Miss Betty’s Week

Miss Betty’s column was never supposed to be funny. Still, every Christmas, after making the pilgrimage from Georgia to Water Valley, Mississippi, my sisters and I would read “Betty’s Week” aloud for guaranteed laughter. Scoring a copy of the North Mississippi Herald was a family tradition, right up there with perusing the staff picks at Square Books and snorfeling down pepper-flecked bacon at Big Bad Breakfast. 

The column featured all the page-turning drama and literary flourish of an industrial carpet brochure. Some days Miss Betty wrote about the roadkill she saw (including a large-eared cat she wouldn’t want to mix with!). Others describe her favorite lunch meat (bologna) and exactly how she prepares her sandwiches (tomato, mayonnaise). Another column was just a glorified list of supply preachers who visited her church’s pulpit when their pastor took a sabbatical. Many times she recounted the weather and exactly which layers of clothing she wore to prepare for it. 

Our favorite column regaled readers with a shopping trip on which she bought new underwear for the first time in “quite a while”! 

How would anyone ever publish this? I would ask, a young 20-something terrified of putting my own thoughts out into the world. I only knew that when I mustered the courage, my own writing would be profound, worldly, and impossible to put down. Of course, the irony is that even as we laughed at her audacity, we were reading her work. 

Today, “Betty’s Week” sits more uneasily with me. As a suburbanite raising three children, I could write about the well-trod paths in my life, from daycare to soccer practice and back again, but I fear that readers will find the minutiae about as exciting as Miss Betty’s temperature updates. 

 My brain is full of nap schedules, parents’ names, growth chart percentiles, and every item I forgot to add to the grocery pick-up order and will have to scrounge for later. Every block of time is Tetris-ed into tasks like laundry and meal prep and vacuuming goldfish crumbs from the deepest crevices of my minivan. 

In my 20s, I spent a summer hiking and working in a historic hotel in Glacier National Park. I lived in an intentional Christian community outside Boston. I earned a master’s in Vancouver and then moved to North Carolina to pursue a career as a chaplain. I was an extra in the second Hunger Games movie after responding to an ad seeking “tall, pale, skinny people who look like they could conceivably live underground.” I thought about the problem of evil and feminism and environmental justice. 

These days I think about the state of my fescue. Suburbia is suffocating in its comforts and conveniences. (The parking lots so wide! The sidewalks so long!) Sometimes I feel as if I’m being gently swallowed by a well-manicured, HOA-approved Jabba the Hut.

I try to write about the latest controversial article or current event, but I don’t have the quick-twitch writing muscle to power out an op-ed before the news cycle changes course. I dabble in fiction, but I know it will be years before readers see the fruits of this labor — if they ever do. Still, I know that a writer cannot write with results in mind. Writing is a discipline, a practice that may bear more fruit for the author than the reader. 

When my granddad was still alive, Miss Betty’s column featured in one of his most memorable pranks. His best friend Snookie was out golfing, and since cell phones had yet to be invented, he was mostly unreachable. My grandad called the golf course and told them that he had an extremely urgent message that needed to be delivered to Snookie. Not when he finished up his last hole. Not later. Now. 

My grandad faxed over the crucial document, and one of the caddies high-tailed it out of the office and frantically searched the course for Snookie. I imagine a plume of Mississippi dust trailing his golf cart as it clattered over the rolling hills at top speed. He yelled to get Snookie’s attention, and Snookie turned white as the young man ran the sealed envelope over to him, breathless but proud of himself for completing this crucial errand. 

Snookie opened it, unfolding the paper to reveal — you guessed it — “Betty’s Week.”

Recently, my 8-year-old informed me that he told the golf course story to his friends over lunch in the school cafeteria, roughly 35 years and three generations after it happened. “It got a big laugh,” he said, grinning. 

I’d be lucky if any of my writing enjoyed such a long half-life as Miss Betty’s, even as the butt of the joke. 

A couple of years ago, I turned on the iPhone feature that automatically rotates photos of your kids from your camera reel every hour of the day. I’ll be confronted with a photo of my daughter as an infant, a rivulet of blue drool down her perfect cheek from her first M&M on Halloween. This daughter is almost 6 now and waging a nonstop campaign to visit Sephora as a reward for learning to ride her bike. 

The son who told the “Betty’s Week” story at lunch appears as a toddler, squatting in a creek in Lightning McQueen rain boots. In real life, he’s telling me how he didn’t mean to break the label maker by attempting to print “six seven” over 100 times. There’s a violence to the pace of our lives — their urgent blooming, my rapid aging — and chronicling these events makes it feel if not slower, then at least witnessed.

A prank, a story, a lunch table full of second graders laughing. Who’d ask for a better legacy than that? As I’ve gotten older, I feel an odd deference for Miss Betty and her tireless documenting of her own ordinary life. Maybe she knew that there is power and beauty in the ordinary, the careful art of paying attention. Even to roadkill. And bologna. 

Plus, new underwear really is exciting. 

 

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