James Fox-Smith
Bye bye BABUBUS
When our children were small, the third leg of our parenting stool was provided by my mother-in-law, Dorcas.
Forty-two years ago, armed with a paste-up lightboard and a can-do attitude, Dorcas founded this magazine from the dining room table of her farmhouse in rural West Feliciana, and, for the twelve years that followed, published it more or less single-handedly until her English major daughter came home from a year abroad with a scruffy Australian expat in tow. Since the couple showed no signs of moving on and the Australian could spell, Dorcas added them to the masthead, and during some rather lean years that followed, did what she could to teach them about the magazine business. Eight years later, just as my wife and I imagined we were getting the hang of this publishing thing, our daughter was born, then her brother two years later. Without much money, we did what I suppose parents with small family businesses have always done, which is to take the kids to work with them. Productivity suffered, of course, and it wasn’t long before Dorcas began trading some of her publisher’s duties for those of a grandmother, sharing the caregiver role with my wife and me as our children’s lives grew busier, and enabling Country Roads to keep soldiering along in the process. Since we all lived on the same property and the magazine was, by that time, run out of Baton Rouge, the kids grew up shuttling between their working parents and grandmother, who for some reason they dubbed “Babu,” toddling over to her house for morning pancakes as soon as they could walk, and later, getting off the school bus in front of her little office in St. Francisville. She would feed them and ferry them about to sports practice or friends’ houses or to the zoo, thereby ensuring them a more complete childhood while their parents focused on the next deadline. By the time the kids were middle schoolers, with music lessons and basketball practice and summer camps and all the rest to accommodate, Dorcas was serving such a vital role in the complicated transportation arrangements that we got her a vanity license plate that said BABUBUS. She was pleased, and long after both children had gotten driver’s licenses and moved away to college, the BABUBUS plate remained—a badge of honor earned for the thousands of miles she logged on their behalf.
Dorcas has always liked to drive—a good thing when you live ten miles from the nearest place to buy milk. And despite encounters with roadside debris and the occasional deer or slow-moving possum that added to the BABUBUS’s unique patina, Dorcas was on the road most days, and long after she retired, the children moved away, and her time was entirely her own, she could be spotted beetling around St. Francisville from one social engagement to another. So last month, it felt sudden when, during an outing to The Birdman, she took the phrase “running into the pharmacy” rather too literally. While swinging into a parking space, she apparently mixed up the accelerator and brake pedals, sending the BABUBUS roaring over the curb and adding new meaning to the phrase “drive-thru pharmacy.” Fortunately, besides the front of the BABUBUS, nothing was much injured. But all agreed that it was time for Dorcas to put her driving days in the rearview mirror.
Like most things that life throws at her, the world’s most sociable octogenarian seems to be taking it all in stride.
So now, we’re driving Miss Dorcas. Or at least, we would be if there weren’t so many of her friends and acquaintances lining up to do so. Most days, Judy or Kathryn or Susan or some other friend for whom Dorcas has always been there will show up for lunch or coffee or to bring her into town. On other days, Miss Drema, a longtime neighbor from nearby Wakefield, is always available with car keys and cheerful conversation at hand. Why am I surprised? Like most things that life throws at her, the world’s most sociable octogenarian seems to be taking it all in stride.
[Read this: "Mentors & Milestones—Looking back forty years to the start of Country Roads"]
In a couple of weeks Dorcas will turn eighty. There’ll be a party, of course. “Nothing big; I just want something simple,” she said, handing over a guest list the length of a biblical scroll. Dorcas’s birthday party grows bigger by the day, with family and friends flying in from both coasts. This is good, because throwing Babupalooza seems like the least we can do given all the years she spent ferrying our kids around. In twenty-five years or so it’ll be our turn, which doesn’t sound like long at all. When that time comes, we can only hope there’ll be half as many friends who care enough to come drive us around, celebrate our milestones, and to pick us up when we fall.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
