September 9, 1999

Better Days on the Tar River

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

I recently found something written by my grandmother many years ago that recalls better days on the Tar River. Perhaps her words would be of some comfort for the flood-ravaged residents of eastern North Carolina who are now experiencing the Tar River's Hurricane Floyd aftermath.
She mused "on the margin of the quiet river where a light glowed within me," perhaps recalling her baptism in the Tar River as a young girl.
Mary Maude Mayo was 19 years old on Feb. 5, 1907, when she copied these words on some note paper from Kaufman-Morris Co. of Tarboro, a "Dry Goods, Fancy Goods, Novelties" store where she worked. The meditation is by author Max Ehrmann.

Mary Maude Mayo in 1909 She entitled her writing, "My Meditation."
"Let me do my work each day, and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times.
"May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of the quiet river where a light glowed within me and I promised my early God to have courage amid the tempests of changing years.
"Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be such as will keep me friendly with myself.
"Lift up my eyes from the earth and let me not forget the uses of the stars. Forbid that I should judge others, lest I condemn myself. Let me not follow in the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path.
"Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am. And keep ever burning before my vagrant star the kindly light of hope.
"And though age and infirmity overtake me and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life and for time's oldest memories that are good and sweet, and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still."

My grandmother was always thrifty (I remember her walking a mile on her daily grocery shopping rounds to save a penny on a loaf of bread) so she used the bottom half of the second page of note paper for a poem.
I don't know whether she wrote these lines, or was quoting someone:

"I live for those who love me,
Whose hearts are kind and true,
For Heaven that smiles above me,
And waits my spirit, too.
For all the ties that bind me,
For all the tasks assigned me,
And the bright hopes left behind me,
And the good that I can do.
For the cause that needs assistance
For the wrongs that need resistance
For the future in the distance
And the good that I can do."

My grandmother married another Tarboro native, Walton Garrett Sugg, in 1909 (the year the photo was taken). They raised three sons and a daughter (my mother, Katie Sugg Myers) in Tarboro and Carthage, NC.
Still waters run deep, the saying goes, and my grandmother was a quiet, gentle soul who kept her own counsel. I never guessed her depths, but reading these long-ago thoughts makes me feel I know her better.
As she mused, "age and infirmity" finally overtook Maude Mayo Sugg in 1964 in Sanford, but her "evening's twilight" did indeed find her "gentle still."
I never knew a gentler soul, and if she ever spoke a harsh word, it was not uttered within my hearing.
She lies beside my grandfather at Buffalo Presbyterian Church cemetery near Sanford, but I look forward to our reunion when we meet again in "the castle of my dreams."