Every once in a while, a reader will ask about my daughter Sally. For three years she wrote a monthly column for these newspapers called “Teens” and they miss catching up on her. Her column took us on a journey back into time, looking through the eyes of a young girl.

We learned about her obsession for a 16-year-old rock star from Australia and about leaving temporary dye in her hair too long and turning it strange colors. She wrote about how she would design her room if her mother would let her, about wearing wide-leg jeans and about what really goes on at those teen parties. She had a wicked, dry sense of humor.

Sally had years ago given up any interest in playing sports, even though she could hit any ball thrown in her direction. Four years ago, she had a brief but brilliant career as an artist. Before she turned in her paintbrushes, she painted two canvasses that still hang in my living room – and designed the logo for our first paper, Atlanta 30306.

So last year when she said she wanted to retire from the column-writing business, I was disappointed but not too surprised.

Those who are close to Sally know one thing: she wants to be in control. This probably dates to her lengthy stay in the womb. She was due to be born during the full moon in October, but she wasn’t born until the full moon in November. That waiting period must have driven her crazy and ever since, she’s been in a hurry to grow up and hell-bent to control her environment.

Without her permission, family members in her presence are not allowed to sing the words to a song on the radio, chew too loudly, wear a cap in a restaurant or participate in a conversation she’s not privy to. She’s been subject to many of the ups and downs of girls her age: grade fluctuation, friend obsession and battles with her parents. She is engaged in a constant battle now with her mother, which I remind them both is common for this age.

But in the past year, I’ve noticed a change. She has gained enough confidence to begin wearing shorts or skirts. The baggy sweaters have given way to better fitting ones. She spends a few minutes applying makeup before we go out. She looks beautiful, has one of the most captivating smiles I’ve seen and is showing it a little more each day.

Although she attends a magnet school for the arts, she resists being forced to produce art. But recently, she picked up a birdhouse at home and painted a beautiful landscape on one side. And I’m hoping she’ll write a column again one day.

She just turned 16 and I’m sure the battles with her mom will cease in another year or two. Sally admits she may one day name her first daughter after her. They will probably end up best friends.

I like taking her out to dinner and hearing about what goes on in her life. She has learned to trust me with the truth. I love it when we exchange, “I love you’s.”

She has a few hurdles yet to go in life, including dealing with those boyfriends. Wherever Sally ends up, I know she will get there according to her own road map and at her own speed. I pretend to be driving but I’m just happy to be along for the ride. I just have to remember not to make a noise when I chew or sing. But she’s worth it.

Photos: Sally Schroder with next door neighbor, Jessie Perlik, hitting the ball in our Charlotte backyard, with me and Thomas at Christmas in Atlanta

When I was born a few years ago, the nurse wrapped me in a blanket and handed me to my mother, who was delighted to see me – even though my arrival had not exactly been planned. She had already given birth to four children, beginning 17 years earlier. As she cuddled me, she told herself that her only regret was that she was already past 40 and would probably not live long enough to see my children.

But 40 years later, she is still on the go. She has never been one to stand still. As a child, her parents moved from Atlanta to Miami and back to Atlanta, where they lived in several neighborhoods, including Poncey-Highland and Garden Hills. When my Dad was getting ready to go overseas in World War II, she and her two daughters joined him in his training camp in Tennessee. During his absence, he bought a house on Atwood Road in Garden Hills that he didn’t see until his return from the Philippines.

Seven years later, they moved to Sandy Springs. Seven years later, they moved to Buckhead. Seven years later, they built a new house in their side yard. We always kidded Mom about having her own version of the seven-year itch. At the new house, my father put his foot down. “You’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box,” he promised.

After a few years, Mom started talking about buying a house at the beach. But Dad was against the idea. “We can’t afford it,” was his standard response. They settled on building a retirement home in what was then a new mountain development north of Atlanta called Big Canoe. After a few years (I think it was seven, to be exact), my mother started saying it was time to sell the mountain house and get a beach house. Dad’s response: “We can’t afford it.”

Somewhere in the 1970s, when CB radios were the rage and drivers on the highway were talking in code to truckers, looking for highway patrol “bears,” Mom bought a new station wagon that had a CB installed. Every driver with a CB had to have a “handle” or a code name to use on the highway so the patrol couldn’t prove it was you alerting other drivers to a “bear with his ears up (radar).” Someone in my family suggested that Mom, whose name is Van, adopt the appropriate handle of “Moving Van.” She did.

In the late ’80s, my parents sold the mountain house and began renting houses at the beach. Mom kept lobbying everyone in the family that it was time to make an investment in a beach house. But Dad wasn’t buying. “We still can’t afford it,” he’d say. After Dad died in 1994, Mom checked the financial picture and announced to the family, “Now we can afford it.” I helped her find a house at the beach.

A few days ago, my mother celebrated her 82rd birthday. She hasn’t slowed down a beat. She drives with friends to the mountains or jumps in her car by herself and heads to the beach. She has moved into her second Buckhead condo in as many years. And she has done more than just see my kids. She has been a constant, prodding and supportive voice in their lives and those of her many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The rest of us only marvel at her energy and drive. We hope we can be half as mobile when we’re 82.

Happy Birthday, Mom. Keep on movin’.

Right after I was born, my father bought an 8mm movie camera. I never knew if his primary motivation for the purchase was for his work as a gastroenterologist at Emory or to record his idyllic family lifestyle out in what we then called “the country” and now call “Sandy Springs.”

Certainly, viewing the movies provided no answer to the question. Halfway through a film of my sisters going off to a prom or my brothers opening up Christmas presents, the image suddenly would switch to a tightly cropped shot of the esophagus or stomach lining of one of his patients. In 1966, Raquel Welch starred in the movie “Fantastic Voyage,” about a medical team that was shrunk and inserted inside a patient’s body. My friends were fascinated, but I felt like I had already seen it.

When I was 10 and 11, I would host “movie nights” for my family, setting up a theater in our basement and playing the old newsreels. Eventually, the films were tossed in an old box in my dad’s tool room, left there to languish for a couple of decades.

One night, near the end of his life, Dad walked into my brother Jack’s house for dinner, shoved the box toward him and said, “Here, you’ll know what to do with these.” And he did.

This past Christmas, Jack gave each of us a videotape.

The films had been edited and enhanced with two new dimensions. He had the images set to appropriate music – ranging from the wistful sounds of “Titanic” and “Gone with the Wind” to ’50s and ’60s rock ’n’ roll classics – and provided a modest level of voice-over introductions.

During the holidays, I watched the film with my two teenage children, who are somewhat disconnected from my side of the family because they now live in Charlotte, N.C., with my ex-wife. I usually struggle to find activities on our weekends that will interest all three of us. But they were transfixed. Somewhere between the then-rare color footage of my parents’ 1939 wedding, the scenes of me carrying cats and footballs as a toddler and awkward moments of my sisters greeting their dates, my kids grasped a better understanding of who are all these people who gather at our overwhelmingly large family parties.

Most amazing to us all was the life we lived in the ridges overlooking the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s. Dad spent hours each week driving the children to school and then going to work at Emory University. He loved the long commute down Riverside Drive and Johnson’s Ferry – seeing only one or two houses before he got to Roswell Road. As the family grew older, he reluctantly agreed to move us back into Buckhead. But we all knew how much he loved his little Eden, now covered with modern homes in a development called North Harbor in Sandy Springs.

Watching the videotape, the kids were getting antsy as it wound on through beach trips, traditional Thanksgiving Day walks and the introductions of my brothers’ wives, but a little treasure awaited them at the end. Before he had put the movie camera up on a shelf for the last time, Dad arranged for the recording of one last scene.

My children and I watched as Dad lifted a glass of champagne and offered a welcoming kiss to a woman who would become my wife – and a few years later, their mother. They fell silent, but I could tell that Dad’s decades-long filmmaking hobby had, in just a couple of seconds, recorded a moment that will help them feel a part of a family, no matter how distant we may seem.

Photo: My father, Jack Spalding Schroder, with my son, Thomas Spalding Schroder