The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher Page B
Authors: Rod Dreher
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Paw’s.
“They had two generators going, and the fans were blowing at your mom and dad’s house,” John Bickham remembers. “Good company and moving air, let’s go. It was a good time. There was no TV. Nothing to do but sit in the dark with everybody else. We all just focused on each other. When you take distractions away, you realize that other people, that’s what’s important. It’s not what you have in life, it’s who you have.”
About two grueling weeks later the lights came back on in Starhill. When she called me to tell me the power was back, Ruthie confessed that she was almost sorry to see it happen. “It was so nice to be with each other every night, just sitting around the grill, drinking beer and telling stories, just being together. Now we’re all back in our houses, watching TV. It’s kind of too bad.”
My return to DC, the city I thought would be my new home, did not last. I moved again, in 1995, to Fort Lauderdale, to take a job as a film critic with the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper. The job was great, the people wonderful, but my romantic life was a desert. One autumn weekend in 1996 I flew to Austin to meet my writer friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, who had just published a book about her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and was giving a couple of talks in the Texas capital. My friend Jason McCrory, whom I’d grown up with and then gone to boarding school with, lived there as well.
That Friday night, at the Logos Bookstore in northwest Austin, Jason introduced me to an undergraduate journalism student who hadcome out to hear Frederica speak. Her name was Julie Harris. She had read and admired Frederica’s writing, and considered her a professional role model.
The college girl Jason escorted over had large, lively eyes, high cheekbones, impossibly full lips, and thick brown hair cut in a stylish bob. There I stood, wearing faded olive chinos, a Trainspotting T-shirt, and scuffed combat boots, suddenly feeling like the biggest fake hipster nerd in Austin.
After the reading Julie and I had dinner with Frederica and a group from the bookstore. Funnily enough Julie paid no attention to her journalism idol, only to the gabby Florida journalist on her left hand. The next night, a Saturday, we met with Frederica under the live oak tree at the Shady Grove restaurant. On Sunday, after church, Julie and I met again, and spent the afternoon together before my flight back to Florida. In the parking lot of Waterloo Records, I kissed Julie Harris, and we fell in love. On Monday, halfway across the country from each other, we were trading delirious e-mails. Four months, several visits, and countless letters later, I flew to Austin with a ring in my pocket and proposed. We decided to marry that December in New Orleans, after her college graduation.
Julie and I met in Louisiana one weekend that spring and spent a day driving around the city looking for a Catholic parish to book for our December wedding. We finally found one at the far end of Esplanade Avenue, near City Park. As soon as we walked in, we knew in our bones that this must be the place. It was free on the day we needed it, so we made our reservation. Four-year-old Hannah would be our flower girl.
Shortly after we returned to Florida to begin our lives as husband and wife, the New York Post offered me a job as its chief film critic. In the spring of 1998 we moved to Manhattan and became New Yorkers.
We were newlyweds in Manhattan during the city’s best decadeof the twentieth century, and we were deliriously happy. I worked for a New York City tabloid, the most purely pleasurable newspaper job I ever held. There was the nutball editor Vinnie Musetto, author of the infamous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline, three desks over. I could tipple with the tabloid god Steve Dunleavy at his perch at Langan’s, the Midtown bar across the street from the Post. Mafia goddess Victoria Gotti kept a desk at the paper, where she
“They had two generators going, and the fans were blowing at your mom and dad’s house,” John Bickham remembers. “Good company and moving air, let’s go. It was a good time. There was no TV. Nothing to do but sit in the dark with everybody else. We all just focused on each other. When you take distractions away, you realize that other people, that’s what’s important. It’s not what you have in life, it’s who you have.”
About two grueling weeks later the lights came back on in Starhill. When she called me to tell me the power was back, Ruthie confessed that she was almost sorry to see it happen. “It was so nice to be with each other every night, just sitting around the grill, drinking beer and telling stories, just being together. Now we’re all back in our houses, watching TV. It’s kind of too bad.”
My return to DC, the city I thought would be my new home, did not last. I moved again, in 1995, to Fort Lauderdale, to take a job as a film critic with the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper. The job was great, the people wonderful, but my romantic life was a desert. One autumn weekend in 1996 I flew to Austin to meet my writer friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, who had just published a book about her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and was giving a couple of talks in the Texas capital. My friend Jason McCrory, whom I’d grown up with and then gone to boarding school with, lived there as well.
That Friday night, at the Logos Bookstore in northwest Austin, Jason introduced me to an undergraduate journalism student who hadcome out to hear Frederica speak. Her name was Julie Harris. She had read and admired Frederica’s writing, and considered her a professional role model.
The college girl Jason escorted over had large, lively eyes, high cheekbones, impossibly full lips, and thick brown hair cut in a stylish bob. There I stood, wearing faded olive chinos, a Trainspotting T-shirt, and scuffed combat boots, suddenly feeling like the biggest fake hipster nerd in Austin.
After the reading Julie and I had dinner with Frederica and a group from the bookstore. Funnily enough Julie paid no attention to her journalism idol, only to the gabby Florida journalist on her left hand. The next night, a Saturday, we met with Frederica under the live oak tree at the Shady Grove restaurant. On Sunday, after church, Julie and I met again, and spent the afternoon together before my flight back to Florida. In the parking lot of Waterloo Records, I kissed Julie Harris, and we fell in love. On Monday, halfway across the country from each other, we were trading delirious e-mails. Four months, several visits, and countless letters later, I flew to Austin with a ring in my pocket and proposed. We decided to marry that December in New Orleans, after her college graduation.
Julie and I met in Louisiana one weekend that spring and spent a day driving around the city looking for a Catholic parish to book for our December wedding. We finally found one at the far end of Esplanade Avenue, near City Park. As soon as we walked in, we knew in our bones that this must be the place. It was free on the day we needed it, so we made our reservation. Four-year-old Hannah would be our flower girl.
Shortly after we returned to Florida to begin our lives as husband and wife, the New York Post offered me a job as its chief film critic. In the spring of 1998 we moved to Manhattan and became New Yorkers.
We were newlyweds in Manhattan during the city’s best decadeof the twentieth century, and we were deliriously happy. I worked for a New York City tabloid, the most purely pleasurable newspaper job I ever held. There was the nutball editor Vinnie Musetto, author of the infamous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline, three desks over. I could tipple with the tabloid god Steve Dunleavy at his perch at Langan’s, the Midtown bar across the street from the Post. Mafia goddess Victoria Gotti kept a desk at the paper, where she
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