We're not all well on the same day

"When all is said and done, people only need compassion and stories."

-Barry Lopez

He's wearing denim on denim, with the sleeves rolled up to the crease of his elbows.

He has white hair, glasses, cowboy boots.

He's tall.  Sitting in the second row of the bookstore book talk, he almost folds in half inside his folding chair.  

He's one of the only men in a room filled with youngish and middle-aged women.

I've journeyed two hours on a weeknight with three friends in tow, desperately excited to see Anne Lamott in the flesh for the first time.

It's a YouTube age, a TED talk age; I know she even records her own books, but I've never heard her voice.

It's a smaller crowd than I expected.

In my mind, Anne would fill a football stadium with adoring fans and followers.  She would sell out like a Coldplay concert.  Or maybe lead those Easter services where thousands of people get saved and baptized on one morning.

I've come here with an entire bushel basket of books for her to sig, but when we walk in, I realize I'm still going to be sitting a squinty-eyed distance away.

Then the tall man stands up, locks eyes with me, and gestures.  I walk to the front and he offers me the empty seat next to him.

"I've been here since 1 pm," he says (it’s now 7).

“Would you like to sit in this empty seat?"  

Why me, in this crowd of believers?

"Let me check in with my friends first," I say.

I return to my tribe, ask if anyone wants the seat. They look at my bushel basket of books and tell me I've earned the "I love Anne the most" award and I should go claim my bounty.

I sit next to the man.

He turns to me and asks, "How is it?"

The talk hasn’t even started yet, but the view.

"Oh, it's wonderful," I gush.

"You're worth it," he says.

The woman behind me taps me on the shoulder and offers me her book signing ticket. I go from 169 to 45. She tells me her name is Caroline because she was born on Christmas. I tell her my name is Trinity.

"Oh, Holy Trinity," she says.  "Does everybody say that?"

"Well that," I say, "and The Matrix."

She smiles, and asks me to take off my hat.  

I'm wearing a black fedora.  

It's got instant style, which is why I mostly wear it when I haven't had time to wash my hair.  

Sure enough, tonight is one of those nights.

I've got greasy bits, and hat head, and I hesitate because I don't want to be in the 2nd row of an Anne Lamott reading with greasy bits.

But then I realize, it's Anne Lamott.

It's the exact place where one should reveal their greasy bits.

I think the tall man next to me is praying.  

His hands are clasped under his chin, fingers wiggling like a child's game of, "Here is the church, here is the steeple. Open the door, see all the people."  

He rocks back and forth, eyes fixed on the wooden podium and the folding table at the front of the crowd.  

There is a box of blackberries on the folding table and nothing else. A plastic box of store-bought blackberries covered in curly yellow, blue, orange, and green ribbon.

Anne appears.

She's frumpy, dready, and sick.  Her voice is croaky, croney.  She says book tours are terrible things.  Terrible, living out of hotels, stale air, sorts of things. She blows her nose with wadded up tissue stuffed in her baggy pants pockets.

"I think God loves REAL," she says.  "I think REAL is the most precious thing."

She says, "refuse to stop feeling what you're feeling."

The tall man cups his hand around his left ear, leans in.

"You're safe, you're loved, you're chosen, exactly the way you are.  You are fearfully and wonderfully and vulnerably made. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it," she says, and tears well up in my eyes.

It's the truest gospel there is.

The way Anne writes about God, the way she sees God, opened a window for me to believe in God again, in language I can use equally with my children and in the darkest of places.  Hers are the books, the only books, I give to someone in the midst of it.

Every time I read her work, I imagine rising up out of my couch, opening my front door, and strutting down the sidewalk, smiling at the sky, at strangers, and declaring "I am God's precious daughter," with a blissful grin.

She talks about her book on prayer: Help, Thanks, Wow.  

She says the 4th great prayer, is "Whatever."

"Because I've got this hilarious idea that things are going to turn out the way I want," she croaks.

She talks about her saggy butt, and how this is life, and how no amount of wishing her butt were different will make her butt different.

Then she turns around and demonstrates a writing technique, the way she strings up a clothesline in her writing room and pegs ideas to it, and I think, It's one thing to talk about your saggy butt; it's a whole other thing to turn around right afterwards in a big crowd at your own book talk and let everybody stare at your saggy butt.

She says, "there can be meaning without having things make sense."

She says, "Grace looks like people getting through the day together."

The tall man kneads his legs with his knuckly thumbs, right above the knee.  He rocks and smiles, rocks and smiles.

"How do you foster resilience?" someone asks out of the crowd.

I do all the things that make me feel alive.  I practice radical self-care. That's how I stay present.  

I never stop going to church. I never stop hiking.  I never stop trusting that I'm loved and I'm chosen and I'm safe, and that more will be revealed.

I'm not left to my own devices very often. And that's what saves me.

The reason I have such devout faith in God is because I have impeccable friends. 

We're not all well on the same day.  So you call around till you find someone who kind of likes their life, and you ask them to talk you off the ledge.

I close my eyes and let the words wash over me.

I imagine myself and Anne sitting on a patchy old couch, covered in a patchy, tattered old blanket.  The couch sits against a wall, under three windows.  There is an old patchy plant, the kind with hairy roots, sitting on a wire-legged plant stand with a mosaic top.

We have a grey cat between us.  We pet the cat, tandem-style, to make sure the cat gets all the love and strokes it needs.

This is what Anne and I would do.

Absent-mindedly, serenely, like two benevolent senile women, in our saggy sweats with our saggy butts.

The talk ends.  

I'm about to get in line for the book signing portion of the evening when the tall man next to me unfolds himself and stands like he’s on a mission.

He walks straight up to Anne.

"I made you dreadlocks," he says bashfully, and he points to the box of blackberries with the curly ribbon in yellow, blue, orange, and green, the only thing sitting on the folding table at the front of the room.  

"In one of your books, you talk about resisting Hershey's with almonds and eating blackberries instead, so I got you a box."

The tall man looks at her adoringly, like a boy would look at his mother, waiting for her blessing.

Anne smiles.