Stitches, page 6
Tomorrow I am going to make coffee-filter butterflies with my Sunday school kids, with paper-towel-tube chrysalises. I know the same girl will be bitter that all of our projects involve coffee filters. I will read her a beautiful passage of Scripture about wings that she will not appreciate much, and I will give her a waxed-paper bag of the season’s first cherries, which she will.
I will ask my kids to consider the beauty of the world, and then I will ask them to think about being stuck and seemingly doomed and in the dark, like a chrysalis. I won’t rant about the tragedy of global warming or the decimation of the butterfly populations and the apocalyptic implications of that, or how when these kids reach college there will be only a few thousand panting, very tense butterflies arriving in our county over the winter. I know that these kids, like all decent humans, will spend some of their lives swimming in sadness. But I want them to keep going to Muir Woods or the beach at Tennessee Valley during the monarch migrations. I want them to cling to hope, no matter the cost. So I’ll get them excited about the process of caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. Wow. Amazing. Then we’ll go outside and find a few butterflies and chase after them.
My fantastic friend Barbara died recently of ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was not afraid, or if she was, I didn’t see it much, because she was still in love with her partner of nearly forty years, still got outside every day, had an adoring community of friends and a tenderhearted rabbi with worldly exposure and a broad emotional vocabulary who came by often to study the Torah with her.
Barbara started out as a lawyer, but after beating breast cancer twenty years ago, she made her life about teaching women the truth about breast cancer: how to beat it, how to live with it, how to walk other people through it, how to avoid makeup and household products with carcinogens, and how to fight the corporations that make a profit from it. (At her funeral, she was eulogized as having died after a long and courageous battle with the breast cancer industry.) Then she got ALS. It completely sucked.
Yet I saw more meaning in Barbara’s last two years and slow death than I have seen in many highly successful ongoing lives. People sometimes say that without death, life would have no meaning. But death was never the meaning of their lives, even though they had to say good-bye to so many friends with breast cancer. Love was, and getting nourishment, however they could. Barbara had a feeding tube for the last four months or so, but she smiled and laughed as much as ever. Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation. She lived to see her partner, Susie, a little longer, and then a little longer. They read, saw friends, immersed themselves in nature. They watched the Giants win the World Series twice in three years, which, believe this old San Franciscan, made a mockery of death.
I asked Barbara one day at the end of her life how she was. She had lost the use of her voice by then, so she typed into her computer translation device, “I am.” Then she typed some more and the computer voice said, “The disease progresses.” Yes. I could see this with my own eyes.
Then she wrote, “The beat goes on.” Those four words continue to ring through the chambers of my mind.
When we agree to (or get tricked into) being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.
“Larger” can mean a great cause, a project of restoration, or it can mean a heightened, expansive sense of the now. Here is just one sentence by Denise Levertov: “In the Japanese tongue of the mind’s eye one two syllable word tells of the fringe of rain clinging to the eaves and of the grey-green fronds of wild parsley.” Larger can mean a six-pound addition to the family—nothing is larger than a newborn—and it can mean mountains, fjords and sand dunes.
The Great Sculptor has made dunes all over the world with drifts of sand that stretch for miles without flaws, all heart-soaring curves and drops, mountain ranges in miniature.
Under the moonlight, you can make your shadow enormous. You feel both tiny and big. You can stagger around making huge shadows as you charge down the dunes. You can make yourself as small as a doll and almost disappear, and then, in an instant, as big as a Cyclops. It’s like you brought a whole cast of scary troll characters with you out into the moonlight, which you can bring forth at your pleasure, all these aspects of who you were inside all along.
We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.
There is so much meaning in stories told around a campfire, or in bed, or at the movies. People who teach others to read or to navigate a library, who don’t give up on slow or challenged students, will get the best seats in heaven. I don’t know a lot, but I know this to be true.
My brother teaches special education at a local high school. I think he will be seated near the Godiva chocolate fountain on the other side of eternity. Our father taught English and writing to the prisoners at San Quentin in the fifties and sixties. All good teachers know that inside a remote or angry person is a soul, way deep down, capable of a full human life—a person with hope of a better story, who has allies, and can read.
My father and brother had to find a resource deep down inside themselves, too, because hope is a conversation. They had to be able to tap into something more authentic than the Lamott default skills of being on, of charm, and our standard offer of affection: I love you, here are the rules.
To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It’s the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.
You start wherever you can. You see a great need, so you thread a needle, you tie a knot in your thread. You find one place in the cloth through which to take one stitch, one simple stitch, nothing fancy, just one that’s strong and true. The knot will anchor your thread. Once that’s done, you take one more stitch—teach someone the alphabet, say, no matter how long that takes, and then how to read Dr. Seuss, and Charlotte’s Web, and A Wrinkle in Time, and then, while you’re at it, how to get a GED. Empathy is meaning.
Finally, darning: Most good families in the 1950s had wooden darning eggs. You may not have ever seen one, and no, there isn’t an app for it, but it is an egg-shaped piece of wood, stone or ceramic, that fits inside most socks. (Some reform families used darning eggs with handles, but not us. We were purists.) You may not have heard the word “darning” in years. So many people nowadays haven’t learned how to sew at all, but back then, most women and girls were taught how to sew, and all of the fathers I knew had served in World War II or Korea and knew how to make basic repairs, and even darn.
Darning is to send parallel threads through the damage in socks and sweaters, in and out, in and out, back and forth, over and under, and somehow, you have a piece of fabric again—such as the heel of a sock, that’s good enough again, against all odds. This is sort of a miracle—good enough again. Wow. You’re weaving, in effect, starting with raggedy edges, going back a bit to the one spot that can still hold new thread.
It definitely helps to have a darning egg as you go through life. Trust me on this.
I have found that my tiny church, St. Andrew Presbyterian, has given me a shape to work against—a darning egg—for the last thirty years, what with all these holes. We have a choir of eight people who open their mouths, and a huge sound comes out, a mix of joy, pain, faith and conversational exposition. Spirit rises and falls in the voices, the choir’s and ours.
The singing is full-throated and clear, like the sound your finger makes when you run it around the rim of a crystal glass. It is like African singing where people call from various spots and create one sound. Twenty minutes after the first cave children started kicking around the first improvised balls, people started singing. Half an hour later, they found harmonies.
Even with a couple of exceptional singers in the choir, you hear a solid spirit of song, rather than how individuals personally embellish it. The rising and falling is like all of us leaning forward together, then leaning backward on our heels, then coming forward together again. Spirit flows, and the sounds keep stirring that spirit, as the breezes from the high open windows above us keep stirring the air.
Sometimes the pianist hits a few false notes, or the soloist warbles, and some of us sing along enthusiastically in the wrong key and the old people’s voices dim. But we all keep singing, a mix of magnificence and plainsong that is beautiful, and the hymn plays on.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone at Riverhead Books, especially my editor Jake Morrissey, publisher Geoff Kloske, copy editor Anna Jardine, and the amazing rascally rabbits in the publicity, marketing and editorial departments—Katie Freeman, Lydia Hirt, Alexandra Cardia.
Love and much gratitude to my agent, Sarah Chalfant, at the Wylie Agency, and Liping Wang. Love and thanks to Steven Barclay and Kathryn Barcos and all the people at the Steven Barclay Agency.
Thank you to the people who help me so much with my work, especially Doug Foster, Karen Carlson, Tom Weston, Janine Reid and Mark Childress.
Thank you to the people of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California, especially my beloved prayer partner Elizabeth Talley.
Anne Lamott, Stitches
