by Anne Lamott
I went home and read The New York Times, usually one of my favorite things, but today it made me crazy. Where will the madness end? The great Andean glaciers are now melting! George Bush’s decisions and movements will take a thousand years to recover from, because his people have done such major damage everywhere. We have become a country that you wouldn’t want to leave your children alone with.
If all this is happening for a reason, it sure explains a lot of things. In these terrible years since Bush’s response to 9/11, I’ve wondered whether our world is in the throes of labor, the struggle toward the end where all is struggle, contraction, and stuckness, after you remember that you dislike children, but before the doctor lets you start pushing. Maybe a new ice age would be just the ticket; and in the meantime, maybe a small volcano blowing up right under Halliburton would be enough to make the company lose stride.
I felt alone and panicky. Sam was still asleep, at two in the afternoon, which is not uncommon for seventeen-year-olds, yet I watched him with tremendous anxiety. I found his drool disturbing. My boyfriend had the flu and was out of commission. My friends were on vacation, except for the one who was doing chemo. It was too hot to sleep, and my only hope was to plug into something bigger than my pulsing mind, to flail around outside rather than within me. God can’t clean the house of you when you’re still in it. So I went for a walk in the hills with my dog, Lily.
There are always lots of people on the trail I chose that day, because it is legal for dogs to run off leash there, but today there was not a soul on the old fire road. It was too hot. And everything was brown: the hillsides, the grasses, the dirt road. You’d have to be on acid to think it was beautiful up here now. The dusty trails were scrabbly and rocky; I was in constant danger of twisting my ankles. My younger brother saw a long, fat rattlesnake on a trail in these parts the other day. The dry, dusty air smells like chemicals, like pollution, and snakes. It is nature’s way of saying, “Go rest in the shade somewhere.” I walked along slowly, heavily, while my dog leapt about as if we were in kilts, on the green hillsides of Scotland.
There are purple and lavender wild flowers up here, bleeding hearts and thistles; also buttercups, weedy goldfields, sticky monkey flowers, few and far between. I noticed that people had not been cleaning up after their dogs; there was a lot of product in the road. There are two essential rules up here: No smoking, and Clean up after your dog. What are we coming to? Look at this place, I thought; it’s a dump.
I cleaned my glasses on my T-shirt, and considered the situation. There was dust on everything. You’d have needed a home-plate umpire’s brush up here to really see things. There was no rain to wash away all the scat. I know this sounds crazy, but it became part of the dust, which then smudged your glasses with atomized snake and finely powdered dog doo. What I counted on daily for pastoral beauty became forsaken and deserted, as it did every summer. There were hair plugs of grass in the dirt. Witchy branches that might reach out and grab your wrist. Abandoned chifforobes would not have looked out of place, tossed from wagon trains by the banded-Calistoga settlers.
I gathered some of the poop with the plastic bags I had brought to clean up after Lily, and left them by the road for the return trip. When my priest friend Tom is at his most despondent over Bush and global warming, he goes around his neighborhood picking up trash and dog shit. It definitely helps on days when you can’t see much hope for this sweet old planet. In the long haul, grace will win out over everything, over the misery, the stupidity, the dishonesty, but it would be so great, so yoked, as Sam would say, if our species were around to witness that. Barring revolution, things are going to be very bad for Sam and his children.
An endless wall of live oak cut through the hills like the great wall of China, only you could walk through it like a ghost.
Two people came into view, a handsome young father of maybe forty, with a beautiful and very young Chinese girl in the throes of a tantrum.
She was lying on the trail, wailing, the brat personified. He was attempting to discuss the situation with her. This is always a parent’s first line of attack in Marin. I sighed in sympathy. We have all taken turns having the awful, hateful child on display. I felt a moment’s relief that it was not my turn. I also thought of all those shins I have wanted to kick all my life, all those parts of me I wish weren’t there, all the immature, spoiled parts, shedding brat-cells like skin flakes. The man looked at me and shook his head as his surely beloved child flopped about in the dirt like a fish in the sand. Not so long ago, I had been the girl with pebbles embedded in her back, and my parent hating it so much. I offered the father my bottle of water, which I hadn’t opened yet, but he shook his head, so I gave him the only thing I could, a smile: I see you and you see me, and we’re both tired, and children can be awful, but did you see the coastal larkspur back there?
After a while, I turned to see how the man and the girl were doing, but they were gone. The hills were silent again except for one birdsong, and it cheered me slightly. See? If there were no other proof of the existence of a bigger reality than birds, they would do it for me.
I started up again, and this time when another person came into sight, my heart quaked. It was a youngish middle-aged man, a biker type, tattooed and all in black—black T-shirt, tight black Levi’s, black boots, like the clothes they give you the day you get out of Folsom. Everyone knows you have to wear shorts up here in the heat, or your gauziest pants, billowing and worn-out such as the ones I was wearing, like Dustin Hoffman’s in Papillon. The man looked angry. My arms bristled with goose bumps. Luckily, Lily appeared and ran up to investigate. She licked and nosed the man’s hand. He reached into his pocket, and appeared to slip her something, a biscuit, perhaps, laced with strychnine. I tried to say something when we passed, but the words lodged in my throat: I squeaked hello, like a cartoon character: “Hi, Mr. Serial Killer—ow, ow!” He passed without speaking, hassled and frozen, like a snow globe of all the terror of the world.
All I had to protect me, besides Lily, was my ubiquitous pen, which, while mightier than the sword, was probably not going to do it if he lunged at me.
But strangely enough, he didn’t. I continued walking.
Around another turn in the fire road, turkey vultures flopped around in the dirt, like the child. I’d often seen them overhead, lazy V’s hanging in the sky, hissing, but I’d never seen them on the road. They are ugly birds, brown with wattley red heads, sort of testicular; but their genus name means “purifier,” because they eat carrion and purify the countryside. It’s a shame they don’t eat dog doo, or spoiled toddlers. I wondered whether there were dead bodies nearby, bodies that the man in black had tossed down the hillside. Lily chased the vultures, her kilt flapping, and they took off, hissing as they flew away.
I tried to imagine what they’d been eating, and what they were saying to one another: “We can come back in an hour! We’ll be hungry again by then.”
Recycling is always going on up here, birth, death, compost. Alone in the hills, I can sometimes feel the people who have died, who stay near. I don’t have a clue how the system works, but this is my belief. I can say “Hi, Pammy” or “Hi, Dad,” and I can hear them say hi. I play their favorite music at home sometimes so we can hear it again together. I crank up Kind of Blue for them, by Miles Davis, who said, “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.” I feel them inside me and on my couch, listening with their eyes closed. Dad and Pammy both loved Mozart and jazz and folk music. I imagine life as a continuum, all sorts of comings and goings, as with the beings who climbed up and down Jacob’s ladder, in the junction between heaven and earth, between the quick and the dead and the not yet born, the invisible beings here to help, moving to and fro, coming to help others move to and fro.
For me, personally, the system would be much clearer if God or life had installed a bald patch of grass between us, and wherever else there is. If anyone had thought to ask me.
The last people I ran into that day we
re a young man a little older than Sam and an older guy who had something nonspecifically wrong with him, an expression of not being all there. He moved with a halting, sluggish gait, and had a small beet-red head, like the vultures. The lenses in his horn-rimmed glasses were so thick that I wondered whether he was nearly blind. The young man looked a lot like Sam, and somehow managed to glide as he walked, like a warrior through tall grass.
We exchanged hellos. I have a funny habit I picked up from my father, who was also an avid hiker. Whenever he passed strangers on the path, he’d say hello in a friendly way, then dip his head and inhale with a sniffling sound, as if the air were freezing. He was secretly shy.
I made the puffy inhalation after I passed the men. At first I tried to invent a touching story for the young man walking with the older one—the heroic teenager with the simple and unsullied older man, from out of Rousseau. Then I figured we probably shared the same basic human condition: we went to plays we couldn’t quite follow, we worried when we had to pee and there was no bathroom around, we fell into moods, both hopelessness and random silliness. The specifics might be different, but not the essence. We’re not so special. That’s the good and bad news.
Lily and I came to the poop baggies I’d left behind. I swept down on them where the grass met the road, as if they were Easter eggs. Lily, on the other hand, staggered with heat prostration. I wonder whether the beings on Jacob’s ladder use an escalator now, whether they carry laptops or cell phones. I looked back at the ancient expanse of hills. You can almost imagine dinosaurs up here, or leopards. It’s pure magic, like heaven or an Italian movie. How had it taken me nearly an hour to notice? Saint Paul, who can be such a grumpy book-thumper, said that where sin abounds, grace abounds, and I think this is Paul at his most insightful, hopeful, faithful, when it comes to politicians and to me—if by “sin” we mean strictly the original archery term of missing the mark. I realized just then that sin and grace are not opposites, but partners, like the genes in DNA, or the stages of childbirth. Labor was so much more painful than I could have ever imagined. I felt I might lose my mind. Sam’s fist tore a small hole in my body, and it got infected. I had a high fever and chills. The nurses covered me with sheets they had warmed up that smelled like Ivory soap and antiseptic, and those mixed with the smells from my body, and my fear, and with the smells of my brother and best friend at my feet, saying, “Push. Push.”
I remembered the sips of ice-cold apple juice the doctor gave me whenever I felt like giving up, like the occasional glimmers on these hillsides of what the landscape will look like when the rain starts to fall.
Kookaburra
The twentieth anniversary of my getting sober was last week, the day before my favorite annual church event, Faith Fair. This is a party the church throws for the children of the community, part of our Ministry of Joy. And twenty years is a landmark birthday. I’ve always believed that there was a certain age after which I would be all well and I’d stop feeling as if I’d been abandoned here on earth with no explanation. When I was little, the magic number was 6—the first-graders had maturity, secret information (like gnostics), and lunch boxes. Then 13, 18, 21, and now, twenty years sober.
So the last thing I expected was to make a childish scene the weekend of the two events. All I can say is, Thank God there are no live feeds of our minds streaming online.
I’ve been in charge of Faith Fair for six years, an afternoon in early summer when we rent a colossal inflatable jump house, decorate our church courtyard with balloons and streamers and used-car-lot flags, and offer the families of the town lunch, sno-cones, face-painting, crafts. We help them make necklaces and wall hangings from clay. Everything is free, including the raffle tickets, which kids can use to win Frisbees stacked with cool little toys, or videos, or soccer balls. Our choir sings a set of our happier hymns—“Somebody Prayed for Me,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” You don’t hear songs about Calvary. You don’t hear “Go Down, Moses.” Afterward we play loud classic gospel CDs, Aretha, Mahalia, Sam Cooke.
It takes a few of us working for weeks to pull it off. I get the equipment, some toys and art supplies; other people handle food, raffle items, music, decorations. We turn our fellowship hall into a crafts shop, so I buy beads, cord, and packs of the best clay, the softest to work with and the best to bake, in glorious colors. Every year I charge the two big-ticket items, the jump house and the balloon bouquets, and write checks for rubber balls, jump ropes, and bottles of bubbles.
The other volunteers and I gather at ten to set up, and then the jump-house guy arrives and inflates the house on our lawn—we always request the Blue Dog. Some of us walk through the community, handing out leaflets. At twelve we put out the first platter of hot dogs. Parents from the other five churches in town often arrive first, with their kids in tow, or vice versa. This is a troubled community, with a lot of darkness and addiction alongside its riches, and people from each church show up to help at functions of the other churches—summer recreation programs, tutoring during the school year, mentoring, Vacation Bible School, and things like our Faith Fair.
This year we had the usual beautiful weather, the fabulous sticky children running around painted like princesses and jaguars, practicing numa-numa dance steps on the lawn (the first year of the fair it was the Macarena), and jumping themselves silly. I’ve taught some of them at Sunday school since they were very young. I have seen their first squiggles, on the light green offering envelopes.
If people are attending the fair for the first time, we show them our Sunday-school classrooms. We have a sweet, simple program: we focus on how much Jesus loves them, on social justice, and on joy. We teach them variations on Blake’s great line that we are here “to learn to endure the beams of love.” We teach them to watch for beauty and to help however they can during catastrophes. We tell them to feed the poor and to feed one another. When you take food in that has been prepared with love, you take in other people. The children know this—I think they know much of what we do, way deep down. They know that they’re made of the same stuff as Jesus and yet capable of the full range of human behavior. That the world is made up of illusion and trickery, and that God is everywhere. And that one day, they’ll be like us. In the meantime, they gobble down hot dogs and bounce.
Faith Fair is one version of the story I love most. Every year we all race around like mad, and then no one shows up when we first open, and I always think we will flop this time. Dozens of kids begin arriving then, and I worry that there will be too many this year, and there won’t be enough food or sno-cone syrup. Something inevitably goes wrong, someone gets hurt on the jump house or a bike gets stolen and the cops are called, and everything falls into wreckage at our feet. Then somehow—this is what the story is all about—things sort themselves out, and we start all over.
This year as I watched the kids, I thought of how often, as my son has grown and the world has changed, I have told them updated accounts of this story. The gist of the story is that faith and grace will not look as they do in Bible stories, will not involve angels, flames, or harps. Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all of my best skills, intentions, and good ideas. I overreact or shut down, then torture myself about what a fraud I am, like Kookaburra’s bitter aunt Esther, in the branches of the old gum tree, pretending to sing the laughing song of the others but privately stewing. Usually there is something I can’t climb over, all the tools and stepladders have broken, and no one is around to give me a leg up. No one comes along to say, “I’ll haul you up, little lady.” Some pitiful thing appears or occurs, entirely inadequate to help shift this grim situation, and it can’t possibly be enough, but then it is.
Nothing went wrong this year at Faith Fair. None of the children got hurt on the jump house, none of the old people fainted in the heat, the PA system worked fine, the choir turnout was big. The pastor, who usually gets to be chairperson of the sno-cone ministry, got to hang out in the s
hade, talking to everyone who came by, and the teenage face-painters adorned every child.
At three in the afternoon, we sent people home, and the jump-house guy came and deflated the Blue Dog. The grown-ups stayed to clean, trudging around with aching feet and Hefty bags.
Late that night I e-mailed my bill to people on the fair committee. In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail. Still, I am always under budget, so even though my mind was a birdhouse of exhaustion, stressed from overstimulation that day, I sent out my bill.
At around eleven, I heard from one woman on the committee that everything looked fine. Then, at eleven-fifteen, I heard from another woman, who said that a man on the committee was sorry, but there was a new accounting system. This year we needed receipts: Visa bill, canceled checks.
A small voice inside me said, “Let this go until tomorrow.” But the arrogant, wounded part was astounded. It said, “Excuuuuuse me?” I was exhausted, and it may just be that “system” is not my favorite word, especially when a man is trying to get me to conform to his, even when he is a good man and a casual church friend. In any case, I stared at the second e-mail like someone needing the Heimlich maneuver. Then I sat around glowering.
This reaction makes no sense at all to me. First of all, I love my church family more than life, and most of me knew that things would sort themselves out. Maybe this old, familiar anxiety helps me feel safe: maybe if I were ever to feel deep financial security and self-esteem, finally get it all just right, God would take me out with an air strike. I don’t get it.
