Traveling Mercies

E D I T O R ' S_N O T E

Look for excerpts from Anne Lamott's new book, "Traveling Mercies," on Fridays; Word by Word, Lamott's biweekly Thursday column, will return March 4.

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An appeal from the author Why you should become a Salon member. By Anne Lamott

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T A B L E_T A L K

How can you teach talkative children to listen? Share your views on theblabbering mouths of babes in the Mothers area of TableTalk

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R E C E N T L Y

Let-r play
By Polly Shulman
Classic and iconoclastic books shake up the alphabet and take kids on a trip through the Dictionapolis of the written word
(02/18/99)

Traumas in adolescent life
By Curtis Sittenfeld
A judge of the Seventeen magazine fiction contest recalls what was endearing about the writers of the 400 stories she read -- even the really bad ones
(02/17/99)

You're a good man, Dr. Smurf
By Martha Beck
Two Harvard degrees taught me to fixate on appearances. My son, bornwith Down's syndrome, showed me the sweet core of ordinary things
(02/16/99)

Cracks
By Anne Lamott
Despite meeting an intelligent Christian, I was not quite ready to give up a life of shame, failure, X-rated motels and Scotch just yet
(02/12/99)

A sardine's story
By Sallie Tisdale
A picture book that follows the life of a fish, all the way to her death and packaging in a can -- has some grown-ups squirming. Maybe kids need to help them face reality
(02/11/99)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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FLEA MARKET | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Finally, one morning in July of 1986, I woke up so sick and in such despair for the umpteenth day in a row that I knew that I was either going to die or have to quit drinking. I poured a bottle of pinot noir down the sink, and dumped a Nike box full of assorted pills off the side of my house boat, and entered into recovery with fear and trembling. I was not sure that I could or even wanted to go one day without drinking or pills or cocaine. But it turned out that I could and that a whole lot of people were going to help me, with kind eyes and hot cups of bad coffee.

If I were to give a slide show of the next ten years, it would begin on the day I was baptized, one year after I got sober. I called Reverend Noel at eight that morning and told him that I really didn't think I was ready because I wasn't good enough yet. Also, I was insane. My heart was good, but my insides had gone bad. And he said, "You're putting the cart before the horse. So -- honey? Come on down." My family and all my closest friends came to church that day to watch as James dipped his hand into the font, bathed my forehead with cool water, and spoke the words of Langston Hughes:

In the next slide, two years later, I'm pregnant by a man I was dating, who really didn't want to be a father at the time. I was still poor, but friends and the people at my church convinced me that if I decided to have a child, we would be provided for every step of the way. Pammy really wanted the kid. She had been both trying to conceive and waiting to adopt for years. She said, "Let me put it this way, Annie. We're going to have this baby."

In the next slide, in August of 1989, my son is born. I named him Sam. He had huge eyes and his father's straight hair. Three months later he was baptized at St. Andrew.

Then, six months later, there would be a slide of me nursing Sam, holding the phone to my ear with a look of shock on my face, because Pammy had just been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy and then aggressive chemotherapy. All that platinum hair fell out, and she took to wearing beautiful scarves and soft cotton caps. I would show you a slide of her dancing in a ballet group for breast cancer survivors. I would show you a slide of her wading in the creek at Samuel P. Taylor Park, her jeans rolled up and Sam, on her shoulders, holding on to the ends of her scarf like reins. There was joy and there were many setbacks, and she played it way down: two days after she'd finally begun to complain mildly about a cough that wouldn't go away, a doctor aspirated a liter of fluid from her lungs. More chemo, and the hair that had grown back fell out again. "Come shave it all off for me," she asked over the phone. "As it is, it looks like hair I found in the trash can and tried to glue back on." I gently brushed almost all of it off. She loved visits with Sam, grieved that she wouldn't get to watch him grow older. The cancer went into remission. A few months later, a slide would show her in a soft pink cotton cap with a look of supreme joy on her face, because her adoption lawyer had finally called and asked if she and her husband wanted to adopt. They did. They were given a baby girl named Rebecca, my darling goddaughter.

But the cancer came back. Not long before she died, my favorite slide would show her lying on a chaise in her lush and overgrown garden, beaming. Out of a storage room that we used for changing Rebecca, we had just fashioned a guest room for her sister, who was coming in from Italy to take care of her. She'd been up and around all morning, trying out the guest bed here and then there, putting it near the window, wanting the sun to fall on her sister just so. We found a place for all the extra junk, and a little rug for the floor, a tiny chest of drawers, and pictures for the wall. So then she went outside to rest, dressed, happy, looking once more like a citizen of the world. It was sunny and blue, a perfect day, and she had the radiance of someone who has been upright and really moving for one last time, so happy and light that even without hair, wearing a scarf, she seemed like a blonde again.

She was thirty-seven when she died. We scattered her ashes one sunny day from a boat out near the Farallon Islands -- white-gold sunlight, mild breezes, baskets and bags of roses.

Then there would be some fabulous slides of Rebecca growing up. In many of these photos, she is dressed in bright saris and veils, as she and her dad go to India quite a lot to visit an ashram there. She has long brown hair, like a filly.

Meanwhile, Sam grew tall and thin and sweet, with huge brown eyes.

Then there would be thousands of slides of Sam and me at St. Andrew. I think we have missed church ten times in twelve years. Sam would be snuggled in people's arms in the earlier shots, shyly trying to wriggle free of hugs in the later ones. There would be different pastors along the way, none of them exactly right for us until a few years ago when a tall African-American woman named Veronica came to lead us. She has huge gentle doctor hands, with dimples where the knuckles should be, like a baby's fists. She stepped into us, the wonderful old worn pair of pants that is St. Andrew, and they fit. She sings to us sometimes from stories of when she was a child. She told us this story just the other day: When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn't find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the police car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, "You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here."

And that is why I have stayed so close -- because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.
SALON | Feb. 19, 1999

© 1998 Anne Lamott; published by arrangement with the author and Pantheon Books.

Anne Lamott's regular column will return March 4.

Click here for information on Anne Lamott's book tour.