Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (15 page)

T
his is not a story about the best Christmas present I ever gave or received, but instead, it’s a story about the best holiday present I ever saw, when, right before my cranky Scrooge eyes, I got to see light return to this dark world.

I’ve had a friend for more than twenty years whom I am very fond of, rather than close to. Her name is Carol Wagner, and she is in her mid-fifties. I first met her twenty-some years ago when she used to pick me up hitchhiking out in West Marin, where we lived. She had unruly curly hair and was a great reader and a down-to-earth modest proletarian type who worked at the post office in Stinson Beach. I was a little afraid of her at first because
she was also on the school board, where she could be tough and crabby, but I always liked talking to her when she gave me rides. She was wry and smart and abided no bullshit, all of which I have always loved in a girl.

There is a beautiful plainness to her, a sense of someone who is solid and true, who has had a lot of losses in life and reasons to be bitter, but who isn’t. A beauty of intelligence and soul shows in her face, the kind that pushes through and becomes visible when people have handled their stuff and their suffering with tenderness and courtesy. She has always had a gnarly, ironic personality, somehow both at a remove and in your face—she does not suffer fools—but she has also seen many people through their hardships over the years, and so she is loved and appreciated. People liked to see her at the post office when they picked up their mail, because she was just who she was. What you saw was what you got. And that is so rare, and so lovely, that it can be a little alchemical. The poet Molly Fisk once wrote in a poem about the post office: “When I open Box 592, there was Carol’s curly hair and one third of her forehead, like an Advent calendar in springtime.”

Several years ago, Carol got leukemia. She did
all the standard medical treatments, including enough chemotherapy to last a literal lifetime. She shook and she baked and she lost all those wayward curls, and she got very sick from the treatments. But they seemed to be working for a while, and the people of Stinson Beach, where she lived, cooked and shopped for her and drove her around and kept her company and donated buckets of blood. She sloughed off all the nonessential aspects of her life, tossed them out of the airplane so she could fly a little higher, but the cancer stripped her way down, as it does, and when the chemo was over, she built her life back up. Then there were a number of recurrences, and she needed more rounds of treatment, and life got stripped back to surviving the disease and the cure, and then she’d build her life and health back up all over again. You would think that God or life would hold everything else back, like a traffic cop holding back the traffic so the baby ducks can cross the street, but this was not the case. Real life reared its head: First, some of the people Carol loves most also got sick, and she did what had to be done to help them even as she tried to get well again herself. But as the psalmist tells us, joy comes in the morning, and it did. Carol’s daughter gave birth to a big darling hunky
chunky boy, and all that soft unarmored baby skin was very healing for Carol. But of course what the psalmist does not say is that at the end of the day, dusk will come again, too, and then night—and for a lot of us, this is the one real fly in the ointment.

When I saw her at a concert, she was doing whatever was essential and not too much else. She was living with the “What if?” that everyone shudders to consider and doing pretty well with it. You had the sense that she was still a pretty tough customer in her private life, though she was visibly softer. I think it was due partly to that luscious, succulent blue-eyed baby boy, of whom she spoke with great happiness, but it may also have been the fact that cancer can wedge a certain kind of person open, so that many new things can get in. My guess is that what got into Carol was the knowledge of how loved she is, and therefore, how safe, and you could feel that she was very thankful to have this knowledge, even at its exorbitant cost.

But then she wasn’t okay again. The cancer came back, and eventually, as a last-ditch effort, the doctors gave her a bone marrow transplant. The people of Stinson Beach circled their wagons around her once more. Meals were prepared and delivered, rides were offered and more blood was
given. Then tests determined that the transplant hadn’t worked.

There was nothing left for the doctors to try, and everyone was very sad, especially Carol, who loves her daughter and that grand little grandson so much, but what are you going to do when there’s nothing left for the doctors to do? If you’re lucky, you get on with life. So when her friends started talking to her about the details of a memorial service, her main wish was to be there for it.

And she was. A few Saturdays ago she gave a party at the Stinson Beach Community Center. She wanted to say thank you to the people of her town for all they had done, to let them know that she had lived as long and as well as she had because of their friendship—all those meals they had cooked, all that blood they had donated, all those children they had babysat so their parents could cook or drive for her.

It was a party and also a service, because we had come with dedication, with loving intention and attention, which is what makes something sacred. The atmosphere was somehow both festive and sad, heartbreaking really, giddy, and warm.

The big barnlike community center usually feels huge and impersonal, with rather unpleasant
lighting. It’s not fluorescent but close, bright enough so you feel exposed rather than illuminated. This night, though, only a few house lights were on. There was a fire in the fireplace and Christmas lights on the tree in the corner and candles everywhere, and it made for wonderful soupy light that cloaked everyone gently. People brought Carol a whole living room, too, couches, throw rugs, easy chairs. Everything was so ethereal and familiar that it felt as if we were all moving through one another’s dream. I spotted her right away in the center of all the people. (There must have been two or three hundred, instead of the fifty she expected.) She was wearing a purple velvet dress, and she looked wonderful. Her hair is shorter now, the grayish curls cropped close to her head, and she doesn’t look like the same old person, because she isn’t: hard has become soft, tough has grown more tender, and after all that chemo, all that dehydration, dry has grown lush again.

A bluegrass band was playing in one corner, and people were talking with a great liveliness, as if to say, “Right this minute, we understand that this is all there is, so let’s really be together.” People milled around at their shiny best, under the fairy lights, as if moving loosely through the big net that
holds us all. Her friends had dressed up and brought food and left their bad stuff outside on the step with their umbrellas. They took that big barny space and made it feel so warm and intimate and lively that I kept thinking everyone was dancing. It was disconcerting, because the truth was, or at least the visible reality was, that besides a melancholy hula early in the evening, only a few people danced while I was there. But there was a kind of Rumi dancing under way: “Dance when you’re broken open. Dance if you’ve torn the bandage off . . .” People danced unpartnered but not alone, as in certain square dances.

In all that warmth and soft light we were like flecks in olive oil, or dust motes in a beam of sun, swirling and dipping and lifting and distributing ourselves over that huge space, the particles becoming one community. How rarely do we get to float.

My friend Neshama and I hid over by the tables of food, waiting for our turn to see Carol. We ate everything that couldn’t outrun us. Everyone eats so much at these events! Maybe it’s because you have a body, and it’s still here and wants your attention. Maybe you want a little extra weight so the wind won’t blow you away.
Mangia!
There were
dozens of dishes of food on the banquet tables, fancy and plain, hot and cold, meats and salads and desserts, but best of all were some tiny roasted potatoes in a huge covered dish, oily and crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, brownish red and striped with wilted rosemary. First they resisted, and then they utterly melted in your mouth.

I sidled up to Carol’s daughter, who was holding that big baby boy. He is solid and jolly and mingly, and he threw himself into my arms without thinking, and I got to smell his clean baby soul and feel his wiggly toughness for a moment. Then he stopped, stared into my stranger’s face, saw with horror that he had made a terrible error in judgment, and cried out for Security. His mother reached for him, smiling, and back in her arms, he smiled at me again; he actually all but winked.

I finally got to spend a few minutes with Carol. She looked happy in that warm light, with all her friends around. Some people seemed stricken, uncomfortable at having been invited to come say good-bye, as if this were very bad manners, or as though they had just found themselves on a ferry ride they’d never intended to take. But mostly people seemed to stretch enough to be able to open up to the fearful thought that Carol would probably
die pretty soon. In all of this shadow, she was glowing, giving off softness. The baby kept looking at her, flirting, and you could see how he kept homing in on her. And you knew watching her that even though she did not want to be dying, she was going to do so with the same elegant ordinariness with which she has lived. She told me later, “I don’t hate dying of cancer—it’s better than dying in other ways, because it’s giving me time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time to repair, time to tell everyone how much I love them.” It is so lovely to celebrate the life of a person who is still here, a chance to shine our best light on her as she shone her light on us, before the light goes out. “This purple is
not
going to look so great on me when the jaundice sets in,” Carol said, but in the meantime, in those moments, she looked luminous, like she might just start dancing momentarily. And she did. We hugged good-bye, and I wandered off, feeling like Eeyore, looking for Neshama, but I happened to turn back one more time and saw Carol moving around on the floor, dancing with her friend Richard to a twangy and melancholy bluegrass song.

N
ot everything is going to be okay. Trust me on this. Especially in late November. November has been the season of the witch—the time of darkness, rain, mold, and reckoning, as the end of the year approaches, and you subconsciously take stock in all that you did, or failed to do. This year, a month ago all the forces of darkness were unleashed. Two young friends were very ill. My dog was diagnosed with cancer. The details of a recent massacre in Syria came to light. Two people I love most in the world were in obscene legal marathons. One of them was in dire psychiatric shape. They left upset messages for me; their problems tore me apart, but there was not
much I could do. I’m a recovering higher power: I deeply want to fix and rescue everyone, but can’t.

I have to believe that a real higher power is struggling in this as much as we are. But horribly, if healing and care are going to get done, it will be love working through us. Us! In our current condition, not down the road, when we are in the fullness of our restoration, in wholeness, compassionate detachment, patient amusement. Us, now. It has taken years for me to get this well, which is to say, half as reactive and a third less obsessed with my own neurotic disappointing self. I don’t agree with the pace of how slowly we evolve toward patience, wisdom, forgiveness. Anyone would understand if we gave up and settled, the way people settle for terrible marriages. But these are our lives. So we try, we do the work of becoming saner and more authentic, which is hard enough without truly monstrous people crashing our lives, often—not always—through marriage, although I am not going to name names. Well, maybe just one: Uton.

Uton is the most awful human in my family’s life, the one whom, if I were not a Christian, I would call lying scum, except that I know that this person is precious to God. So let’s say, then, a devious, two-faced lying child of God. And because for
complicated reasons she can’t sneer at us herself in public, she has two friends who serve as proxy sneerers. When we come upon her friends, they give us the stink-eye. It’s sort of funny. Usually we just call one another to report an Utonic sighting, and laugh about it.

I went to the movies one Saturday to get away from it all, for solace, spur of the moment, with no makeup on, in my fattest pants. I hadn’t eaten, as my favorite meal on earth is popcorn and a salted caramel chocolate bar, and I planned to treat myself. Sometimes, as is true for the Coneheads, only consuming mass quantities will do.

As I walked from my car to the theater, I saw two things. One, a long, long line, which made my heart sink. But at the end of the line was a tall man who looked just like my younger brother. And the man miraculously turned out to be my younger brother, with his wife. They were going to a movie I’d already seen. I fell in with them.

We hugged and kissed and compared notes on how excruciating the recent month had been for those we loved, and we also teased each other gently and laughed. Heaven. We slowly got nearer to the door. Then a voice rang out from behind us: “Hello, Anne Lamott.”

I turned to see who it was, and saw Uton’s best friend, way behind us. She is a buxom brassy blonde, with teeth like a pirate, named Tammy. She is the only sober alcoholic in our local community who makes my skin crawl. She called out, “Wow, everyone, it’s authoress Anne Lamott!”

My brother put his hand on my shoulder and I took a deep breath. But I was not the only person who heard—a friend of Tammy’s, many people ahead in line, heard and recognized her voice, too.

“Tammy,” the man enthused. “Long time no see.”

She called out his name and then came forward to hug him, ten feet ahead of us. I could see the cross she wears around her neck. She beamed at me. Then the friends she’d been in line with came up to hug him, too.

Then they all decided to stay there.

They were now many, many spots closer to the ticket counter.

I smiled, trying to shake it off and be a good sport. For people like me, the fight-or-flight instinct comes out in the desperate desire to fix, people-please, and create harmony. My rage usually goes underground and then pops up like a caterpillar, eating another leaf or bud in the garden
or an oat bag of popcorn. Come to think of it, though, it’s also sometimes expressed as a desire to stab people in the head or run them over. It is my deeply embedded limbic system, my shadow open-carry Tea Party person. I wouldn’t be human without it, yet at a time like this, when an image flickered on my inside screen, of me tearing out a clump of Tammy’s brassy blond hair—well, it more than gives a girl pause. It’s the last frontier.

And things got worse. The people still behind us collectively decided there was now a forked line, two creeks merging into one stream of people passing through the doorway ahead.

I turned to the people now racing to be in Tammy’s line and said, “There’s just one line, folks,” although clearly now there were two, the real line and the new rogue line.

I said to the second line, “Come on, you guys. It’s really not fair. We’ve all been waiting.” I threw my hands up good-naturedly. “Please get back in line.”

But they
liked
their line. They weren’t stupid.

Tammy, the leader of the rebel forces, now ahead of us, nearly to the doorway, opened her eyes wide and said, “Uh-oh, I think we’re making Anne Lamott unhappy.”

A lot of people laughed. I prayed, “Help me,” and looked at the ground. Now the lines merged at the door, and people were taking polite turns: You go, I go. I was all but pawing at the ground, snorting through my bull nostrils.

My brother and sister-in-law were whispering encouragement, as if I were in labor.

My hands quivered. I put them in my fat-jeans pockets. I calmed myself the best way I could, asking my brother, “Did you by any chance bring a spear?” He frisked himself, shook his head apologetically. I asked my sister-in-law, “Do you have a flask of acid in your purse?” She rummaged around, produced and proffered two packets of moist towelettes, maybe hoping I could wash my hands of the whole matter. I accepted them. The world is so wrong, and it’s a horrible feeling, like in the
Threepenny Opera
song, “The world is mean, and man uncouth.” All I could do was hold my head high, wash my trembly hands, try to breathe. I know enough at sixty to believe whoever said never to fight with dragons—because to them, we are crunchy and delicious. So I washed my hands with one towelette, put the other in my pocket, smelled my lemony hands. Good smells bring such
primitive comfort, and I somehow held my own, until more people moved to Tammy’s line and I accidentally said, “It’s not fair.”

“No!” my son said later, mortified when I told him the story. “You didn’t really.”

Yes, I did.

Everyone in front of us turned to stare, as if I were wearing my Miles Standish costume.

Tammy stepped through the lobby door before wailing to her posse, “‘It’s not fair.’”

Tears sprang to my eyes. My brother and his wife surrounded me, like white blood cells, and offered to drive me home. The crowd moved us through the door. Even when we got inside, a couple of people in the lobby turned around to see my weepy authoress self. It felt like so much of my childhood, those times when you felt like you were on a ferry dock and the boat with the happy people was pulling away, or as if Margaret Hamilton might come pedaling by. I was torn. I wanted to see the movie, feed myself the only way I can sometimes, by shoveling it in and down. But if I left, Tammy won.

On the rock face of loneliness, I laid my money down on the ticket counter.

I assured my brother and sister-in-law that I was okay, and sent them off to their theater. There were only five other people at mine, obviously a bunch of losers, none of whom was familiar. We sat as far away from one another as possible and gobbled our popcorn, like goats. I wondered why we were even at this unhappy indie movie. What do I have in common with police and gang members? “Shh shhh shhh,” I soothed myself, and just watched. Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified.

I tried to concentrate on the movie but kept hearing Tammy mock me, and the laughter of the people in line. The memory was primitive, biblical—she was the serpent going, “Come on—this is an easier way to do it.” It was her animal. We all grew out of gills, tails, and sharp teeth, but the animal we grew out of is still in there. It’s usually layered over, inside the armature of civility, of being presentable. The animal can be “The Lottery,” or it can be juicy, rich, with pure, raw life and a fierce vigor, so we aren’t cut off from instinct. It
can be dogs running, a monarch butterfly, a baobab, a whale. It can be Koko the gorilla, who told her teachers in sign language that she was a fine gorilla animal.

Something seized me and got in, what we religious types might dare to call holy spirit. One acronym for God that I like a lot is Gift of Desperation. Maybe, I thought, this one night I could try something new. Willingness to change, after all, comes only from pain. I’m not talking the big-T transformation—well, actually, maybe I am. I do crave radical change, but perhaps with a little warning—I’d prefer to be wearing some makeup, perhaps a hint of color. But two baby steps forward? I’ll take it.

I decided in the darkness of the theater to shoot the moon, to find Tammy after the movie and say I was sorry. Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right—a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it’s about me, and my bile ducts, and
how unique I am and how I’ve suffered. And that is what hell is like. So whom was I going to echo, Gandhi and Jesus, or Tammy and me?

Look, can you give me a minute to decide?

Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be right? Hmm. Let me get back to you on this.

I sighed loudly and knew what I needed. It was not to army-crawl through the lobby of the theater or to think about all the ways in which Tammy needed to improve.

After the movie ended, I went to look for her, to apologize for my part in the craziness. I surrendered; I laid my weapon down. I got to have transformation, of the consignment-store variety, from the cringing exile, to the Beloved, to fine gorilla animal.

Did I find her? Of course not. Life is not the movies. It doesn’t work out in a convenient and linear way very often. But I found me. I found my timeworn dignity. I found the second towelette in the pocket of my jeans and washed the salt off my fingers. Best of all, I found my phone in the car and called a friend. I had tears of laughter streaming down my face by the time I’d finished telling him the story.

As I drove home, I realized that Tammy was
probably telling the story to Uton now, comparing notes on my disgrace. But I shook my head. I had responded to myself like a friend. You can’t get there from where I’d been, in line, to where I sat now. A few weeks later, I did find Tammy, in another line, at the market, although with three people between us. At first I thanked God that the view was blocked. Then I leaned to the side and poked my head out, so she could see me. She was holding a clear sack of apples and a tub of Cool Whip. I smiled and looked contrite, and then she smiled, too, a shy pirate smile.