by Anne Lamott
Lost and Found
If I don’t have red, I use blue.
—PABLO PICASSO
Steinbeck Country
In Salinas, word went out. This is how many tribal stories begin: word goes out to the people of a community that there is a great danger or that a wrong is being committed. This is how I first found out that the governor planned to close the public libraries in Salinas, making it the largest city in the United States to lose its libraries because of budget cuts.
Without getting into any mudslinging about whether or not our leaders are clueless, bullying, nonreading numbskulls, let me just say that when word went out that the three libraries—the John Steinbeck, the Cesar Chavez, and El Gabilan—were scheduled for closing, a whole lot of people rose up as one to say, This does not work for us.
Salinas is one of the poorest communities in the state of California, in one of the richest counties in the country. The city and the surrounding area serve as the setting for so many of Steinbeck’s great novels. Think farmworkers, fields of artichokes and garlic, faded stucco houses stained with dirt, tracts of ticky-tacky housing, James Dean’s face in East of Eden, strawberry fields, and old gas stations.
Now think about closing the libraries there, closing the buildings that hold the town’s books, all those stories about people and wisdom and justice and life and silliness and laborers bending low to pick the strawberries. You’d have to be crazy to bring such obvious karmic repercussions down on yourself. So in early April, a group of writers and actors fought back, showing up in Salinas for a twenty-four-hour “emergency read-in.”
My sad sixties heart soared like an eagle at contemplating the very name: emergency read-in. George W. Bush and John Ashcroft had tried for years to create a country the East German state could only dream about, empowering the government to keep track of the books we checked out or bought, all in the name of national security. But the president and the attorney general hadn’t counted on how passionately writers and readers feel about the world, or at any rate, the worlds contained inside the silent spines of books.
We came together because we started out as children who were saved by stories, stories read to us at night when we were little, stories we read by ourselves, in which we could get lost and thereby found. Some of us had grown up to become people with loud voices, which the farmworkers and their children needed. And we were mad. Show a bunch of writers a sealed library, and they see red. Perhaps we were a little sensitive or overwrought, but in this case we saw a one-way tunnel into the dark. We saw the beginnings of fascism.
A free public library is a revolutionary notion, and when people don’t have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. You cut people off from essential sources of information—mythical, practical, linguistic, political—and you break them. You render them helpless in the face of political oppression. We were not going to let this happen.
Writers and actors came from San Francisco and San Jose, from all around. Maxine Hong Kingston came from Oakland. Hector Elizondo drove up from Los Angeles, as did Mike Farrell. The poet José Montoya drove from Sacramento, four hours away. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez flew all morning to be there. I drove down from the Bay area with the Buddhist writer and teacher Jack Kornfield.
When we arrived, the lawn outside the Chavez library held only about 150 people—not the throngs we had hoped for—but the community was especially welcoming and grateful, and the women of CodePink, who helped organize the event, kept everyone’s spirits up. It’s hard to be depressed when activists in pink feather boas are kissing you. Many people had pitched tents on one side of the library, where they could rest through the night while the readings were proceeding onstage.
Can you imagine the kind of person who is willing to stay up all night in the cold to keep a few condemned libraries open?
Well, not me, baby.
I was going home to my own bed that night. But then I saw some of my parents’ old friends who were planning to stay, people who have been protesting and rallying in civil rights and peace marches since I was a girl, people who had driven from San Francisco because they’ve always known that the only thing that keeps a democracy functioning is the constant education of its citizens. If you don’t have a place where the poor, the marginalized, and the young can find out who they are, then you have no hope of maintaining a free and civilized society.
We were there to celebrate some of the rare intelligence capabilities that our country can actually be proud of—those of librarians. I see them as healers and magicians. Librarians can tease out of inarticulate individuals enough information about what they are after to lead them on the path of connection. They are trail guides through the forest of shelves and aisles—you turn a person loose who has limited skills, and he’ll be walloped by the branches. But librarians match up readers with the right books: “Hey, is this one too complicated? Then why don’t you give this one a try?”
Inside the library were Hispanic children and teenagers and their parents, and a few old souls. They sat in chairs reading, stood surveying the bilingual collection, and worked at the computers. These computers are the only ones that a lot of people in town have access to. The after-school literacy and homework programs at the libraries are among the few safe places where parents can direct their children, away from the gangs.
On this afternoon, parents read to their children in whispered Spanish, and the air felt nutritious. As Barry Lopez once said, “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
I went back outside. Poets of every color were reading. People milled around with antiwar placards—“¡Libros sí! ¡Bombas no!” Older members of the community told stories from legends, history, their own families. Fernando Suarez stepped up to the mike and spoke of his nineteen-year-old son, who had died not long before in Iraq. Suarez spoke first in English and then in Spanish, as he does frequently around the country, and your heart could hardly beat for the sadness.
Maybe in Oaxaca children are still hearing the stories that the elders tell, but these kids in Salinas are being raised by television sets: they are latchkey kids. Their parents work for the most part in the fields and in wealthy homes. If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don’t get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn’t miraculous—and it is.
The media attention brought in enough money, partly as a result of that day, to keep the libraries open for a whole year. You might not call this a miracle, exactly, but if you had been at the emergency read-in, you would see that it was at least the beginning of one.
A bunch of normally self-obsessed artist types came together to say to the people of Salinas: We care about your children, your stories, and your freedom. Something has gone so wrong in this country that needs to be fixed, and we care about that. Reading and books are medicine. Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering. Now we were all saying: Pass it on.
Shadows
Late one night I got into a cab at the San Francisco airport and headed home after two nights of travel. I was tired and rattled after a turbulent flight, so I was grateful that the organizers of the conference where I’d just spoken had arranged for a car to pick me up and take me home. The driver was waiting for me in the baggage area, wearing a black suit and tie, holding a sign with my name on it. He was very handsome, like Marlon Brando, and must have weighed close to four hundred pounds.
I had spoken that day on spirituality, and therefore felt evolved enough to know his body and biography were not who he was: that his soul, the glow of the eternal divine deep inside him, was the truth of his identity. People stared at him as we walked through the airport to the parking lot; I walked tall and protectively beside him. It goes without saying that many people see fatness as a m
oral matter that everyone can agree on—they believe that even Jesus was deeply offended. That he hated heavy people, but those parts had to be taken out of the Gospels because they were so cruel.
In the car, Mozart was on the radio, a clarinet concerto so piercingly beautiful that something inside me woke up with a myclonic jerk, like someone revived with smelling salts or waking abruptly after dozing off at the movies. I closed my eyes to listen.
When the piece ended and I opened my eyes, we were driving past the graveyards of Colma, ten minutes from the airport, where naturally a girl’s thoughts turn to how many veterans are buried there, and how she feels about chickenhawk leadership. I was used to this: I had been angry all summer, let alone the last few years, as things in Iraq continued to deteriorate, and this anger, combined with a month of intensely hot weather, had left my soul feeling deeply worn-out. The one thing that revived it was to clean my house. Puttering helped, as did sweeping and working with my hands at simple tasks like washing dishes, because it’s monk work.
The driver pointed out all the crosses. I nodded.
“I have cosmic contact with this place,” he said, “even though I didn’t see it for the first time until two weeks ago.”
“Did you just move here?”
“Yeah, but it’s not that. It’s a Holy Spirit thing. I am called to this place.” He laughed a sniggering, adolescent laugh.
This completely unnerved my spiritually evolved self: a hugely overweight stranger with a Beavis and Butt-Head laugh who seemed enamored of the cemetery.
I got a pen out of my purse, to use as a weapon should the need arise.
“Dust to dust!” he enthused. I smiled, rather grimly, and reminded myself to breathe slowly. If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care.
I don’t even know what that means—soul. Traditionally it is believed to be the component of ourselves that survives physical death; a reflection of the Holy, made up of light and breath and silence and love, of everything ancient and of babies about to be born. C. S. Lewis said, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” If this is right, we have a purpose, which is to shine, like the moon shining in the sky; or to paraphrase the old bumper sticker: Think globally, shine locally.
So I tried, through clenched teeth, to shine.
I offered him gum, the Communion of Dentyne. We chewed gum together and listened to the classical station: instant church. The music was beautiful, now a Bach partita, but I wasn’t riveted as before with the Mozart, when I’d felt the thing inside me come to pure attention, a dog being offered bacon. I used to imagine the soul as the gentle intelligent energy at the steering wheel of my body, until I realized that the driver of me was usually late and punitive on the road. Then for a while I saw it as the one-year-old cartoon baby Maggie Simpson, attentive and good, until I shared my insight with Sam, who snapped, “Oh my God, Mom. I guess you forgot that she shot Mr. Burns.” I love Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line about the soul, “the dearest freshness deep down things,” and that seems pretty close. But lately I’d been imagining it also as a baby kangaroo, several months old, peering over its mother’s pouch with big peepers at the world, as she carried it around, infinitely safe.
Highway 280 became 19th Avenue, the main road to the Golden Gate Bridge, and led past San Francisco State, where in the sixties my dad took us to rallies at which students and professors protested Sam Hayakawa’s tenure, past all the places on 19th where my tennis partners and I used to hang out after long mornings on the public courts. And then, right before 19th swerves sharply to become 13th, or Park Presidio, the driver made a sudden left into Golden Gate Park.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I know a shortcut,” he said. He turned off the radio, which, since the cemetery, had been my main signal to okayness. Without it, panic flared inside me.
“There is no shortcut—Nineteenth Avenue is the shortest way! What are you doing?” I asked again, really afraid. I could see, in the streetlight from the deserted boulevard, his long, fat fingers gripping the steering wheel: his long, strangly fingers.
He laughed. “Oops,” he said, and laughed his Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.
It was like an elevator making an ominous sound. Thick trees overhung the road and blocked out the moon. I had no water with me, and my mouth was dry, my tongue like Velcro. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. I wanted to scream: it was so dark, his hands were so huge, and I was so alone.
“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“Someone told me about a shortcut,” he said.
As we drove deeper into the dark, desolate woods, I said sharply, “You must go back to Nineteenth Avenue.”
But he kept on driving.
And he stopped talking to me.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me!” I would have called the cops, but I didn’t have a cell phone. I thought about borrowing his, as a test: if he lent it to me, it meant I didn’t have to call the cops. If he didn’t, then I’d leap out of the car. But I just sat tight; so tight; tight as a sphincter.
We had been only ten minutes from the bridge, and now we were in no-man’s-land. I’d been in the picnic fields here once the previous summer for a John Kerry fund-raiser, but before then I hadn’t been to the west side of the park that often in the thirty-plus years since I was a teenager, when my friends and I used to hitchhike to hear the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. I’d taken Sam to the other side of the park many times when he was young, to the same places my father used to take me—Stow Lake for paddleboat rides, the crocodile pit inside the Academy of Sciences, the Japanese Tea Garden, the de Young Museum, peace marches that ended up in the Haight-Ashbury—but I hadn’t brought Sam to this side of the park, because there wasn’t that much going on, even during the day.
The car now passed the deserted picnic grounds, and then the barbecue pits, which made me think of the teenage boy in Marin who years ago killed his parents and burned the bodies in their backyard barbecue pit. But the driver did not stop to burn me up. Instead, he kept driving until we reached the buffalo paddocks. This felt like something of an improvement: I’d loved this place when I was a small child. As a teenager, I used to come here with friends after school to smoke dope. The buffalo were always milling around their meadow, which they shared with red-winged blackbirds and regular old blackbirds and the occasional red-tailed hawk. Things could change on a dime when you were stoned. You might be blissing out on the park’s beauty and your deeply developed Native American connection to the Great Spirit, communing with one of the buffalo, feeling that it was talking to you: “Hello, Sister Mammal,” it would say. Then all at once you’d be tweaking and think the buffalo were going to come roaring toward you, their mouths open wide, like grizzlies.
The driver pulled over. I thought about jumping out of the car, but I had no phone, and there was nothing but deserted darkness around, and God only knows what dangers lurked in the shadows.
Plus, my laptop was in the trunk. Also my toiletries and medications. My products.
Without a phone or the courage to leap from the car, I did the only things I could think of: first I got out my car key and clutched it in my right hand, the pen still in my left, and then I prayed, the great Helping Prayer, which goes: “Helphelphelphelp. Helphelphelphelp.”
And right then the driver reached for his cell phone and made a call. “I need to talk with my dispatcher,” he said. I nearly swooned with relief. Then I heard a busy signal at the other end. If he said hello to the busy signal, I would know to leap out of the car. But he hung up and resumed driving.
“Helphelphelphelp,” I prayed again, but instead of feeling Jesus beside me, I could sense only the lunatic employees of the Swing Shift. This is the committee inside me that is sometimes dumb and dangerous with bad judgment, and often obsessed with thoughts of personal greatness or impending doom. Like, for instance, the unbearable truth that all the people you love most
will die, maybe in painful circumstances, and soon, probably sometime next week. I hugged my arms to my chest, with the key and the pen tucked inside my armpits, my wet and swampy armpits, my crocodile-pond armpits. The driver veered abruptly to the left, onto the street that takes you out of the park to 41st, still under tall trees but with the streetlights of the avenues just ahead.
“Excuse me!” I said. “Try the dispatcher again.”
“I think I know where I am now,” he replied.
There were no shops or gas stations, just houses with their lights out. The Swing Shift kept telling me that I could outrun the driver if I leapt out of the car, unless I was too badly injured—but where on earth would I go? I could feel Jesus next to me with his little glow-light, which reminded me of what my pastor Veronica always says: “In life and in death, we are God’s—there is nowhere we can be where God isn’t with us,” which she always says with a perfectly straight face. This helped, for a moment: as Father Tom says, every year you’ve been in recovery buys you one second of sanity in a crisis. So I was able to calm myself for twenty seconds.
When the bell rang at twenty seconds, though, I became the joey in its mother’s pouch, only instead of feeling safety, I felt the mother kangaroo’s terror at a nearby threat, a big red-mouthed danger.
Jesus reminded me that he was with me always, here, now.
The Swing Shift noted helpfully that if my leg was crushed while I leapt from the car, I would get to take serious narcotics.
But then, out of nowhere, I felt my furious girl inside me. I’d known her for only three weeks, since a day in church when, during silent prayers, an apparition surprised me. Two feet away stood a teenage girl, trying to claw and scratch my face, held back by an adult woman I didn’t recognize. I drew away, because I could honestly feel her, this girl I suddenly and absolutely knew was me. Her hair was not mine, it was longer, and only slightly curly, and it kept me from seeing her face, but I knew she was raging at me, and that she was actually there. I can’t explain it better than that. (I also feel a real true wife who lives in me, and I experience her coming to me, the same way I experienced Jesus hunkered down in a corner of my houseboat late one night the year before I got sober). I’m not crazy, or at least this is not a symptom of craziness. I know from distortion and illusion; I know sometimes when you’re hiking in the fog or at dusk you think you see the most startling thing and your mind makes up stories to explain it. My hiking friend Judy once thought she saw a moose on the road, but it turned out to be a big dog carrying an unimaginably large branch in its mouth, twigs reaching up from both sides. In church, however, I recognized the furious girl instantly, although I had never seen her before. I understood in a blink that she was someone I had ignored or kept hidden all my life. Later that day I figured out that I wouldn’t have been a decent writer without her, and ever since I made that connection, I have felt her presence off and on, lingering there in the shadows.
