- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K What books do you read to your kids on Christmas? Hanukkah? Kwanzaa? Swap favorites in Table Talk
- - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Hot flash
Time for one thing
Confessions of a Lesbian Sperm Donor
Wild Things
Spice of Life
- - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It would be hard to capture how I felt at this moment. I told people later that I felt like hanging myself. It was like PMS on bad acid: psychosis and bloat and Bad Mind. Bad Mind can't wait for this kind of opportunity -- "I told you so," Bad Mind says. Bad Mind whispers to me that I am a loser, that I am doomed. And Bad Mind has a tiny problem with paranoia. "The woman you bought this car from," it whispered, "is on a plane back to Iran." Horns honking, metal grinding under my hood, Bad Mind sharing. "I'm freaking out," I said to Sam. I turned on my hazard lights and did Lamaze. "Move the goddamn fucking car," someone shouted. I did not know what to do. I tried to get the car into gear; it brayed. "Will you pray with me?" I asked Sam. "So I can calm myself?" Sam has been talking about Jesus again a lot since Advent began. It's very touching. "OK," he said, "but wait a minute." Then he stuck his head out the window, and 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 believe that God is always with us, that goodness guides, provides, protects. If you had my friends and son, you might too. "Do you need a hand?" a man asked a few minutes later, bending down to peer in the window. I nodded. "OK," he said. "You steer. I'll push." And he did. I am not going to say some dumb half-baked thing about who I think had, in disguise, come to help us. When we were out of the road and the man had left, I called Triple-A from the car phone. It went dead. I looked at Sam and sighed. Then, on the screen of my mind, Matty's face appeared. Matty, and all those tires. "I know where to go!" I said. "To the tire shop!" "Is there something wrong with our tires?" "I don't think so, honey. I just know that's where we're supposed to go." So, holding hands, we ran down the street in the rain. We ran until we came to the tire shop. Matty wasn't there. But her father was. "Remember me?" He nodded. "My car broke down six blocks away." "Listen," he said, nicely, "we're a tire shop." "But you fixed other things on Thursday, too." "But nothing mechanical," he said. "We have no mechanics on duty. And we close at 3 on Saturdays -- that's just over half an hour." Sam peered at me with the mix of faith and worry that I felt. Finally, I said, "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." "Well," Matty's dad said finally, "there's this Mexican guy in the back." My soul heaved a huge sigh of relief: Of course there was this Mexican guy in the back, I thought, and absolutely knew that he was our connection. "I suppose I could go get him," said Matty's father. And I smiled. The Mexican man came out a few minutes later, tall and beautiful, in greasy coveralls. His name was Joaquim. He asked how he could help me. "My car broke down down the road," I said. "I just work on tires," he said. "I need you to just come with me and take a look." "OK," he said. So we piled into the old Cutlass Supreme and we drove to my car. It had stopped raining. Joaquim opened the hood, peered in, then peered under the car. "Ohhh," he said, and what I think he said next, since I do not speak Car, and he spoke halting English, was that some major bolt worked loose, but that if the threads were not stripped, he could fix it. "What do we do now?" I asked. "We need to go get Al," he said. Oh, I thought, of course. Of course we need to go get Al. Duhh! We drove back and picked up Al, who was small and did not speak any English at all. He drove us all in a dilapidated truck back to my car. Al found a pitiful short piece of fraying rope in his glove box. It was like girl rope; it was like a bit of rope I'd have in my purse, that you couldn't do anything with except maybe tie up your hair. And Joaquim used it to tie my Volkswagen to Al's crummy truck. It was like the traveling Dr. Zeus Repair Shop, à la Rube Goldberg. Joaquim and Sam got into the VW. Al and I started towing them. Smash crash, it was like the Demolition Derby. And I just smiled, I couldn't have been happier. I wasn't afraid anymore. I wasn't ashamed. I wasn't alone. We lurched and crashed along until things finally began going more smoothly. Joaquim and Sam were no longer bumping into us. This is grace at work, I decided rather smugly, then turned around to discover my new car half a block behind us, on the other side of an intersection. Sam and Joaquim had their heads stuck out the windows and were waving to us as if they were on a float, or the honorary Fire Marshalls in the Damaged Parade. We went back and tied them to us again; they came untied again. And coasted right passed us. After they'd come to a stop, Al drove up to my new car and nudged it forward a ways. Then he caught up with it and bashed it forward. I could see by the back of Sam's head that he was staring straight ahead, trying to be polite. Al nosed and bashed my car all the way up the street, into the greasy work deck of the tire shop; right past all those tires. The next thing I knew my car was on the lift, in the air. Joaquim and Al peered up into its innards with flashlights, consulting in hushed tones, like doctors. Joaquim came over to talk to me gravely, like I was the next of kin. "We are only open for 20 more minutes," he said. "OK," I said, magnanimously. "I can leave it over the weekend." "No," he said. "What I mean is, come back in 20 minutes." So I did. Sam and I played in the parking lot of a bank nearby, playing soccer with a old tennis ball that was losing its nap. I felt entirely happy. 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 $36. "Don't worry," he said. "It's a terrific car." I wrote him a check, and slipped Joaquim and Al each a 20. You cannot under-tip Jesus. So, back in the saddle again. It's the story of my life. The car is running great and it's fun to drive. And I'm beginning to get an idea of what was trying to keep me distracted so it could get itself born, but I can't put it into words yet. All I know is that I've been happier in the ensuing few weeks than I've ever been before. I feel quite often these days as if I'm on a mild dose of magic mushrooms, which is the only comparison I can think of for feeling this much wonder, this much love. Bad Mind tells me that it's probably the result of a brain tumor, or a breakdown. But I think it's the gift of grief, the gift of failure, of all that crying and rage -- of having dealt with so much pain. Maybe all those tears washed me a little bit cleaner, like an inside shower. And maybe they somehow also watered the soil beneath me. Who knows. But I will keep you posted; more will be revealed.
And in the meantime, I'm going on sabbatical for four or five
months, to finish a book on faith. So take good care, and thanks. And
traveling mercies to you.
While she's on sabbatical, get your Anne Lamott fix in Table Talk -- or browse the archives for past Word by Word columns. |
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