Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott

Author:Anne Lamott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Near the Lagoon, 2004

It is autumn now, following a treacherous August, and I awoke this morning to find that the leaves in my heart have started changing color, from green to yellow, persimmon, and red.

After a rainy morning yesterday, both sun and clouds were out when several friends and I headed through the West Marin corridor, past meadows full of cows and horses, and hills of dry, lion-colored grass. We drove through the small rural and hippie towns on the way to the ocean, out to Bolinas, where I lived when I was in my twenties. I was an out-of-control alcoholic then—but in a good way, I had thought. A festive way. Along with the beverages, I took a lot of drugs, which sometimes expanded my mind, but other times caused me accidentally to sleep with other women’s husbands. I hurt some innocent people along the way. I also began my life as a writer there, describing the mountains, the beaches, the tide pools, the lagoon, the pelicans, the ocean, the marvelous life and values of the community. But when I was in my mid-twenties, the world came to an end: my father died in our family’s cabin above Duxbury Reef, half an hour’s walk from the Bolinas lagoon, where we went birding every week. It only took ten to fifteen years to bounce back from that.

We were headed to that lagoon yesterday, and that is very rare for me, as I have stayed out of the town for most of the twenty-two years since I left. It is too painful to go there; it’s filled with the huge, gaping absence of my father, and with the faces of people who loved me, or didn’t, whom I hurt so egregiously, or by whom I was hurt or abandoned. But I still have a couple of friends there. One of them, Megan, is a cofounder of the Mainstreet Moms: Organize or Bust (themmob.org), which has grown from a ragtag group of a few mothers into a thriving grassroots organization helping women (especially mothers) in swing states register to vote. Members send packets to volunteers across the country, with names and addresses of unregistered women voters, pretty stationery, decorative stickers, and sample letters. The volunteers write to the women, who thought they didn’t count, and tell them that they do.

The group was having a fund-raiser, a picnic by the lagoon, and I was going to do a reading. I didn’t remember walking to the lagoon in the years since I’d left, until my friends and I headed down a private path that led from the town’s main road.

I almost immediately got a Twilight Zone feeling. First, I was going back to the place from which I had fled, and that is usually a signal to me that something mythical is in the works. And second, instantly a hobgoblin of a man appeared in our path, in overalls, with chin hairs and a pointy hat—the whole gestalt. He asked, with raised eyebrows and a portentous tone, “Do you know where you are going?”

We didn’t.

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