Pammy said something that I have clung to like the last heel of bread: “Sam has a deep core of sweetness within him.” She was right. He’s deeply compassionate, and fair, but he also loves knives, and air-soft guns, and paintball guns, and Ninja blades, and violence. Maybe it was inconsistent for us to watch Touched by an Angel together, right before we watched South Park. Maybe it confused him that we went to church on Sundays and then watched The Sopranos.
He has always said the funniest things. Until he was five, he couldn’t say l’s properly. He pronounced them y. Yeaf, yunch, yove, the Yord, and Sam Yamott. One day he came home from school and said slowly that he had llloved his lllunch. His teacher had finally taught him l’s. He ran to the house next door to show off for the teenagers he adored. It was a bittersweet moment: Your kid can’t get a job on CNN if he can’t say his l’s, but now he’s growing up; he’ll be dating soon, and mouthing off and sneering when he’s furious. And that has come true, though now he’s the teenager all the little kids love.
He still says things that I scribble down on index cards. Just this morning as I drove him to school, we were talking about politics, and he said, “Mom, you know—you have a very rich vocabulary.” He can make words all his own. “Random” is the latest favorite. I’ll say something I’ve been meaning to tell him all day, and he’ll look at me askance and say, “Wow, that’s a little random.” Driving along with him and his friend Nick the other day, I told Nick, “You know, I’ll always be one of the adults who is on your side, if you need me.” He replied, “Oh, thanks, Annie,” and there was silence in the car until Sam said, “God, that was random.”
Now Sam pushed the tip of his branch into the pebbly ground like a divining rod, splitting the road in two, making a great noise unto the Yord. He exerts tremendous energy, and it builds up and he sends it forth with his tools, his swords. It’s art, it’s an installation, it’s the American way: “We’re big and strong and male, and this thing is about to get seriously small, and be in shreds, because I am about to heavily fuck with it.” He finds where something has a weak spot, picks up a branch, and jabs it, like a physical yell.
He can say terrible, mean things to me, and then, a few hours later, be so kind and contrite that it brings tears to my eyes. He was always this way, accepting and fair, capable of casual meanness and extraordinary empathy. When he was seven and we started looking for his father, I asked him what he would do if it turned out that his father was strange, or standoffish, and Sam said genuinely, “Oh, I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t care if he was a crook. I wouldn’t care if he had a gun. I wouldn’t care if he cut down trees and didn’t replant.” You can see that we live in an ecologically correct area.
I pulled over by the side of the road to write this down, pretending I was making a shopping list. I always write down his exact words. He is an exact person, as we all are, even though I sense that there is only one of us, that we are mosaic chips of that One. Sam is very stylish, oddly enough, as I’m not stylish at all. His hair always looks good. And I was always a great student, whereas he isn’t, in the classic sense, of a student who studies hard, likes to read, and hands in homework. He’s a great student in the reform sense: he’s fascinated by life, he’s funny, and he participates eagerly in discussions. I’ve never yelled at anyone in my whole life except for him, and he yells at me, too. We fight about homework and his mouthiness and the laundry. I no longer wash his dirty clothes for him, because he will not put them away, so he does his own, and keeps the clean clothes unfolded in a basket, with an empty basket beside it so he can transfer clothes rapidly from one basket to another while looking for something to wear—like a fabric Slinky. There’s a third basket, for dirty clothes, which is usually empty, as the dirty clothes are strewn all over his bedroom floor.
Sam began chucking rocks into the creek, and Lily barked at them loyally, as if shaking her fist—“and stay away!” I listened to the splashes of the rocks he was pitching, aiming at other rocks, or at unseen enemies, creation and destruction in the same breath. I heard the knock of one stone hitting another, and fingered the diamond heart that I wear on a thin gold chain around my neck. He bought the heart for me last December, at the Mervyn’s holiday sale. A few days before Christmas, he thrust the box at me. I turned away from it, because I wanted to wait till Christmas, but he ripped the wrapping paper off, then opened the box for me. There was a small gold heart studded with diamonds, the exact piece of jewelry I had always wanted. He watched me with enormous pride and pleasure. “One hundred fifty-nine dollars at Mervyn’s, Mom,” he said, proudly, and added, “Retail.”
I asked a friend of mine who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart to explain the name, because I instinctively know that both Sam and I have, or are, diamond hearts. My friend said our hearts are like diamonds because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we not only are portals for this love, but are made of it. She said we are made of light, our hearts faceted and shining, and I believe this, to a point: I disagree with her saying we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that merely seem dense and ponderous, yet actually are made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children. But I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs.
I would call my path Diamond Meatball: people would comfort and uplift one another by saying, “There’s a diamond in there some where.”
Still, on better days, I see us as light in containers, like those pierced tin lanterns that always rust, that let the candlelight shine out in beautiful snowflake patterns.
Sam raced ahead of me, and then slowed down, looking back to gloat at the distance he’d put between us. He’s very competitive, like me. Then he waved nicely, and went on. Oh, Sam: I worry that I was either too strict, or not strict enough. I’m not quite sure which. I’ve given him a lot of freedom—he can take public transportation all over the county—but I’m strict about manners, and church. You have to contain children, or you ruin them, and no one will ever want you to come visit. But children go ballistic when their unfettered spirits feel constricted and picked on by horrible you. They like you less, but if you don’t do it, they feel wounded. “You shouldn’t have even had children,” they’ll say with contempt. They’ll comment on your clothes or your butt, in public, or your hair or your grooming.
Once when Sam was twelve or so, we were standing in line at the movies and I found him staring at me judgmentally.
“What?” I asked.
“When you got your dreadlocks, you made a commitment to keep them groomed,” he said. “But you’ve let them get all fuzzy.”
It’s a mixed grill of sweet and nourishing and intolerable, like life. You and your bright, bonny child walk hand in hand to the park, and then, while sitting on a bench, you see his delight in hurting another kid. Kids go right for the vulnerability in other kids, ganging up on the weakest, ditching, or snatching things away. Life is not what one had in mind; it’s not the TV sitcoms or the commercials, or the photo of the Sudanese baby. It’s punishing. It makes you want to punish back.
There are times when Sam is so mouthy that all I can do is pray for a sense of humor and absurdity, even if it’s the size of a mustard seed. Otherwise, I look at C-minuses on progress reports, and see him at thirty taking orders at Taco Bell. If he could even get that job, with his handwriting. Or he is sent home from school for participating in a mudfight, and I think, Timothy McVeigh. Or I realize: I don’t like this child, I shouldn’t have had a kid, it’s all hopeless. All I can do is pray: Help!
Sam, Lily, and I walked together in the shade of the trees for a while. I looked over a few times and smiled at him. Left to my own devices, I find myself hurrying along with my head down, shoulders hunched, my hands grasped behind my back like Groucho Marx. But Sam beside me and the songs of unseen birds make me look up and around, make me notice the patches of blue sky between the dens
e branches. Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it’s why we are here, to see as many chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within one another’s meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you’d miss the beauty of the veil. The shadow is always there, and if you don’t remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you’re plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show. Without shadows, we’d see only what a friend of mine refers to as “all that goddamn light.”
Sam ran ahead again, picking up rocks as he went. Lily chased after him. He creates a force field around him that nothing can breach, that comes out of the very center of him. Everything is concentrated on that torque. I watched him go. I’ve been watching him go since he learned how to crawl. Sometimes I didn’t watch closely enough, and he got hurt—he burned his hand badly once, and he split his eyebrow open on a coffee table, and he and his friends got drunk a few times last summer. I’m always afraid he’ll end up as I did, stoned and drunk for many years, sick in the mornings. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he says, but that’s what I used to tell my parents. I tell him what Chef in South Park said. “Children . . . There’s a time and place for doing drugs, and it’s called college.” He smiles, and like a hawk I watch him go, and watch him go, watch him go.
Heartbreaking things have befallen some of the children we know, even when their parents kept their eyes open: cystic fibrosis, truancy, homelessness, alcohol, drugs. Most of them have come through, though, scarred and shaking their heads. Sometimes things were so awful for friends of mine that I thought it was all over. Rocks came tumbling down on them, on their lives, yet with help, they endured. In some cases, the rocks continue to fall, but even so, when it looks to the outside world as if they are doomed, it turns out that something inside is slowly being fused back together. They find an underground, wiggly strength.
Sam stomped ahead of me like a mountain goat to the top of the hill, and waited. When I caught up with him, he stuck his branch out—to pull me up, I thought—but he pantomimed a swordfight and poked me.
“God,” I said involuntarily, knowing it was an accident. “Can you cut me a little slack?”
“I’m sorry. My bad.” He always says that, like a baby Rastafarian: “My bad.” He reached out and pulled me the last few steps to the top. I walked until I came upon the view of a million fleecy trees, the foothills of Mount Tam. I sat down.
“What if there’s another 9/11?” he said.
“What made you think about that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Is there any situation where you would kill Lily?”
“Of course not, unless she was very ill.”
“What if there was another 9/11?” he asked. “And we didn’t have any food. You wouldn’t kill Lily to feed me?”
“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.
thirteen
untitled
I was at a wedding the other day with a lot of women in their twenties and thirties. Many wore sexy dresses, their youthful skin aglow. And even though I was twenty to thirty years older than they, a little worse for wear, a little tired, and overwhelmed by the loud music, I was smiling.
I smiled with a secret smile of pleasure in being older, fifty plus change, which can no longer be considered extremely late youth, or even early middle age. But I would not give back a year of life I’ve lived.
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don’t love—until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach—but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.
Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory?
You bet I would. That is why it’s such a blessing that I’m not left to my own devices. I have amazing friends. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I’ve learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I’d give up all this for a flatter belly? Only about a third of the time.
I still have terrible moments when I despair about my body—time and gravity have not made various parts of it higher and firmer. But those are just moments now—I used to have years when I believed I was more beautiful if I jiggled less, if all parts of my body stopped moving when I did. But I know two things now that I didn’t at thirty: That when we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth. And that I am not going to live forever. Knowing these things has set me free.
I am thrilled—ish—for every gray hair and sore muscle, because of all the friends who didn’t make it, who died too young of AIDS and breast cancer. I’m decades past my salad days, and even past the main course: maybe I’m in my cheese days—sitting atop the lettuce leaves on the table for a while now with all the other cheese balls, but with much nutrition to offer, and still delicious. Or maybe I’m in my dessert days, the most delicious course. Whatever you call it, much of the stuff I used to worry
about has subsided—what other people think of me, and of how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least eventually. It’s a huge relief.
I became more successful in my forties, but that pales in comparison with the other gifts of my current decade—how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I prepare myself tubs of hot salt water at the end of the day, and soak my tired feet. I run interference for myself when I am working, like the wife of a great artist would—“No, I’m sorry, she can’t come. She’s working hard these days, and needs a lot of down time.” I live by the truth that “No” is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act.
I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had swum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert. So this informs how I live now.
I have survived so much loss, as all of us have by our forties—my parents, dear friends, my pets. Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built. If you haven’t already, you will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet of old friendships.