Good Words from Anne Lamott

 


        I have passed through the initial five stages of grief: Denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance.  Now I am in fascination--cobra hypnosis, newly apoplectic every day by the latest.  I believe I have actually keened within recent memory.  At this rate, I may have a flickering tic in my eye by sundown.  Also, I am doing the unconscious eating that everyone I know is doing, whole packages of Oreos for us sugar freaks, whole bags of chips for the salty-fats crowd, oat-bags of dip, whole sides of beef: no little dog is safe in the midst of our voracious appetite for numbness. I absolve everyone: It's okay for now.  We need ballast.

     Because we're all doomed.  It's hopeless.

     Oh, wait, never mind.

     But what do we do, what do we do?  We have to figure this out--oh wait, never mind.  Figure out is not a good slogan (altho certain very tall people in your household and classrooms always insisted that this was the golden path to glory.) (I will not name names.)

     Where do we start?

     Well, that one I can answer.  We start here, where our butts are.  We get up and feed the dogs--I said feed them, not eat them.

    We can say a little prayer even if we are not believers: "Help" is a great prayer.  "Help me, help me, I am a completely doomed human" is even better.  When my then six-year-old son got his head stuck in the bars of a chair at the dining table of some friends we were visiting, he went unnoticed for a time, and then a tiny voice piped up and said, "I need help with me."  The friends had this calligraphied and framed for us.  I say it at least once a month.

     I'll tell you a great praise prayer for the believers, and then one for the Nons.

     I have a friend who is a hopeless alcoholic of the worst sort, like me, who somehow like me has put a few years between those cool refreshing beers we had with breakfast, just to get all the flies going in one direction.  She went to some sort of "meeting," and met up with a woman who had had most of her tongue removed during surgery for an aggressive oral cancer.  She shared during the meeting that the cancer had returned and she needed another round of chemo.  Everyone looked on in dismay, but she flipped her wrist dismissively.  "Oh, I'm not worried," she said. "God's got it."

     God's got it.  This is so not me.  I'm more of a Rube Goldberg machine of herky jerky attempts at control, domination, and, most importantly, assigning blame.  But then the pain and isolation of feeling like the wizard of Oz gets my attention and eventually, I give up.  I surrender.  I lay down my weapons, and breathe, maybe not like the Dalai Lama, but less like a sturgeon on a dock

    And for the Nons:  a dear friend once got a call from a world-famous screenwriter, who, in the throes of grandiosity, had lost or was losing almost everything precious to him.   He recounted a litany of troubles and obsessions, from the distant wife to the scary child to the lack of prospects, and then demanded that my friend gave him one good reason to stay here on this vale of tears.

     My friend listened attentively, which is pretty much all we have to offer, and then said, "Mornings are nice."

    That's a gorgeous prayer.

    "i thank You God for most this amazing day:" cummings wrote, "for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes."

    So that's where we start--here, now, damaged, scared, grateful, surrounded by our beloved, by sad strangers, with lots of poor people to care for, a world to save, a bracing cup of coffee, walks begging to be taken, lonely people to check in with, Oreos and Cheetos to get through, (someone's got to do it,) a whole new day before us, that we can screw up or not. Sigh.  Here we go.

A Commencement Address by Toni Morrison

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/21/toni-morrison-wellesley-commencement/

I've loved Toni Morrison since reading The Bluest Eye and then all her other novels.  She's brilliant and wonderfully wise.

This speech was delivered in 2004, but it's perfect for today.

What now?

In the past couple of weeks, I've had countless conversations with friends (face to face, in email, and on the phone) who are despondent about the election.

My Blue Friends and I have eaten more candy, watched more movies than news, cleaned out our closets, and spent a fair amount of time under the covers, unable to find the energy to move forward.  We've been gripped in paralysis.

When I feel hopeless, I look to writers who have wiser things to say about it than I do.  This morning's Brainpickings includes Toni Morrison's response:

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=70016c55ba&e=7940cd5ca2

For a few days, I deactivated my account on Facebook, only to reactivate it to read something Kate asked me to read.  I'm tired of politics.  I'm tired of people passing on "fake news" stories without checking the veracity of the stories.  I'm tired of being pulled into (and contributing to)  the maelstrom of fear and anger.

Ragged Dolls

On my recent trip, I took many photographs of doll faces.  Then I ran them through the cheater watercolor app on my phone, Waterlogue.

When I showed them to Elena, she said, "I don't like ragged dolls." Then she shot me a sort of warning look: "If anybody gives  me one, I won't play with it."

Okay.  That's settled then.  No Raggedy Ann or Andy dolls for Elena.

Believing

We can learn a lot from children, believers in stories.

Yesterday, I was doing the voices of the pink elephant (Stompy), the raccoon (Racoony) and the kitty (Liddy.)

Elena was the only shopper in my pet shop.

The elephant spoke in a creaky old lady voice; Racoony spoke in a husky voice; and Liddy spoke in a baby voice.

"Will I be happy in your house?" Stompy asked.

"Yes, we will all love you and I will have you all my life," Elena said.  "I will always be with you."

Earlier, Elena had needed a Band-Aid.  When she noticed a slight stitching defect in the trunk of the pink elephant, Stompy said, "Maybe I need a Band-Aid."

Elena turned to me and whispered--whispered! so Stompy wouldn't hear--"Let's don't tell her about Band-Aids."

Teaching herself to read....

As we were riding from place to place today, Elena kept spelling words in the backseat: Mommy, Elena, Daddy, Nathan, zoo, zebra.  Later, she read several words to me from new books I'd bought her.

"How did you learn to spell and read?" I asked her.

"I taught myself," she said. "Easy."

Her mother confirmed that fact.  All she needed to know, she said, were the sounds of the letters.  Putting them together into words came easy after that.

A bonus day with my love bug

Hopefully, today will make Elena a lifelong lover of art shows.  We so enjoyed the Uptown Stroll today, especially at Alison's booth of fabric and whimsy and hats.  Elena picked a pink bubble hat for cold mornings, if we ever have any:

She also chose Christmas presents for her family.  I won't say what in case her parents read this, but they are her choice entirely and she's so excited about them. If you're in San Antonio, the Uptown Stroll continues on Sunday on and around Thorain and Mandalay.

Then we pushed it--me with my back ache and Elena with her allergies acting up--and spent the rest of the day at the zoo, riding the train and picking out a pink elephant.  Pink was the color of the day.

We're both rather lethargic now, so we're going to finish the day with a movie on Netflix.

I don't see the likeness,
but it's a caricature after all.

Love Bug

That's what I call her, Love Bug.
When I picked her up from school, she ran into my arms with pure glee.
Who even uses that word anymore, glee?
She hugs with her whole heart for a long time, nothing tepid or half-hearted.

Elena has always cried in a grown-up way. Her eyes fill up with tears but there's no sound.
She had her bags for overnight but she had the sniffles and a cold coming on.  "I want to come over til night, but then I want to go home with my Mommy and Daddy."

We went to a couple of shops in old town Helotes while waiting for her parents' to get my text. One of the shops used to be a Mexican restaurant where went on Friday nights when Day and Will were little.

She chose a plastic horse and an old ceramic cow creamer, but wanted to be sure we went to the
"Sewing store" where they have the big-eyed stuffed animals she likes.
I'd forgotten that last time we went to Jo Ann's she'd spent half an hour choosing just the right one and I'd promised we'd get another one next time.

"Grownups sure do have a lot of work to do," she said as we were driving.
"Like what?" I asked.
"Making rules for their children, going to their jobs, making the food, fixing things when they break."

"Children don't have to do anything but what they want," she said.

"What kind of rules do your parents make?" I asked.
"Like not being rude to your brother and making good choices," she said.
"Sometimes I am rude to my brother because he doesn't let me play with his Legos."

When one driver honked at another, she said, "One time someone even honked at my parents!
That is so rude!  Other people are not the boss of us!"
"Who is the boss of us?" I asked.

"Jesus and God," she said. "But they don't talk so you can't ever really hear them."

At eleven when her parents came to pick her up, she said,
"But now I wish I said I would spend the night! I'm not sick anymore."

We'd started watching Tarzan but had to stop because 'it got sad."
"Let's just sit on the floor and make art things."
So we did, me and Love Bug and Racoony and Liddy, the stuffed animals."

"Sometimes I donate my toys," she said, "But never my stuffed animals.  They need me."

Halloween Party on Ogden Lane

This is my party of the year.  My little house is filled with thirty-plus people who gather to eat hot dogs and veggies and cookies, then head over to Argo and Abiso to Trick-Or-Treat.

Cousins, Audrey, Elena and Preston

Cowboy Preston

Vicky and Preston's little brother, Sage

Elena, Nathan, Veronica, Will
along with Skippy and Conway Twitty

Preston, Nathan, Audrey and Elena

Charlotte, Elena and Kate
Breaking in the new sofa

Kate, Sebastien and Makken

The unicorn and the princess

Nathan and Will

Ninja Nathan

Audrey's new little brother, Christian

Eric, Brenda (Audrey's parents) and Nando, Granddaddy

Telling The Truth

Without secrets, we'd have no literature.  Readers and movie-goers are willing to spend hours to follow the skein of deception to get to the core of truth in the end.

As a card-carrying narrative addict, I enjoy the pleasure of the journey to truth as much as the final destination, as if believing that the "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is possible, Perry Mason notwithstanding.

Along the way, there are ambiguities, different perceptions and outright blindnesses, just as in real life.  It's fascinating to observe the ways we humans cover up or hide from the light of truth as much as the ways we try hard to be truthful.

I've never seen  a political campaign so fraught with fact-checking and revelations of outright lies.  I learned a new word that applies: Truthiness: a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

There's literal truth-telling: the facts as best we know them.  But there are also plenty of ways we mostly-honest people lie to ourselves and each other, often unintentionally. We tell half-truths, we keep secrets, we gloss over details that matter, we finesse, we exaggerate.

When friends intentionally keep secrets from each other, the arteries of the heart of friendship get clogged.  When friends trust each other to tell the truth as we know it, it's like rough-drafting a story: this may not be the version I want to share with the world just yet, but here it is, the embryo of a story that wants a second set of ears and eyes.

What a relief it is to tell the truth, the partial truth, and skewed perceptions of the truth! What a freedom it is to have a friend listen as the truth evolves.