I never liked numbers, anyway: Feb. 23, 2003

As 40 approaches, I'm happy for the chance to revisit this column and be reminded that I consider age an irrelevant factor in most respects.

The older I get,the less age matters

    My husband and I celebrated our birthdays last week. We used our tax refund money to buy an antique dresser for our bedroom and then treated ourselves to the John Prine concert at the Tivoli on Friday night.

    Yep, we really know how to party.

    It might not sound like a whole lot of fun to most people, but we had a terrific time. We always do, in large part because we have a million things in common, both big and small, that make our partnership as natural as breathing.

    One of those things is our birthdays, which fall on Feb. 19 and 20. When Jim told me, during our first date, that his birthday was on Feb. 19, I laughed out loud.

    "Mine’s the next day," I said.

    

    I was 24 at the time and sitting with Jim at a picnic table at the MudPie restaurant at the end of a day spent mountain biking. I remember thinking he was probably in his 30s. On our second date I found out I was right: He was 39.

    For those of you who are as bad with numbers as I am, I’ll just do this for you. That’s 15 years and one day of age difference. I’ve never done math in my head as quickly as I did it in the moments after I got that information.

    He was 20 when I was 5. He was 30 when I was 15. He’ll be 50 when I’m 35. Oh, man, he’s only 10 years younger than my parents.

    It freaked me out at first, but it didn’t scare me for long. Here was a man who would go mountain biking with me and then say I looked beautiful with mud on my face. He had a degree in mechanical engineering, a career based on whitewater kayaking and long dreadlocks he’d grown during a recent visit to Costa Rica. I was smitten.

    Now, seven years after our first date, Jim’s age occurs to me only occasionally — like when he talks about something he remembers that happened before I was born (anything that occurred during the 1960s, for example). Or on our birthdays, when those numbers flip over one more time.

    There are always 15 years and one day between our ages, but I find Jim and I seem to get closer in age as we get older. When we started dating, I was a recent college graduate working my first job and trying to acclimate to life without semesters and Christmas break. He was a single man with an offbeat career and no plans to do much but enjoy himself.

    Now we’re in the same place in the progression of our lives — raising a small child, hoping for another one, constantly scrounging for a few more dollars for the renovation of our old house. We still love to mountain bike, though the opportunities to do it are few and far between these days. The list of things we have in common gets longer as we share more of ourselves and our lives with each other.

    And I’m finding that the older I get, the less I notice other people’s ages, as well. My husband and I have a circle of friends who range in age from 20-something to 60-plus, and their ages really only come up when we’re planning birthday parties.

    My mother, who has always been my friend, seems more like my peer all the time. The 25-year gap in our ages seems to get smaller every time we plan a holiday together or shop for shoes or play on the floor with my son. My grandmother is funny and sharp, and every time I talk to her I completely forget she’s got 50 years on me.

    On the flip side, I now understand how it feels to be on the older end of the equation. I teach a high school journalism class at Chattanooga High School Center for Creative Arts, which means I spend three mornings a week with teenagers.

    One Monday morning last month, my students and I talked for much of a class period about the space shuttle Columbia. Talking about that tragedy brought me inevitably to my memories of the Challenger shuttle and its heartbreaking end one January day in 1986.

    When I began to discuss the parallels, my students grew quiet. None of them, I realized, had any memory of Challenger. "Was anyone here even born when that happened?" I asked.

    They thought for a minute. "I was born in March 1986," one of them offered. A few more did some figuring and said they had been born but were less than a year old in January 1986.

    It’s a short distance between generations and what defines and separates them, I suppose. I look at my students and see young adults. They look at me and see a dinosaur who remembers the birth of MTV and every one of the Reagan years.

    I know how they feel. At 24, I thought 39 was old. But at 31, I think 24 was just way too young to know any better.

    At some point in adulthood, a decade — or two or three — stops seeming like much distance between congenial souls.     

A house with a story to tell: Jan. 26, 2003

Before we married, Jim and I bought an unremarkable little dump of a house that turned out to have a pretty remarkable history. After I wrote a column ruminating on the little bit I knew about our house, people started getting in touch with me to fill in the blanks.

For a girl who lives for a good story, that was a terrific gift.

The history of my house is a story with heart

    My grandmother is really into genealogy. Two summers ago she came all the way from Florida to attend the Darwin family reunion in Dayton, Tenn. She said it felt strange, sitting in a room with all those people, knowing she was related to each of them.

    My mom, who went with her, said it just looked to her like a bunch of strangers, and she didn’t feel a thing. I’m with Mom on that one. I figure we’re all related if you go back far enough, and people I’ve never met are no more or less interesting to me just because we’re kin.

    Lately, however, I’ve developed an interest in a sort of secondary genealogy. It’s not based on bloodlines or last names, but on an address.

    I own and love an old, crooked house. After my husband and I moved in six years ago, we found a rolled-up high school diploma in the attic written out to Mary Jo Thompson and dated 1918. Last summer, after I wrote a column about my house and the diploma, people began writing me letters, calling and stopping by to tell me about the woman whose diploma I had found.

    I’ve learned a lot about Mary Jo through these stories. I know she grew African violets and made fantastic chocolate rum balls for her book club every Christmas. She had a baby grand piano in her tiny living room. She never learned to drive and took the bus everywhere, including to her job as a secretary for Judge Sam A. Connor. She had an 8-foot-tall mahogany headboard she bought for $75 at a Ninth Street antiques store; my neighbor bought it from Mary Jo’s daughter and still has it.     

    But every story about Mary Jo always comes back to one thing: She was completely devoted to her son, Bud, who was born with Down syndrome in a time when little was known about the disorder, and few school or work options existed for people who had it.

    "Mary Jo really lived her whole life for Bud," said Bettye Seepe, a lifelong friend of the family and Judge Connor’s granddaughter. "She was a lovely little woman, but she was so strong."

    In 1925, when she was 25 years old, Mary Jo built a two-bedroom cottage in North Chattanooga with her first husband. They had a daughter, Carolyn, in 1929, but divorced a few years later. When she remarried, it was to a man named Edward Parker. They had a son, Edward Parker Jr., in 1939, and called him Bud.

    Mary Jo was determined to give Bud every chance at a happy, productive life. She and her husband were part of a small group of parents who founded the Orange Grove School in 1953.     

    "Everybody just loved Mary Jo," recalls Betty Jo Smith, whose mother was Mary Jo’s first cousin. "She was so patient and good to Bud. And she wanted to help other children, too."

    Bud attended Orange Grove School and, when he was old enough, worked at the school making pens. Every month, Mary Jo called each member of the Orange Grove board of directors to find out if they planned to attend the next meeting.

    "She did that from the first time the board met until her death," said Hal Baker, the deputy director of Orange Grove. "She would call everyone, then call the school and say who was coming. They relied on her. She was their conscience."

    In 1964, Mary Jo was named the Mother of the Year by the executive committee of the Chattanooga Council for Retarded Children Inc. of Orange Grove School. Her devotion to her son and to Orange Grove helped Bud thrive, Mrs. Smith said.

    "Bud was a delight," Mrs. Smith said. "He had a wonderful sense of humor."

    From the time Bud was born, Mary Jo had one great fear, Mrs. Seepe said.

    "Mary Jo had a horror of leaving Bud," she said. "She hoped she would live longer than he would so he would not have to leave her."

    After Mary Jo’s husband died in 1974, she and Bud lived in this house until the late 1980s, when Mary Jo became ill. Mrs. Seepe remembers visiting them in those last years.

    "This house, I remember, when I would come to see Mary Jo and Bud, it just radiated love," she said.

    When Mary Jo died in 1990 at age 90, it was with the knowledge that Bud would be cared for. Throughout his life, she had done everything she could to make sure that would happen. She left the house and its furnishings to Carolyn. The house sold quickly to a family friend. Everything else went for Bud’s care.

    Bud, who was 51 when his mother died, moved to an Orange Grove group home. His housemother loved him dearly, Mrs. Smith said, and she still takes flowers to the graves of Bud and his parents.

    Bud lived nine years after his mother’s death, and passed away in 1999 age 60. His sister, Carolyn, who had long since settled in Texas, died in 2001.

    In January 1997, I wandered through this house with the man who would become my husband. The place was in sad shape, in need of everything from new wiring and plumbing to central heat and air. I wanted it almost immediately.

    My husband and I have loved this place, and we have put everything we have into renovating it. But Mary Jo lived nearly 65 years in these rooms. In some ways, this house is still very much hers. I have a neighbor who has lived more than 40 years on our block. When I invited him in recently to see the addition we’ve built, he looked around and grinned, shaking his head.

    "It’s just amazing what you’ve done with Mrs. Parker’s house," he said.

    Sometimes, as I read my son to sleep in the bedroom that was Bud’s, or stir a pot in the kitchen where Mary Jo must have cooked thousands of meals, I think maybe I know why my grandmother came all the way from Florida to sit in a room full of Darwins she’d never met before.

    I never met Mary Jo, I never will, but I feel connected to her, to her history, to this house.

    And I have the strongest sense sometimes that she is still here, in the most benevolent way. 

Like a kid at Christmas: Dec. 22, 2002

I like stuff. I like to buy stuff and have stuff and give other people stuff and just generally enjoy stuff. I am an unapologetic consumer, which makes me an unapologetic fan of the holidays. Having kids gave me a whole new reason to love Christmas. Seeing it through their eyes is the best possible view of the annual holiday spectacle.

Christmas is more fun when you’re Santa Claus

  

    I was 9 years old when my baby sitter told me there was no Santa Claus.

    I tricked her into telling me by pretending I already knew. (One of several early signs that I was destined for a career in journalism.) We were talking about what I wanted for Christmas — more specifically, what Santa would bring me.

    "Duh, Lisa," I said in my most condescending 9-year-old tone. "I already know there’s no Santa. I’m not a baby."

    "OK," she said. "Just don’t tell your little brother."

    I had suspected for a few years, of course, that the whole thing was a made-up story perpetuated by adults to keep kids in line (extreme skepticism — another hallmark of the burgeoning journalist). But it was another thing entirely to have it confirmed.

    I felt both vindicated — Ha! I knew it! — and disappointed — Oh, no, really?

    I never let on that Lisa had blown the secret, never talked to my parents about it. Knowing the gifts were from my folks certainly didn’t stop me from ripping giddily into the wrapping paper every Dec. 25, nearly deranged by avarice. But I did stop dropping letters addressed to the North Pole in the mailbox and just started telling my mom what I wanted for Christmas.

    Now my son, Jack, who is 2 1/2, tells me this about Santa: "He brings Jack presents and cake." This is the first year he has really been able to appreciate the spectacle of the holidays, and watching him is so much fun it almost hurts.

    The arrival of the Christmas tree at our house last weekend prompted joy that verged on hysteria. Jack danced and jumped around the room, awkwardly hugged and kissed the tree, then pronounced it "poky and very green and big."

    Every morning he wakes up and trots immediately to the tree, demanding that I "make the lights twinkle." Any time a visitor stops in, he dashes to the tree and points to it — "Look, look, a Christmas tree!" — apparently worried someone might fail to notice the 8-foot-tall tree in his house.

    His unabashed wonder is teaching me one of the best lessons I’ve ever had the pleasure of learning: It is immeasurably more fun to be Santa than it is to believe in him.

    Knowing this has given me a new understanding of my own mom and dad. When I was a kid, Christmas morning always found my brother and me tearing into toys and games while our folks sat wrapped in their bathrobes, blinking sleepily, until one of us scrounged up a package for them to open, which usually contained some really scintillating gift, like socks or the Three-Volume Biography of Some Important Dead Guy.

    Yuck, I thought. It must be horrible to be a grown-up.

    My parents always wanted to do the craziest things on Christmas morning, like drink coffee, eat breakfast, take a shower or, astoundingly, sleep. It seemed downright pitiful to me, the way they treated that day like any other — as if mundane chores like eating and sleeping and bathing mattered on Christmas.

    Later, when I was a teenager, I still felt sorry for my parents at Christmas because I always came away with a stack of new CDs and cool clothes while Dad had to settle for ties and underwear (yes, really), and Mom got ceramic cats and lapel pins.

    Even after I grew up, I looked forward to my Christmas haul. It was the only way I figured a 24-year-old could justify asking her mother to buy her a new outfit. And later, my husband, after a shaky start, turned into a really wonderful giver of gifts — largely because he works in a store that is crammed with stuff I want.     

This year, however, budgets are tight all around, and there’s nothing in this world we need more than we need to save money. Jack will get some toys to add to his collection, but no one is buying anything big. My parents are planning a slim Christmas, and my husband and I have made a pact not to buy each other anything at all.

    A few years ago I might have been disappointed, but now I don’t care a bit. If I never get another Christmas present from anyone, it won’t matter. All I want is to sit in my bathrobe, blinking sleepily, and watch Jack as he marvels that Santa somehow knew he would love to get a car carrier truck and a puzzle shaped like a fire engine for Christmas.

    That’s what my son has given me for Christmas this year, and for every year when the sight of a tree in his house can set him dancing. Seeing him happy is the happiest I have ever been.

    Thanks, Jack. Merry Christmas, little boy.

How I met Thanksgiving: Nov. 24, 2002

For me, becoming a Fortune was the beginning of understanding the appeal of Thanksgiving. I don't like to cook, and I'm pretty indifferent on the whole eating thing. But now I understand that the meal is incidental.

My husband and his family have made my life a better place in many ways. Thanks, Fortunes.

Family is at the heart of Thanksgiving

  

    I never really knew what Thanksgiving was all about until I fell in with the Fortune family.

    Before I knew my husband, Jim, and his mom and his three brothers and their wives and children, I kind of thought Thanksgiving was an overrated holiday. You eat — that’s it. What’s so great about that?

    My own family is tiny. I have one first cousin, and I haven’t seen him since I was a kid. I grew up in the Army, always separated from my grandparents by several states. And we were often stationed in some far-flung spot where no one would want to go anyway, even for the holidays.

    Fort Huachuca, Arizona, anyone?

    So Thanksgiving was generally just my mom, my dad, my brother and me eating slightly more than usual and taking a turkey-induced nap in whatever town we happened to live in that year.

    But then I became Jim Fortune’s girlfriend.

    Jim has a family that seems, to me, huge. He is one of four boys, and his mother is married to a man who has two daughters and everyone has kids.

    Over Thanksgiving weekend 1996, Jim took me home to meet the family. That’s when I discovered Thanksgiving.

    We all gathered at the home of Jim’s mother, Freddie, and her husband, Mandy, set on a sprawling, sandy plot of farmland in Thomson, Ga., just outside of Augusta.

    We spent the weekend eating, napping and talking for hours about nothing. We watched rented movies and interminable football games. We flopped on couches, sprawled across chairs and curled up in spare bedrooms to sleep.

    When anyone needed a break from the somnolent warmth of the house, the call went out: "Who’s up for a walk?"

    Several of us would pull on coats and stroll companionably across a wide field next to the house, stopping occasionally to look at all the space around us, feeling the chilly late-November air in our lungs.

    Then it was time to head back to the house for more pie.

    One afternoon during that lazy weekend, Jim took me into Augusta to see the small rental house where he’d grown up, to visit the bike shop where he’d worked as a teenager, to point out the high school he’d attended.

    Later that night Freddie sat next to me on the couch and showed me pictures of Jim and his three brothers as children. She was in her element with her boys home and her house full of family.

    When the weekend was over, everyone hugged and kissed and climbed into their cars, headed in several directions back to lives of work and mortgages and "what’s-for-dinner?"

    It was jarring, leaving that weekend behind. It had been an unself-conscious celebration of family, of home and history, and it didn’t even matter that I was a newcomer. I had been welcomed and fed and embraced because one of the Fortunes brought me along, and if one of them loved me, they all loved me.

    We’ve had several Thanksgivings since then. In 1998 I arrived in Thomson sporting an engagement ring. In 1999 we came to the annual family dinner as newlyweds. And in 2000, we brought our 6-month-old son for his first visit to the warm heart of his extended family.

    It turned out that was our last visit to the old place in Thomson. Freddie and Mandy sold the farm last year and moved to Florida, leaving the "children" to carve out new traditions.

    Old habits die hard, though. The farm is sold and Freddie is too far away to make the trip this year, but Thanksgiving will find the Fortunes together again.

    This time we’ll gather in Atlanta, at the home of one of Jim’s brothers. At some point, we’ll all get on the phone to Florida, I’m sure, to tell Freddie that we love her and we miss her, but that we’re all together — just like she’d want us to be.

Where I'm from: Oct. 27, 2002

Growing up an Army brat, I never imagined I'd end up so settled and suburban. It certainly has its perks. Sometimes I still daydream about pulling up stakes and starting over somewhere else. But I'm also pretty sure my stakes are sunk too deep for that.

Realizing that this is home

  

    In the first 17 years of my life I lived in Alabama, two places in Germany, two places in Virginia, Arizona and New Jersey.

    That’s seven places in 17 years, courtesy of my father’s career as an officer in the U.S. Army. But I recently answered the question "Where are you from?" with a shrug and a casual "Oh, here, mostly."

    My internal hall monitor snapped to attention. "That’s just not true," it scolded. "You go back and amend that answer."

    But the conversation had moved on. There was no graceful way to backpedal and elaborate on a topic that had passed.

    "Besides," I snarled silently at that pesky voice, "I AM from here, mostly. I’ve lived here for 13 years. I became an adult here. I got my first driver’s license here, went to college here, got married here, had my son here, my parents live here, and if I want to say I’m from here, I will."

    My internal hall monitor shut up and went back to waiting for me to eat something fried or chocolate so it could berate me on a safer topic.

That left me to wonder when, exactly, I had decided to be from here.

    I certainly didn’t come here planning to end up here. My father retired from the Army, my mother got a job teaching English at UTC, and we landed in Chattanooga.

    I needed to go to college but hadn’t made any progress in deciding where. So I went to Chattanooga State while I waited for a better idea. I liked it. Then I went to UTC, where a journalism professor told me I ought to work in newspaper writing. I did, and I liked that, too.

    Meanwhile, I learned that all the people around here from Cleveland are not transplants from Ohio. I found out that saying LaFayette the wrong way is actually the right way. And I discovered that you should only use your turn signal during a lane change if you want every other driver in Tennessee to hit the gas in an attempt to block your move.

    I met my husband, landed a job I’d spent two years angling to get and bought a house. I was, for the first time in my life, getting comfortable.     

    Then, the Monday before Thanksgiving 1998, my editor called me at 8:30 a.m. to tell me there would be a meeting at the newspaper in an hour to discuss the future of The Chattanooga Times.

    I hung up and looked at my husband. "I’m about to lose my job," I said. "What are we going to do?"

    Jim and I have both lived a lot of places, and we had both grown to love Chattanooga. He’d even weathered his own layoff, trading his career as a mechanical engineer at DuPont for one managing stores for a local outdoor retailer.

    Talking quietly across the breakfast table that morning, we never did decide what we were going to do. But we decided what we were not going to do: We were not going to move.

    I was scared, but I also felt oddly safe. That, I think now, was the first moment I knew this was home. It was the first time I had ever felt that way, anywhere.

    The newspaper where I worked was sold and, by some combination of luck and mercy I still do not fully understand, I kept my job. Now I’m part of a finite group of staffers at the Times Free Press that remembers when half of us spent our days trying furiously to beat the other half. We laugh about it now. Mostly.

    Walking in my neighborhood recently, I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since my days at Chattanooga State nearly 12 years ago. The feeling was tremendously disorienting, and it took me a few minutes to figure out why: I have never lived anywhere else long enough to run into someone I haven’t seen in years.

    The other places I’ve lived and the people I’ve known simply disappeared in a cloud of dust kicked up by the tires of a moving van, and I never was much good at keeping in touch. But there I was, 12 years after community college, chatting happily with an old classmate on a North Chattanooga sidewalk about our kids and our houses and our jobs. It felt good.

    I realize, of course, that roots come with their own hazards: My son, because he was born here, will probably hate this place by the time he’s 16. And all the stupid things I do, say and wear will live on in the memories of folks I’ll run into 12 years later.

    But it’s worth it, I think, to feel this sense of belonging and connection that comes from finally being able to answer the question "Where are you from?"

    In all the ways that matter, I’m from here.