Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

Something seized me and got in, what we religious types might dare to call holy spirit. One acronym for God that I like a lot is Gift of Desperation. Maybe, I thought, this one night I could try something new. Willingness to change, after all, comes only from pain. I’m not talking the big-T transformation—well, actually, maybe I am. I do crave radical change, but perhaps with a little warning—I’d prefer to be wearing some makeup, perhaps a hint of color. But two baby steps forward? I’ll take it.

  I decided in the darkness of the theater to shoot the moon, to find Tammy after the movie and say I was sorry. Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right—a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it’s about me, and my bile ducts, and how unique I am and how I’ve suffered. And that is what hell is like. So whom was I going to echo, Gandhi and Jesus, or Tammy and me?

  Look, can you give me a minute to decide?

  Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be right? Hmm. Let me get back to you on this.

  I sighed loudly and knew what I needed. It was not to army-crawl through the lobby of the theater or to think about all the ways in which Tammy needed to improve.

  After the movie ended, I went to look for her, to apologize for my part in the craziness. I surrendered; I laid my weapon down. I got to have transformation, of the consignment-store variety, from the cringing exile, to the Beloved, to fine gorilla animal.

  Did I find her? Of course not. Life is not the movies. It doesn’t work out in a convenient and linear way very often. But I found me. I found my timeworn dignity. I found the second towelette in the pocket of my jeans and washed the salt off my fingers. Best of all, I found my phone in the car and called a friend. I had tears of laughter streaming down my face by the time I’d finished telling him the story.

  As I drove home, I realized that Tammy was probably telling the story to Uton now, comparing notes on my disgrace. But I shook my head. I had responded to myself like a friend. You can’t get there from where I’d been, in line, to where I sat now. A few weeks later, I did find Tammy, in another line, at the market, although with three people between us. At first I thanked God that the view was blocked. Then I leaned to the side and poked my head out, so she could see me. She was holding a clear sack of apples and a tub of Cool Whip. I smiled and looked contrite, and then she smiled, too, a shy pirate smile.

  Market Street

  I woke up full of hate and fear the day of a peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing, as I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Wavy Gravy and the sad elegance of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I was angry that our country’s leaders had bullied and bought their way into preemptive war. Hitting first has always been the mark of evil. I don’t think one great religious or spiritual thinker has ever said otherwise. Everyone, from almost every tradition, agrees on five things. Rule 1: We are all family. Rule 2: You reap exactly what you sow; that is, you cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds. Rule 3: Try to breathe every few minutes or so. Rule 4: It helps beyond words to plant bulbs in the dark of winter. Rule 5: It is immoral to hit first.

  I tried to pray my way out of the fear and hate, but my mind was once again a pinball machine of blame and ridiculousness. I had planted bulbs a few months before, but they had not bloomed yet, and I did not want to get out of bed. Like everyone I knew, I was despondent about the war. And I wondered if I actually even believed in God anymore. It seemed ridiculous, this conviction that I had an invisible partner in life, and that we were all part of a bigger, less punishing and isolated truth. I lay there gnashing my teeth, sure that what you see is what you get. This was it. This earth, this country, here, now, was all there was. This was where all life happened, the up and the down and the plus and the minus and the world of choices and consequences. Not an easy place, but a place full of significance.

  I clutched my cat as I used to when my parents fought, a life preserver in cold, deep water.

  But then—a small miracle—I started to believe in George W. Bush. I really did. In my terror, I wondered whether maybe he was smarter than we thought he was, and had grasped classified intelligence and nuance in a way that was well above my own understanding or that of our era’s most brilliant thinkers.

  Then I thought: Wait—George Bush? And relief washed over me like gentle surf, because believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God seems almost rational.

  I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: “Hi!” I said.

  Someone or something hears. I don’t know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don’t feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that—Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday’s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it. During the Renaissance, Fra Giovanni Giocondo wrote:

  No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven!

  No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

  And so I roused myself and went to meet some friends in San Francisco.

  We milled around the Embarcadero, where you could see endless sky and bay and a Möbius strip of the ’60s, a massive crowd gathered once again on sacred ground. Haranguers harangued us from various sound systems unimproved in the past thirty-five years, like heavy metal played backward at the wrong speed. But the energy and signs and faces of the crowd were an intoxicating balm, and by some marvelous yogic stretch, we all stopped trying to figure out whom and what we agreed with, and who the bad elements were: The socialist haranguers? The Punx for Peace, who had come prepared with backpacks full of rocks? The Israel haters? The right-wing Zionists? You just had to let go, because Market Street was wide enough for us all, and we began to march, each a small part of one big body, fascinatingly out of control, like protoplasm bobbing along.

  The sea of people looked like a great heartbroken circus, wild living art, motley and stylish, old and young, lots of Buddhists, people from unions and churches and temples, punks and rabbis and aging hippies and nuns and veterans—God, I love the Democratic Party—strewn together on the asphalt lawn of Market Street. We took small shuffle steps, like Zen monks in a crowded wedding procession. It was like being on a conveyor belt, overwhelming and scary, because you might trip and get stepped on, but once you were really on the street, you could sit by the curb and sob, or adjust to it. It’s disturbing to not walk with your usual gait, to move at once so slowly and with such purpose. I felt I was trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time.

  The “I” turned into “we.” You shuffled along with your friends, moving at the pace of the whole organization, moving to the heartbeat of the percussion. You saw people you knew, and hung out awhile, and then they moved away, and new people fell in step beside you and offered you comments and gum. Whoever came along came along. The goodwill gave you a feeling of safety in this mob, a fizzy euphoria despite the grim reality of these times. Songs I’ve loved for decades were sung—“We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Give Peace a Chance”—and then we’d tromp along, and the peace-march wave rose again, a joyful roar of solidarity rippling out from the front, over us, then picked up by those behind.

  There was gaping, and a lot of volition; you were swept along, but the crowd had a self-correcting mechanism—it kept letting go of what wasn’t quite right, the more raw, angry elements, the strident and divisive. It was a Golden Rule parade: you acted the way you wish the government would act, with goodness and tender respect, and this held the peace. The splinter groups that we
nt crazy later and trashed everything were peaceful when they were with us. I saw only friendliness, sorrow, goodness, and great theater. My favorites were the people dressed as sheep on stilts, who resembled huge silver masked-ball aliens, with horns and curly tinsel wool, like puppets that Louis XIV might have commissioned. No one had any idea why they were sheep, or why they were on stilts. Maybe they were peace sheep, and maybe they just wanted to see better.

  The Mothers in Black moved solemnly in the middle of the throng, steadfast and profound, witnessing for peace. They dressed in black, like the Madres in South America. They stopped you with their presence, like punctuation, made you remember why you were here.

  Two things carried the day: regular people saying no to power, and glorious camaraderie. We were sad and afraid, but we had done the most radical thing of all—we had shown up, not knowing what else to do, and without much hope. This was like going on a huge picnic at the edge of the fog, hoping you would walk through to something warmer. The mantra you could hear in our voices and our footsteps was “I have a good feeling!” The undermutter was silent, spoken with a sort of Jewish shrug: “What good will it do to do nothing?”

  The barricades were broken down for once, between races, colors, ages, sexes, classes, nations. There are so few opportunities for this to happen; at first, it feels like us versus them, and then you’re shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of people, reading one another’s signs, signs that pierce you or make you laugh out loud. You rub shoulders, smell the bodies and the babies, and pot and urine and incense and fear, and everyone’s streaming past, including you. For once, you’re part of the stream, and in that, in being part of it, you smell the pungent green shoots of hope. The feeling may be only for the moment. But it’s a quantum moment: it might happen again, and spread and spread and spread; and for a moment and then another, there’s no judgment, no figuring out, just an ebullient trudge, step, step, step.

  People sang, and babies cried, and your feet started to hurt, and you wanted to go home, and just then the broad-bottomed Palestinian women started chanting, “This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.”

  Wow. That’s the prayer I said the morning after the peace march: Wow. I felt buoyed by all those people walking slowly together down Market Street, by the memory of the peacenik dogs with kerchiefs around their necks, the Mothers in Black, and the peace sheep. Then, amazingly, only a few days later, the very first bulbs began to bloom. Within a week, there were dozens of daffodils in the yard. When this finally happens in late winter every year, I’m astonished. I’ve always given up. In November and December when I plant them, I get swept up in the fantasy that the earth, after so much rain, will be rich and loamy. Planting bulbs sounds like a romantic and fun thing to do, but it never is. The earth is rocky and full of roots; it’s clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, yet you dig holes for the ugly, shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover everything over, and you know you’ll never see them again—it’s death and clay and shrivel. Your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails are black with soil. December and January have been so grim the past few years, and this year the power kept going out, and everyone was crazy as a rat. Yet here we are in February, with war drums and daffodils everywhere, and poppies waiting in the wings.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, Jake Morrissey and Geoff Kloske, supreme commanders of Riverhead Books and of my life. Thank you, Anna Jardine, for brilliant and exasperating copyedits all these years. You have saved me from looking illiterate more times than I can count. Thank you, Alexandra Cardia and Katie Freeman and Lydia Hirt, and all the other rascally Riverhead rabbits.

  Thank you, Sarah Chalfant, my gorgeous agent and friend.

  Thank you, Steven Barclay and Kathryn Barcos and all the peeps at the Barclay Agency.

  Clara Lamott, you are our sunshine, as Sam often says.

  All writers are doomed without great writing friends to keep them honest, push them to make the work better, encourage and nag, celebrate or commiserate. Thank you, Doug Foster, Mark Childress, Neshama Franklin, Janine Reid.

  And most of all, to St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California, and Pastor Veronica Goines. Services at eleven.