TODAY

Word by Word
By Anne Lamott
Meditations on belly-button lint, bodily decay and the sensuality of life

Table Talk
Is homeschooling a copout?

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ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BY ANNE LAMOTT | so there I was on the beach at San Quentin last week with the flu. The viral cloud of autumn has descended and Sam is back in school which means he is a portable petri dish of filth and pestilence, and we have caught everything that has come down the pike. To make everything worse, there's a truly wonderful writer named Rick Fields who lives down the street, who is in the process of living with metastatic lung cancer. He drives by our house a couple of times a day and -- I consider this so aggressive -- he seems to be in a really good mood most of the time. I hate that: I worry that he's out to get me. Several weeks ago, when I had a head cold, I pounded on his windshield when he attempted to drive by, and said, "Why are you doing this to me? Look at me -- I'm sick as a dog! I'm conGESted."

He smiled. He loves me, loves my emotional drag-queeny self. He's about my age, and he looks a little bit like Spielberg, especially because he wears a baseball cap most of the time now and does not shave every day.

I saw a recent interview he did for a Buddhist quarterly, in which he said that he's savoring the moments of his life so intently right now that he no longer feels that he has a life-threatening disease, he has a disease-threatening life. I am really trying to get there, but I've got to say, it isn't going quite as well as I had hoped.

When I got the flu, the head-achy flu, I limped downstairs in the morning to get my paper, gripping my lower back like Grandpa Walton. And of course right then Rick drove by. He looked grizzled, and radiant, which is a fabulous mix. I stepped in front of his car to make him stop, which he did. Then I pounded on his windshield.

He smiled.

"Do you do this just to mess with me?" I asked. "Drive around looking content? Because now I have the flu."

"I'm sorry," he said. "Sometimes colds and flus are harder to handle than cancer."

"Especially for an extremely sensitive person like myself."

"Yes," he said, and patted the back of my hand. "But did you notice what an incredibly beautiful day it is?" he asked. "The air has gotten so sharp with autumn, even though it's sunny, and blue."

"Oh, STOP," I said.

In his interview in the Buddhist magazine, he said, "I'm going to live until I die. And the doctor is going to live until he dies. He thinks he knows when I'M going to die, but he doesn't even know when he's going to die."

So that it is why I came to the beach at San Quentin -- because all of a sudden I began to wonder how I might play out the day if it was going to be my last day on earth. And I do not want to spend my last day on earth doing either Big I, or Poor Me. I just want to be here, on board. Rick said in the interview, "I'll live -- and here I'll add, as well, as deeply, as madly as I can -- until I die." So I decided to go to the beach and practice being in it as if it were my last day of my life.

N E X T+P A G E+| The warm, familiar scent of bellybutton lint