by Anne Lamott
One morning recently, after I dropped off some soup for Nell at their house, Eddie tried to trap me with his butterfly net. I race-walked to my car, pretending not to hear him calling me, and realized immediately that I was being an asshole. This was ridiculous—it was only hurting me. Maybe the hate in me that comes with the human package was looking for a place to roost.
Last week, I was given a chance to learn to love, or at least like, Eddie.
It started off poorly, as these things usually do, and without my approval. Our county was having a rare late-spring heat wave, and by ten a.m. I was already pinned to the couch. Sweat pooled underneath me. The heat had stolen the glossy briskness of my everyday life, and I was about to take a nap when Nell called and badgered me into taking a walk with her.
We met at the trailhead. She used to have long, thick blond hair and boundless energy; now she is bald and moves like an old woman with gout. She is still beautiful, even stripped of so much, but pretty like a girl playing dress-up, with her scarf and light pink lipstick, her mother-of-pearl earrings. I love it. We started up the trail, breathing in the fresh, grassy, laundry smells. The geodesic dandelions next to the dirt road looked like disco balls. If you were making a movie on a really low budget, you could use them as your space station, but after you make a wish and blow away the white fluff, they resemble any old dandelions.
Nell looked at me unhappily. I asked her what was wrong, fearing it was bad cancer news, but she dismissed the very suggestion. “Oh God, no,” she said, “I am like totally sort of whatever about that,” which is a very Nell thing to say. Also, if you think about it, it’s a profound spiritual stance, to be totally sort of whatever about something this scary. The trouble, she told me, was that during her last, miserable stretch in bed, Eddie had bought a central air conditioner, on sale, marked down from $4,000 to $2,500, with the money they’d been saving for vacation.
“Why did he do that?” I asked.
“It was a great deal,” she said. “And he was hot.”
The sun blazed down on us. I took it personally, as I do everything—I can’t seem to learn how not to, or at any rate, I’m the slowest learner in class. I used to be one of the quickest. My teachers read special texts with me in the back of our classrooms while the other kids worked their lessons. I thought of Henry Tanner’s famous painting of Christ learning to read. Jesus is a boy of seven or eight, standing beside Mary, touching the words on a scroll, figuring out each word as he goes. He had to learn to read from scratch, with the alphabet, the way I did. He did not have infused knowledge: he was born not knowing anything. And hey, I was only four when I taught myself to read. Maybe Jesus struggled with reading. I’m just saying. So, after all, maybe there was hope for me in areas where I’d been behind.
Nell continued talking. Their house got plenty of shade and had fans in every room. And freon is so bad for the environment. Plus, she’d so wanted a vacation when she was done with chemo. But Eddie had spent that money.
“Can’t he return it?”
“It was a floor sample. Final sale.”
What an idiot, I thought, even as, walking along feeling weak and exhausted from the heat, I understood why he’d done it. I wanted air, too, and believed that if I had it, my house would be perfect. I’ll go to my grave convinced that you can find happiness out there, somewhere, with the right someone or good financing. If you could just get things to line up properly, you could relax, learn to experience life in all its immediacy, reconnect with who you really are, with the soul or spirit, the divine whatchacallit deep inside that sparks when it hears certain music.
We’re not stupid, Eddie and I. We are Americans.
“And it’s broken,” Nell said mournfully, “sitting in our driveway, waiting for the Sears repair guy. He’s supposed to come today.”
I smiled, remembering all the friendly repair guys in their Sears uniforms who came to our house to fix things when I was young. My mother loved them, the way I love my pastor. She fussed over them and fed them homemade brownies. This triggered my memory of all the men like Eddie whom my mother hated, all the reasonably good-looking men in town who thought they were so charming, who were not good enough for their wives, and who then left them during the diaspora of the early sixties. My mother had incredible women friends, many of them married to ridiculous, arrogant men. There were also men whose wives came to our house in the middle of the night with bruises. “What a son of a bitch,” my mother would say of any man who left his wife to marry a younger woman, who stayed but was not faithful, who remained young and trim while his wife got fat, or any man whom she’d voted for who shipped American boys to Vietnam. “He got what he deserved,” she’d pronounce if someone lost his job or had a heart attack or, in one special case, an amputation. “He was a son of a bitch.” It was a black-and-white world, like Bush’s or any fundamentalist’s. She distrusted most handsome men, because my father did not love her and was handsome. “So-and-so is handsome, but he’s a son of a bitch, like all those Kennedys.” Yet she loved the Kennedys, and cried for years about Bobby’s death.
So I grew up a little confused.
I thought about the air conditioner for a moment. “Maybe this is happening for a reason,” I volunteered. “Our lives are filled with people who provoke us, especially people we love. They help us figure out our own shit and why we are here.”
“And why are we here again?”
I shrugged. “We don’t know.” Nell smiled. “We only sort of know,” I said. “To live, love, help—to decorate. To sweep our huts and find some food.”
Turkey vultures circled above. Speaking of which.
“Let’s turn around,” she said. “I’m beat.”
I could see that she was not only tired, but sick as well. How had I not noticed her terrible color, her skin pale and flushed at the same time? Her cheekbones stuck out like bad implants. My highest self, my conscience, whatever it was, grabbed me by the shoulders and said: “You are such an asshole! You see her every few days, but Eddie sees her at her worst, after chemo, sick, tired, asleep. God! Get that container of Accent out.”
I imagined Eddie, in the driveway with the Sears guy, trying to stave off death with an air conditioner—it reminded me of Sam when he was little, asking me what we would do if a man came into our house at night with a machine gun. When I shrugged, he ran around the house, gathering tennis rackets, bricks, steak knives, and a fire poker, and then stashed them under my bed.
I took Nell’s hand and started to cry, out of general misery for all of us—for Nell, for me and my angry delusions, for Sam with only me to protect him, for Eddie watching Nell sleep beside him. I opened my eyes wide the way I did as a child, to spread the tears so they wouldn’t pool and fall. When my nose started to run, I wiped it on the top of my T-shirt. Nell looked over at me and stuck out her lower lip. She rubbed my arms briskly. “Look,” she said. “I’m okay now, and you’re okay. Right? That’s a lot. And either they’ll get it running or it’ll make a great planter.”
We stopped to drink from our water bottles. The vegetation was unusually dense this year, after the rainiest winter of our lives. It was as green as hills in Ireland. The grass would turn dry and golden soon, after the earliest heat wave any of us could remember. In the old days, I would have blamed both the rain and the heat on Bush—his lethal environmental policies and all that goddamn brush-clearing. Now I looked around at the wild flowers and grasses. Wild irises were still growing—unheard of in late May. People had even seen mountain lions this year, although bobcats were much more common, standing on hillocks watching you approach, like gatekeepers. There were also deer and baby rabbits, everywhere.
“It’s sort of sweet,” I said, “that Eddie spent his vacation money, too. He wanted to show you he’s there for you, and your house will be so cool.”
“It will,” she said. “Eat your heart out.”
Me? I was planning to go home and crawl into bed. When it’s so hot, you need to take off even your
lightest blanket and lie between the sheets. You can make a cave with the top sheet, make your own world inside a cotton tent, where there’s shade, and you can be your sweaty animal self and no one else can get in. There were fields like that where we were walking, hidden from the beaten paths on these hillsides, where you could step out of the heat into a glade, and there are huge tufts of coarse deer fur that they’ve shed all over the grasses and coyote bush, so it looks like it’s been snowing.
Near the Lagoon, 2004
It is autumn now, following a treacherous August, and I awoke this morning to find that the leaves in my heart have started changing color, from green to yellow, persimmon, and red.
After a rainy morning yesterday, both sun and clouds were out when several friends and I headed through the West Marin corridor, past meadows full of cows and horses, and hills of dry, lion-colored grass. We drove through the small rural and hippie towns on the way to the ocean, out to Bolinas, where I lived when I was in my twenties. I was an out-of-control alcoholic then—but in a good way, I had thought. A festive way. Along with the beverages, I took a lot of drugs, which sometimes expanded my mind, but other times caused me accidentally to sleep with other women’s husbands. I hurt some innocent people along the way. I also began my life as a writer there, describing the mountains, the beaches, the tide pools, the lagoon, the pelicans, the ocean, the marvelous life and values of the community. But when I was in my mid-twenties, the world came to an end: my father died in our family’s cabin above Duxbury Reef, half an hour’s walk from the Bolinas lagoon, where we went birding every week. It only took ten to fifteen years to bounce back from that.
We were headed to that lagoon yesterday, and that is very rare for me, as I have stayed out of the town for most of the twenty-two years since I left. It is too painful to go there; it’s filled with the huge, gaping absence of my father, and with the faces of people who loved me, or didn’t, whom I hurt so egregiously, or by whom I was hurt or abandoned. But I still have a couple of friends there. One of them, Megan, is a cofounder of the Mainstreet Moms: Organize or Bust (themmob.org), which has grown from a ragtag group of a few mothers into a thriving grassroots organization helping women (especially mothers) in swing states register to vote. Members send packets to volunteers across the country, with names and addresses of unregistered women voters, pretty stationery, decorative stickers, and sample letters. The volunteers write to the women, who thought they didn’t count, and tell them that they do.
The group was having a fund-raiser, a picnic by the lagoon, and I was going to do a reading. I didn’t remember walking to the lagoon in the years since I’d left, until my friends and I headed down a private path that led from the town’s main road.
I almost immediately got a Twilight Zone feeling. First, I was going back to the place from which I had fled, and that is usually a signal to me that something mythical is in the works. And second, instantly a hobgoblin of a man appeared in our path, in overalls, with chin hairs and a pointy hat—the whole gestalt. He asked, with raised eyebrows and a portentous tone, “Do you know where you are going?”
We didn’t. He described a meandering path to the water.
Next we came upon some tall, thin wood posts, like stripped tree trunks, very Native American, with a hint of maypole, festooned with yellow silk streamers. We looked up to find a horde of children ahead, swinging on tire swings tied to tree branches, playing on hay bales, all of them in bright colors, wearing tie-dye, overalls, sequins.
It was like an updated scene from Brueghel, with that amazing shifting light. There were those hay bales, and then people in farming clothes and hippie peasant wear, none of the black you see in cities, but instead the colors of flowers and Necco wafers. There were tables covered with exquisite natural foods, raised and produced locally, none of that weird seitan and mochi that make you feel like an abused astronaut, but barbecued oysters and sausages, cornucopias of bright salad, and pastry. A few hundred people sat eating under the trees and in the sun. Tables were set up where you could make or buy beaded necklaces with clay letter charms spelling out “Vote.” It was like a hippie fair, with a single theme: Vote. And there were tables covered with voter packets that you could take home, with their lists of names and addresses of unregistered women voters, lavender paper, aqua envelopes, silver stars. Sweet hippie musicians were playing protest songs, not with the heavy-metal polemics or rap you might hear at some antiwar rallies, but herbal-essence guitar and harp polemics about peace and love and freedom. They led us in singing “America the Beautiful,” and I felt dizzy with joy in the patriotism and connection, glad to be amid all this good, loving, angry, dissident energy, which can still—still—happen in this country. You can’t always live in furious emergency, and for all that mess and defeat and grief Democrats had been feeling over the 2000 presidential election to be transformed into beauty and work, well—this was brilliant, and brave.
The town and the townspeople had grown up since I’d been away. I checked in with a number of the grown-up kids I’d been closest to when I was in my twenties, as if they were on a birding list at Audubon Canyon Ranch. They had been elementary school–aged then, or teenagers. I had driven them around town once when I was on acid. I had slept with some of their fathers. But they had adored me, because I was a good listener, funny, and halfway between their parents’ ages and their own. I thank God that they survived loving me. Many of them now had kids of their own, who were on the tire swings we had passed. Their parents were grandparents, or ersatz grandparents, broader in the beam and going gray. The former kids were in their thirties now, and a number of them appeared to be drinking a lot or drug-addicted. This can be a tough town.
The light on the lagoon and the field shifted constantly, bright in contrast to the glower of the morning. The tide was so high that it looked as if the lagoon could have leapt over the meadow into the clearing where we had gathered.
At the same time I felt that happiness, seeing these old friends, I kept saying to my companions, God, I hope so-and-so isn’t here—and then that person would suddenly appear. Sometimes it was an old lover, or one of the women I had betrayed, or someone I had dropped or been dropped by. I had tried to clean things up efficiently when I got sober, but with wounds to the heart, the healing is expensive and circuitous.
Still, in each case, everyone wanted to hug and kiss me; eventually.
The morning rain had left a sprinkly shine on the leaves.
It had been twenty-two calendar years since I’d moved, but my relationship to this town and these people has always taken place outside time. Maybe it was all those drugs, or the suspended animation of my father’s long illness, but I don’t think so. It feels more like the way soul time passes, like when your baby turns one week old, or when you’re with someone who will probably die that day. But now I was with all these people, some of them firebrand activists but most of them regular old people, and it felt quite natural. We had gone beyond an absurd and terrible time in our lives, the first four years of George W. Bush’s presidency; then tapped into ordinariness, and let it guide us to this gathering. That is what happens in fairy tales: the wound or the danger guides you straight into the heart of itself, and you end up finding you.
I found some of that yesterday by the lagoon, that mysterious shy familiarity with a community that had helped form me. I was there because nine months before, some people had gotten to such a level of fear and frustration with the government that, instead of stomping off and saying, “This is so fucked, and so hopeless,” they had decided to register as many mothers as they could in swing states, by writing to them. And they invited me to help raise money for their effort.
The first month, they sent out five thousand letters. By Election Day 2004, they had sent out 201,000—five thousand alone on the day before the fund-raiser.
Some people might think that writing letters to unregistered women voters is a pathetic howling in the wind, totally self-serving, like being willing to face people fr
om a sometimes messy past and trying to make amends. This is how the pendulum shifts slowly in the other direction, by the very act of howling in the wind, which always blows back eventually, a breeze carrying seeds.
People seemed to love my reading, which lasted half an hour; I realized that I will always be family to the people of this town. It got cold not long after I finished. The clouds that had threatened rain were breaking up, but kept hanging there in front of the sun, like memories. On top of everything, I felt grief and a deep, scary discomfort. In a fairy tale, you often have to leave the place where you have grown comfortable and travel to a fearful place full of pain, and search for what was stolen or confront the occupying villain; it takes time for the resulting changes to integrate themselves into the small, funky moments that make up our lives. All that mess I had made, all that love and damage, all those connections, those ghosts and those children who were parents to the children on the swings—all of this was part of the lava lamp inside me, inside my life. It was like finding a long-lost heirloom. Thirty-five years ago, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, or more recently at peace marches, the energy would sometimes pull in a direction you wanted to go, where what you were doing was real, and counted: it was going to work. Then, all of a sudden, people would pass a balloon around overhead, and everyone would tap it as it floated by, lifting all that energy with the lightest touch.
