Grace (Eventually)

by Anne Lamott

  These days some of Sam’s lifelong buddies are in trouble with drugs and alcohol, and so are their girlfriends. One young woman we know is in an institution for the time being. A very young man we know is in rehab in Montana. A few months ago, Sam and I went to the funeral of a local boy who died of an OxyContin overdose: we stood in the chill of an autumn dusk in the old Jewish cemetery in San Rafael, and listened as the boy’s mother shoveled the first scoops of dirt onto his coffin. It was the loudest sound I have ever heard.

  Most of us have gotten off relatively easy so far—our kids are impossible only half the time, screwing up, troubling our hearts, making dumb choices, forfeiting fragments of their dreams, but still basically okay.

  But God, they can be annoying. “Sam,” I told him Sunday morning, “you said you’d do errands with me—they’re all for you. And your laundry is overflowing—you swore you’d do it yesterday. That’s why I let you blow it off the other day. Plus you’ve got the garbage and the recycling.”

  “Okay, okay! God.” You’d have thought I’d asked him for a pedicure.

  John, the young man who got busted at school, opened his eyes and said sleepily, “Hi, Annie.” He is often at our house, part of the smelly Jurassic herd who hang out in Sam’s room. He’s a good person—observant, dignified, funny, and tenderhearted, just like Sam at other people’s houses. John has always done wonderfully in school, without much prodding, and it was his and his parents’ dream that he would go to a top liberal arts college and pursue a career in journalism; at least, until this semester, when he tanked. Now they hope he can just get in anywhere decent.

  I called his father one day in tears, because Sam was in danger of failing a class. John’s father and I are allies: he listened, with the tough gentleness only the parent of another great kid in trouble can muster. He expressed love and respect for Sam. Then he said that John had just flunked advanced algebra, and so could not get into any of the UC campuses.

  “He’s been working for so long to get into a really good school,” said his dad. “And then? It’s gone, in the blink of an eye.”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. This is obscene, that higher education is so desperately cutthroat that a single adolescent slip can make such a difference in the quality of the rest of a young person’s life. He continued haltingly: “It’s just the way it is. We talked about it last week when his report card arrived—that what we had all hoped for was probably not going to happen now. It was a sad conversation for both of us. And later that night, when I was in bed, he came into my room and told me, quietly, in the dark, ‘Don’t give up on me, Dad.’”

  His voice cracked. When we hung up some time later, we were both better.

  I know what it is like to be scared to death that your child seems out of control, and what it is like when you cannot locate him late at night; I have gotten the two a.m. call from the sheriff’s deputy. But I don’t know what it feels like to have academic dreams shattered, because our dream has been modest. Sam’s always been a good artist, an inventor, an animator, an imaginator, but a reluctant student, except for the social life, and art. He had an obvious way with his hands in kindergarten, which is when our troubles began.

  His teacher called me one day to schedule a conference, to discuss his problems as a slow paper-cutter. I am not making this up. He was the slowest paper-cutter in the class. The teacher seemed genuinely worried. I pointed out that he was meticulous in his approach to art and numbers, but she wouldn’t let go of it. I almost lost my temper. “Why don’t you just go ahead and say it?” I wanted to shout. “The kid’s a loser!”

  Yet he and his friends are anything but losers. They are teenagers, wild horses corralled in their parents’ homes, who want to carve out their independence; they want to drink, smoke dope, borrow the car.

  “Get up, Sam,” I told him later Sunday morning. “You’ve got chores to do—you’ve already spent your allowance, and you owe me some time. And you promised to go with me to the convalescent home this afternoon.”

  It was almost noon. I’d decided to skip church, because I’d be performing a service that afternoon at the home, which my church sponsors. “We’re not going to have time to do your errands today. I’m going to take Lily for a hike,” I said. I wanted to chill out for a while. I told him what I wanted done by the time I got home. We would be leaving at two.

  He sat up in bed and rubbed his face. “Okay,” he said. “Have a good walk. Bye-bye, Lily.”

  “Thanks, darling,” I said, because his voice was so sweet.

  “No problem.”

  One of the four things I know for sure about raising kids is to savor whatever works. I smiled as his friends woke and surveyed the mess in his room; then I left.

  Lily and I set out for our favorite hike on Mount Tamalpais. The contrast was a lovely shock: the mountain and foothills are their own fresh, spacious sacrament for me, especially when the lower hills have begun to turn green. All summer and fall the slopes are golden-brown, and then new green grass appears. It pushes the old grass up and away, until it lies like small hay drifts, gathered neatly before the hay balers arrive. Lily ran ahead, off leash, which is not, strictly speaking—or actually, in any way—legal. But most dogs up here run free. She scampered up the wet grassy hillside. After the rains, the old grass is silvery gray, like a Weimaraner.

  I walked along lost in observation of the winter wild flowers beside the path, the lacy moss on tree trunks, the coyote bush on the hillside flocked with white fluff, and was startled by the abrupt appearance of two men. They wore green uniforms, and I knew in a jackhammering heartbeat that they were deputies from the sheriff’s department. Just like that, at the point on the path where Mount Tam comes into view, fills the sky and lowlands with green fleecy trees, they stood twenty feet in front of me. I gasped.

  “Oh, no,” I said, as Lily bounded up to them with a stick in her mouth. They were both in their late thirties or early forties, one nice-looking with a mustache, the other looking a lot like Barney Fife. None of us said anything for a minute. This couldn’t be! I’d been on these hillsides many times a week for years now, and I’d never even seen a deputy. And Lily was such a good dog. And I was such a good person, about to head to a convalescent home. God!

  The handsome man said, “Looks like you know what we’re up to.”

  I nodded. You hear stories of how they issue $200 fines for not having your dog on a leash. I felt like the teenager in trouble, the deputies my meddling parents. So I instinctively did what I have always done when I’ve run the tail end of a yellow light, ever since I got my license at sixteen: I worked on a good lie. Then I tried to jolly them out of giving me a ticket—“Could this be like a fix-it ticket, where I show up at your department tomorrow with my dog on a leash? Heeling?”

  The first one looked at me sympathetically. The other one stared at me, accusing, hurt.

  I hung my head and started to cry. Tears pooled in my eyes—tears of pure adolescent misery and frustration, that years of letting Lily run free were at an end; tears of shame and of simply wanting to be left alone to pursue my life without being hassled to death in one of my favorite places on earth.

  Barney got his ticket book out, and then—his mouth drawn as if he were a fierce boy armed with a slingshot—his police radio. I wanted to scream at them: Don’t you guys have anything better to do? Like arresting the guys in the park who sell drugs to kids? Like busting the old farts outside the movie theater who pick up teenage girls? You’re here to hassle and fine a Greenpeace supporter?

  And it went from bad to worse: “May I see your driver’s license, ma’am?” Barney asked. I was lost, furious…and olllld.

  They did a check for prior convictions and unpaid parking tickets, and I was clean. Barney filled out my ticket and handed it to me. And somehow, I gave up the fight. I sighed deeply, loudly, and shrugged. Then I put on a crafty expression.

  “What if I were to tell you that she’s not actually my dog?” I asked. The men s
miled. I looked at Lily. “I’ve never seen that dog in my life.”

  Lily bounded over to me with her branch and flung herself against my leg, staring up at me, a furry, panting Saint John the Divine.

  On the lower part of the path home, new grass wasn’t growing yet. The short golden grass lay flattened by weather, in swirls of hat hair.

  It was after one when I got home. There was progress: Sam was now asleep on the upstairs couch.

  I roused him. “We have to leave in an hour,” I said. “And I told you to get your chores done before we go.”

  “Give me ten more minutes!” he cried. And remembering how the cops had made me feel, I let him sleep.

  My friend Neshama arrived. She was going with us. I pantomimed choking my sleeping child. Then I made sandwiches for all of us. She and I ate.

  At ten of two, I shook Sam again. “Get up now,” I said. I was about to shout at him. But he looked like a skinny marine mammal, washed ashore.

  Another of the four things I know for sure about raising kids is that most times when you overlook bad behavior, or let them blow you off when something is important to you, you injure them. You hobble their character.

  The third of the four things I know is that if you can shine a small beam of truth on a beloved when you are angry, it is more beneficial than hitting that beloved with a klieg light of feelings and pinning the person to the wall. I can’t remember the fourth, but I put numbers 2 and 3 into practice.

  I closed my eyes, gathered myself, bent down and spoke to my son calmly.

  “Sam? You’ve said several times you would come with me today. I want you to, but I don’t want to make myself crazy trying to get you to live up to your promises. If it doesn’t happen, I’m going to be sad and angry, but I am not going to lose myself in your bullshit.”

  He got up and went downstairs to his room, grumpily. Neshama looked at me.

  “You did great,” she said. I closed my eyes and let my head drop to my chest. We heard Sam’s footsteps on the stairs coming toward us.

  The three of us went outside and got in the car, Sam in the backseat, where he ate his sandwich in sleepy silence.

  There were only six residents waiting in the recreation room for us to begin the service, five women and one man, fragile as onion skin. There were five of us from church, plus Neshama, so I assigned everyone a resident to shepherd through the short service. We always sing a few songs, say a few prayers, take the residents’ hands and look in their eyes and say, “The peace of God be with you.” Sam accompanied a pretty Asian woman, who talked to him as if he might be one of her relatives. He introduced himself to her shyly. “Yes,” she said happily. “Sam.” He took his place at her side. For the next half-hour, he turned the pages of the worship book for her and ran his fingers along the words of each hymn so she could follow. He’s been coming here with me off and on his whole life, because I so believe in this ministry and want him to share it with me: the people here are shipwrecks, and sometimes there is not much left, but there is a thread in them that can be pulled and that still vibrates. It’s like being with nuns who have taken vows of silence and mutter. So we show up, talk, and sing. It seems to fill the residents, breathe more life into them. Sam’s companion beamed and concentrated on doing her part correctly, as if to please him. When we sang “Jesus Loves Me,” a song she and the others may have learned as children, some sang along, muttering and murmuring like brooks: there’s such pleasure in knowing the words to a song.

  I’ve seen them come back to life during this service, even when they cannot sing. I’ve seen these moments bring them joy and comfort. We don’t lay a heavy Jesus trip on anyone: it’s more that he is a medium for our showing up and caring.

  My person was sound asleep. I was beginning to think it was the effect I have on people. She was wearing a bright red sweatsuit and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. When she finally woke up, I greeted her.

  “I want to go back to sleep,” she cried out, and I assured her that that was okay. I took her hands and she babbled for a minute. “I like that house,” she said, and I held on to her hands. Sam came over. “She wants to sleep,” he whispered, “because she liked the house in her dreams.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said. He went back to the Asian woman. My woman in red fell asleep again. I continued with a prayer.

  Some of the residents seemed to be out of it, drooling, dazed. Then you would hear them saying the Lord’s Prayer. “Amen,” we say loudly; then we go around one last time, touch each person, and tell them how glad we are that they are there. I realize again and again that this is really all you have to offer people most days, a touch, a moment’s gladness. It has to do, and it often does.

  “Hey, thanks,” I told Sam as we headed outside with Neshama.

  “No problem,” he said. We walked to my car. “I liked my person,” he added. His hair was matted down in bed-head tufts, like the hills.

  Earth School

  Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Bastille Day

  I’ll read anything with the words “divine love” and “impeachment” in the first sentence, so I included them in the first line of my call for a revolution in the spring. I know the word “divine” makes many progressive people run screaming for their lives, and one hesitates to use it. And we all know it’s unlikely that there is going to be an impeachment anytime soon. So I hastened to add that this would be a revolution about decency—as in, “Have you no decency?” It would be calm, polite, and inclusive. Perhaps in lieu of “divine love” we could use the idea of “kindness,” and we would be guided by the way Gandhi and Dr. King behaved toward the armed white men who fought them when they changed the world.

  In the spring of 2006, I believed that good people who had watched their country’s leaders skid so far to the triumphal right would want to do something. I mean, wouldn’t they? Otherwise, those people’s children would ask them someday, when we would all be living in caves, “What did you do to try to save us?” And the children would be angry, and they are so awful and unpleasant when they are mad, even in the dark.

  I, for one, did not want to answer that I’d done nothing, or that I’d ranted and flailed, showing up only to support my own causes and candidates. In the face of hate and madness, you can’t just turn your face to the wall and give up. I wanted to figure out how to say, “Enough”—and be part of a revolution that would save the world. Or at least help people keep the faith.

  I hoped that July 14 worked for everyone.

  In 1967, my father published a great novel about an antiwar march, called The Bastille Day Parade, in which protesters carry signs that read “Turn Off the Lie Machine.” In choosing July 14, I would like to pay tribute to him and to the people of his generation, who are surely turning in their graves with horror about contemporary life in their beloved America. They were passionate in their fight against fascism, Joseph McCarthy, and litterbugs. They were committed to civil rights, to libraries, and to good manners. They raised their children to be polite, as honest as we could manage, and to live as if the word fair meant something, which all sounds a little Amish now. A renewal of these values would be the major plank of this revolution.

  In this revolution, there would be no positions except greenness, kindness, and libraries. We would not even have a battle cry, as that can lead to chanting and haranguing. We would simply look one another in the eyes, shake our heads, and say, “This can’t be right.” We would not try to figure out what it all means: Iraq, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Terri Schiavo, abortion rights, the Downing Street memo, domestic spying, immigration, the Kyoto Protocol, the Geneva Conventions, Tom DeLay—none of it.

  Mostly we would show up and say things like, “Giving India massive nuclear assistance? I don’t know—that just can’t be right.” Or, “John Bolton at the UN? Jeez, Louise.” Also, everyone would commit to taking a few naysayers to
Al Gore’s movie as the most effective possible consciousness-raising about the ecological tragedy of global warming. We would not suggest through words or body language that George W. Bush’s approach to the environment had helped destroy the planet. We would be starting over. We would pass the popcorn.

  After an initial call I made in a column for Salon, I was hoping for a large turnout, even though so few people showed up to mark the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This was dispiriting, but let’s not dwell on it. More than 59 million people voted for John Kerry, and I was hoping for a turnout somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million. We would need precinct leaders to get the word out, although not the kind who go door-to-door while people are eating, then threaten sweetly to come back later. Bitter neighbors were the very last thing this revolution sought.

  We would all show up on Bastille Day on the biggest street in our town, or in front of city hall, or wherever we felt like gathering, with friends, or alone. We’d be propelled by the ferocious belief we’ve carried since childhood, that the United States is supposed to be a republic, of fifty states, united and humane, and that we’d fight tooth and nail—nicely—for that to be true again.

  I thought it would be cool if people turned off their cells phone that day.

  I chose a color for the revolution, green, because we’ve lost our connection with the natural world, and this would be a step toward reclaiming it; also because trees, grass, and the rest of the natural world are incredibly beautiful and precious. Nature is the truth. Some might suspect that this was inching dangerously close to a “position,” what with everyone in green, hundreds of shades of green. And if I’m being honest, it’s true that the tiniest point might be made that a black-and-white worldview, a Manichaean good-versus-evil color scheme, was wearing out its welcome.