Vonnegut's Blues for America by Kurt Vonnegut

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.

When I went to grade school in Indian apolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit – ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead – the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That’s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That’s correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

I’m kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about 10 to one.

I’m going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.”

But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s licence – look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: “What is life all about?’” I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Writers on Writing: Family Ghosts Hoard Secrets That Bewitch the Living By Amy Tan

This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributions, includes essays by John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Bellow and others. Related Articles • Featured Author: Amy Tan • Review: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' (Feb. 18, 2001) • First Chapter: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' • Writers on Writing Archive

In the last week of her life, my three half- sisters, my younger brother and I gathered around the easy chair in which our mother lay floating between this world and the next.

"Nyah-Nyah," she moaned in Shanghainese and waved to an apparition on the ceiling. Then she motioned to me. "Invite Nyah-Nyah to sit down. Bring her tea, and quick, fetch her my mink coat."

Indulging my mother these wishes, I began to write her obituary, with the help of my siblings. It was a task that kept our minds focused, unified us, made us feel helpful instead of helpless. That was how I learned for the first time what my mother's birth name was.

"Li Bingzi," my sister from Shanghai told me. My God, to think I had never known the name given to her by her own mother. "Born Li Bingzi," I duly put down, "daughter of Li Jingmei . . . " And another sister chided: "No, no, Grandma's last name was not Li. It was Gu. Gu Jingmei."

I sensed the ghost of my grandmother in the room. "Ai-ya! What a stupid girl," I could hear her saying, "This is what happens when you let them become Americans." I imagined other wispy-edged relatives, more frowning and head-shaking.

As my sisters and I chatted, we exchanged further notes. Our mother, one sister revealed, received a different name, Tu Lian Zen, when she was adopted after her mother's death. Then she chose a school name, Tu Ching, which she kept after she married an abusive man named Wang. Whether she ever legally divorced this man is not clear. Nonetheless, she fled the marriage, left behind three daughters and came to America under the name Ching Tu, then married my father, who christened her Daisy after a song about being half-crazy in love on a bicycle built for two.

My mother, I realized, never told my sisters about the name Daisy Tan Chan, which she took when she married for the third time in her 70's. A year later she had the marriage annulled and reverted to Daisy C. Tan. As to T. C. Lee, the dapper gentlemen whom our family in Beijing met when he and our mother honeymooned there, well, the truth was, she and T. C. had simply lived together without the benefit of marriage. My sisters guffawed.

My mother's many names were vestiges of her many selves, lives I have been excavating most of my own adult life. At times I have dreaded that I might stumble across evidence of additional siblings, husbands and lovers, more secrets, ghosts and shame. I had once thought I was the only daughter, the middle child, a position I took to have great psychological significance. I then discovered I was actually the youngest of five girls, that one had died at birth. There were three brothers as well, including one I didn't know about; he died at age 2 in 1939. With all taken into account, I was demoted to No. 7 of eight children.

There was also confusion about my mother's age. She had one birth date based on the Chinese calendar of ancient lunar cycles and the method of considering a baby 1 year old the day it is born.

In determining her younger Western age, she miscalculated the year and date, thus writing that she was born on May 8, 1917, instead of May 9, 1916. When she was about to turn 64, she told me she was really almost 65. She knew this for sure, she insisted, because she was born in a Dragon Year, 1916, just as I was born in a Dragon Year 36 years later. There was absolutely no way she could confuse this. Thereafter, she fretted day after day, until my husband untangled bureaucratic knots and set the record straight in time for her to retire in the right year and collect Social Security.

But that was not the end to her questionable age. My sisters and I found out that for her obituary the international Chinese-language newspaper wanted to report her as 86 instead of 83, to account for the bonus years she had earned for living a long life. All the confusion about her age, her three marriages, her many names and the order in which her children, living and dead, should be listed led us to nix the idea of a Chinese obituary. It would not look proper if we told the truth.

In writing a simple obituary, I realized there was still much that I did not know about my mother. Though I had written three novels informed by her life, she remained a source of revelation and surprise. Of course I longed to know more about her. Her past had shaped me: her sense of danger, her regrets, the mistakes she vowed never to repeat. What I know about myself is related to what I know about her, her secrets, or in some cases fragments of them. I found the pieces both by deliberate effort and by accident, and with each discovery I had to reconfigure the growing whole.

"Nyah-Nyah," my mother kept calling in the last days of her life.

I finally thought to ask what Nyah- Nyah meant.

"A Shanghainese nickname for `Grandmother,' " my oldest sister, Yuhang, replied. And then I remembered a story my mother once told me, of her being 4 years old, delirious and near death as she called to her grandmother to stop the pain. My mother had been horribly injured when a pot of boiling oil fell across her neck. Nyah-Nyah had sat by her bedside, day and night, telling her that her funeral clothes had already been made but were very plain because she had not lived long enough to deserve anything more elaborate.

She told the little girl that everyone would soon forget her because she had lived too short a time for them to remember much. That was how Nyah-Nyah, who loved my mother very much, scared her back to life. Now my mother was calling for Nyah-Nyah once again. This time I think Nyah-Nyah was telling my mother that her funeral clothes had already been made, and not to worry, they were fancy beyond belief.

For four days my mother's breathing kept me in suspense. She would take three breaths, then nothing would follow for 45 seconds, sometimes longer. It was like watching the tidal wash in anticipation of a tidal wave. At night I lay next to her, sleepless, staring at the pulse bobbing in the cove of her throat, my own heart pounding to this steady yet uncertain rhythm. Later I put a pearl in the hollow so I could more easily see this proof of life. Though I dreaded that she would stop breathing, I was relieved that she would die of natural causes and not from suicide.

For as long as I can remember, my mother talked of killing herself. The threats came at least once a month, sometimes day after day. She would utter them in front of me, my brothers, anyone within earshot. On a few occasions she made an attempt. I remember seeing her lean out an open door as our car sped down the highway, and we, her mute children, sat in the back. Several times she ran into busy lanes of traffic with flailing arms.

In my memories of adolescence there are also flashes of a knife, a cleaver, a pair of scissors. The reasons my mother wanted to die were many. It could have been something my father did or didn't do. It was often something I said or didn't say. Whatever it was, we were supposed to make amends before it was too late. Once I refused to say I was sorry. Then I was really sorry.

I didn't realize until I was in my 30's that her suicidal impulses most likely started when she saw her own mother kill herself. She was only 9 when this happened. And thereafter some part of her would always remain the 9-year-old who believed that the only escape from any kind of unhappiness was the route her mother took, an immediate departure from this world to a heavenly form of China. As long as she was alive, her mother's death was an everlasting punishment to her. Whenever bad luck visited us, she asked aloud whether her mother was angry at her. Was this a curse?

Though my grandmother killed herself in 1925, she was a presence in my young life, a ghostly presence. Ever since I was 4, my mother had believed I could see my grandmother. That was because like most children I had complained about a bogeyman under my bed. Instead of reassuring me that this was only my imagination, my mother asked me to pass along messages. She was convinced my grandmother had taken me as her confidante.

I soon learned not to mention what scared me, and my mother did not press too much for me to talk to the ghost. That was because my father, an engineer, was also by avocation a Baptist minister, and the only ghost he believed we should talk to was the Holy Ghost.

But when I was 15, my father and brother died, both of brain tumors, and my mother began urging me often to ask their ghosts why this had happened. She had me sit before a Ouija board, then noted when the room grew cold, when telltale pings and creaks signaled that the spirits had arrived. She was always hoping for one last goodbye, one more message of love.

Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would also seek their advice on the stock market. With our fingers poised over the planchette, she would ask, "Should I buy I.B.M. or U.S. Steel?" I would push it to whichever answer was the shortest, a method of stock trading that, by the way, proved quite successful in my mother's portfolio.

For our mother's memorial card, our family selected the photos that captured her best: Grinning as she cooked with a gigantic wok. Smiling shyly for my father in the early days of their courtship. Staring solemnly as an 8-year-old adorned in mourning clothes for her grandmother, Nyah-Nyah.

My mother had always been a natural Shanghainese beauty and quite vain and snobby as a result. She bragged how spoiled she was as a child because she was "pretty beyond belief." She used to lament openly that I had not inherited any of her good Shanghainese features, that I resembled my father, a Cantonese. My nose was too broad, my skin too dark, my lips too coarse. I had long recovered from the wounds of those remarks when Alzheimer's began to erode her logic and memory. One day, my mother announced that I looked just like her. It was not too late to hear such praise.

As I studied the photos with my sisters, I saw that I did indeed resemble her. She and I had the same crimped chin, the wrinkling caused by holding back what we felt but could not say. In her case, it was secrets and hopes. In mine, it was protests and desires. For many years we had been unable to say, "I love you" to each other.

During the last hour of her life, our family murmured to our mother that we loved her very much and were sad to see her go. We whispered to her all the things we would miss: her dumplings, her advice, her humor. To myself I mourned: Who else would worry about me so much? Who else would describe in explosive detail what might happen to parts of my body if I was careless? Who would be frank enough to warn that my husband might exchange me for a younger woman unless I forced him to buy me jewels so expensive it would be impossible for him to leave both me and the gems behind?

My mother did not speak during those last four days, but with her final breath, a long release of an exhalation, she uttered a faint sound, a single sustained note. I had to bend my ear to her mouth to hear. I was the only one who heard it, but I don't think it was my imagination. To me, she sounded surprised.

After my mother died, I began to rewrite the novel I had been working on for the past five years. I wrote with the steadfastness of grief. My editor and dear friend, the great Faith Sale, would have called that grief "finding the real heart of the story." My mentor, Molly Giles, said the bones were there, I just had to reassemble them in a new way. To find that heart and repair the bones, I had to break them into pieces, then start to dig.

And so I rewrote, remembering what scared me: the ghost, the threats, the curse. I wrote of wrong birth dates, secret marriages, the changing place one has in a family, the names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. And with the help of my ghostwriters, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.

School Lunches by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows. So: sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches–at parochial schools, private schools, twenty years earlier than mine, or ten years earlier, in Southern California or New York. And they always turn out to be similar to my middle-class Northern California public school lunches. But in important ways they are different, too, and this is even more interesting, for the obvious reason that when we study the differences, we see in bolder relief what we have in common. And for some strange reason, when my students start to jam with me about school lunches, they get off the phone feeling more enthusiastic and in better shape.

One time, in one of my classes, I asked my students to write about lunches for half an hour, and I sat down with them and wrote:

Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is. It was a precursor of the showers in seventh- and eighth-grade gym, where everyone could see your everything or your lack of everything, and smell the inside smells of your body, and the whole time you just knew you were going to catch something. The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like people, were Okay, and some weren't. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.

But in half an hour there was already too much material for me and some of the people in the class, and it threatened to immobilize us. So we decided not to even bother with our parents' handwriting on the outside of the brown paper lunch bag–how much it resembled a Turkish assassin's and what that said about us. We decided to set aside the bag itself for a moment. For the time being we'd stick with the contents, and, to begin with, the sandwich. That was the one-inch picture frame we were going to look through.

Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.

Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry for instance–

Now, see, I couldn't remember, as I wrote in class, just exactly what it was about raspberry jam that was so disconcerting. So when I got home that night, I called a friend who is also a writer, very successful and maybe the most neurotic person I know. I said, Remember how in elementary school, grape jelly was best in your lunch, strawberry jam was Okay, but raspberry was real borderline? Can you talk to me about your experiences with these things? And my friend went into an impassioned, disoriented riff about how there was too much happening in raspberry jam, too many seeds per spoonful. It felt like there were all these tiny little pod people. It was Body-Snatcher jam.

My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don't know why, but I'm sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.

I sat down that night and kept writing:

In general, come to think of it, when fathers made lunches, things always turned out badly. Fathers were so oblivious back then. They were like foreigners. For instance, a code bologna sandwich meant white bread, one or two slices of bologna, mustard, one wilted piece of iceberg lettuce. (The Catholics were heavily into mayonnaise, which we might get into later.) Fathers, to begin with, always used non-regulation bread and then buttered it, which made the sandwich about as tradable as a plate of haggis. Also, everything was always falling out of the sandwiches fathers made. I'm not sure why. They'd use anything green and frilly for lettuce, when of course only the one piece of wilted iceberg was permissible. Your friends saw a big leaf of romaine falling out along with the slice of bologna, and you might soon find yourself alongside the kid against the fence.

There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn't? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn't end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn't help.

He almost certainly ended up being a writer.

Now, who knows if any of this is usable material? There's no way to tell until you've gotten it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write.

I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away. I think this was some sort of Zen reference–the Buddhist disciple remembering Buddha's flower sermon, in which all Buddha did was hold up a flower and twirl it, in silence, sitting on the mountain. Me, I'm a nice Christian girl, and while I wish I could quote something kicky and inspirational that Jesus had to say about writing, the truth is that when students ask me for the best practical advice I know, I always pick up a piece of paper and pantomime scribbling away. My students usually think this is a very wise and Zenlike thing for me to convey. Mostly I forgot to give Natalie Goldberg credit.

But write about what? they ask next.

Write about carrot sticks, I tell them:

Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn't even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju. If you so much as glanced at him, a visible empathetic arc would stretch between you, and link you two in the minds of your peers forever.

And then there was the matter of the wrapping paper; waxed paper and later Saran wrap. If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right. So it was a little like making your bed at lunch. Everything should be squared. Sandwiches should be wrapped with hospital corners. Right?

Okay. That's all. But now I have this material to chose from, to work with, to shape, edit, highlight, or toss. (And that's very nice of you to suggest the later.) That is my version of school lunches. Yours might be different and I would be interested in hearing about it. (Now don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting you mail it to me. But I bet it reveals some interesting stuff about you and your family and the times in which you grew up.) And even though what I've quoted here is shitty-first-draft stuff, the boy against the fence appeared out of nowhere–I had no idea when I started writing that he was in my memory. To me, he is the most important thing that came out of this exercise. Tomorrow when I sit down to work on my novel, he will be someone who matters to me, whom I want to work with, get to know, who has something important to say or somewhere only he can take me.

Polaroids by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't–and, in fact, you're not supposed to–know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn't notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him. Now, maybe it's his family, or the family of one of the kids in the class, but at any rate these people are going to be in the photograph, too. Then the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer, and finally you see the husband and wife holding their baby with two children standing beside them. And at first it all seems very sweet, but then the shadows begin to appear, and then you start to see the animal tragedy, the baboons baring their teeth. And then you see a flash of bright red flowers in the bottom left quadrant that you didn't even know were in the picture when you took it, and these flowers evoke a time or a memory that moves you mysteriously. And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

You couldn't have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about.

Watch this Polaroid develop:

Six or seven years ago I was asked to write an article on the Special Olympics. I had been going to the local event for years, partly because a couple of friends of mine. Also, I love sports, and I love to watch athletes, special or otherwise. So I showed up this time with a great deal of interest but no real sense of what the finished article might look like.

Things tend to go very, very slowly at the Special Olympics. It's not like trying to cover the Preakness. Still, it has its own exhilaration, and I cheered and took notes all morning.

The last track-and-field event before lunch was a twenty-five yard race by some unusually handicapped runners and walkers, many of whom seemed completely confused. They lumped and careened along, one man making a snail-slow break for the stands, one heading out toward the steps where the winners receive their medals; both of them were shepherded back. The race took just about forever. And here it was nearly noon and we were all so hungry. Finally, though, everyone crossed the line, and those of us in the stands got up to go–when we noticed that way down the track, four or five yards from the starting line, was another runner.

She was a girl of about sixteen with a normal-looking face above a wracked and emaciated body. She was on metal crutches, and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, Come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy girlish way.

A tall African American man with no front teeth fell into step with me as I left the bleachers to go look for some lunch. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, and I looked up at him, and he handed me a Polaroid someone had taken of him and his friends that day. "Look at us," he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down's syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. "That," he said, is one cool man."

And this was the image from which the article began forming, although I could not have told you exactly what the piece would end up being about. I just knew that something had started to emerge.

After lunch I wandered over to the auditorium, where it turned out a men's basketball game was in progress. The African American man with no front teeth was the star of the game. You could tell that he was because even though no one had made a basket yet, his teammates almost always passed him the ball. Even the people on the other team passed him the ball a lot. In lieu of any scoring, the men stampeded in slow motion up and down the court, dribbling the ball thunderously. I had never heard such a loud game. It was all sort of crazily beautiful. I imagined describing the game for my article and then for my students: the loudness, the joy. I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line–all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I could see it almost as clearly as I could the photograph of that one cool man and his two friends.

The auditorium bleachers were packed. Then a few minutes later, still no score on the board, the tall black man dribbled slowly from one end of the court to the other, and heaved the ball up into the air, and dropped it into the basket. The crowd roared, and all the men from both teams looked up wide-eyed at the hoop, as if it had just burst into flames.

You would have loved it, I tell my students. You would have felt like you could write all day.

The Rules of Writing Practice by Natalie Goldberg

from Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

For fifteen years now, at the beginning of every writing workshop, I have repeated the rules for writing practice. So, I will repeat them again here. And I want to say why I repeat them: Because they are the bottom line, the foundation of learning to trust your own mind. Trusting your own mind is essential for writing. Words come out of the mind.

And I believe in these rules. Perhaps I'm a little fanatical about them.

A friend, teasing me, said, "You act as if they are the rules to live by, as though they simply apply to everything."

I smiled. "Okay, let's try it. Do they apply to sex?"

I stuck up my thumb for rule number one. "Keep your hand moving." I nodded yes.

Index finger, rule number two. "Be specific." I let out a yelp of glee. It was working.

Finger number three. "Lose control." It was clear that sex and writing were the same thing.

Then, number four. "Don't think." I said. Yes, for sex, too, I nodded.

I proved my point. My friend and I laughed.

Go ahead, try these rules for tennis, hang gliding, driving a car, making a grilled cheese sandwich, disciplining a dog or a snake. Okay. They might not always work. They work for writing. Try them.

1. Keep your hand moving. When you sit down to write, whether it's for ten minutes or an hour, once you begin, don't stop. If an atom bomb drops at your feet eight minutes after you have begun and you were going to write for ten minutes, don't budge. You'll go out writing.
   
   What is the purpose of this? Most of the time when we write, we mix up the editor and creator. Imagine your writing hand as the creator and the other hand as the editor. Now you bring your two hands together and lock your fingers. This is what happens when we write. The writing hand wants to write about what she did Saturday night: "I drank whiskey straight all night and stared at a man's back across the bar. He was wearing a red T-shirt. I imagined him to have the face of Harry Belafonte. At three A.M., he finally turned my way and I had to spit in the ashtray when I saw him. He had the face of a wet mongrel who had lost his teeth." The writing hand is three words into writing this first sentence–"I drank whiskey…"–when the other hand clenches her fingers tighter and the writing hand can't budge. The editor says to the creator, "Now, that's not nice, the whiskey and stuff. Don't let people know that. I have a better idea: 'Last night, I had a nice cup of warmed milk and then went to bed at nine o'clock.' Write that. Go ahead. I'll loosen my grip so you can."
   
   If you keep your creator hand moving, the editor can't catch up with it and lock it. It gets to write out what it wants. "Keep your hand moving" strengthens the creator and gives little space for the editor to jump in.
   
   Keeping your hand moving is the main structure for writing practice.
   
   
2. Lose control. Say what you want to say. Don't worry if it's correct, polite, appropriate. Just let it rip. Allen Ginsberg was getting a master's degree from Columbia University. Back then, they were doing rhymed verse. He had a lot of practice in formal meter, and so forth. One night, he went home and said to himself that he was going to write whatever he wanted and forget about the formalities. The result was "Howl". We shouldn't forget how much practice he had in writing prior to this, but it is remarkable how I can tell students, "Okay, say what you want, go for it," and their writing takes a substantial turn towards authenticity.
   
   
3. Be specific. Not car, but Cadillac. Not fruit, but apple. Not bird, but wren. Not a codependent, neurotic man, but Harry, who runs to open the refrigerator for his wife, thinking she wants an apple, when she is headed for the gas stove to light her cigarette. Be careful of those pop-psychology labels. Get below the label and be specific to the person.
   
   But don't chastise yourself as you are writing, "I'm an idiot; Natalie said to be specific and like a fool I wrote 'tree'." Just gently note that you wrote down "tree", drop to a deeper level, and next to "tree" write "sycamore". Be gentle with yourself. Don't give room for the hard grip of the editor.
   
   
4. Don't think. We usually live in the realm of second or third thoughts, thoughts on thoughts, rather than in the realm of first thoughts, the real way we flash on something. Stay with the first flash. Writing practice will help you contact first thoughts. Just practice and forget everything else.
   
   Now here are some rules that don't necessarily apply to sex, though you can try to apply them to sex if you like.
   
   
5. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
   
   
6. You are free to write the worst junk in America. You can be more specific, if you like: the worst junk in Santa Fe; New York; Kalamazoo, Michigan; your city block; your pasture; your neighborhood restaurant; your family. Or you can get more cosmic: free to write the worst junk in the universe, galaxy, world, hemisphere, Sahara Desert.
   
   
7. Go for the jugular. If something scary comes up, go for it. That's where the energy is. Otherwise, you'll spend all of your time writing around whatever makes you nervous. It will probably be abstract, bland writing because you're avoiding the truth. Hemingway said, "Write hard and clear about what hurts." Don't avoid it. It has all the energy. Don't worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.
   

I am often asked, "Well, isn't there a time when we need to stop our hand moving? You know, to figure out what we want to say?"

It's better to figure out what you want to say in the actual act of writing. For a long time, I was very strict with myself about writing practice. I kept that hand moving no matter what. I wanted to learn to cut through to first thoughts. Sure, you can stop for a few moments, but it is a tricky business. It's good to stop if you want, look up and get a better picture of what you're writing about, but often I don't stay there. I give myself a little gap, I'm off for an hour daydreaming. You have to learn your own rhythm, but make sure you do some focused, disciplined "keep the hand moving" to learn about cutting through resistance.

If you learn to practice well, it is a good foundation for all other writing.

When I was young, I played tennis. My arm wasn't very strong, and I was impatient. I was so eager to play, I held the racquet up higher on the grip than I was supposed to in order to compensate. Unfortunately, I got used to using the racquet in this way. I was a fine tennis player, but no matter how much I played, there was just so far I could improve, because I never mastered one of the important basics: the proper grip on the racquet.

I use this as an example for writing practice. Grow comfortable with it in its basic form before you begin to veer off into your own manner and style. Trust it. It is as basic as drinking water.

Sometimes an interviewer asks me, "So writing practice is old hat. Have you developed something new?"

And I say, "It would be like a Zen master teaching you meditation one year and then next year saying, 'Forget compassion. Standing on our heads is what's in.'"

The old essentials are still necessary. Stay with them under all circumstances. It will make you stable–something unusual for a writer.

Excerpts from Why I Write by Joan Didion

From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976

Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don�t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific�s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco�s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn�t think. All I knew then was what I couldn�t do. All I knew was what I wasn�t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I�m thinking, what I�m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

Broken things have been on my mind lately because so much has broken in my life this year and in the lives of the people I love–hearts, health, confidence. Our wonderful friend Ken Nelson died of AIDS just the other day, and that was terribly painful. Then not long after, my old friend Mimi, the mother of my junior doubles partner Bee, began to die after a long struggle with a rare blood disease.

Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken–those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.

And then she went on vacation.

“Traveling mercies,” the old people at our church said to her when she left. This is what they always say when one of us goes off for a while. Traveling mercies: love the journey, God is with you, come home safe and sound.

Besides the big brokenesses, I've noticed all sorts of really dumb things breaking lately, too. I've had a dozen calls from friends reporting broken cars, water heaters, a window, even a finger. So I've been on the lookout for something wonderful to happen, because of this story I heard recently: Carolyn Myss, the medical intuitive who writes and lectures about why people don't heal, flew to Russia a few years ago to give some lectures. Everything that could go wrong did–flights were canceled or overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel given to someone else. She kept trying to be a good sport, but finally, two mornings later, on the train to her conference on healing, she began to whine at the man sitting beside her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far.

It turned out that this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said–gently–that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born–and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

I believe this to be true. And I especially believe it when other people's things are breaking down. When it's my stuff, I believe the direct cause is my bad character. For instance, not long ago a car I was leasing broke down irretrievably, and while trying to find a secondhand car, I rented a car which broke down two days later. I did not find this very inspiring: I did not look around to see what lovely thing was trying to get itself born. I was just deeply disturbed. Still, I was being a pretty good sport until out of nowhere it began to rain. And it rained, and rained.

I'm not sure why, looking back at all those broken cars with the rain pouring down, it seemed like a good idea to buy a convertible. Maybe it was because so many things had gone so badly or been so troubling this year that I just wanted to feel lighter, or have a little fun or fresh air.

But in any case, I bought an old Volkswagen convertible. I've always loved Volkswagens. They're cheap and they run forever. And I wanted something cheap that didn't waste gas, something funky and smart, a little rusty, a little banged up, like me.

I didn't set out to get a convertible; I started by thinking seriously about Jettas, because they're sporty but in a touching, hippie way, like Pete Seeger wearing new Reebooks. Then, on the day the rains began, I heard about a '92 Cabriolet, which is the convertible form of the Jetta. This one had low mileage, as well as five speeds, and white fake-leather seats. It was teal green, and cheap. I called the owner, who was an Iranian woman.

She and I took the car for a ride, and it drove like a dream. I took it in to a Volkswagen diagnostician, who said it was a terrific car.

So I bought it.

And the rains poured down.

Sam loved the car. We tooled all over town in it, listening to oldies on the radio. I decided to buy brand new tires in deference to the bad weather; the front wheels need realigning anyway. So I took it to a tire shop in Marin where there are always a million new tires stacked in front. I bought four tires, arranged for the realignment and a few miscellaneous repairs, and bonded like mad with the woman behind the counter. Her name was Matty. She was my new best friend.

I picked up my car that night and said good-bye to my new best friend. "Come back in 40,000 miles, and we'll cut you another great deal," said my new best friend's dad. He looked like an old golf pro in a 49ers jacket.

Two days and forty miles later, on a Saturday afternoon, Sam and I were on our way out of town. We were going to say good-bye to Mimi, who lived and was dying half an hour away. But all of a sudden, at the stop sign of a busy intersection, there was a sound from the front of the car. It was a bad sound, a slippery crashing, as if the car had prolapse, as if all of its internal organs were trying to fall out of its vagina. The car wouldn't go forward. Sam and I gaped at each other. I tried to ease the car into first, but it made the bad sound again and would not move. Cars behind me started to honk. "Move your fucking car," someone shouted. Everyone started honking. It was my own private New York City.

It would be hard to capture how I felt at that moment. It was a nightmare: Bad Mind kicked in. Bad Mind can't wait for this kind of opportunity: "I told you so," Bad Mind says. It whispers to me that I am doomed because I am such a loser. And Bad Mind can lean ever so slightly towards paranoia. "The woman you bought this car from," it whispered, "is already on a plane back to Iran, celebrating. "Horns blared, metal ground against metal under my hood. "I'm freaking out," I said to Sam. I turned on my hazard lights and did Lamaze. The rain poured down.

"Move the goddamn fucking car," someone shouted.

I tried to call AAA on my cheap lousy car phone but it wasn't working. I tried to get the car into gear; it brayed, and I started to cry. I cried because Mimi was dying, and because Bad Mind was saying she would die before we had a chance to say good-bye, and because nothing worked at all anymore, not the whole world, not relationships, not even my new goddamn car.

"Will you pray with me?" I asked Sam. He appeared to be listening to something in the distance or trying to remember someone's name. Car horns continued to honk while he considered my request. "OK," he said, but wait a minute." Then he stuck his head out the window, and screwing up his face, wild and flushed, he shouted, "Stop yelling at us, you fucking assholes!"

We said a prayer together that we find a solution, that we feel calmer. I don't believe in God as an old man in the clouds–"bespectacled old Yahweh," as the late great John Gardner put it, "scratching his chin through his mountains of beard." But I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, protects, even in traffic.

A few minutes later, a man bent down to peer in the window. "Do you need a hand?" I nodded. "OK," he said. "You steer. I'll push."

He pushed us out of traffic and over to the sidewalk.

When we were out of the road and the man had left, I looked at Sam for a while. "Now what?" he said. I sighed, not knowing what to do next. Then, on the screen of my mind, Matty's face appeared. Matty, my new best friend, and all those tires.

"I know where to go!" I said. "To the tire shop!"

Sam thought about this with a dubious expression on his face, but then he shrugged. "OK," he said, and we ran there in the rain. Matty wasn't in, but her father was.

"My car broke down six blocks away," I said, out of breath.

"Listen," he said nicely, "we're a tire shop."

"But you fixed non-tire things on Thursday, too."

Sam peered at me with the same mix of faith and worry that I felt. Finally, I said to the man, "I'm not trying to con you into helping us. All I know is that we were supposed to come here. That if we came here, we would be helped."

He hemmed and hawed, and then sighed deeply. "Well," he said finally, "there's this Mexican guy in the back."

My soul heaved a huge sigh of relief. Of course there's a Mexican man in the back, I thought. He was our connection.

"I suppose I could get him," said Matty's father. I smiled.

Joaquim came out a few minutes later, tall and beautiful in greasy coveralls. We explained our problem and that we knew he just worked on tires, but we still needed help. "OK," he said. We piled into his broken-down old car and drove to mine. Joaquim opened the hood, looked in, then peered underneath the car. "Ohhh," he said.

"What should we do?" I asked.

"We need to get Al," he said.

Oh, I thought, of course. Of course we need to go get Al.

I hadn't a clue who Al was until we drove back and picked him up. Al was very small and did not seem to speak any English at all. He drove us all in a rusty truck back to my car, and then found a pitiful short piece of fraying rope in his glove box. It was like girl rope, like a bit of string I might have in my purse, that you couldn't do anything with except maybe tie up your hair. Joaquim used it to tie my Volkswagen to Al's crummy truck. It had stopped raining.

Joaquim and Sam got into the VW; Al and I started towing them. Smash crash, it was like a demolition derby. We lurched and crashed along until finally we nosed right into the greasy work deck of the tire shop.

The next thing I knew my car was on the lift and in the air. Joaquim and Al peered up into its innards with flashlights, consulting in hushed tones like doctors. In due time Joaquim came over to talk to me gravely, as though I were the next of kin.

"It was a loose bolt," he said. "It's going to take me at least fifteen minutes to fix."

We called Bee and said we would be on our way soon, but she said maybe we should come the next day, when her mother might have more energy. So Sam and I went to a parking lot nearby and played soccer with an old tennis ball that was losing its nap.

It all made me think of Eugene O’Neill’s line, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending.
The grace of God is glue.”

When we went back to the tire shop, Matty's father gave us a bill for thirty-six dollars, but I slipped Joaquim and Al each a twenty.

We drove on home. Back in the saddle again, I thought to myself, the story of my life. I still did not know what was trying to distract me so it could get itself born, but I felt happier than I had in a long time.

The next morning Sam woke up with a cold, so we still couldn't go visit Bee and Mimi. Finally, several days later, with Sam back in school, I went to visit them by myself.

I walked into their house at nine, into this wooden palace as familiar to me as my own childhood home, the walls covered with framed photos I've been looking at for thirty-some years, Mimi's tiny framed oil paintings of flowers hung all over the house life flat bouquets. Outside the windows were trees and roses, the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, blue waters, blue sky: birds, life, motion, stillness. Bee's eyes were red from crying, the brown irises clouded with sun damage from our tennis years. We walked hand in hand down the hallway to where Mimi lay asleep on her bed, breathing in the loud labored way that means the end is near. Bee and I talked for a moment, and then she sat in the chair beside the big bed, holding her mother's hand, and I lay down beside Mimi, because she was the most gregarious woman I've ever known, flamboyant and loving as the Broadway stars she loved, and she seemed a little lonely. Bee held Mimi's hand to her face and her chest; I stroked Mimi's shoulders and smoothed her hair. We talked to her the way you talk to a sleepy child too trouble to fall asleep. We whispered that we loved her. We told her over and over that we would stay with her as long as she needed but that when she was ready, we were also willing to let her go. And that she was safe, with God here now on this side, and in a moment with God on the other. Traveling mercies, I whispered into her ear. We said prayers softly, although Bee is not particularly religious, and we lit candles, and help Mimi lightly so she could take off when she was ready. The space between each new breath became longer and longer, until an hour later there was all space, and she died.

Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self-centered or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I'll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn't really matter. It was just such a blessing to have been there helping Bee bathe her mother's body with beautiful soaps, smooth her skin with lotion, working as thoroughly and gently as Mimi must have done forty-three years ago, when Bee had just been born.