by Anne Lamott
I thought about her now in the car.
And I could see that she was not happy with this situation.
I sat holding the pen in my left hand, the key in my right, as we drove through the dark streets. There were about ten of us passengers by then: me, the furious girl, Jesus there with his nice glow stick, the two petrified kangaroos, and the Swing Shift, all jumbled together, the way entire litters of children used to be allowed to occupy the back, with no seat belts. I still felt terrified, but not alone. Then I felt myself as a high school girl watching the buffalo thirty-five years earlier, convinced in her stoned fear that they might attack and trample her. And I wondered, for another twenty seconds, if my huge driver was actually as benign as those buffalo.
Then I found myself sitting with Jesus and the furious girl, clutching my weapons, but the Swing Shift was gone, and some of me was semi-okay. The driver now picked up his phone again. I held my breath as he explained where we were. I could hear the man on the other end chewing him out, and part of me panicked. Don’t be an ass, you’ll push him right over the edge, I thought. And part of me felt for him, this huge guy new to the city, new to this job. He listened. He kept saying, “Right. Right.”
Then he hung up. “The dispatcher says we’re near the Great Highway. We can get to the bridge through the Presidio.” Five minutes earlier, the Swing Shift would have shoved me out of the car at the word “Presidio,” which is as dark as the grave. But the Swing Shift wasn’t on duty anymore, and the Night Shift is so much more stable: they are on duty when the lights on the ward are low, and most of the patients asleep.
“Sounds like a plan.”
When we reached the highway, a shard of moon was shining on the ocean waves. “Boy, talk about not getting off on a good foot with the boss,” he mumbled, and sniggered into his chest, but by then we were driving north again, and I was heading home.
I got us each some more gum, and we talked all the way past the ocean, through the Presidio, across the bridge, and past the hills of Sausalito. I pointed out my church to him, like a kid, when we passed Marin City. You can see it from the highway. My heart was lifted by seeing it, even in the dark. When I get there on Sundays and pass the room where the choir rehearses, I can hear their muffled voices behind the closed door. I love hearing them, no matter how hushed, but every so often, one of them has to leave practice for a moment and opens the door just as I am passing by, and a beam of singing falls directly on me.
The Last Story of Spring
One day last May, I was heading home after dropping my son off at school. Sam had said the most unexpected thing: I’d asked how he’d liked Macbeth, which his sophomore English class had just finished. “I didn’t love it,” he told me. When pressed, he added, “I had no idea it would be so tragic.” I thought of that as I drove along, about how many friends of mine are face-to-face these days with the truth of this, and how the rest of us are merely feeling deeply in the generic dark, about our teenagers, our bodies, and Bush.
I started making the turn onto my own street, but without exactly meaning to, I swerved back onto the main road. I call this a Holy Spirit snatch, when something inside you clears its throat, tugs on your sleeve, or actually takes the wheel. When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can. So a few minutes after I turned away from home, my big dog and I were in the parking lot beneath the foothills of Mount Tam.
Lily bounded ahead on the path. The air smelled grassy and warm and clean, like oats that had just come out of the dryer. There was a mild breeze that did not have an objective, the way the biting winds of winter do. It was breathing the cool air, too, draping you lightly in itself.
A riot of wild flowers lined our way up the narrow path on the hillside. Lily raced around, carrying branches in her mouth, such a danger running past me that I had to keep stepping aside like a matador to avoid being whacked. Most of the wild flowers now were purple and orange, monkey flowers and lupine and of course, poppies, the traffic cones of a foothill meadow.
The mountain iris seem to stick mostly to themselves. They are not as showy as the irises in my garden: they are the color of old-fashioned ladies’ face powder, almost lambent. They are so stately compared with all the purple flowers, the scruffy weeds, and the big thrusting, shouting pom-pom girls.
Lily ran off with her sticks, bounded up the steep hillside, then doubled back to check in with me. She loves me the way I love Jesus, falling into a trance of despair when she can’t feel me. My brother says that whenever he stays with her in the car when I go into a store, she stares at the store as if it were on fire, and then at him, desperately, like, “Can you please take me in there?”
Under the canopy of trees on the hillside, light and shade dappled the path, so it looked like a leopard’s coat. When Lily and I had walked another fifteen minutes, we left the woods and came out to the sunny flanks of the hills. We were both panting. The difference is that Lily tore off farther up the mountain, whereas I gripped my side and plopped down on the trail. The meadows were crazy jumbles of flowers, giddy experiments of a painter trying ideas out together: How about this with this—isn’t it wiggy? The sweep of foliage at the top of the hill, bunchy and fleecy and furry, rolled like a body, with haunches and shoulders, knees and a belly. It kept its shape, but was generous. Resting, I let my vision blur, and practiced looking out of the corners of my eyes. After the 2004 presidential election, Tom told me that according to a friend of his, during times of darkness, you need to develop night vision; if you look straight ahead in the dark, directly at things, you often see only looming shapes, and you’re likely to get blindsided. So you need to look at things out of the corners of your eyes—shapes, positions, objects in relief and in relationship to one another. You may still not see perfectly, but it will be enough to see by and in time it will help you know what is true; as Veronica said, Easter means you can put the truth in a grave but you can’t keep it there. Out of the corners of your eyes means, in real life, that you listen to your intuition, hunch, faith.
While I was practicing seeing glimmers and suggestions and shapes, I realized Lily was missing. She sometimes runs off through the chaparral and returns when I call, but this time she didn’t. At first I wasn’t worried. I could see the whole world from where I sat. I had some quiet minutes of calling for her, expecting her to burst out of the brush at any moment. I scanned the trails above and below me, and a fire road down the hill that drops off suddenly, like something Wile E. Coyote might tear off from, pedaling like mad in midair for a few seconds before looking down.
After a while, though, I realized Lily was really gone, and panic set in. What if I had to go home without her, had to get into my car alone in the parking lot, with one last look? What if I had to tell Sam? Then I thought of Lily’s lonely death on the mountain. I thought of wolves eating her.
Losing Lily would be the end of the world, in a way you can understand only if you know what a dear, precious being she is, or if you have a dog you adore, or if, like us, you have just barely, within the last few years, survived the loss of another dog.
I started walking about more quickly, calling for her, clapping, but no Lily. Then, way below me, down on the stretch of fire road, I saw a squirrel race toward where the road drops off, skipping like a pebble on water, faster than a speeding bullet. A minute or so later, from out of nowhere, I saw Lily bolt onto the same road, heading for the dropoff: “Good smell! Over there! Oh, my!”
But as I started running down the hill after her and before she hit the dropoff, she veered off to the right and disappeared down the side of the mountain I call the Canyon of Death. I made my boyfriend walk there once with me, and we are still trying to get over it. There is no path through the brush; it is dark and shadowy and steep and leads nowhere, except to where a modern Bluebeard might bury his wives.
I called and called, but I was too far from her. I ran toward the Canyon of Death and th
ought about all the mountain lions here, and the coyotes. And the rattlesnakes. I prayed as I ran, but Lily was not there when I got to the fire road. So again I clapped, and called, and prayed. Then I remembered teaching Sam that if you get lost, stay put, so I stood still, and ran through every one of my skills, deficiencies, mental problems, and faith, all in the course of five minutes.
But still no Lily. I looked around wildly. All I can say is that I didn’t go into the total panic that would have hurt me physically, like rushing down the hillside into the Canyon of Death. God! When did I start worrying about falling down and breaking my hips? I’ll tell you—about three days after my skin cleared up, in my late thirties.
I stayed put and called for her. It occurred to me that it was I who was lost, not Lily—I was so lost in the fear of loss, in the knowledge of all the places where the people and animals I love can go, where I can’t follow. Like teenage Sam, and now Lily. As is usually the case—which I totally resent—I couldn’t fix or save anything. I’m not a tracker. I’m just someone who loves a dog.
All I could do was pray to stay calm, and hope that someone useful might appear. An EMT. Or a ranger. Or some scouts.
If I had been where there was an obvious place to begin a search-and-rescue effort, I might have started there, but I wasn’t. I could not be in my usual clunky, overly game, charge-ahead body. But because I couldn’t bash my way through anything, I looked for spaces—out of the corners of my eyes.
And right where the sky opened, in the space where the fire road dropped off, the last person on earth I was expecting came along. It was Amanda, an old friend I bump into now and then. She had been sad the last few times I’d run into her, as she was going through a divorce after many years of marriage. She was with her golden retriever, Rocket, only five but already seriously arthritic, limping behind her.
Amanda called out ecstatically. This was a “godsend,” she said, because she so needed to talk.
I walked toward her with my arms open for a hug, trying to figure out how to get rid of her so I could look for Lily.
Amanda is usually the person to whom you turn when things are hard, but on this day she came with a heavy load of her own troubles. Taking apart a life with someone else is never much fun, especially with a child still at home, even when both parties feel it is the right thing to do. She told me that she was renting a U-Haul that afternoon to take her things out of the house that she’d shared with her husband and where she’d raised her child; she had a week until the realtors started showing the place. Rocket gimped around like Walter Brennan. I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t have time to listen because Lily was missing. When she finally took a breath, though, I did.
Amanda started clapping, which is how we call Lily. “Come on, Rocket,” she exhorted, as if the dog worked K-9 for the FBI, but by now he was lying down, gasping.
“I think I’ll run down to the parking lot and check,” I said.
“No, no, we’re going to help you. Aren’t we, Rocket!” It was ridiculous. We walked around the fire trail, clapping, calling, the panic and grief in me rising. My enchanted woods had turned into the dark forests of fairy tales. But looking at Amanda out of the corners of my eyes, I remembered what happens in fairy tales: The helper always appears in a form that doesn’t look very helpful, yet that’s who’s going to get you out of the woods. In fairy tales you have to stay open to the search, and to goodness and generosity. So I tried to be that way, even though I wanted to yank Amanda and Rocket and get them to race around with me. But Rocket was not at all yankable at that point—he looked as if he needed a stretcher. So I was forced to be patient.
We stayed put on the fire road, intermittently clapping and calling for Lily, while Amanda told me more about the U-Haul project. I listened. And that must have been enough for something to happen—call it grace or magic or answered prayer or coincidence—but because I was exactly where I was, not down in the Canyon of Death or heading to the parking lot, I was there when Lily appeared. All of a sudden, out of the corners of my eyes, I could see her, far away, at the top of a hill, like Rin Tin Tin. I cried out for her and Amanda clapped, and Lily bolted toward us.
She eventually reached us, panting, the inside of her mouth dark with dirt, and after I chastised her and cried a little, and after Rocket leapt to his feet and threw himself at her, the four of us headed down the mountain. We walked toward the parking lot, so happy that we were not walking into the abyss; not today. I harangued a promise from Amanda that she would call our vet, Rob, who practices Eastern and Western medicine and has healed a number of our friends’ hopeless cases. My uncle Ben told me when I turned twenty-one that God works in mysterious ways Her tum-tum to perform, and apparently so does Rob. As it turned out, he had a cancellation that very afternoon, and saw Rocket that day for the first of a dozen treatments, after which, as God is my witness, Rocket did not even have a trace of a limp.
Tiny white wild flowers grew in the grass, and clover lined the trail as at a girl’s First Communion. We reached an awning of eucalyptus and redwood, where it was much cooler, and stopped to listen to the sounds of the creek: a steady deep burble, like a water engine, running and pouring over the rocks, and the rocks singing.
Samwheel
A man riding on the meaning of rivers
Sang to me from the cloud of the world:
Are you born? Are you born?
—MURIEL RUKEYSER
from “Are You Born?—1”
Chirren
By the time my child was born, I had seen two ultrasound images of him. He looked like a very nice person: perfect, helpless, sleeping. I love that in a baby. I thought about him every few minutes during my pregnancy, talked to him, imagined our conversations as he grew, and lived for his arrival.
But during labor, I began to realize how hard it was going to be without a partner or any money or an overabundance of maternal instincts. Also, that I did not like to spend time with children all that much.
By then, of course, it was too late to reconsider why I wanted to have a child. Midway through the birth process, there was no way out—I couldn’t say, “Let’s just skip it. I have to go home now.” This is the reason most first children get born: By the time it’s too late to back out, you have already fallen desperately, pathetically in love with them. For too long, I had imagined holding him, smelling him, watching him grow; teaching him and reading to him, and walking and studying and resting and splashing around in the ocean with him, and comparing notes with him on the mean children in the park.
I loved him intimately, sight unseen. Yet when he lay on my chest for the first time, part of me felt as if someone had given me a Martian baby to raise, or a Martian puppy. And I had no owner’s manual, no energy, no clue as to what I was supposed to do.
The other part of me felt as though I were holding my own soul.
Now, all these years later, this still pretty much says it.
Why did I, like many other single women, many gay men and women, many older women, and many other not-so-obvious parents, people who used to think they could never have kids, choose to do so?
Let me say that not one part of me thinks you need to have children to be complete, to know parts of yourself that cannot be known any other way. People with children like to think this, although if you are not a parent, they hide it—their belief that having a child legitimizes them somehow, validates their psychic parking tickets. They tell pregnant women and couples and one another that those who have chosen not to breed can never know what real love is, what selflessness really means. They like to say that having a child taught them about authenticity.
This is a total crock. Many of the most shut-down, narcissistic, selfish people on earth have children. Many of the most evolved—the richest in spirit, the most giving—choose not to. The exact same chances for awakening, for personal restoration and connection, exist for breeders and nonbreeders alike.
But some of us unlikely candidates did have children, and this
is why I did:
Instinct, and all that. As for so many women, my body said, Do it. My body kept looking at the watch on its wrist and moaning with worry. But parenthood is also a modus vivendi, an arrangement where people finally know or think they know what it’s all about: You’ve had a kid, your destiny has arrived, you’re busy with extremely important things, and you’re too committed and tired to pursue the petty obsessions you used to have.
I had never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women, which, of course, was really a desperate longing to have a mother like Marmee, who cuddled endlessly and kept her weight down. Yet I somehow always assumed I would be a mother. I had a couple of abortions in my twenties, not because it would have been inconvenient for me to have a child, but because I was single, habitually broke, nomadic, and a practicing alcoholic. These abortions brought me anguish, but also the profound relief that they were the right and sane courses to take. Even so, I felt more and more of a longing to have a child someday. It was almost a calling, like the inexorable pull toward the life of a priest or a nun or a poet.
