The Only Thing That Really Matters

Paulette and I have just spent a week with our 5-month-old grandson Paul, and I came away from the experience reinforced in my belief about what should matter most in our lives.  The short of it is the thing called relationships, and that encompasses a vast territory in this business of being human. 

I had a great time with Paul.  Paulette did most of the feeding/napping stuff, and I was around to lift, tote, fetch, change diapers, and entertain.  Paul loves to be carried, so we spent a lot of time in close verticality.  He’s at the age where his eyesight is fully developed, and he takes a keen interest in everything around him.  He wants to see, touch, feel, and put things in his mouth.  I provide a good bit of the locomotion to help him do all of that.

But it’s not all just toting the baby around.  Paul and I had a regular routine that includes educational and cultural development.  We sing together.  I am partial to “She’ll Be Comin’ Around The Mountain,” and “Froggy Went A’Courtin’.”  Paul chooses to overlook my less-than-sterling singing qualities, and when I launch into one of the songs, his face lights up.  We play the piano together, and again, Paul doesn’t mind that my pianistic dexterity is mostly of the one-finger-at-a-time sort.  Paul plays one fist at a time, a much advanced technique.  I think I can hear some Chopin in there somewhere.

We also practice our Spanish.  Buenos dias, Pablo.  Como esta?  Muy bien, gracias.  Next we will advance to the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from the original Spanish, of course.

The main thing is that we are simply together.  We are building a relationship that will be a work in progress as long as we are both on the planet together.  We will give to and take from each other in ways large and small.  I will have his back and he will have mine.  Paul will always know that no matter what he does or who he becomes, I will love him unconditionally.  In doing so, I’ll get the same back from him.

I explored the business of relationships in my novel Captain Saturday.  My hero, Will Baggett, is Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman, pretty much caught up in his minor local celebrity.  But then suddenly and precipitously, Will loses his job, and in taking stock of the wreckage about him, he realizes that it includes his relationships with the people he should cherish most – his wife and nearly-grown son.  The story is how Will, laid low by fickle fate, tries to re-invent himself and re-capture those damaged relationships.  I’ve had a good number of folks say that reading about Will Baggett prompted them to take stock of their own lives and see if there are some things that need mending.  For a storyteller, that’s the ultimate payback. 

I think some of the most important relationships we build are those with people who are younger.  We all have somebody younger, and when we pay attention, invest time and energy in them, and let them know in a thousand ways that they’re important to us and themselves, we help them build good foundations.  In turn, it enriches our own lives.

I believe we naturally think a lot about relationships during the holiday season.  We remember those who are no longer with us, and take stock of our feelings for those who are still here.  Relationships can be tricky and tough, because we human beings are a messy lot and we are prone to get things tangled up when we deal with those we’re supposed to cherish.  But building, strengthening, and maintaining relationships is what life is all about.  We’re all connected, all precious in God’s eyes, and all worthy of acts of love and kindness.

We often hear about the things we can’t take with us – fame, fortune, etc.  I prefer to thing about the things we leave behind, the bonds we have with family, friends, and indeed all of God’s great creation.  That’s the only thing that really matters.

Christmas Is For Storytellers

My favorite time of the holiday season is Christmas afternoon.

It stems from my boyhood in a small southern town  in a family of storytellers to whom I owe much of who I am as a writer today.

We were a large, rowdy group – my mother, her three brothers, in-laws, cousins, and my grandmother,  Nell Cooper.  She was a feisty, independent soul – widowed at a fairly young age with four children at home.  She raised and educated them and in her later years enjoyed having them close at hand.  Especially on Christmas afternoon, when we all gathered at Mama Cooper’s house.

It was the family tradition for the twelve cousins (I was the oldest) to draw names a couple of weeks before and exchange small gifts.  Mama Cooper would hand out presents to each of us, we would all have punch and cookies, and then the kids were sent outdoors to play with the stuff we had gotten from Santa that morning.  The adults would gather around Mama Cooper’s dining room table and tell stories.

Mama Cooper was the tee-totaling daughter of a Methodist minister, and she did not allow fermented spirits in her house.  Except on Christmas afternoon.  The boys would concoct eggnog, liberally flavored with bourbon, and the more eggnog that was consumed, the better the storytelling got.  My dad and three uncles had been in World War Two – two pilots, a sailor, an infantryman – and much of the storytelling involved that time in their lives.  Never about combat, but about far-flung places, girlfriends who became wives, the fast-moving and often chaotic world into which they had all been catapulted  from that small southern town.  And about life back home while the boys were off at war – the ration books, the gold stars in windows, the heady uncertainty, the powerful sense of relief when it was all over and they could put small-town lives back together.

Nell Cooper and her family, c. 1927

Curious kid that I was, I would leave the little young’uns playing in the yard, sneak back into the house, and hide in the living room, listening to the tales being told on the other side of the wall.  I don’t remember many of the details of the grownups’ stories, but I do remember vividly the realization that I was hearing things about my parents, aunts, uncles and grandmother that I could have scarcely imagined.  I understood that there was a rich texture to their lives, an undercurrent, that shaped the people they were now, and that the texture, the undercurrent, was the most fascinating part about them.  It made them intriguing, even exotic, and it had a profound impact on my evolving view of the world and human experience.

As a writer, I am all about characters and relationships.  There are things about people we see and hear, and there are things unseen and unheard.  There is a tension between the faces we show to the world and the things that are in our hearts and souls.  That tension has a great deal to do with who we are and how we relate to the people around us.  Our relationships are profoundly affected by our hidden places, our secrets, the soul stuff.  And how we each reconcile the tension between the obvious and the secret has a great deal to do with how genuine we are as people.

Okay, that’s all a mouthful, but it’s as close as I can get to my approach as a storyteller.  My job is to present a character who bubbles up from my imagination, present that character as honestly as I can, warts and all, and plumb the depths of the hidden stuff.  I hope, when the work is done, you’ll find something that resonates with your life, your world, your relationships.  If I do, I’ve been successful.

It all goes back to Christmas afternoon at Mama Cooper’s house.  Ever since, those few hours have been special to me.  This Christmas afternoon, I’ll take some time to be quiet and think about those good people there in Mama Cooper’s dining room and thank them for the gift they gave me without ever knowing they did.

Merry Christmas.

The Girl He Couldn't Do Without

They’re honeymooning at the beach – our young friend and the girl he couldn’t do without.

It’s a piece of advice my mother gave me when I was single, dating this girl and that one, occasionally bringing one home to meet the parents.  “Marry the one you can’t do without,” Mother said, and I took her advice to heart.  When things began to look a trifle serious with a young lady, I would ask myself, “Could I do without this one?” In every case but the last one, I could.  Then I met Paulette.  We’ve been married for 46 years.  I couldn’t do without her back then, and I can’t now.

I suppose it’s a tough yardstick to use when you’re considering a relationship that could become a lifetime.  But as mother said, if you choose someone you could do without, the odds are you eventually will.  Better to be tough going in than tough coming out.  Better a broken heart when a relationship is in its infancy than when it’s over.

So Paulette and I joined the crowd of friends and family in a rural Baptist church in south Alabama last weekend to see John and Candy begin a life together.  The way they looked into each other’s eyes as they stood before the preacher and said their vows told us they’ve chosen the ones they can’t do without, and that bodes well for a long life together.

There are times in any marriage when things seem to be coming apart at the seams.  It’s easy to just walk away.  But if the person on the other side of the conflict is the one you just can’t do without, you’ll make the extra effort to work things out and keep the partnership together.

I thought about my mother’s advice a lot when I was writing my new novel The Governor’s Lady which comes out in September.  There’s a marriage at the heart of it, and there a point where Cooper and Pickett have to face the essential question: can they do without each other?

Every good story needs a dilemma at its heart.  How the characters respond to the dilemma tells us who they are and how the story unfolds.  How this one unfolds will have to wait for September.