Grace (Eventually)

by Anne Lamott

  We could bring bulbs that we would plant in November, no matter how things shake down. Bulbs are about new life after darkness and storms. It was important that we constantly replant, in case the Bush administration insisted that all daffodils be killed off, under the rubric of the Clean Ground Initiative.

  One last thing: It would be great if people brought a bit of fruit to share, and maybe a few dollars, in case anybody ran into someone desperately poor. Bananas are great, as they are the only known cure for existential dread. Also, I’ve heard that in India, even people dying in the street will share their bananas with anyone who needs them; we might start this tradition of sharing here, too. I once saw a note on someone’s computer that said: “The Law of the American Jungle: Remain calm, and share your bananas.” So the more I think about it, the more convinced I am about the bananas.

  Jesus would take care of anyone who was hungry, maybe by making soup, and then sitting down to eat with everyone. Then, when people had eaten, he would encourage them to get moving again, and help him pick litter up off the street. But soup is not practical to serve on the day of the revolution. Trust me, fruit is a nice touch. Apples, oranges, it doesn’t matter, and it would not be mandatory that you bring fruit at all.

  I was asking only that people show up and help foment a revolution based on kindness. Maybe we’d sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” No offense in that, is there, if you forget the way the song has been used as a weapon against the people of America, and think instead about the words? “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” Nothing too objectionable, really.

  But we wouldn’t sing it if doing so would stir up a lot of debate and distraction. I was thinking that both of my parents died here, in this land they loved. They were both born abroad. A lot of our parents have died, people who made sure their children read John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, and Langston Hughes. I would show up for my parents, by proxy.

  Seriously; we wouldn’t have to sing that song if it’s going to freak people out. Still, I cry when I hear it.

  We would come together, on Bastille Day, and ixnay on the cell phones and speeches. As Woody Allen once said before I turned on him, eighty percent of life is simply showing up. We will show up and foment a loving revolution, wearing green: I just looked up foment, to make sure that this is what I meant. It comes from the Latin fomentum, which means a warm poultice. You apply a cloth, dipped in warm water or medication, to a body that needs healing, and that is exactly what we need to do.

  I was thinking noon-ish.

  Unfortunately, my plans for the revolution stalled during a book tour in April, although a number of Salon readers around the country shared with me in person that they and their friends were organizing groups of people to show up with them locally on July 14. Then, in late May, when my commitment and strength returned, the weather had turned August-hot. I am not blaming this on the escalation of the earth’s destruction during the Bush years. I’m just saying: way too hot for May. And maybe the idea was ridiculous. So I held off on drumming up local support.

  On Bastille Day, my feet hurt, and I wondered whether anyone would notice if I sort of skipped the revolution. Also, it was my boyfriend’s birthday, and I needed to get to Macy’s. I hadn’t updated my plans in Salon, because the revolution piece had generated dozens of letters, half of which said it was stupid to stand on the street with a few other aging bleeding-heart-liberal tree-hugging types—like it was a bad thing. Who would be the wiser if I didn’t show up, since I hadn’t told any of my friends to meet me? But around three I turned on CNN and discovered that the new Israel–Hezbollah conflict was not going as well as one had hoped.

  I grew extremely agitated. Years ago I had a button that said: “I’m not worried—I’m just very alert.” I sat watching the news in what my grandmother would have called “a state.” And then I did the single most important thing one can do to save the world: I got up off my butt.

  Even though I had told everyone in my original manifesto that there would be no placards, I felt a nudge in my heart. I got out some poster board and a thick marker, and began drafting. First I wanted to pay tribute to my father by writing, “Turn off the lie machine.” Then I thought about plugging An Inconvenient Truth because Gore’s movie gave me the first hope I’d felt in a decade that this planet could be saved for our children, nieces, nephews. I considered “Pro-Soldier/Pro-Peace,” but finally settled on “One People. One Planet. One Future.”

  I wondered whether those mean readers had been right. Was it stupid?

  Then I thought, But everything else is totally stupid, on a big scale. The men in power have so screwed things up, hugely. I would be the hermit crab rising up to shake a brave claw.

  We need the rising up.

  Nothing else can save us.

  I kept thinking about the younger people who meet on our main street many nights with signs announcing the latest body counts in Iraq, of both Iraqis and Americans. So I put on a green T-shirt, made my sign, and went to stand under the shade trees downtown.

  It was slow at first. I held my sign and smiled, but did not wave the way you do when you have a candidate or a cause to push. When my spirits flagged, I thought about how cheered I feel whenever I drive by someone standing up for peace or the environment. This is a plenty good reason to do things.

  Still, I felt like a fool—mute, ridiculous, and happy, like Forrest Gump, holding my shitty sign as the world passed by. But you can’t go limp in the face of this world’s horror and barbarity. Limp is what they want, in the paranoid sense of the word “they.”

  Finally business picked up. People stared as they drove past, gave me a thumbs-up, a smile, a look of confusion, or a peace sign. Easily half of them were on the phone.

  I tried to look at each person kindly, because I believe that we are family. I don’t always feel it, but I know it. My pastor Veronica often quotes whoever said that it’s not what we’re looking at, but what we’re looking with, so each crooked smile could be like a minimal dose that, however small, helps the healing. Just as a doctor can help you relax for a moment during a spasm, and you remember you’re going to be okay at some point.

  I kept telling myself bravely that a small act of peace can cause a quantum shift. Then, after I had been there twenty minutes, I heard a motorized vehicle approach on the sidewalk. I looked over. An old, thin man in an electric wheelchair had paused about ten feet away. I smiled. He wasn’t having any of it. He sat there for some time. Then he revved up the motor and scooted to where I stood.

  “What are you screaming about?” he asked angrily. I stayed neutral, so neutral. I was Sweden, Switzerland. Except for the part of me that thought about pushing him over in his contraption.

  “I haven’t said a word in over an hour,” I replied meekly.

  “You should join the Marine Corps,” he said with enormous contempt. I looked back at him blankly. I was about to enthuse, “Now that’s an intriguing idea,” when he motored away.

  I shook my head and imagined him hiding in the bushes nearby for days, awaiting someone to confront. I couldn’t wait to tell my boyfriend.

  I stood there until my feet started to hurt. All good revolutionaries ought to invest in a good camp stool. I hated to leave. The tree that shaded me was a sycamore, tall, with an umbrella of manly branches and lush, mapley leaves. The dark bark was peeling, light green emerging underneath.

  It was nearly dinnertime when I finally went home, and I was not going to make it to Macy’s. I called my boyfriend and told him about my afternoon.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “The revolution must come first,” he said. I poured myself a glass of ice water and turned on the TV. The big new war in the Middle East was more awful by the hour. Some of the pundits were saying it was World War III. What are you supposed to do in the face of this? I pulled out my tree book. The photograph of the sycamore in it looked like the tree that had shaded me. The new bark I’d noticed today, revealed as the old bark fell
off, was my favorite color: sea-foam green, the same color as the young harmless snakes around here after they’ve shed their first skins. I looked up for a moment, and an idea came to me. We had to have another revolution soon. I wondered how mid-October might work for everyone, in the weeks before the midterm elections, when the leaves begin to turn.

  Mom, Interrupted

  Yesterday, I called my Internet provider with a billing question and got a vivacious female robot who told me how glad she was to help me. Could we begin with my touch-toning my phone number? I hit O for an operator, but this time the robot paused for a second and said calmly, like Nurse Ratched, “Okay—but you’ll just have to answer these same questions with someone else. So would you like to begin again, by touch-toning your phone number?”

  I could hardly breathe. After a moment, I said, slowly, “Mom?”

  My mother has been dead for several years. But old mothers never die, and they never fade away. They are too complicated for either.

  For a long time after her death, I didn’t feel much of anything—except relief—because I’m a complicated mother, too, and I have my hands full as it is. I felt much more spaciousness in my life after my mother died, partly because my phone did not ring every several seconds, and partly because I didn’t have to be both a complicated mother and a complicated daughter at the same time.

  My mother was a handful. You can ask her best friends and her sibling: she was imperious, with no self-esteem, which is a terrible combination. She was controlling, judgmental, withholding, needy, and desperate to be loved.

  Everyone always said how proud she was of me. But she mostly forgot to mention this to me, and instead held other people’s kids up as true successes: people with college degrees, spouses, stylish clothes.

  When my mother was alive, I felt like strangling her about half the time. The rest of the time, though, I was tender and dutiful toward her, on every level of her existence, there at her side like an aggrieved bellhop throughout our forty-eight years together. Fortunately, I was still drinking much of that time. Then, after I quit and started to get my life together, she would announce to everyone who would listen that I hadn’t been a “real” alcoholic, and that this little phase would pass. For my mother, who had a tiny issue with denial, a real alcoholic meant that you drank like the red-haired lady who lived around the corner from us when I was young, and passed out in the street with some regularity. People in your family were not real alcoholics. They were bons vivants.

  I really loved my mother, in a lot of ways. I used to visit her in Hawaii, where she had moved when I was eighteen. I’d agree to visit only if she’d buy marijuana for me from her younger friends. Then, after having several festive blender drinks with her on the lanai, I’d smoke too much dope and become paralyzed while trying to make it to my bedroom—huddling in the hallway and gaping with horror at the two-inch geckos on the wall. Later she would bring me pineapple juice and tuck me in. She was a black-belt co-dependent.

  I brought her back from Hawaii when her finances and health began to run out. I took her everywhere, included her every chance I could, and tended to her daily when she got sick with Alzheimer’s. She floated away on the riptide of dementia, ultimately a speck on the horizon, waving for as long as she could to her deeply confused children onshore.

  When I think of her, I miss how great it felt to make her laugh—no one could make her laugh harder than I—and last week I had a little episode at the San Francisco airport security line that I long to tell her about. It was such a perfect Nikki story.

  I didn’t feel like taking off my shoes that day. I had been told by various screeners that taking off your shoes was optional, and on this particular day I chose to exercise my option, since I was wearing flats.

  But it turns out to be optional only in the loosest sense of the word. I was verbally nabbed by the screener on the other side of the gate. I was fuming by then, muttering to myself about how they ought to be out there securing our ports, and how if they did that I’d be glad to take off my shoes for them. I was pulled out of the line.

  “Look,” I said calmly, “I want to know what kind of shoes you don’t have to take off.” And I swear to God, the screener smirked.

  “Try flip-flops,” she said, then beamed at the other screeners.

  I stood there, all but pawing at the ground like a bull. People in line did not want to make eye contact; I might be a Dr. Scholl’s gel bomber. Later, I realized this was a story my mother would have loved. She’d get it: she loved that I was rebellious. (Although she also wished I was married, and rich.)

  The “Jesus thing,” as she referred to it, just drove her crazy. After I converted, she must have asked herself many times where she’d gone wrong, as she did when I dropped out of college. But one of the innumerable things the Jesus thing gave me was an understanding of how hard it is for all mothers when the time comes for their children to leave.

  When Jesus is about twelve, talking to some folks in a temple, a man comes in to tell him that his mother and father are waiting outside for him, and he blows them off.

  The man says, “Your mother and father are outside and want to see you.” And Jesus says, “Who is my mother? And who is my father?”

  But he’s trying to say what my son said to me at twelve, and what I said to my mother forty years ago: “Don’t you know I’m twelve now?” It’s wrenching for the mothers, and the drug they use is worry. And their worry is exhausting for kids. It’s hard for everyone.

  It wasn’t until her death that my mother stopped exhausting me. Then I didn’t forgive her for a while. All her friends and a few relatives hassled me to let it go, to forgive. But I did it my way, slowly, badly, authentically, eventually scattering her ashes, with deep grief, a year and a half after she died.

  Now here it is, three years later, and I am beginning to miss her. Before now, I missed having had a healthier, more elegant mother. But now I miss her, Nikki Lamott. I think of her often, and sometimes feel her nearby, the way I feel my father. I think of stories she’d love. I think of how much she must love watching her grandson Sam grow up into a mostly lovely young man, magical and complicated. I think about her being intimately loved by God now, somewhere.

  At times I think of her with enormous warmth. The other day, when I walked up the stairs to the house, Sam came out to greet me. He was on the phone and I heard him say, “My mom’s home. I gotta go bond.” That’s how I feel more and more about my mother: that she’s home, finally, and I gotta go bond.

  Junctions

  I woke up in a bleak place on Sunday. It was not the place of ashes, like the morning after the 2004 presidential election, but there was no comfort anywhere. It was miserably hot, and the news couldn’t be worse—a new crop of mutilations in Iraq, with 2,500 U.S soldiers now dead, and a North Korean ICBM apparently pointed at the West Coast. Two of my dearest friends had terrible diseases. There was a nasty separation going on in our family, and a small distraught child. Also, my son had not obeyed his curfew and we had had words at two a.m.

  Seventeen can be tough: my friend Meredith said to approach my relationship with Sam like a frozen gym membership, where I am taking a break. So far, I have not pushed him down the stairs, which during rough patches passes for grace around here. This falls short of the heavenly banquet, but some days will have to do.

  In the face of all this, I did the most astonishing thing a person can do: I got out of bed. At least I could still walk. A better person would think, Thank you, Jesus. But I thought, God, do my feet hurt. God, am I getting old. Then I had some coffee, to level the playing field of me and my mind, as it had had several cups while I slept, and now it felt like talking.

  Then I headed to church.

  And it was not good.

  The service was way long, and boring, and only three people had shown up for the choir, and the song they sang sucked. There was a disruptive baby who had about three hours of neck control but was already spoiling everything for the rest of us
. I sat with a look of grim munificence, like so many of your better Christians, exuding mental toxins into the atmosphere. I decided that this church was deteriorating. I had come for a spiritual booster shot and instead got aggravation. I was going to leave, and never come back.

  Then something amazing happened. I would call it grace, but then, I’m easy. It was that deeper breath, or pause, or briefly cleaner glasses, that gives us a bit of freedom and relief. I remembered my secular father’s only strong spiritual directive: Don’t be an asshole, and make sure everybody eats. Veronica quoted a fellow pastor recently: “I’m only a beggar, showing the other beggars where the bread is.” There are many kinds of bread: kindness, companionship, besides the flour-and-yeast kind. I remembered Sam at this church in his first months, making loud farting noises with his mouth, or sobbing uncontrollably about the state of things, and no one seemed to care or notice. This memory evoked patience in my anxious, complaining heart. The squalling baby and I tired ourselves out at about the same time. He fell asleep; I pinched the skin of my wrist, to bring myself back to my body. I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it’s good to be out where others can see you, so you can’t be your ghastly, spoiled self. It forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby the world.

  I gave up enough so that my muscles let down, and spent the last hour of the service feeling becalmed in a boat, no paddle, no wind springing up, slightly frustrated. But I knew that there would eventually be movement on the water again, and the wind did pick up toward the end of the service, two hours after it began. Driving home, I no longer felt that I must quit this church as soon as possible, any more than I would quit my family after a disastrous holiday meal.