enough to fix it.


the day we were to present the video, he asked if i'd like to see it. so i sat in his beach house room and watched the story of my parents' life unfolding on the screen, to music he had chosen (i did have a say in it.) and the tears just came right on out of my head. there were a few hiccups only a mother could see, but i loved it, as did my whole family. we watched it over and over in the last days of our time together, marveling at what a 'pro' job he'd done.


and then we all went back to work.


all this time, for months really, my son had been using his off time, at least some of it, on the video project for john. is it ready? can we see it? we would ask. no, soon, he'd say. 


soon came last week, in the middle of a crowded lunch spot as i sat with two good friends. i'd been telling them about the video i'd seen the day before on the app's website, a cute stop-action spot starring a couple of graham's friends, and i picked up my phone to show them the work he'd done.


turns out, i had the wrong video, because a new one had popped up, and i saw for the first time what the boy who started out at 7 years old with the camera on his shoulder was actually doing with that college degree. you can watch it here. 


as we watched, my friends and i laughed, recognizing faces from my son's high school class, and then, well, i just couldn't stop watching. back at work, i showed it to everyone i saw. my son did this. isn't it good? i had, i hate to admit now, become one of those mothers. the ones who can't shut up about how fabulous their children are and how they are single-handedly saving the world. 


i don't really expect my boy to save the world. just change your corner is what i am always telling my kids. the fact that he's a good friend and an honorable person (he even called up the power company to tell them they had credited him for paying a bill he hadn't paid)... is enough to make me pretty daggone proud to be his mama.


but how to describe the moment you know your child has found his professional calling? pride, of course, excitement for what lies ahead as he pursues it, hoping, expecting, he surely will. but it just feels so much deeper than that. it's your own understanding that what the parent saw way-back-when in the boy, well now the boy finally sees it for himself. and believes it about himself. and that, folks, can be life-changing. for both mothers and their kids. 


the fact that he created this little commercial — with many, many helpful hands — and it had nothing do to with his day job seems a minor detail. 


'i don't want to take my hobby and make it my work,' he told me when he graduated from college. why ever not? i said then, think now. why would you ever not want to do something you love doing every single day and make money doing it? it would make things so much easier. not that it's not hard work to do the work you love, but the finished product is so much more rewarding when you hang up your shingle at the end of the day if you love what you are doing while the shingle sways in the breeze.


of course, he wasn't listening to me then. maybe not even now. but last night when he came over to break bread with us, i could sense some pride in his own voice at what he'd accomplished.


'they say they want to do another one,' he said to us as he was leaving.


and this mama knows who'll they'll go to for that.



writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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