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.

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Oh, How I Miss Reverb

Reverb 2010: Gift. This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?


Ok, so I skipped this one last month. Let's just say it is because I was holding out to see if my fairy godmother Merriweather would stop by long enough to wave her wand over me and say: Muffintop, be gone!


But however much I still want that to happen, she has yet to show. Maybe it was because it snowed on Christmas night and the inches were much deeper than she was tall. Or she got stuck in the ice storm the next week. Or maybe Princess Aurora finally started behaving like a true adolescent, leaving poor Merriweather with her hands full. Or maybe she did show, and her gifts to me in fact were the afternoon naps I was able to snag during all that ice and snow. She did give dear Princess A. her own longwinter's nap, after all. 


Truth is, I have been thinking about this gift thing for awhile now, and it is so hard to pin down one that has been most memorable. The writing? Yes, that's been a wonderful gift, something I felt I had lost for awhile, but now, my blog stats are falling in the New Year because I am not posting, and something tells me I have to actually keep it up. So this gift has come with beautiful ribbons tied so tightly to it that they are impossible to unknot. 


But what about something else? There was the pocketbook my children gave me, the charms I got from my husband, but I'm thinking, that though I love those things, it must a gift I haven't thought of. Tangible or emotional, the questions reads. 


Was it the hour on Christmas Eve, when I sat in the pew with my husband and all of my children — together for the first time in months — listening to the choir and the trumpets and the harp? 

Or our beach week, when I woke every day to the sunrise over the Atlantic, was able to sit with my daughter and know that we had space to breathe in the ocean air and laugh and dance and that at the end of our week, neither one of us would be leaving the other on a NYC street corner, crying in the cab?


Could it have been sharing a hot dog with my father at his favorite stand, knowing that he always orders a Chicago dog (mustard, chili, onions and slaw) and because it is his favorite place, it became mine, too, long ago, and my children's, too?


Might it have been the $150 in cash my rector handed me a few days before Christmas, and learning that someone in our parish gave — anonymously — the same to every single person on our staff, because of jobs well done?


Surely, wasn't it also watching my son walk out the door, suit coat in hand, headed to his first career job, knowing I had a small part in helping him find his path?


And then there were the times when funny three-year-old Cheney and her her super cool three-year-old friend Davis ran to me, their arms open wide, and said: whatchadoin' Sooze?


Or was it when we laughed til our hearts hurt at the dining room table with our friends as they searched their DROIDS for the best song ever — (how do you compare the Allman Brothers with Bill Deal and the Rondels, really?) —  and then sang it, loudly, with our grown children in the next room at the grown-up kiddie table, laughing at us. And later when my Pea said she hoped one day to have good friends like that? Was it that?


Couldn't it have been watching my mother make the turkey gravy at Thanksgiving with my grandmother's gravy spoon, worn on one edge because she always stirred, holding it just the same way?


Was it finding out that my sister, at age 6, skipped first grade one day, curling herself up in the gnarled old roots of a giant oak tree, after she crossed a highway by herself — by herself! — because her teacher had been mean to her too many days before? Or watching my husband and children open the paintings I gave them of the dogs... yes, that was a gift. Surely it was time spent with Boone and Martha, with Hilda Kay and Cloos' Club and in the purple room and sailing with my husband (though I didn't do it nearly enough), and walking the dog and reading in my napping room. 


Will all these things be the gifts I will remember for 2010? They each made my year memorable, to be sure.

But maybe it is this one, the one that brought tears to my eyes at the end of the year, given to me in a purple a bag by my purple room friend, with these words:  When I saw this I thought of you, because you have to be, to accomplish all you plan to do in 2011. It's the piece of a puzzle, and Lord knows I am that. One side just says: I AM. The other says this: BRAVE. I AM BRAVE.


Well. I am not, but my friend thinks I am and maybe I need to look back and see what I said I'd do this year that made her think so. 


No. I am not brave. Brave is our boy Ryan in Afghanistan. Brave is my friend with cancer. Brave is my first grade sister. Brave is that woman in Arizona who took the shooter's ammunition away. 


Brave is 'fessing up and facing it, changing direction even though the wind is trying hard to blow you a different way. Brave is ditching the excuses. Doing the harder thing. It is telling the truth to yourself before you try it with anybody else.


Oh...no, I am not there yet. Not even the tiniest bit close. But it makes me feel just a little bit braver knowing my friend thinks I am. I have been brave before, a few times in my life. But these days not so much. But could I be again?


Put the puzzle piece somewhere you'll see it every day, Lee said. So it's on my key ring. And a million times a day as I fiddle with my keys in search of the right one, every now and then that little piece of puzzle that is BRAVE will pop, reminding me that maybe I can be brave again, and that one day the piece of the puzzle that is me might just fit.


sbr

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Let Me Be Clear

I'm team-teaching a class on Sundays in January on the books of Asheville writer Patti Digh, in preparation for The Gathering, a women's retreat I'm involved in next month, with Patti as keynote speaker. To prepare for the class, and for the retreat, I am opening Creative Is A Verb randomly each day, reading the story and working through the creative challenges Patti provides. Today's impromptu opening revealed page 180, Embrace your Clearness Committee. (more on that later)


I haven't known Patti long, but on a frustrating day last spring, as we were struggling to find a keynote speaker for our event, I stumbled onto her blog. I liked what I saw — a fellow writer musing about intention. And creativity. And story. About living life as art, even if we have never felt like artists before. 


As much as I would like an entire weekend to be about ME and all my needs, I had to step back a bit and be (somewhat) unselfish. (Let's face it. All writers want ATTENTION.) Still, Patti's blog practically shouted at me to ask myself some questions. What was I doing in my life that was intentional, creative? Had I forgotten my own story? Might there be other people out there who could hear the shouting, too?


As I clicked further into her blog, I found the very language that we had been trying to define for our event:

• What learning and significances are right in front of us, in the stories of our days?
• How can we move beyond the limits of who we think we are into what we were meant to be?
• In what ways can we relinquish our “role” in order to discover who we might be beneath the mask?
• How can we live more mindful, intentional lives by saying yes, being generous, speaking up, trusting ourselves, loving more, and slowing down?

Oh, and she was funny. Very funny. She liked Bobby Sherman, and anyone who knows a thing about him has to have a sense of humor.Somehow I knew she would be the perfect choice for our keynote, not just for me, but for everybody else, too.

I told my friend Mel, The Gathering organizer, about her. She read the blog and liked Patti immediately. Send her an e-mail, Mel said. And write your heart out. And so I did, telling Patti of our a shared passion for "Julie, Julie Julie do you love me?" (ok, we were 13, so give us some slack...) And our small town N.C. roots. Not to mention that in one of her photos she is wearing a sailor collar dress like I used to have in first grade. I told her that I connected to the fact that she has sailed around the world because my husband has a sailboat, though we have as yet only sailed around Kerr Lake. I titled my e-mail: I have been looking for you all day. Which was true, since I had spent the whole day in a maze of Google searches that seemed to have no end, until I found her blog.

I said a little prayer. And then I hit SEND.

In 14 minutes, an e-mail from this woman who travels around the world and has written boocoos of books and speaks all over everywhere, showed up in my box:

My dear Susan -

Imagine my wonderment and delight to be sitting here at my computer and see your message come up. Anyone who shares my fondness for Bobby Sherman... and little did you know that my daughter will start NC State University in the fall, so Raleigh is very much on my radar and I am looking for excuses to come there.

I would be delighted to come. Let's find a way to make this work.

love, patti

Captain Who?

What I learned later is that Patti gets hundreds of requests in a month's time, and she never responds quickly, much less in 14 minutes. A quick response she reserves for her daughters, husband and maybe dear Bobby, should he ever figure out who has been Googling him. And maybe a certain actor with a penchant for pirate movies. My e-mail clicked, and well, whodaever?

Funny, funky Patti Digh

In the months since, Patti and I have had several conversations about The Gathering, and a few weeks ago, I attended one of her readings locally, wanting to meet this woman who is so honest about herself that she has started a new blog this week about wrestling with weight, trying to be a more bendable in body. She strikes me as being particularly bendable in spirit. She is soft-spoken and Southern and funky and funny and just like the self she projects onto the page. When she joins us in February, she'll talk about her path in hopes that we all might draw something from her life that will fit in our own. 


It's Patti's fault, really, that I subjected y'all to this blog during December. She challenged her Facebook followers to join her in Reverb10, and I just said why not? The fact that I haven't posted anything in several days tells you that I need the challenge ever-present in my in-box, and though keeping the blog going is part of my 2011 self-improvement plan, apparently I don't hold much clout with myself, at least just yet. But this is a start.


So back to the Clearness Committee. It's a group of people gathered together to support us, whose job is not to have the right answers, as Patti says,  but to craft respectful and supportive questions. Do we each have a such a group we can convene at the important moments in life, she asks? If not, we should find them, surround ourselves with such people, and at least a couple of them should have different perspectives on life from our own.


My answer would be yes, I do have a CC. And it's not just the people who say: you're terrific, though I do love those people. (Please keep it coming!) My CC is made up of those supporters, and those who aren't afraid to help me figure out when I have screwed up, have hurt someone, have fallen short of my potential. Those good folks who point out my typos, both literal and figurative. If I would only ask.


But am I open to the truth of me, and the truth as someone else sees me? My family (and a couple of people on my CC) would probably say no, I am not.


And, this: Am I on anyone else's CC? Have I shown my friends that I am the kind of person who can listen, who can ask respectful and supportive questions, who can give, as Patti says, "unconditional love with hopeful expectancy?" I hope so, but I wonder sometimes if I just take take take and don't give as good as I get. Yet another thing to work on. 


So as I count down the weeks to The Gathering, I plan to gather my CC for the weekend, too. And together I hope we will craft respectful and supportive questions for each other, and in doing so, retell our stories, challenge our creativity, and maybe even admit we all loved Bobby Sherman, once upon a time.

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Becoming Me — Breaking the rules, yet again

Whose dogs are these anyway?

Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.


One of my favorite movies in the last few years is Becoming Jane. It is of course about Jane Austen, the world that made her into the sister, the daughter, the writer she would become. I always cry at the end in part because of the love story, how she let go of the love of her life — sometimes you just have to let go, to become — and how years later he comes back to hear her read and brings his daughter (spoiler alert!!!) whom he has named for his own lost love. But I also cry for the writer. About how it takes that letting go of the very things she loves the most, to become who she is meant to be.

To say that I identify with this story on many levels is too obvious. Though a big difference is that though I did leave one love in my life a very long time ago, I found another, and he's going to gripe about taking the Christmas tree down in a couple of days, but he is walking one granddog right now who became ours a couple of years ago, and another who will be going back to NYC on Friday — and I didn't have to ask him to. This from a man who didn't really like dogs when we first met, but gave me one anyway, just because I did.


And that old love? He loved dogs, so much so that he took back a dog I gave him once because he was not in a position to take care of it. He had sons, though I doubt seriously whether he would ever have named one of his children after me if he had had a daughter. And he has never once shown up at one of my author events, though his wife did buy a book from me for a Christmas present the year my first book came out.

James McElvoy in Becoming Jane

But back to Becoming Jane. Standing there with his curly locks looking a little bit like that boy I knew in the 70s, James McElvoy just pulls all the tears I have inside me right on out.


That boy from my high school and college days became himself once we broke up, not somebody I tried to make him to be. Come to think of it, he actually always was himself, never pretending, like I often was (am).  


And me: I sort of became myself. 


But here's the thing: I think there is more to me than I realize, and some of it isn't as good as I would like. So that's what I want to achieve in 2011. To become me, finally, at 53. (Ok, so I will be 54 in 2011, but not until WAY into the year.) And I have a feeling if I do that, finally become me, it might affect more people than just me. (Not that I have that much influence or anything, but still.)


* I want to become, the me who: 
creates more honestly; who gives love without worrying about the crusty patches on my skin or the fact that my eyes don't look so good through my glasses; who drops everything for a friend, even when I don't feel like it or have something else to do; who picks up after myself (I mean really, how many receipts do I need to save? And when am I finally going to put my shoes away?). The me who arrives early and prepared so she will never have that dream again about showing up in class without her homework. The me who forgives, especially when I REALLY don't feel like it, the me who finally forgives myself. The me who picks up where she left off on so many, many things. Who finishes, finally, what she has started. Who calls her sister. And her brother. and her sisters-in-law, more often. Who stands in her own skin and does not say "I wish I were", or  'I ate too many Cloo's French Fries so that's why I have this muffin top.' The girl who starts to get rid of that muffin top, no excuses.

To become that girl, that woman. And then move along.


So that's it. Become. Just a word, but one with so much possibility. 


Put it out there: I want to become... it can mean anything in the world, anything at all.


How will that make me feel? Who knows. Try it with me. Just try.  Become...  you'll see. And maybe I will too.


* It sounds a little bit the Sammy Davis Jr version of "I Gotta Be Me", which apparently you can get on a ring tone on your cell. 

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I ought to be in pictures: Ok, so I cheated just a bit

Photo - a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

Amateur photog that I am, I have taking well over a thousand photos this year, 999+ of them of other people. And of the two or three of me taken, they all seem to say: tired, old, fat, and tired again. Now, if this was last year, it would be easy. Despite 9 months of lost sleep and fretting, I looked pretty damn good on my daughter's wedding day, if I say so myself. What a happy day that was, for all of us. (Thanks, Joey/Jessica, and Linda, and Eric.)


But in 2010? Not so much.

Oct. 10, 1982

My husband and I have a tradition, though. Since Oct. 10, 1982, we have kept a photo record of our anniversaries. The idea came from the wedding gift of a dime store photo album from one of my mother's cousins, who gave us instructions to fill the album of photos taken on our wedding anniversaries, and looking back, we would be surprised at the stories the photos tell. That first picture was captured on a humid Georgia Sunday, and we dressed up in our rehearsal dinner clothes. I have written before that it looks to me like we are a couple a little unsure of the road we are traveling together. He holds me as if he will never let me go. I look like I could use a few pounds. What the picture doesn't show is the gnats flying around our faces, and the sadness we both felt, because my husband's father had had surgery to remove a necrotic brain tumor the day before.


Not all the Oct. 10ths between then and now have been quite so awful for our family, though one or two have been marked by loss. We've celebrated pregnancies, moves, new houses, even something as seemingly inconsequential as yet another year together, just muddling through. I often give photo albums as wedding gifts, being careful to choose ones that have at least 50 pages. A few years ago, I had to buy a new album, because our old one was filling up.

Oct. 10, 2010

On Oct. 10, 2010, a Sunday, we got up early and took our dog to church. Now smart as he is, Reagan is not quite up to all the bowing and posturing and kneeling we Episcopalians are known for, and as far as I know he couldn't tell a credence table from a lavabo bowl. But the date of our 29th wedding anniversary happened to be on the Feast of St. Frances, when everybody brings an animal to church for a blessing.


The photo is taken by our friend Claire, just a quick snap so we could have it for the album. When I look at it now, I search for traces of the skinny girl in the Princess-Di-style dress who wasn't so sure about marriage at the end of that first year. Now, this woman seems to understand much more (though there are still some things she has yet to learn), and her groom has loosened his grip a bit, sure now, that she is not going anywhere. She's put on a few more pounds than she needed back in 1982, but she's added some laugh lines, too, and I'd like to think those lines show that today she can giggle a little more freely than she did that first year.


The picture may not be worth a thousand words, but it is worth more than the 10,585 days together that it represents. We have grown up and older, loosened our grip of each other enough to grow into ourselves. And I hope that keeps on happening, as we move toward 7,665 more October 10ths, to 50 years, and beyond. 


And what I said before about another year together seeming inconsequential, that is not true, not true at all. Even though on some of those days we have lost time arguing at stoplights, have forgotten to give each other a kiss goodbye, just have nothing new to give each other at the end of the day except a burden, on other days we have watched our children tickle toes with the ocean, take hold of a new family, find their gifts. We have watched each other grow businesses, write books, fail, then try again. 


Though on some days we have buried our parents and dogs, on others we get to take our dog to church, or like today, watch him playing with our granddog in a new snow fall. And though we may end this day, both of us snoring side-by-side (as the dog snores on the floor next to us), every single one of our days is a prize. 

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Merry Christmas, All Y'all. Searching for Santa, redux

This story was published in 1994 in the N and O. Merry Christmas to all!

Searching for Santa

© Susan Byrum Rountree

OK, I admit it: I am 37 years old and I still believe in Santa Claus. That fact is an embarrassment to my husband and even my children, who are borderline themselves this year, but who will pretend to believe, just to please me.

I keep a picture of the Real Santa on my desk all year long. Next to the Christmas Story in the Bible, The Polar Express is my favorite holiday book. And on Christmas morning, though I have recently conceded that the kids can go downstairs first, I always wake up wondering if this will be the year he’ll visit me again.

I don’t really know what happened, way back when I was 11 and one of my friends told me her version of The Truth. With three older brothers, she knew all the truths of life and was quick to squelch my naiveté, with stories about the tooth fairy who lived in a little tooth hut in the woods between our houses, or the giant who had once stepped in her front yard and then across the street at the cemetery, and left two giant-sized footsteps that later turned into ponds.

Let’s just say when she told me that Santa was nothing more than a myth, I wasn’t buying so quickly.

My mother was ironing when I came home that fateful day that could have changed my life. I will never forget the warmth of her kitchen, how she pressed the wrinkles out of one of my father’s shirts, and how I knew she would press out this particular truth for me. “Santa Claus is who you want him to be,” my mother said, neither validating my friend’s confession, nor my insistence of his reality. “You know in your heart what you believe.” It was the perfect dodge, one I would learn to appreciate more when my own children came along, but words that confirmed for me that though the magic stops for some people, it didn’t have to stop for me.

Truth is, my mother probably still believed then, just a little bit, herself.

Why else would she have driven us almost three hours to Richmond, Virginia, once even dodging a James River flood, to see the old elf? There were dozens of Santas along the way, any one of whom would have been glad to hear our wishes. But somehow, none was like the Real Santa.

The Real Santa

When you mention The Real Santa to any kid from six to 56 who grew up in Eastern North Carolina, they know all about him. True, he lives at the North Pole most of the year, but come November, he moves south to Richmond. Sequestered on the top floor of the old downtown Thalheimers department store in Richmond, he sits for hours from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, just like all the other mall Santas, taking requests, chuckling, talking about Rudolf and the gang, even going up to the roof byway of the chimney.

But ask those same kids why the Real Santa was different, why today they join some 45,000 others who drag their own kids extreme distances and withstand hours of waiting in line, just to sit on his lap, and they’ll be quick to respond. The real Santa is different, because he knows your name.

I should know; it happened to me every time I visited him. Just before it was my turn, the Snow Queen, a beautiful fairy-like girl in a long flowing gown, greeted me. Then, in a moment of absolute magic, Santa turned to me and said, “Why it’s Susan, all the way from Scotland Neck. It’s good to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

No mall Santa has that power, and believe me, I’ve searched. They may look the part, but it’s always hello little fella, or why you’re a pretty little gal. And it’s always tell me where you’re from. The Real Santa knew your name and your hometown as well as he knew your wishes, some before you knew yourself.

How does he do it? No True Believer will ever divulge the secret, except to say that he is The Real Santa, and he is magic. 

I’ve thought of Santa many times in the years since my friend stopped believing. Throughout my childhood, he granted most of my wishes; the ballerina bride doll, was the first one I remember. And forgetting to tell him about that blue plastic tea set didn’t mean he didn’t bring all 50 pieces anyway. He gave me my first typewriter, proof to me that someone somewhere believed in my 10-year-old dream of being a writer. (If you’ve seen the movie The Santa Clause, this won’t seem original, but the only thing I ever wanted that Santa didn’t bring me, really, was a Mystery Date Game. And I would have been willing to go out with Poindexter.)

A few years ago, my friend Grace asked my kids and me to tag along with her family on their annual trip to Richmond. She grew up on his lap, too, and I suspect for her, the magic hadn’t ended either, simply with growing up.

I hadn’t seen The Real Santa in almost 30 years, and while I was excited, I was reluctant to return to the scene of my childhood fantasy. Would he be the same? Would he remember me? Would my belief in him be shattered for good?

But there we were, huddled among the mass of people waiting in line for as turn in his gold and velvet chair. With the first glimpse of his balding pink head, it was like seeing a cherished friend after a lifetime of being apart.  I could see that, though he’d gotten older, he hadn’t really changed.

As my children approached the Snow Queen, my heart began to pound until those 30 years had slipped away and I was five again, waiting for my own visit on Santa’s lap. He turned his rosy cheeks toward my daughter and son, who looked a tiny bit frightened at first, until he spoke. “Why, it’s Meredith and Graham. How are things in Raleigh?” he said, and the bond was made, their belief — and mine — in someone they can’t always see, firmly intact.  Even my husband, the family cynic, was scratching his head in wonder.

This year, my sister is coming home for Christmas, all the way from Iowa. She hasn’t seen Santa since she was a child, so guess where we’ll be on Friday? But my sister and I won’t be the only ones making the trip to Richmond this year. We’re bringing children and husbands, my brother’s family, my parents, even a mother-in-law. Never mind that there are more adults than kids. Or that my son’s the only one of the kids who truly still believes anymore.

I’m not worried. The Real Santa is magic. And after a visit with him, we’ll just see who’s first one up to find what’s under the Christmas tree.

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Giving Sooze a piece of my mind

Future self. Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (Bonus: Write a note to yourself 10 years ago. What would you tell your younger self?)


My rolls are in the oven, the dogs have settled, and for a short while, the house has quieted of the pre-Christmas rush. James Galway's soft flute and the voices of the Chapel Choir of King's School Canterbury drift over the aroma of yeast as it fills the kitchen.
SCRATZZZZH!!


That was somebody else's life I was describing, because though Galways' flute does dance across the air of my kitchen, now the dogs' shrill barks wake me from my holiday stupor. Their nails click across the floor as they pace, back and forth from window to door, jarred, it seems, by the simple rustling of the leaves outside, the washing machine humming, the oven timer going off.


Despite their ruckus, I do have 10 minutes between as each batch cooks, to think about yesterday's prompt, which I had meant to get to, but well, did the folks at reverb realize that Christmas is TWO DAYS away? Something tells me no, that when they were thinking up this wonderful project it was July, and the sidewalks were sizzling and there was absolutely no thought given to the holiday rush because Christmas was five months away. A lifetime. Five years.


In five years from now I will be 58. Fifty-EIGHT! The same age my husband is now, and he will be a little bit closer to retirement. I hope I'll have a couple of grandchildren, and instead of the dogs interrupting my nap with their barks, I'll snuggle down with little people who will call me Sooze, and we will warm our toes under the covers for an afternoon story. I'll pull out the soft ornaments I used to hang on the bottom of the tree, so they can feel free to touch. I'll save the roll scraps for them, and I'll show them how to carefully tie the dough into knots. And we will read the Christmas story from the Advent calendar of little books their mother used to read from — since my son doesn't even have a girlfriend at the moment I will assume he won't be a dad just yet — and we will read it straight, with none of the joking that came when my own children were teenagers, when Old King Herod  became Old King Harold, a favorite neighbor down the street.


If I could sit down with Sooze and give her a little piece of my mind that she could take with her as she navigates the years between this one and the one I imagine, I would say these things:
• Listen to your dreams
• Get some fresh air
• Stop what you're doing when a child is whispering
• Put your mind to it (see previous post on that one)
• Nap with the dogs
• You have already worried enough
• Meet your children half way
• Sing more often
• Plant more seeds
• Bring flowers into the house
• Hug your parents closer
• You will eventually figure it out
• Call your sister
• Use every color in the crayon box
• Remember what happened when you (insert mistake here). It's over. It's forgiven. Now go.
• Let your husband see into your soul
• Giggle at every opportunity
• Write every day
• Show God you are paying attention


sbr


(stay tuned, because I am thinking of that bonus letter.:)

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Santa Baby... Hurry Down the Chimney

Beyond avoidance. What should you have done this year but didn't because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

The other day, I was trying to redecorate the Christmas tree, which after I had put the lights on I had handed it over to the men in my house and of course I should have known better, but I wanted them to have a part in it. Or at least pretend. Anyway, as I was redecorating, I was looking through the top drawer in my living room chest, which I never look in except for at Christmas, for those ornament hooks that are all tangled up together so much so that it almost looks like they have been propagating like gerbils since last year. And then, as often happens with someone who has never been diagnosed with anything like ADD but who has an ADD brain sometimes, I started rifling through the stuff in the drawer. Christmas napkins (hey they were supposed to be in a different drawer). Old baby books, including my own. A neat pull-out Victorian Christmas card I got as a child that I loved, and then a bunch of papers my mother gave me a long time ago that I had forgotten about. Inside I found this:

(Facebook friends, please humor me).

How funny, I thought, that when I was 8, I wanted a typewriter. (Please, those of you who think I should have known that Santa didn't exist at 8 (ok, 9) don't tell me because he still does, at least in Scotland Neck, NC, so of course he did in 1966.) 
I had no idea how to type, wouldn't learn until I was a senior in high school, and even then I didn't think I needed to know how. That was not a skill I would ever use in my career. Typing was for secretaries and such. And the whole typo thing I am so good at? Apparent, even in my very best 8 (9)-year-old cursive.  Where was my proofreader, is what I want to know.


But reading this letter to Santa, I got to thinking. (Oh no, not that again) Though there are other things I have avoided this year (many) the BIG THING is owning the whole writer thing (again) and actually doing what I have been talking about doing for a long, long time. I have wanted to be a writer since I was six. I can't tell you exactly why or when, but I can say it might have been because of Hitty, that Newberry Award-winning story about a doll somebody gave me a long time ago. I could never quite get past the first few pages, thinking surely I could write better than this. There were no pictures! Though I hear it has been remastered, whatever that might mean.


And I am a writer. But I have lost that identity along the way of being one, of trying to pay a few bills. So, as I have written before (these questions are beginning to seem very repetitive) what I didn't do in 2010 is finish my funny novel, I think because it is so unlike anything I have ever written before that I am worried about what folks will think of me. (and not just my folks.) And I didn't even pull out the other one I have not finished, the one those "real writers"  I know said showed so much promise. 


IN 2010: Yes. Too scared too busy too worried too unsure, all of that. Aren't y'all tired of hearing that now? I am. And I'm sorry to repeat myself.


So here we go. The promise: I'll make Santa Claus glad he gave me that typewriter. Now... If I could only find it in all the clutter around here.

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The Behinder I Get

Ok, so it's Sunday morning, and I have to get to church then come home and make three dishes for an open house I'm helping host for a young couple about to be married (and it turns out I should have made one of the dishes last night)... and so since I don't get the REVERB10 email this morning I go to the site to see what today's prompt is and I find out that I have missed not one but TWO prompts since Thursday (what happened to my Friday? And my Saturday? Oh, Christmas will be over in a week, so there's that.) And so now, if I am to get caught up, I have to learn something, decide to try something and heal something, all in the same day, all in about 10 minutes so I'll have time to at least brush my teeth before I head out to church.

December 19 – Healing What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011? (Author: Leoni Allan)

December 18 – Try What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it? (Author: Kaileen Elise)

December 17 – Lesson Learned What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward? (Author: Tara Weaver)

So I will take them in backwards order: What did I learn about myself? That when I put my mind to it, I can think about how to make people around me happy. I can surprise them. I can support them. I can help them remember. I can give them joy. So, it 2011, I will (try) to put my mind to it.

What do I want to try? To write every day. Like this. Better than this. To finish what I started, but I have said that here in the past 19 days a lot already. 2011 WILL be the year I finish that novel, find an agent, get going with it.

I also want to try to be more mindful of and responsive to the needs of others. To exercise every day. I have gotten WAY off track on that one this year, blaming it at first on a workout injury, then on the weather, the job, the time of day. If you think about it, this could apply to the whole healing thing. 

Not sure I was healed of anything this year, though my exercise injury is a lot better this morning, but next year? To be healed of what ages me, and that covers a lot of territory.

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Hilda Kay

This whole reverb thing is proving harder to do every day. So forgive me for taking a full day to finish up yesterday's prompt:

Friendship: How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst? Author: Martha Mihalick

I have never been good at long division. It just felt like to me an attempt to separate the big number from the small. Part of me liked the architecture of it, all those lines and angles, and how you could make everything work out to zero, but when I looked at the big number at the top and the zero together, it just felt like something was lost in all that dividing. And sometimes there was a remainder. What about that?
I grew up in a town divided. White/black, rich/poor, white poor/black poor. Those kin to everybody/those kin to none. Those born there/those who were not. Farmers/farm workers. Educated/not. The black/white part everybody understood. It was just that way.


The rich/poor or upper class/middle class thing was harder to determine. I didn't think of my family as rich, though because my father was a doctor, a lot of folks in town thought we were. But I never had fancy outfits — everything I owned had to go with something else. I didn't get my own car when I turned 16. We didn't take fancy family trips. I guess back then, I thought that most all the white families in my town were rich, and all the black ones poor, not understanding divisions by degrees.

My own world was pretty small. School, church, home, riding bikes, playing Clue in the summer, hanging out with friends who were pretty much like me.

Though I don't remember when I met her, I had a friend named Hilda Kay. In first grade we took tap dancing and ballet together, and when it came time for our recital in the spring, we had our picture taken for the town newspaper. I'm seated on the front row, with my friend Lydia, and Kay is in the back, her eyes wide and wondering, or at least that's what it looks like to me. We played the roles of maids to the lone boy in our group, who played Mr. Clean. (He had an earring way before it was fashionable, but for heaven's sakes. Maids?) Hilda Kay didn't live near me, but when you live in a town that is about 2 square miles, I guess that's relative. Her house was in the neighborhood where my family lived when I was born, down Church Street and across 12th, then straight on the dirt road by the Boy Scout Hut where my brother went once each week. 

When I was young, I remember Hilda Kay as a smiling girl who later wore glasses.  Once when I played with her after school, she showed me her bb gun. My father had a shotgun, but it was buried in the back of a closet, and I had never seen him take it out. That day was the first time I ever shot a gun of any kind. I can't tell you now what I shot at, but I thought I was going to get in trouble. I do recall that when Hilda Kay shot, her aim was true. 


Divisions within our class were fairly clear-cut as I recall: reading groups, smart vs. "socially promoted." Kids who sometimes didn't wear shoes because they couldn't afford them, who rarely bathed, or who didn't show up until after harvesting season ended because they worked on the farm. And the rest of us. Hilda Kay was one of us.

Though she was a bit scrappy, if she will forgive me that adjective. In 6th grade, Kay and another of my friends — who lived on my side of town — got into a fight after school on the playground. Girls in my group got into spats all the time, but this was an arm-slinging fist fight like the boys got into. I remember kids in a circle — boys and girls — egging the two of them on, and I like to think I was not one of them, but I likely was. I remember dust flying with the punches, and wondering how it must feel to be pulled to the ground with your underwear exposed for all to see. When I picture it in my mind, I am far away, but I was probably closer to it than I care to admit. The friend she fought was probably at the time supposed to be my better friend, but she was often not nice to me, or to others in our circle, so was I secretly pulling for Hilda Kay to win?

I never saw Hilda Kay as being set apart in any way from the rest of us, except maybe she was smarter that most. I certainly never thought of her as poor. Her Daddy was a mailman, after all. She tells me now that she was a keen observer when she played with friends who had more than she did at home, trying to emulate the manners her mother didn't teach her but our mothers did. She never had napkins on the table, she says — I thought everybody did — and when she visited our homes, she would watch closely how we used ours, so she would know what to do. She described my childhood home as clean and quiet and safe, and my mother elegant. I know about the clean and quiet, but whose home would not be safe when you are 11?

In 1969, when integration loomed, a bunch of us moved to a private 'academy', a euphemism for a place where no blacks where allowed. (My town, 15 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, had not fully integrated, and the white power elite took what they perceived as their right not too follow the law all the way to the US Supreme Court. Not their finest day.)Before we left public school, we all loved our classmate Vironette, one of the blacks to integrate before 1969. She could hit a softball harder than any girl I had ever seen, and when we left for the academy, she wanted to go with us. Kay and I both have often wondered what happened to her. 


Kay stayed in the public school because her family could not afford otherwise. And she made friends with the black kids, played basketball with them, walked down Main Street with them, which was something none of the rest of us would do. I know these things, not because I knew them then, but because just a few weeks ago, Kay and I became friends again, on Facebook. 

In 10th grade, she joined us at the academy. And then, when she was about 16, she vanished from our sight. In the years since, I have heard here and there about her. I knew she was an attorney, but that was about all. 

When I found her on FB, I sent her a quick note, hoped she was well, wondered how she was doing, told her I was a writer. Soon, she wrote back, and in the weeks since we have learned a lot about each other we didn't know. And she has enlightened me about many things, about how much we are the same, and how divisions, real and unintended, shaped us both. We have discovered that we wondered about lots of the same things, but were too young to articulate what our thoughts were.

Growing up, I always thought I was a little divided from my group of friends. I thought too much, cried when somebody looked at me the wrong way, had long conversations with myself, some of them about the divisions I couldn't understand. Why was it was ok to have black servants prepare food for me when I spent the night with friends, but it was not ok to share a classroom with them, or to shake their hands in church? 

I have come to learn that Kay wondered about these things, too. In her emails, she has shared a lot about her life and how different it was from mine, though I never knew any of it. We have laughed over the schoolyard brawl, which she says now was because she was tired of our "friend" choosing who would be left out of our group each day. She recalls getting in a pretty good punch before the fight was broken up.

Kay moved out of her house as a teenager, dropped out of high school, and I knew nothing of this, just knew she was not in our class for graduation. She later became a nurse, then went to law school at George Washington. And she flies her own plane for heaven's sake. Doesn't sound like something a scrappy little girl — who might be most famous in childhood for fighting a battle few of us were willing to — could accomplish. But I said she was smart. 


Hilda Kay has done well for herself. She has her own private practice, is married to a doctor, and rescues precious puppies who need a loving lap to spend some time in. It seems now that she has finally made a safe home for herself. 

Our email conversations have been a gift, and all these words have been an attempt to articulate what all I have learned from her. Much, but maybe I can say it like this: Dare every now and then to cross that great divide, even if though the answer might be zero. Because sometimes, when the dust settles and the angry crowd withdraws, you might just find that what remains is worth keeping.


sbr

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