whole food
i spent a long lunch hour today with friends i have known my whole life, celebrating a birthday... our shared history unspoken between us, but sound.
i have known one of them since kindergarten, the two of us sharing those first lessons in creating angular letters on the chalk board. Later, we three shared reading groups, basketball and cheerleading tryouts (one of us AlWAYS sat on the sidelines.)
endured algebra class and diagramming sentences, weathered boyfriends (a few of whom we have in common), college angst, the uncertainty of new marriage (and the 30+year kind), parents who perplex, siblings who sometimes don't give us what we hope, or sharing the complexity of being an only child.
today we weather elderly parents, children launching themselves or who attempt, siblings who have never needed us before but now who suddenly do. all difficult things.
though i don't see them often enough, they make me whole, somehow, in a way only home can do.
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.
Departing the Text
The little town where I grew up has seen its share of tragedy. Those who grew up there know that death always comes in threes, and in the past 10 days or so, that adage held true. A young woman who as raised there to a tragic accident. An elderly woman whose husband owned a favorite hamburger stand in the 50s and 60s. Then brother of longtime friends to another accident. Add to that, damage done by a foot of snow on Christmas night to one of the few thriving entities in town. So we breathed a little. But today, comes another, this time the town optometrist, long loved by all. Dr. E. was once kidnapped by a prisoner from a nearby prison farm who had come to the office to get his eyes checked. When we heard on the transistor radio at school that a doctor in town had been kidnapped, I panicked, because I had been present when some of those prisoners came to my father's office across the street. I don't remember all the details clearly, but I seem to recall that the prisoner forced Dr. E. into the country, where he left Dr. E. shackled to a tree. But first, he took Dr. E's his clothes. Dr. E. lived many, many years to tell that story.
But no more.
Thinking about this, it seems as though I need to pay tribute to my little town in this space. I did some years ago in the newspaper. In the years since, some of the landmarks I wrote about are gone. The town has grown smaller, sadder, poorer. I suppose everybody who has been raised up by a small town thinks of their world as special. I know those who hail from my town do. And when something bad happens, we are drawn to each other in hopes of saving what's left of it, if only in memory.
Anyway, sometimes things just bear repeating. Thanks, Doug, for the pics.
But no more.
Thinking about this, it seems as though I need to pay tribute to my little town in this space. I did some years ago in the newspaper. In the years since, some of the landmarks I wrote about are gone. The town has grown smaller, sadder, poorer. I suppose everybody who has been raised up by a small town thinks of their world as special. I know those who hail from my town do. And when something bad happens, we are drawn to each other in hopes of saving what's left of it, if only in memory.
Anyway, sometimes things just bear repeating. Thanks, Doug, for the pics.
The Town that Raised Me
Copyright 1999 By Susan Byrum Rountree
“What this place needs is a GAP,” my daughter says as we drive down Main Street toward the house where I grew up. As we pass The Freeze — the landmark of my teenage years where they make the best Pizza Burgers in Eastern North Carolina — I try to see my hometown through her eyes.
There is a battered car wash, old buildings and empty store fronts in need of fresh paint. The Idle Hour Restaurant sign advertising “air conditioning” hasn’t been lit in years, and the Zip Mart stands empty, its front windows boarded shut.
This is Main Street, Scotland Neck, NC, how a passer-through on Hwy. 258 might see it. People who don’t know it and love it as I do might find little here but the remnants of a once-thriving farm town.
But I wish that my daughter could see what I see. Her view, when compared to the mirrored marble sidewalks of her Crabtree Valley Main Street offers little more than peeling paint and crumbling buildings. There are no khaki-clad mannequins artfully backlit, no sidewalk vendors selling the latest styles of silver jewelry, no clusters of teenagers sharing the latest gossip.
But my eyes see home. There is the old Pittman’s Department Store where I bought my first two-piece bathing suit and worked wrapping presents on Christmas Eve. Though it stood empty for a time, in what used to be the men’s department, waitresses now serve the breakfast crowd hot coffee and homemade biscuits.
I can still hear the creak of the Roses floor as we rushed to buy notebooks and pencils for school, recall the smell of the Post Office when I pulled mail from my father’s box, see the audience staring back at me as the curtain opened for my dance recital, feel the touch of newsprint between my fingers as I read my first byline in the Commonwealth.
Scotland Neck. The place with the funny name like the country and the body part. Folks new to North Carolina have never heard of it, but anyone who grew up east of Raleigh most likely knows someone or is kin to someone from there. And that’s saying a lot for a town of just 2,500 people.
Sure it was the cliché, a mix of Mayberry and Maycomb, with a cast of characters no less colorful than Barney or Boo Radley. There were a couple of old houses we swore were haunted, a handicapped man who used to walk down Main Street on his knees, and every now and then, a murder or two, just to keep our attention.
We picked flowers for our teachers in a neighbor’s back yard without fear of a scolding, saw first-run movies at the Dixie Theater Saturday matinee, crunched on frozen Cokes like popsicles between Sunday School and church. And if your dog wandered the school hallways looking for you, nobody thought a thing about it, though you might be asked to take him home.
It was the kind of home town my city-bred kids will never know. Where everybody knows who you belong to, and where you ought to be. Where they know you had prickly heat, watched you ride your bike down Church Street to school, believed in you until you finally made a name for yourself. And they weren’t the least bit surprised. Folks from Scotland Neck have always done that.
We never had stoplight (still don’t) much less a GAP, but the eastern North Carolina town where I was born, raised a governor and a Congressman, doctors, lawyers and farmers, even a writer or two. Not so long ago, our former mayor was president of the National League of Cities. Imagine that, a sleepy little town in the southeastern end of Halifax County, one of the poorest counties in the state.
The population has remained stable most of my life. When I was 11, the headcount did swell for awhile, when over 11 million blackbirds roosted there. Each evening at dusk “The Birds” converged on the woods behind my house, circling for hours like a stationary tornado, until each one found a spot to perch for the night. They woke us each morning as they headed out, turning the sky black. Their annual infestation brought some notoriety and national media attention, but it didn’t last. The birds, like many of the young people, found little opportunity in Scotland Neck, so they moved on.
For those of us who’ve left, there has always been a difference between “where do you live?” and “where are you from?” — we are always “from” Scotland Neck. Ask us about “home” and our first thoughts won’t be of the places we live now. Instead, we’ll tell you about the pink Crape Myrtles blooming in the middle of the street in July, or learning that All Have Sin from the Biblical alphabet Miss Lucy Wells taught us all in public school, or of baring our arms for Typhoid shots so we could swim all summer at the murky waters of the Scout Pond. It is a life I would go home to in a second, if it were still there.
Since I moved away from “The Neck.” as those who grew up there call it, I’ve found fellow natives in the least likely places. Like Atlanta Braves games in the old Fulton County Stadium, sitting 10 rows behind me. Or as the contact for my very first interview as a new reporter in Augusta, Georgia. Be it on Sunday morning, the first time I attended my new Raleigh church 10 years ago, on an escalator at the mall, in the hallway of a Wake County elementary school, no doubt somebody besides me will be from The Neck.
World traveler that he is, my Atlanta-born husband has never had a similar encounter. I moved to his hometown, and wouldn’t you know it, I soon found a friend from Scotland Neck. In time, Rick began seeing people he knows from Scotland Neck in his travels around the country. But not once has he run across anyone he knew in Atlanta.
I never thought myself disadvantaged because of my small town beginnings. The town limit sign may have separated me from the rest of the world, defined me as being “from” someplace, but it was never a boundary keeping me from discovering what was best in me.
Though I have lived in five cities since I left home 20 years ago, this tiny speck on the map is the one place I’ve always known I belonged. And it is in belonging that we define ourselves, know who we are and where we fit. I could not be who I am if I didn’t hail from this place, couldn’t look at the world the way I do without the growing I did there with the help of all the people who nudged me.
There are dozens of Scotland Necks in this largely forgotten corner of the state, in the “other North Carolina.” Some are growing, some, like Scotland Neck, could use a coat or two of fresh paint. Not one will ever have a GAP.
But my friends who’ve stayed there are making it a good place, though different, for their children to grow up in. They’ve built a new town hall and a new hospital, and they keep nurturing the Crape Myrtles, their pink blossoms becoming more beautiful with each year.
And as they watch the communities around them fading, they’ve loosened the boundaries that once separated Scotland Neck from the towns nearby, their citizens mingling at work, church and school, in hopes of keeping the sense of community they used to know.
And they always welcome me back, proud of the freckle-faced daughter who likes to see her name in the paper. I hope they know how much credit the town that raised me deserves.
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
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.
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
Take a Giant Staple
Karen and Libbett always held fort on the front row because they were short. Here they are in Miss Williams' 5th grade, Karen on the right in navy knee socks, Libbett (for Little Bit) to her left in the navy jumper. Betty Keeter stands between these two girls who never really got the message— as my good friend Anne Boone said recently about Karen — that they were short. They were together in their defiance, both of them growing larger in life than their frames portrayed. And now, at age 52 and 53 respectively, Karen and Libbett are dead, Karen from cancer in November, and Libbett on Saturday, from complications of a lifelong battle with juvenile diabetes.
This seems fairly impossible for me to imagine. Two girls I grew up knowing throughout my childhood — Libbett from birth and Karen from kindergarten, are not here anymore. Even if I didn't think about them as I drank my morning coffee or on my drive to work, they were there, somewhere. But now, how can it be that they are not anywhere, anymore? Except of course, in heaven.
Today memories flood my mind, particularly of Libbett, who lived just down the road, four houses from my own.
The fourth child— and first girl — in a family of three older brothers, she must have grown up fighting for her own space. I spent many a Friday night at her house, playing 'Murder in the Dark' with her brothers, down the long narrow hall of their house, scared more than half to death. In the morning, we woke up to Lon Cheney's Mummy on Sunrise Theater, watching the flickering black and white screen from the floor of the playroom of her house on the hill.
We didn't have a playroom at our house. But her house was all about play, from the playroom to the tennis court, from the horse barn to the handmade dough ornaments on the Christmas tree. Even the tenant house way out back where the maid lived with a daughter named Queen Ester was our playground. A real queen, living in an unpainted house with a wide front porch. Nobody else had that in their back yard. (I seem to recall the maid's name was Irene — I remember how she talked, in a low rasp that sounded like she had swallowed too much snuff — and that she was left-handed, which I am, and how she told me one day that her teachers wrapped her hand up so she would be right-handed, but she was ambidextrous instead.)
Saturday mornings in Libbett's house meant her mother would be in the kitchen, humming as she poured blueberry pancake batter onto a sizzling pan. After breakfast, it was to the bathroom to check her blood sugar with little strips of paper that turned color when dipped into the little potty she kept there. She even let me pee in it a few times. Her diabetes was as much a part of our lives as my left-handedness, a fact that made her who she was. I marveled, watching her bravery, as she stabbed herself in the thigh with a hypodermic. Who could do that at seven? Doctor's child that I am, I ran screaming at the sight of one, except in Libbett's little bathroom.
She was as creative a child as I was gullible — the tooth fairy lived in a tiny castle built in the woods that separated our houses with the teeth she gathered from beneath our pillows. Libbett said so. I imagined Tinkerbell, flitting about, a little dusty from the sandy soil, her toothy front door framed by tiny cotton boles gathered from the fields all around. But somehow we never found this magical home amid the stumps, wiregrass and kudzu in our woods. (Why the tooth fairy would want to live in a house made from missing teeth, I never understood, but she left a quarter under my pillow, so I dared not challenge her. Or Libbett.)
At the base of the hill in front of Libbett's house, there was a pond shaped like a footprint, and across the street in front of the old churchyard, another. Oh, the hours I spent trying to fall to sleep, imagining a giant strolling down the highway outside my house, deciding not to take that giant step in my yard but in hers instead — she was the lucky one.
And I will never forget the day she told me that Santa Claus was not real. My mother was ironing when I came home from her house with this most unsettling news. (I think I was probably 11 by then! He is who you choose to believe he is, my mother said, and so I have never really stopped believing.)
Born an artist, Libbett had the largest box of Crayolas in first grade that I had ever seen, the thin ones with violet and flesh for colors, and a sharpener on the side. The rest of us had the flat box of six giant ones to fit our nubby fingers. She drew full figures to our stick ones, girls with curled hair and eye lashes, window boxes when the rest of us could barely sketch a window at all.
And what a Barbie collection. I admit that I coveted her Barbie nesting mixing bowls. I believe — though I can't rely on my memory — that she had a Barbie mixmaster to go with them. And a kitchen.
Libbett's family had horses, and I learned from her not to go barefoot in the barn because I might catch hookworms. Sometimes we'd head out to the pasture beside her house, and she'd saddle up. She could ride, but I could not, and I distinctly recall her galloping down the dusty road behind our houses, as I labored, lopsided, to stay on the horse, scared that I would surely die that day. I wonder now if she failed to fasten the saddle on tight enough for me.
In thinking of what she taught me — childhood friends always teach you something —perhaps it is best to say this: to explore. The woods for the tooth fairy, the colors in the Crayola box, the complications of friendship — and ours was complicated. Sometimes we got into trouble. Sometimes we didn't get along. And sometimes I did stick up for myself.
But she is there in so many memories, at church, home, school, on the back road, in the old tobacco barn, in her room at night, watching the shadow of trees scrape across the window. Today, as I browse photos of her on her 50th birthday on the Facebook page set up for her by her family, I see something in there of the girl she was. I know nothing of what her adult life was like, nor she mine. I suppose we are both at a loss because of that.
She told me once that I could write about a paper clip and make it interesting. I don't know this to be true at all. The paper clip. If you filtered through my file cabinet now, you'd see that I favor it over the staple, though I am not sure why. It is a temporary fix, looping a hold on things that can too easily slip away.
I am thinking now that I want to staple myself to the people I am still connected to in the picture above by virtue of Miss William's fifth grade. I don't want to lose anyone else. We have a past together. I have kept up with some of you. But you can't know how often I wonder about the rest.
Bottom row: Mark Faithful, Woody Pridgen, Bobby Keeter, Johnny Hudson, Otis Cocker, Ralph Leggett, Libbett Gregory, Betty Keeter, Karen Todd; Second row: Robbie Mosley, Scott Allsbrook, Elizabeth Stallings?, Lydia Bray, Parks Boyd, Paul Oglesby, ??, George Johnson; third row: ??, :?? Sandra Coward (where are you?!), Betty Rufty, Susan Byrum, Toni Harrington (she had her hand slapped with a yardstick by Miss Williams!!); Charmaine Lofton, Billy Cook; back row:Douglas Pickette, Lanny Lawrence?, Ricky Payne, Bill Whitehead, David McLawhorn, Lee King. (please correct my memory if I have gotten a name wrong:)
(This is not our whole class. I don't have a copy of the one from Miss Holton's class. Miss Holton... now there's a story. She deserves a story all by herself.)