Plan B by Anne Lamott

Author:Anne Lamott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780143057345
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2005-03-03T08:00:00+00:00

“Sam.” I laughed, but he was serious. “Okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll kill Lily.”

“If there was nothing left, would you let me kill you and eat you?”

“Sure, honey.”

“I wouldn’t want you to die, necessarily. I might just cut off your arm to survive.”

“Well. Help yourself.”

“What if there is another attack, here?”

“Then we’ll all band together and share what we have.”

“Will we have to share with Uncle and Jamie?” He gave me his trademark look, a long, slow sideways glance. He was suppressing a smile.

“Of course—he’s my brother!”

“Yeah, but Stevo and Jamie eat so much. And now with the baby? Too many mouths to feed!” Sam can always make me laugh. I know where he got his gallows humor. I can see myself so clearly in him, many of my worst traits, some of my goodness. I also can still see many of Sam’s ages in him. New parents grieve as their babies get bigger, because they cannot imagine the child will ever be so heartbreakingly cute and needy again. Sam is a swirl of every age he’s ever been, and all the new ones, like cotton candy, like the Milky Way. I can see the stoned wonder of the toddler, the watchfulness of the young child sopping stuff up, the busy purpose and workmanship of the nine-year-old. I see him and his oldest friend, Jack, outside working on an electric fence, taping six-volt batteries to it, using endless amounts of duct tape and wires and switches. I see him fashioning robots at the kitchen table with bits of junk, a glue gun, and a nine-volt battery. I see him at my desk, making a small electric fan that works. He can get most of his inventions to light up, or walk: he invents the same way I write—as Virginia Woolf said, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” Sam creates things out of whatever grabs his attention—bits of plastic, toys, cloth, balloons, fool’s gold, mirrors, batteries.

He came and stood beside me, silent. “What do you think about when you come here?”

“This is where I most feel the presence of God. Except for church.”

He looked out at the mountainside, at a hawk, at turkey vultures circling, at birds singing in the brush. “Can I sit in your yap?” he asked.

I was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, and he plopped down into my lap. He weighed a ton. I couldn’t have gotten up if I’d wanted to. I held him loosely and smelled his neck. Sometimes when I dream about him, he’s in danger, he’s doing things that are too risky, but most of the time he’s stomping around or we’re just hanging out together. Sometimes I dream about him when he was younger, and I remember it with such sweetness that it wakes me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.