about a boy
just before daybreak, the phone rang and i answered. a woman, asking for my husband. a reporter, she said, for one of atlanta's tv stations i recall. i pictured a well coiffed, sleek brunette in spiked heels just waiting to purr something seductive into my husband's ear. i shook him awake, handed him the phone and looked toward my feet, but couldn't see them.
just then i felt, well, a nudge. and when he hung up the phone from his seductress, i said three words:
don't go far. then four more.
the baby is coming.
i could feel it.
my husband dressed for work — he was in public affairs for a utility company at the time and there was some sort of nuclear issue, which is in no way as important as a baby, don't you know.
i gathered my thick body in my quilted robe and put my alarm clock in my pocket. walked into my daughter's room, wondering what in the world i would do with her in these hours as i waited for this new baby to come.
she found my closet, right after breakfast, and as i timed my contractions with the pocketed tick of the blue plastic clock, she found my honeymoon shoes and pulled my 'Princess Diana' rehearsal dinner dress over her head just so. how i wish i had pictures.
as my 3-year-old plundered, i crouched on my hands and knees, cleaning all the bathrooms because once again, my mother would be coming and things had to be right.
a few hours in i called my mother-in-law, who was on her way to the beauty parlor, which would be the perfect distraction for a cute little girl who would greet a new sibling, we hoped, by the end of the day.
i called my husband. it's time, i said, and he left the carefully coiffed reporter and drove the 20 miles home to take me to the hospital and into our new life as a family of four.
it was one year to the day, i remember, from when the space shuttle exploded on national tv.
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last night we sat across from our son and his girlfriend sharing supper and stories. she asked what time he was born, he said: after Guiding Light, which is partly true. there would be no tv in the labor room that day, and GL was my favorite story, so i asked one of the nurses to find some way for me to watch. 30 minutes into Josh and Reva and this boy would have nothing of my distraction, breaking into this world so quickly that his napping dad hardly had time to put on his scrubs. i have to say my son has consistently interrupted my train of thought since. just when i thought i'd have a moment to myself, this quiet boy would say something that made me wish i had been paying closer attention.
he does so, still.
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it seems, looking back on it, as if he grew from two feet to four then to six overnight, stretching his lanky body at times in such awkward ways that you could almost see the paIN in it. as a boy, he craved independence, admired (and practiced) great wit, loved Harry Potter and studied how to build things. he learned how to be a loyal friend to many and a brother to the sister he adores.
some say he looks like me, which is a curse or a blessing, depending upon your perspective (his/mine). the two of us have had our moments. there were days when i thought, well, i will never be good at the mother/son thing, and others when i felt we had just about gotten it right.
lately, though i don't see or talk to him every day, it still feels tenuous. i want to help him but give him space. want to soothe with my mother thing but give him breathing room. want to say i'm proud but leave space for growth.
in the last year, i have seen my son grow into a man. we walked, hand-in-hand, into his grandfather's hospital room and out again, both of us quietly weeping. we shopped for sofas for the house he was buying. i stood by as he walked my mother to the communion rail on Christmas Eve, her arm in his hand.
he inherited my father's saw and is building a place to put it using plans he found online. he is kind and funny and quiet, and he can be quite charming, i hear. though he drives me mad sometimes, my love for him is fierce.
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today he turned 27. Happy Birthday, G. It's a pleasure to know you.
mom
susanbyrumrountree.com 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.
a toast to a happier time
a year ago today, my entire family gathered in the great room of a rented beach cottage to make a toast. to the day, 60 years before, when what would become our family took root. on this, my parents' 61st wedding anniversary, i say thanks to God that we had that time together, however fleeting. it's been a bittersweet week, remembering where i was when i took the pictures posted here. thinking of the quiet chats my father and i had each day, when he climbed the two flights of stairs to see what we were up to. strolling together down the rickety pier behind the cottages to see if any fish might be biting. sharing a meal and talking about his life. just watching him watch his grands and great-grands. marvels to me.
my parents' dance is over, sadly, but today i just want to be happy that they took that first dance together long ago.
Save the last dance
They met in the hallways of Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem in the fall of 1951. Not long after, the skinny young man in the white coat asked the wavy-haired Florida girl if she would like to go to a med school dance with him.
Two weeks later, he asked her a bigger question: Will you marry me? And on June 14 the next year, she did.
And the day after that? He graduated from Bowman Gray School of Medicine. All the family was coming anyway, so what better time to get married than the day before you become a doctor?
My mother often said Daddy didn't want to go to Louisville (the location of his internship) alone. So she went with him, and two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, my brother joined them in their little apartment with the Murphy bed in the wall.
In those early years, the young Byrums would not often be together. Mama moved with my brother to live with my grandparents, whom she had really only met a couple of times. Daddy joined the Navy, spending his days in the cramped infirmary of a destroyer, tending to the medical needs of other young men his age. He has a certificate from that time that says he crossed the Arctic Circle.
When he came home, they moved to Newport, Rhode Island, then back with my grandparents. Daddy left again, and while they were living apart, my sister was born, the story of her birth a favorite of my grandfather, who drove my in-labor by the hospital entrance because the February fog was so dense.
When my father left the Navy, they looked around for a place to settle down and found a spot just an hour from my grandparents. Within a year, they had a house and another baby — me — Daddy tending to the needs of patients who would come to him for the rest of his career —more than 50 years.
I wrote about them last year
Little has changed except they are moving a little slower, but I marvel at the fact that my parents continue to grow closer today as each day passes.
This week we have gathered — 23 of us (with two pending) — to celebrate the fact of them and their 60 years together, and that what seems to us to have been a hasty decision back in 1951 has turned into a pretty remarkable life.
Each day someone new has arrived to join our celebration. Grandchildren. Spouses. Great-grands. Earlier in the week, we even gathered in a nearby gazebo to toast the newest union-to-be, all of us weeping after my nephew proposed to his girlfriend. What a joyful moment for us all.
Mama has enjoyed sharing the story of how she met my dad with each new face. Daddy checks his watch and asks who is coming next. By this afternoon, we will all be in place, and we have a few special things planned for them to mark this day in our family history.
Last night, Daddy stood before supper and thanked us all for coming, and for being who we are. He said he was proud how we are living our lives, and though he and my mother could not take credit, they would like to.
Well.
"There was more I wanted to say but I have forgotten!" he said then, tempering the tears that had formed at the corners of all of our eyes with the subtle humor he is known for. I watched Mama sitting in the chair behind him, looking up at him, her blue eyes sparkling.
"Would you like to go to the dance?" he asked those years ago. My mother has never felt she was very good at dancing, but when my father took her in his arms that fateful night, somehow she stayed in step. For 60 years. Imagine.
Happy Anniversary B&Pop B. May the dance continue.
©susan byrum rountree, june 14, 2012.
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.
a cure for dreams
lydia and i have been getting into mischief since we made onion soup from the wild onions in her front yard when we were five and promptly forgot about it. it was spring, and the sun beat down on the bucket of onions, water and sand until it was ripely rotten. the smell lasted for days.
we sent love letters (she did, i was just her accomplice) to the boys next door, bathing our mouths in her mother's lipstick, planting kisses all over the envelopes, then we ran through the bushes to put them in the box.
we did something else that same year that i can't confess, even now, because my mother reads this blog and would not approve.
we'd slip into the darkened Dixie Theatre with too much popcorn and drink in our hands and get the giggles. once we (she, really) spilled half her drink down someone's back in the row in front of us.
one day when we walked home from town, Miss Hooker, an elderly woman who took care of her mother, ran out of her house toward us and shouted: help me! mother is dead!
i will not say that we rushed into the house, but we did go in, rubbing the old woman's legs until she moaned and we knew that she was indeed NOT dead. i remember calling daddy that day, asking if we had done the right thing.
'as far as i can tell you did,' he said. years later, when miss hooker visited my daddy's office, she looked fondly into my eyes.
things like this always happened to lydia and me. i have used some of it for fodder in my fiction, and i will tell you that each episode makes for a good story.
as lydia and i grew older, we built huts out of wheat straw gathered from the field next to her house. we slipped on our rain boots and crept into the dark woods that by night were inhabited by millions of grackles and starlings swirling above our heads. by day we stomped through knee-high bird droppings, just because we wanted to see for ourselves what the whole bird story was all about. writing about it in fiction, i made it night, though it was pretty scary to go there by day.
when we were in junior high school, we got into decoupage and antiquing furniture in her playhouse, not knowing that we were ahead of our time. we sneaked scuppernong wine her grandfather made from the attic. we set up a beauty parlor on her side porch and i actually let her give me a perm, promising i wouldn't take the curlers out for 24 hours. hours!
on to high school and boys and once, when we stood talking in her back yard as a storm loomed miles away, we watched (and felt and heard) as a beam of lightning shot down and struck the chimney of her house, sending bricks flying toward us. years later when we were together and a thunderstorm approached, i don't know who headed for the car first. we have not liked to be together in storms since.
in college, lydia lived right across the hall from me our first year, down the hall the second, and she was like my sister. applauding me when i did well, putting me in my place when i disappointed her.
when daddy died, almost the first person i heard from was lydia. 'i'm coming,' she said, 'and i'm staying, even if i have to put up a straw hut in the back yard.' and i knew she would do just that.
at the visitation, she came through the back door, telling the folks in the kitchen that she had never used the front door and would not start at that moment. she worked through the room, visiting with people she had known her whole life, and when all the visitors left, she took over the kitchen, pulling out homemade sweet potato ham biscuits (made just that morning), passing them out to all the grands, saying something under her breath like: lydia is gonna take care of things.
the next day, after we buried daddy's ashes, lydia called my cell. 'let's take a ride,' she said, and i said of course, sure. she picked me up, and we drove around the old hood, trying to name who lived where, though neither of us has lived there for more than 35 years.
put two country girls together who have not been in the country for awhile, and they will surely take a ride, out, toward the fields, the open air. i knew where we were headed, a few miles out of town to the country club where our daddies had played golf for so many years. this trip was for lydia, i thought, to see a place her father had helped build.
as we drove into the club, i saw some men fishing on the edge of the pond and there it was in my head, the picture of the huge bass i'd caught with a cane pole, lydia next to me, so heavy that fish was that the two of us had to drag it across the ground up toward the woods. we had no net. we were maybe 13.
Lydia drove around the clubhouse, noted the wood fence post her father's business was known for years ago, still standing guard against the putting green. on we went, down the hill toward the tennis courts where she had tossed her first serve — this was still her trip, mind you... i never played tennis — toward the club house.
lydia plays golf, is married to a pro, so again we were doing this for her. her mother died just last year, her father a few years before, but they lived away from our town for years. and while the week for me had been catching up with folks i'd known much of my life, lydia didn't have that chance when her parents died. i was more than happy to share our grieving.
humm... she said. i'm thinking maybe i'd like an ice cold beer.
so we sauntered into the pro shop and she told me to put my money away. it was quiet, only a golfer or two on #9 next to the shop, another on #10 teeing off with his son. she asked the pro for two cold ones, and i asked his name. suddenly, i felt a tightness near my eyes and throat and said this: my father was dr. byrum.
'was?' he asked. 'i had no idea.' and then he told me that daddy always came into the shop, golf shoes in hand, and sat right in that chair there — and he pointed to it — to change his shoes. same thing every time. 'i knew he was sick,' he said. 'hadn't seen him in awhile.'
then we talked about how lydia's daddy used to bring her through a back gate on weekend afternoons when the course was under construction, how daddy use to bring me out, too, so we could watch it all being built. the pro showed us a aerial photo of the course being built, then talked about the hundreds of oaks felled during hurricane irene almost two years ago. then this:
'why don't you girls take a cart and go for a ride.'
back outside, lydia hopped right in the driver's side and i took my place beside her.
we wove down the path toward the front nine and drove down that first fairway. and then i realized it. yes, this was her trip, but it was mine, too, for when daddy was not in the office or hospital or home, he was here, walking up the #3 par 3, across the little bridge and over the small pond to the green. i had done that very thing with him myself as a girl.
daddy didn't have much time off, but if he couldn't get to Nags Head to look out over the ocean to clear his head, he was here, swinging the ball, knocking it in, walking. thinking.
we looked out over the course and sipped our beer and made a toast to our fathers, cutting across one fairway after another, until we were back in place, both of us healed, a bit, from our short time with our daddies again.
'lydia knows just the cure,' she said as we drove down the back roads toward home.
i don't see lydia often, and i miss her. miss the mischief, the giggles in the night over a spilled coca-cola or a secret wish shared only with each other.
years have put life and distance between us. but on this day, we were at it again, our lives whole for a few minutes, despite all we have lost.
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.