by Anne Lamott
The mystery of this still leaves me scratching my head, that a baby was made in my body, grew on my milk, and lives here in the house with the kitty and me. It’s too big to comprehend: Pammy said the other day that the thing happening in her body is so bizarre, so unthinkable, that trying to accept it is like being eight years old again with someone explaining to her that the light from the star she is staring at took twenty years to reach her. All she can do is to stand there staring at the star with a kind of fearful wonder, waiting for the information to make sense.
I pray all the time that we make it to the water, that the birds don’t pick Sam off. I’m afraid that they’re going to get Pammy, though. I guess they get us all. When I held Sam alone for the first time, after Steve and Pammy had gone home the night that he was born, I was nursing him and feeling really spiritual, thinking, Please, please, God, help him be someone who feels compassion, who feels God’s presence loose in the world, who doesn’t give up on peace and justice and mercy for everyone. And then one second later I was begging, Okay, skip all that shit, forget it—just please, please let him outlive me.
He’s in for it now, big-time, for all kinds of crazy shit. There are times when he experiences bad things, pain or fear or hurt feelings, and he clings to me like a wet cat, like a cat you’re trying to bathe in the sink who tries to climb onto your head. It is the same way I cling to God at 5:00 in the morning when I wake up thinking that maybe Pammy is not going to live forever.
I wonder if someday Sam will end up believing in God. Let’s face it, the whole thing is sort of ridiculous. I was talking to Bill Rankin about Pammy, and somehow we ended up talking about this teenage boy in Bill’s parish who died recently of bone cancer. I felt really appalled, because the whole family had been fighting so hard and keeping so faithful, and then the kid just died anyway. It just fills me with unspeakable terror, for obvious reasons. And I asked Bill, “What kind of all-merciful God would let that happen?” and Bill just sort of shook his head. I said, “Don’t you priests have anything to say for yourselves?” and he said that a God who adores us and is truly and totally merciful and present for us, who will one day bring us home to be with him, is something we hope is true, something our faith tells us is true. And I said, “Well, that is not very goddamn much, is it?” and he shook his head. And I said, “Do you think this teenage boy is with God now, in his arms, and if Pammy dies, she’ll be with him, too? And that he’s taking care of her somehow right now?” And he looked at me sort of apologetically, for a really long time, and then he said, “I don’t know.” I said. “But what do you think?” and he said in this very gentle voice, “I hope so.”
I don’t know what to make of it all. But, as I was writing this just now, Sam went into the living room closet, played a little song on the guitar, and then, just this second, peered around from behind the closet door, babbling absolutely incoherently, grinning at me like some like crazy old Indian holy man.
PAMELA MURRAY DIED AT HOME
IN MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA,
ON NOVEMBER 2, 1992.
SHE WAS THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD.
ALSO BY ANNE LAMOTT
BIRD BY BIRD
Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’ ”
Writing/0-385-48001-6
CROOKED LITTLE HEART
Rosie Ferguson, in the first bloom of young womanhood, is obsessed with tournament tennis. Her mother is a recovering alcoholic still grieving the death of her first husband; her stepfather, a struggling writer, is wrestling with his own demons. And now Rosie finds that her athletic gifts, once a source of triumph and escape, place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers is developing an obsession of his own.
Fiction/0-385-49180-8
TRAVELING MERCIES
Some Thoughts on Faith
Traveling Mercies explains how Anne Lamott came to have the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alludes to in her writing. The people in Anne Lamott’s real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. Lamott’s faith isn’t about easy answers, which endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she comes to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself.
Religion/0-385-49609-5
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