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.
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.
