Deep memories are spurred by the Deep South book, "The Help"

Memories of the drama, of my mother and my father, of the lingering pain and guilt of growing up in the Deep South during the racist 1960s rushed in as I read “The Help,” by Kathyrn Stockett, a book set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

“The Help” is the tangled, emotionally complex story of African-American maids and their white mistresses, told in the voice of two of the maids and a young white woman who is sympathetic to their plight. Just at the time that Dr. King and Rosa Parks are becoming familiar names in this hotbed racist town, so are some of Jackson’s African-American maids coming to a deepening realization of the irony of their lives: The white women, afraid the Black women carry disease, force their black maids to use a separate toilet in the garage. This -- even as the black women cook the white women's meals and tend their babies. One of those white babies grows up to be sympathetic. And she goes on, with the secret help of these and other maids, to write a book exposing the shame, injustices and degradation suffered by Black women as they raised the families of the very people who hated their race. Even if they didn’t truly hate them deep in their hearts, they had to act like they did. The Junior League and even the governor of Mississippi were watching.

I, too lived in the Deep South in the 1960s – in the little town of Greenville, S.C., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

I, too, had maids or baby sitters.

There was Velma, who loved to sing Negro spirituals, who had half a dozen children of her own, whose stairs inside her darkened home had rags on them instead of carpet, which we saw when Mama defied Southern culture and took us into her house to pay our respects after she died.

There was Florence with her downcast eyes.

There was another maid, a beautiful young woman with caramel skin, who undid her bra one afternoon in the back yard because me and my sister wanted to see what a breast looked like.

I also had a mother who sympathized and a father who didn't.

My father was from Greenville, Mississippi, not far from Jackson. He was one of nine children, born in 1933 to a father who was a sharecropper and who eventually walked to college so he could be a teacher. My father’s father eventually moved the family to Greenville, S.C., -- Mississippi racism and all.


(My dad, at 16)

I once heard my uncle whispering to the other adults in the living room of my grandmother’s old wrap-around porch house, where they were all sitting after Christmas dinner: “They need to send them n... back to Africa.”

Those words rang in my ears like I'd been slapped – I can still see my uncle stopped in his rocking chair as he made his proclamation.

The words rang strong because of Mama.

In Mama’s view, the “n” word was one of the worst words anybody could utter in anybody’s presence, but especially in the presence of her four daughters. Good Catholic girls she was determined for us to be, we were not allowed to hear or say “shut up,” “butt” or even “hate.” But the worst word of all was the word that started with an “n.”

My mother was half Lebanese and half Deep South, her father born of Lebanese immigrants, her mother of a Seneca County, South Carolina, war lieutenant and a proud Cherokee Indian who never learned to read.

My mother looked more Lebanese than Southern, her hair, dark, her skin, olive-complected.

With black eyes and high cheekbones, she was Sophia-Loren exotic in a community that celebrated lily white.

As immigrants, Mama’s relatives empathized with the minority, so much so that Mama’s family became responsible for starting the three black Catholic churches in South Carolina.

A few years before my godfather, Mama’s uncle and my great uncle, Uncle Jamile died, I called him in South Carolina and asked him to tell me the story of how the bishop commissioned three black Catholic churches, one in Greenville, one in Charleston, and one in Columbia.

Uncle Jamile, who was a real estate developer, who made his money along with the rest of the family starting grocery stores that went on to become the Bi-Lo chain, fanagled a scheme with the bishop: He would secretly buy three pieces of land like he was going to develop it for commercial purposes. He would then turn around and sell each parcel to the Catholic church for 99 cents. The church would turn the parcels into churches for Black people.

This is the good part of my mother we grew up identifying with.

And then there was Essie, my mother's mother, who was also part of Mama, and us.

Essie, herself an abused, angry child who ran away to the orphanage when she was 12, had her own story of pain, which she cast onto my mother like a spiderweb, maybe because she was beautiful and smart and beloved by the Lebanese side of the family.

My mother was Essie’s whipping post. Essie threw cast-iron skillets at my mother’s head and told her she was stupid. When my mother tried to sing, she smirked. “Shut up that mouth! You don’t know how to sing!” Essie, who worked as a nurse at night and slept during the day, made my mother take care of the next three siblings. The siblings were born when my mother was 9, 11, and 14. When she was 17, my mother married my father so, she said, she could escape.

I only saw my grandmother be physically abusive once, when I saw her throw a tub of pimento cheese at my aunt’s head. Otherwise, what I saw of Essie's wrath was psychological. She stomped through the 900-square foot house so that it shook, bellowing at nobody. Her husband, a mouse or smart, who’s to say, never had much of a job, never said anything, but sat glued to a wing-back chair in the living room in front of the TV.

I only knew the stories of abuse because my mother told me.

Our relationship muddied by co-dependency, my mother used these stories too many times when I was young to explain her depression, her misery, and ultimately, her inability to cope with motherhood.

In later years, Essie became the excuse for her explosion. When she was 33, when my sisters and I were 14, 13, 9 and 7, she divorced my father and became a poor role model for responsibility, the willful, wild adolescent she never got to be.

I never saw physical abuse against my mother.

But I caught sight of Essie’s hold on my mother once, when Mama was in her 50s, and I was in my 30s. I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother, sitting on the couch. We were talking, I don’t remember about what. My mother said something Essie didn’t like.

My grandmother turned to my mother and screamed from deep inside her, like the bass of a cello or King Kong. “You better shut up your goddamned mouth, girl!”

It wasn’t so much Essie’s visage or her words that showed me the truth.

It was the way my mother shrank before my eyes, from a grown woman to a small, scared child. “Yes, ma’am,” my mother said, her dark eyes widened in fear, glued to my grandmother’s, her body shaking next to me on the couch.

My mother, her self esteem nil, her depression augmented by the burden of four children at the age of 26, strong, clung to the plight of the downtrodden, as if they were her blood kin.

She was most at home with the small.

When I got invited to a junior high sorority mother-daughter tea in eighth grade, she sat in the piano room with the girls while the other mothers had coffee and cake in the other room.

She was quiet at dinners at my father’s mother’s house, where the table was long and the tea, sweet, where the Southern women would cast long, disgusted eyes at my mother’s dark hair and high cheek bones.

My mother was most of all at home at the Black Catholic church that her family started.

Her rich relatives attended and supported the high-church Catholic church in town, St. Mary’s. They even paid for her to attend St. Mary’s parochial school from first through twelfth grade.

Our own home church, the one my sisters and I attended, was Our Lady of the Rosary, the smaller Catholic church in town, where we also went to school. Mama was always putting on a face there, trying to be like the other mothers.


(This photo is my mother in later years, when she was 61, meeting my youngest child for the first time.)

But where Mama let down her guard, where she was most herself, where I felt like smiling when I was with my Mama, was at St. Anthony’s, at the Black Catholic church named after the man who is the patron saint of lost things and missing persons.

The Black people there would stretch out their hands in greeting to her as if to tell her she was good and strong, and perfect just as she was. And she would outstretch hers. And when it came time to sing, my mama would close her eyes and throw back her head and open her mouth and release her Essie-squelched voice with the people she was most comfortable with.

Although after the divorce, my mother worked 14-hour days at a nursing home, when I was little, my mother only worked one year, as a secretary at the utility company.

That's when she hired the maids. I was 9.

I remember Florence and her downcast eyes, specifically related to two occasions -- once, when I was reading a school book that had the word "bunk" in it, as in "bunk bed."

I didn't know what a "bunk" was and so I showed Florence the word in my book and asked what it meant.

She stopped ironing. “You makin’ fun a me?” she asked.

"No, ma'am, Miss Florence," I said, confused.

On another occasion, she asked me if I wanted “sam-min” for lunch.

"Yes, I love salmon!” I said.

She shook her head and lowered her eyes and wouldn't speak to me.

I didn't understand what happened until I saw her making me a sandwich.

She had been asking me if I wanted a sandwich for lunch, and I thought she said salmon.

I tried to tell her I didn't understand. But I could tell she didn't believe me.

I see now she thought I was trying to shame her.

Of course, I remember the beautiful young woman with her beautiful body, being so brave as to show me her beautiful skin. She was proud and confident.

But who I remember most of all is Velma.

Velma was a very large woman, I remember, who sweat profusely in the Southern summer heat.

The scent of her sweat was rich and deep, nothing I was familiar with.

Her sweat was comforting, a comfort like my own mother never could comfort me.

I have no memory of my Mama, so hardened by Essie, ever taking me in her arms or so much as smoothing a hair on my head.

But I have a vivid memory of Velma on one of those sweltering Southern afternoon summer storms, an electrical storm with its sudden lightning and thunder.

I was frightened.

And big Velma, drenched with sweat in our un-air-conditioned house, stopped ironing and sat down in the rocking chair in the living room.

“Come on,” she said, holding out her slick, sweaty arms to me.

I climbed up onto her ample lap.

She closed her eyes, and her arms around me.

And she rocked and patted my back and held me as she sang.

I think I can can

My great grandmother, Granny White, a millworker who lived in Seneca, S.C., about an hour from where I grew up, could not read. She wore little granny glasses and little black shoes. She lived in a house with an outhouse, dipped snuff, made muscadine wine and slept on mattresses made of duck feathers. The mattresses were so soft that you sunk three feet in the middle when you laid on them. My mother, Granny's granddaughter, used to love to escape her mean mother to go to Granny's duck mattresses.
Granny also canned vegetable soup. It was the best vegetable soup in the entire universe, and every time we drove out to see her, she'd pop open a jar and warm us up some. Okra, tomatoes, green beans and potatoes. Simple. Yum.

I always wanted to learn how to can, too, one of those tasks passed down woman-to-woman in the country. I always wanted to learn, but I'd heard all the bad stories -- exploding pressure cookers, botulism, that kind of life-threatening thing. I needed somebody to teach me, to show me. I am, after all, a visual learner, and a woman who works best in community with others.

Along comes my friend, Kelley P. , a member of an organization called TimeBank, where people give and get services from each other. (Reminder to self: Write about this in a future post). Now Kelley is a level-headed woman, the mother of two really good little girls, who would know all about staving off all the bad things in life. She had just learned to can tart cherry jelly. She told me she would teach me!!

Yesterday, we spent two hours canning and an hour jabbering. In the end, I had 12 jars of cherry jam, no preservatives, made by my hands, with the help of Kelley. I had a good talk, woman-to-woman, to add to the pockets of my soul. Voila!



Next, I want to make blueberry with lime zest. Yum yum yum. And talk some more and more and more with Kelley...

HOW TO CAN THE JELLY WE CANNED ABOVE
4 cups tart cherries in their own juice
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
6 small jars
one pot with heavy bottom and lid
one gallon saucepan
one small saucepan
one box no sugar needed pectin
four tools from Bed Bath and Beyond for 8 bucks: a funnel, a magnet on a stick, a measuring rod, tongs

1. Wash your jars and lids in the dishwasher. You want the water hot.
2. Don't touch the insides of the jars after that, or the insides of the lids. In fact, don't touch anything that will touch your jelly. That's how you seal in bacteria. Wash everything in really hot water. Then wash it again.
3. Fill the biggest pot of water, the one with the heavy bottom, so that when you put the jars in there, they're covered, plus an inch. Using your tongs, put your jars in the cold water. Cover the pot. Bring it to a boil. Once it's boiling, turn down to a simmer.
3. Meanwhile, chop cherries however you want them. Some of us like them whole, others a little pulsed in the food processor, others chopped on a chopping board.
4. Put cherries in the medium pot with the box of pectin. Medium high heat. Bring to boil. Add two cups sugar. Bring to boil again. Set timer for two minutes. When the two minutes are up, your jelly is ready to can.
5. Meanwhile, start the other, littler saucepan with water to boil, enough to cover your lids. Keep them on a simmer til ready to use.
6. Using your tongs, bring out a jar. Use your funnel and pour some jelly in the jar. Use your measuring implement to make sure the jelly is 1/8 to 1/4 inch from the top. Using your magnet on a stick, grab your lid from the simmering pot and pop it on. Using a hot pad, hold the jar, while you twist on the top. Put the jar back into the boiling water.
7. Once all six jars are done, put the lid back on the big pot, bring it back to a boil for ten minutes.
8. Use tongs to get the jars back out. Put them in a quiet place, where they should sit still, setting for 24 hours. You will hear the jars pop over the next half hour, as they seal. Touch the tops after a few hours to make sure there is no give. That means they've sealed.

Jars will store for a year. Opened, they will be good for three weeks.
Yum yum and soo much easier than I thought.......Thanks, Granny and KP!!!

Hard drive crash and the Zen of emptiness

I decided a few months ago that I wanted to enter some of my photos in the county fair competition in August.

Procrastinating as long as I could, I finally plugged in my hard drive a few days ago to begin the arduous task of looking through 40,000 digital pics to find the four I like best.

I turned on the drive.

"Folder is empty," it said.

I turned off the hard drive, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I turned off the computer, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I went downstairs, came back up.

"Folder is empty."



Now here's the deal. Technology is the part that I HATE about today's art world. In order to be a contender, you have to have the right side of the brain working AND the left side. You can't just be good at composition and subject matter. You have to know raw vs. jpeg, tungsten lighting vs. studio light and how to merge layers in PhotoShop. Technology isn't just for the pro shooters, either. Any 22-year with a Mac knows how to do this stuff.

And then there's me. I get panicky when I try to set a clock. But I love to take pictures, and so I take it one step at a time, even as I simultaneously fight the technology, refusing, even, to back up my pictures with a second hard drive.


"I actually think it might be a good thing if my hard drive crashes," I once told Blood Sistah 3. "Maybe a clear hard drive would make me realize the impermanence of life. I could live into the Zen concept of emptiness."

Be careful what you ask for and all that, blah de blah: For the past two days, while the computer gurus at the local shop worked on my hard drive, I wasn't sure whether I would ever see those 40,000 pics again. I did find a few photos on CDs that I had made, enough that I was able to pull together a collection of four for the photo contest. I knew I had a bunch of albums on Facebook that I had culled from my collection. Certainly, I still had all the hard-copy pictures from decades of pre-digital shooting. Meanwhile, all the pictures I took with my Nikon D 80 digital during these past two years, all the weddings I've shot, the New Orleans Jazz Fest shots, the senior high school photos -- those would be gone.


Except they wouldn't be. They would be in my brain.

"I'm actually feeling pretty calm about this," I told Blood Sistah 4 on Day 2. She is a video producer, who works with computers and images, who just lost her own hard drive a few weeks ago. "I think if I lost all my writing, I would be devastated. I couldn't easily conjure that back up. As for my pictures, I am a visual person. Each and every one of those pictures is etched on the hard drive on my brain.

It's true I'd never see them again in high resolution. But truly, it makes me nervous to be so attached to a little black box, like my world would end if it did. What am I going to do with all those pictures anyway?

Then, just a few minutes ago, I got the call from the guy at the computer shop.

"We got all of 'em back. You can pick up your new hard drive later today."

Thank God.

The case against the case against summer

DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK
BRINGING UP MOMMY
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
----------------------
THE CASE AGAINST THE CASE AGAINST SUMMER VACATION

Record-breaking summer heat notwithstanding, I went chilly all over when I saw “Time” magazine’s “The Case Against Summer Vacation” cover in my mailbox recently.

Here we go again, I thought – the brain-drain days of summer being vilified for a substantial fall-back in September achievement, being blamed for a failed education system, being pounded on for our inability to compete with our European and Asian counterparts, being ultimately responsible for our entire economy becoming a laughingstock around the world.

The case is nothing new, nor is the split between parents. While one set of parents remains pro-summer, nostalgic for long, barefoot summer days for their kids, the other sees summer as little more than a mad, three-month scramble for child care. While one set wants the institution of summer not tampered with, this latter group believes replacing summer with shorter, more manageable breaks throughout the year would spell relief.

The issue, meanwhile, remains clear-cut for education gurus like U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, his approach apparent in a speech last year to a group of middle- and high-school students in Denver: "Go ahead and boo me. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week, eleven, twelve months a year." And arguments continue to stack up, with “Time’s” Aug. 2 issue reporting a particular relevance for the gap summer vacation creates between income groups:

Middle- income kids lose a month of (math) knowledge during the summer, while poorer kids lose a full three months (in reading comprehension). Middle-income kids use their summers to enrich their lives --- trolloping off to summer camps and family vacations – while low-income kids are relegated to home alone, hours in front of video games, boredom and isolation. The solution, according to “Time” sources, is organized summer learning and enrichment camps -- summer school -- which philanthropic organizations have been building throughout the country, and which public schools have begun to offer in some low-income areas.

I make no apologies for my knee-jerk response to this and every other “case against summer vacation” – a response that has little to do with nostalgia. Nor am I necessarily against summer “enrichment,” if that’s what it really is.

My disdain, rather, is built around the concept of “academic achievement.”

Don’t get me wrong. I support public education and every child having the opportunity to do well in school.

What I do not support is academic achievement as the definition of childhood’s success.

What I cannot hold up is the success of a child’s life being tied to formal education, being tied to numbers, being tied to competition in China, where kids get six weeks of summer, which are spent studying for entrance exams.

I happen to believe there are other critical aspects of humanity to promote during childhood, such as balance, such as family wholeness, such as identity and a sense of play. Wrap a child’s year around school, which is what would happen if he were given a couple of weeks off here and there, and he would become a functionary in an economic system. Life outside school would no longer constitute enough constant space to give it an identity of its own, its shape determined by the individual family for better or for worse. It would be only a blip of time here and there, a small break from the system that sets the clock for life.

I do not pretend to know the answers for failed academic achievement. I appreciate what my teacher friends tell me about the summer brain lapse. I am hesitant, however, to believe that summer enrichment camps, especially if they are run by the public school that has already failed the student, is going to make that much difference in the end.

Meanwhile, I know this is a country that prides itself on its ability to compete, and that competition is only getting fiercer. Duncan’s vision of the 11- or 12-month school year may one day ride right into town on the fear that competition promotes. If and when that day comes, Mr. Duncan, I hope you and your staff are aware of
additional issues that will need addressing:

1. All schools will need to have the same time off so that if my family wants to visit my sister’s family in Memphis during whatever coveted time we have, we won’t be visiting while her kids are in school.
2. All schools will need air conditioning. This would have been especially important this summer, which included the hottest July in recorded history.
3. All schools will need to reinstate daily physical education classes and incorporate plenty of outdoor time into the day. More time in school means less physical time with friends and family.
4. All schools will need to fix the start and end time to coincide with a particular age group’s sleep needs. While younger kids are OK with “early to bed, early to rise,” teenagers’ brains have been proven to function better if they go to bed at 2 a.m., and get up at 11.
5. Extracurricular activities, like sports and music lessons, should be kept at a minimum if kids are going to get enough sleep, down time and family time, and homework time without collapsing, which means the school is going to have to take up this slack, too.
6. Homework, once and for all, will have to be kept at the recommended limit of 10 minutes per grade level, preferably less. Remember the adage that begins “All work and no play.”
7. While we're at it, keep in mind there’s only so much one child can carry on his back. “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” wrote cultural critic and author, Neil Postman in “The Disappearance of Childhood.”

--Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been publishing her column about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.

The summer of pickles

BRINGING UP MOMMY COLUMN
BY DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK
PUBLISHED BY MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
JULY 2010
~~~~~~~~
THE SUMMER OF PICKLES

My 13-year-old spends his summer days hanging with a gang we call The Pickle Boys.

It's not a gang in the street sense of the word.

Think instead Spanky and Alfalfa.

Think freckles and braces and five 12- and 13-year-old boys who have been best friends since pre-school. Think long, hot days in a cool, black lake. Think Four Square and Frisbee and Pickle in the Middle, a keep-away game they play so much that one parent borrowed the name and gave it to them. Think World Cup parties evolving into burgers and watermelon, evolving into S'mores and sleepovers, and when the order has been given for lights off, the sound of boys' muffled laughter and chatter into the night from tents in the back yard or from the basement where they've lain their sleeping bags side-by-side.

The Pickle Boys are not without their modern distractions. Like millions of other American boys, they have their DSs, their Wiis, their PlayStations and their iPods, from which they have to be pulled away.

But together, they are bigger than their gadgets. In a culture of organized activities and a constant struggle against summer boredom, the Pickle Boys are their own organization, like the neighborhood gangs of eras gone by, especially apparent during the easy, accessible days of summer when it's just as simple for five to hang out, as it is for two or three or four.

The beauty of the Pickle Boys lies in this collective loyalty and in a shared joie de vivre, captured in endless afternoons of driveway basketball and pickup soccer, captured in a summer snapshot during a safety break at the pool one afternoon, their chests bare while they laugh over a book that in later years might very well be a centerfold in Playboy, but this summer is the "The Ultimate List of Top Ten Lists" and the Top Ten Poisonous Foods We Love to Eat.

It lies in chronology. Old enough this summer finally - to walk the several blocks to each other's houses, they are yet young enough that a simple game of Pickle in the Middle is enough to sustain and entertain.

It lies in longevity. They've known each other since they were 3, riding the halls of Tree City Preschool on three-wheelers.

We parents look on gratefully, knowing what we have here. Not geeks or nerds, not artsy or jocks, not yet flirty with the girls or snippy with their mothers, here is a gang of boys whose parents stayed in the same place long enough for five boys' shared interests and temperaments to bond together in friendships that have carried them almost as long as their families, through all of pre-school and elementary school, into the notoriously fractious years of middle school.

We also know the summer before eighth grade doesn't last forever. Next summer is the summer before high school. Someone will go into summer sports training. Somebody will get a girlfriend. Paths will change. Other interests will form.

But for now, the ones among the Pickle Boys who have braces tell the orthodontist, "Lime green bands, please," because of a pact they made to keep the same color on their teeth.

They rise in the morning, wondering what they will do today. They go to bed at night, often next to one another under twinkly lights strung up in the basement.

These days will change one day; we don't know how.

For right now, right here, in a small town in northeast Ohio, this is a summer where memories are being made. They are memories for us, too, one gracious summer of watermelon and sleepovers, of laughter and simple pleasure and a gang we called the Pickle Boys.

Forever moments

My 13-year-old son and youngest child is away at camp. For a month. Ahem. Did you hear me correctly? A month. Thirteen years old. What is up with that? I miss him, and so I am reprinting this "Bringing Up Mommy" column I wrote for Knight-Ridder/Tribune News when he was 9.

FOREVER MOMENTS
The best part of summer vacation was not the pizza with the award-winning sauce or the shuffleboard game or even the soft-serve cones that were big as Mrs. Simpson's hair and cost only a dollar.

The best part was the sky.

"Look! The sky is purple!" said my 9-year-old son as the two of us walked through the village square along the shore of Lake Erie.

It was a signal.

And as the sun cast its last reflection of the day on this great expanse of Great Lake named after an Indian tribe, my young son and I stopped.

"What else?" I whispered.

"I hear flip-flops flopping and a basketball."

I waited, quiet, so we could offer full attention to the unmistakable sounds of a child's summer sandals slapping against the sidewalk, and, sure enough, a basketball bouncing on the village court.

"I smell fish from the lake," I said.

"Hmmmm," my son said, and he took in a deep breath through his nose.

"I see the lights of the boats," he said, his eyes wide open now.

"I feel a light breeze on my arm," I said.

"I feel happy in my heart, and peace," he said.

"I feel safe," I said.

With each pronouncement, with each observation, my son and I experienced the summer night more deeply, until we were satisfied we had imprinted another "forever moment," as we have come to call them.

It was not unlike the moment we chanced upon a few weeks ago while riding bikes: Instead of racing along the trail in a hurry, always rushing to see what's around the bend, we had decided to open our hearts and our five senses, one-by-one, to each curve along the path.

"I see shadows on the trail from the sun."

"I hear the sound of a lawn mower."

"I smell the crispness of the air."

"I see a turtle!"

We saw nuances and details that we typically overlook when we are thinking about what we're going to have for lunch or when boys' soccer practice is going to start up again.

We noticed that the leaves on the same tree appeared to be different shades of green because of the slant of the sun. We distinguished between the call of doves, crows and what I call tweety birds. We experienced and recognized the wind and the sun in our faces. We felt peace.

The constant, the mainstay, in these moments is what we feel inside. So far, when my son and I have stopped to be where we are, we have reported to each other feelings of safety, happiness and peace, which makes me wonder why we, why all of us in our family, why all of us everywhere, don't allow ourselves these moments all the time.

When my husband and I are sitting at the soccer field watching our children, when our family is all together at the dinner table, when we are playing a board game, when we are saying our long, ritualistic good-nights, cuddled up to each other, instead of thinking of what we have to do tomorrow, instead of worrying how much higher gas prices are going to go or how we're going to pay for college, we could be having a different experience.

"I hear the tick tock of the clock."

"I hear an owl outside."

"I feel your skin against mine."

"I feel the love between me and you."

We've all read the pundits, the philosophers and the theologians who remind us to live in the present moment: "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," sings James Taylor. "Do not dwell in the past. Do not dream in the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment," said Buddha. "This it the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it," says the Psalmist.

I had thought this would require some kind of paradigm shift, some measure of life-commanding attention.

Now, having had these moments with my willing child, I know that the present moment is as easy as leaving my post, stepping outside and calling to my young son, "Want to have a forever moment?"

We sit on the front stoop, him in his sweaty, dirty play clothes and me in my apron from the kitchen where I've started supper. And we listen to the wings of the birds and the beginning of a summer evening, emblazoned now forever.

Corporate hospitality and the comfortable hotel

I have, for the last week, traveled the state of my birth, South Carolina, from north to south and west to east, from the mountains where I was born, to the sea where I had my first newspaper job, from the pines and mountain laurel of the Upstate to the palms and sweet grasses of the Low Country. My last night here, I even tiptoed over the border, to Asheville -- which I heard had transformed into an artists' colony. This North Carolina jewel, elevated 2,100 feet in the Appalachians, did not disappoint with its artists' district along the winding, dipping French Broad River, with its hippie chic downtown shops and its uber cool restaurants. Among the Asheville eateries is Vegetarian Seed, a mostly vegan gourmet cafe cheffed by Jason Sellers, former chef of Candles 79 in NYC, once named best veggie restaurant in the U.S. Jason is a gentle and approachable soul, who sat at the counter and chatted with me at length about how he comes up with recipes, both international and traditional. I also made, on my way back to Greenville from Asheville, a surprise veer off U.S. 25 on a dark and spooky night. I went deep into the edge of the Blue Ridge, where I found my beloved Camp Wabak, a Girl Scout camp embedded so deep in forever moments that I remembered the smells as I flew the back roads, my windows open to the crickets, the tree frogs and the sticky heat of a South Carolina summer night.

It was indeed a journey that started last Saturday, July 17, with a Southern Baptist funeral in my hometown Greenville. The funeral was for my outspoken but gentle and beloved Aunt Jane, the Bledsoe-side relative who never conspired with many of the other aunts and uncles to villify me and my three sisters for aligning with my wild child mother after her divorce from my father. I always said I would attend her funeral when she died, and despite many obstacles, including concern that various aunts and uncles would not be happy to see me, I did. I moved aside other obligations, flew to Atlanta and drove the 150 miles to Greenville where I met up with Blood Sistah Kim of the Memphis Lloyds. She and I went together to the Southern Baptist funeral, which was held outside in the 100-degree heat and which was presided over by two fire-and-brimstone preachers determined to save everybody gathered at graveside, including two people who fell out, not from being saved, but from the 100-degree heat. There was indeed an aunt there who would not lift her face to me as I approached her under the tent where she was cooling herself with a church fan. Ah, but I had sister Kim and Cuz Pam, and later, at Aunt Jane's house where her Sunday School class had provided Southern style funeral food -- potato salad, mac and cheese, green beans and sweet tea - there were reunions with other cousins who told us they had moved beyond calling me and my three sisters "the devils." I heard the word, "healing" a lot that day.

On into the week, I reunited and re-introduced myself to the loveliest parts of South Carolina, including the artfully landscaped downtown of this charming Greenville that I couldn't wait to leave when I was 16, which I did with the aforementioned wild child mother. I rediscovered the cosmopolitan Columbia in the Midlands where, I married my husband, bore two of our children and worked as a newspaper reporter for 11 years. And I became smitten --again -- with the culturally diverse Low Country and its Taffy Tacky Surfside Beach, its poignant salt marshes of Pawley's Island, and the mystical, haunted Murrells' Inlet, where Steve and I spent the most tumultuous days of our "courting". Throughout the week, I saw old friends from The State Newspaper in Columbia who felt so much like home again that I'm afraid I must dispute Thomas Wolfe. I was blessed to spend two days with my dear, dear heart friend, the lovely M.E. Perkins, who, when she was 10 years old 21 years ago, was my first baby sitter when my first child was born, and who now, sweetly, is pregnant with her own child. My time with her was magic, as were the hours spent with Cousin Pam and sister Kim, who was here for three lovely days -- one of which was her birthday! My compatriot in flirts with waiters between sips of wine, she also co-stalked my father's old house to see how it had changed, and sat with me for hours, feeling all the feelings that come, on the porch of my maternal grandmother's house, which was condemned two years ago by the City of Greenville for lack of care, but which remains standing because nobody, not even the City of Greenville, can muster the cruelty to destroy a breaking heart.

Greenville was Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Monday evening was Columbia. On Tuesday, M.E. and I traveled south to Charleston and north, up the coast, ultimately all the way to Myrtle Beach, in search of the perfect coastal experience -- and the perfect beach hotel. Not TOO tumbledown, but not too richy-rich was the beach scene we were after. We ended up settling on Huntington State Park, where we knew we really wanted to go all along, a pristine beach 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach and as wide as a six-lane highway, with a marsh to guide us in, with its bigger-than-life ecosystem and its teeny tiny sweet little angel crabs, its elegant egrets and goofus pelicans where I took too many pictures to edit. Once we decided on our hangout for Wednesday, we checked in to the Hampton Inn in Litchfield for Tuesday night.

This was HI Experience Number One, a lovely experience as soon as we walked in the door, when we were greeted by a nurturing, joking woman who obviously loves the beach and her job, who told us we might believe we our offshore hotel is waterfront if we stand on the roof and look really hard. The maids were friendly. Breakfast was lovely, including as it did (instant, but still) grits, fresh fruit and a waffle made fresh in a self-worked waffle iron. And: There were no sperm blankets -- those polyester hotel bedspreads, which infrared light revealed in a documentary are covered with all kinds of human yuk that is never laundered, much less sanitized. "Yes, we have upgraded bed linens," our maternally inclined hotelier said knowingly, meaning "Yes, we have white, washable duvet covers with no sperm on them."

We spent Tuesday at the hotel, did the beach on Wed, drove back Wed night after eating soft-serve ice creams as big as Mrs. Simpson's hair and after driving through Myrtle Beach with its souped-up cars dragging the Grand Strand. I spent the night with M.E., saw more friends on Thursday and then headed up on a 99-degree midday to the Upstate.

I was on the highway, which was 123 degrees, about to fall asleep and thinking I should pull over into a parking lot and do that. But I thought I might melt or faint or succumb completely in the heat. "I know," I thought. "What if I find a Hampton Inn? I'll tell them I was just at one of their sister hotels on the coast. And maybe they'll let me come in with my laptop and doze off a bit in the lobby."

I was a little hesitant, to say the least, and thought for a second of just sneaking in to an HI, which is short for Hi!!, BTW. I would slip by the desk clerks, unnoticed, and do what I needed to do, without asking.

Side note: This is is not my M.O. I like to tell the truth and see what happens. I almost always am rewarded. And so I boldly walked into the lobby with my laptop prepared to give a speech. But right away, without even a word from me, the woman at the desk handed me an access code for the Internet.

"I'm not a guest here," I said.

She just shook her head back and forth, like "You don't need to explain yourself, honey."

I blabbed on, "I did just leave a Hampton Inn on the coast. I'm headed up to Greenville, but I'm about to fall asleep."

The whole time, she was just shaking her head. "It's OK, honey," she said, pointing to the lobby. "Go get yourself some complimentary coffee if you want some."

When I left an hour later, refreshed, cared for, dare I say, loved, they gave me two homemade cookies.

I shall never wander the interstate exits again. Not to the Best Western, nor Holiday Inn. Not Ramada or Quality will I go. But Hampton Inn, which is where, like a devoted lamb, I pulled in last night, my last night with Southern hospitality in SC before I drive to Hartsville International in Atlanta. This is not an advertisement, but an unpaid endorsement, a lovely thread to have wound its way through my journey home.