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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me, as me

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?

Write about that moment.

(Author: Bridget Pilloud)

It was a summer sunday afternoon just like this one when i hugged my kids goodbye at camp and instead of driving south, toward home, i headed north. i had never been on this particular road right by myself — had actually never been alone on a trip in fact — and with each mile marker i passed, i knew i was plotting new ground.

a few weeks before, a plain brown box had arrived at my door with books inside. books with my name in 64-point type stretched across the cover. books that as i cracked open the spine, for the first time in my life i knew the plot, the sentence structure, almost by heart.

and on this particular sunday, i was headed out on my very first book tour. first stop, richmond and a radio interview. r-a-d-i-o? with my squeaky voice? (let me say to any of the book writing folks out there: choose radio over the talking heads of tv.)  the pr flack i share bed space with had spent months with me it seemed, rehearsing talking points about the regional history i had put to paper — the people and the houses that had shaped the beach i had loved my whole life. how was it, that i, an outsider to this provincial world had been the one to capture it? or that the 12-year-old girl inside me who had always dreamed of writing had actually gotten an advance check (however small, it was the largest one-time paycheck i had ever gotten... a record that still stands.) that my publisher actually expected to see 7,000 books. Seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d! dear lord. a third of those in hard cover.

yet i had already sold some. many to the very people i wrote about. had a book signing party in an old cottage on the oceanfront on a glorious blue-sky day. and now i was going all over the place, it seemed, all by my little pea-picking self, to talk to strangers about why they should buy it, too.

at the time, it felt as if my whole life's work had come to this moment, me rambling down the highway to THE FUTURE. all those poorly constructed sentences in third grade, all the dangling phrases in 9th, the misspelled words that first year out of journalism school... in time my grammatical ineptitude shape-shifted into something real enough to be clipped and posted to refrigerators in homes of people (not just my mother) i didn't even know. how had that happened?

but seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books? i had never sold so much as a stadium seat cushion sporting my high school mascot without apology. 

and yet i would not apologize for this book. not the three years it took me to write it or the year it took for me to convince the publisher that my vision was right. (oh well, i would apologize about the cover, just a little because i had no control and i didn't like it at first. but it has grown on me.) and i did apologize to my pr flack for the money we spent just trying to realize my vision. (i do think we have realized about a nickle profit.)

but on that Sunday afternoon, i was thinking about none of that. just that in the back of the car i had a box of books and they were m-i-n-e. my own creation (with the help of many, many others and of course G-O-D) but my words. at least those that lay outside the margins of quotation marks.

on that drive north (well, richmond is not too north) i thought about the summer morning three years before when i sat in the parking lot of the episcopal church across the street and looked at the grand old ladies i was writing about, thinking: what do they look like to me? just to me? and came up with it, right there (G-O-D loves and helps people, even if all they do is sit in church parking lots) staring at the ladies' wide porches and how they are just like wide-brimmed summer hats. they surely surely are, their propped shutters like eyelids, looking out toward the open sea.

that, come to think of it, is just like me. or where i will be in a couple of weeks, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this remarkable experience, remarkable if only that i wrote the damn book and sold those seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books (and then some). funny that my publisher didn't think of putting out a 10th anniversary edition. but still.

after richmond i drove to norfolk (arriving two hours early for a tv interview. the tv part of this story is a whole nother story...), then back to north carolina through the great dismal swamp with the windows rolled down — a swamp that on that day was not dismal but promising, for some strange reason. it reminded me of a high school girl a few years before that on her first solo drive to and from that marvelous beach in an un-air-conditioned light blue ford maverick, driving down a country highway all by herself but not afraid of anything. oh, how i wish i could connect with that girl again, out on a straight stretch of road, windows open, headed to what yet awaits.

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empty chair, empty, there

 

she was supposed to be here, 

sitting in that empty chair there, 

as the dog sleeps behind her on the carpet. 

having eaten her hot dog with her mother's homemade chili, having chatted with her grandparents for the first time in person since last summer,

having had her nails done in pretty princess pink

and found gold slippers that don't hurt her feet,

to go with the dress we bought her in new york last month. 

was supposed to be talking to me 

while her husband ate the marinated shrimp he loves 

while her dad gets her hugs for father's day.

but she didn't get here. 

two canceled flights and $100 cab ride for naught 

left them anxious about trying yet another 

and left me (and her dad) once again more than disappointed 

that sometimes it seems NYC just won't let their displaced southerners 

go

so instead of a house full of people 

and the chance to watch my daughter 

watch her friend since 4th grade tie the knot this afternoon,

i will spend my evening wishing she were here

and wiping my eyes, imagining the two of them in their 

 stoplight halloween costumes 

or as a diamond and spade

in a deck of life-sized cards the year after that.

that will be me, looking at her empty chair knowing

just how much she would love the flowers, 

imagining her smile and her bare feet on the dance floor 

with her husband and her high school friends. 

and she will be wondering and texting and calling 

but will have to wait for my pictures 

to see just how much the groom looks like her husband, 

and how the bride's wedding gown

looks so much like her own.

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good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

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