2 posts tagged “writing”

"Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom."

I started to think this exactly a year ago when a doctor substituting for Sam's regular pediatritian ran some routine blood tests on him because she suspected he was haboring a parasiting memento of a trip to Mexico.  He was in fact treated for parasites, but two weeks later when they tested his blood again, there was still something wrong. y then he had had blood drawn half a dozen times and was so panic stricken each time that he had to be held down by a monolithic lab technician named Ira.  Ira would be summoned form the back room and basically he'd sit on Sam while the lab technician drew blood. It was awful. But iwas a Parisian holiday compared with the next phone call from the doctor , when she said "We've ruled out almost everything obvious. Im afraid I went ahead and sent his blood work to the head of oncology in San Fransisco. The oncologist has studied our findings, and wants to see you Monday." I felt the top of my head detach, lift up and blow away like a painters paper cap.

"Oh" I whispered into the phone.
"We need to draw more blood today, too," she said. I felt terror like I'd never felt before, and rage, rage: I saw myself cutting through her neck with an electric carving knide. I wanted to shout that he didn't have any more blood, that she'd already druk it all up because she was a pig and that she was not ot bother us again.
"Oh, God loves it when you talk like that," My sarcastic Jesuit friend Tom said. "God calls the escort service when he hears you talk like that."
 
I called all our best friends and everyone immediately started listing tall the things it could be, besides the bad thing. This was the battle cry- that it could be any number of innocuous things --- but I have been through a lot of cancer with a lot of people, and I'm definitely nobody's fool.

So everyone, including Sam's real doctor- who was out of town but who spoke to me by phone - and my doctor friends, all said I needed to stay as calm as possible because it was going to turn out to be OK. Tom reminded me that sometimes you ge to see just how little you're actually in charge of. I told him I was never going to call him again.

I started to cry, and I cried off and on all day. I picked Sam up from school and made some lame excuse for my tears and offered him any toy he wanted in exchange for him giving a little more blood. We went to the lab and they summoned Ira, who lumbered out and sat on Sam while blood was drawn. When they were done I took Sam off to the bathroom with me because I had to pee and that was when I first discovered God is in the ladies' room.

Maybe God is in the men's room too, but I have been in so few of them since I got sober. At any rate, I sat on the toilet and closed my eyes. It was incredibly quiet. Then sam becan to fill up urine specimen cups with tap water and to do various pouring experiments with them - pouring twater from cup to cup when he brims were touching, pouring from one cup to another from many inches away, covering the mouth of one cup with another and trying to transfer the water without spilling any - or, the second time, without spilling so much. ......

So, in the women's bathroom at the blood lab, watching Sam contentedly do his pouring experiments with urine specimen cups, I decided I would simply show up and be as sane as I could, as faithful and grown up. This decision helped me back out of the tunnel of fear. I looked in the mirror at my worried face, but instead of fixating on the draw's feet,  the brand new Harry Dean Stanton crease in my cheek, I prayed. I asked for faith in God's will, for faith in God's love ad protection. I prayed for my sense of humor to survive. I prayed for guidance, and studying my scared-mother face in the mirror, I suddently got my answer: Go forth, I heard, and shop.......

There in the toy store, watching him tear off the plastic packaging, my mind raced ith images of him pale and quiet and weak, and before I knew it, I grabbed him by the hand and headed back to the women's bathroom.

We went into a stall and I sat on the tiolet and he began to play with his toy, which was in it's replicant stage. I closed my eyes and prayed beggy prayers. U suggested all sorts of really awful people he or she should go after instead of my boy, people of dubious political responsibility. Sam was making quiet replicant noises, windy and metallif like a breeze pasting through rusty machine parts. He seemed entirely happy, whereas I felt like I as facig execution. An ache of homesickness came over me, a for our old life before Sam's blood got funky, for the sweet functional surface of that life, for all the stuff and routine that held me together, or at least that I believe hold me together. That's the place I like to think of as reality. Maybe it's full of lusts and hormones and yearnings for more, more, more and maybe it is all about clutching and holding and tightness, but I just love it to pieces and it was where I wanted to be.

Instead everything felt so ominous, dark and frightening, a if we were hiding from someone in a cave. I suddenly remembered the cave where the prophet Elijah hung out while waiting to be either killed by Ahab or saved by God. An angel had come to him earlier as he sat in the desert under a broom tree, and the angel had given him a message. First the angel told him that he should eat. This is one of my favorite moment sin the Bible, God as Jewish mother; Elijah, eat something! The angel said he should eat, and then rest, and then retire to the cave and wait for further instructions. The angel promised that the Lord would be passing by there soon.

So this is what Elijah did. He ate hearthcakes and drank a jug of water and then went to wait in the cave for the wrod the the Lord..."and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stoof at the entrance to the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him." The voice told him God's will for him, what he must do to save himself and God's people, and this of course was exactly what Elijah proceeded to do.

Sam wanted to leave, but I felt safe in teh cave with God and Sam.

Still, after a while I got up and took Sam's hand and we went and got some smoothies. You really do have to eat, anything at all you can bear. So we had smoothies, with bananas, which I believe to be the only known cure for existential dread. Then we got in our car to go home. I liked being alone with him. He was talking about wonderfully odd things. "If dogs had the heads of cats but still the bodies of dogs, would cats be afraid of them?" he asked. He seemed happy. He had so little armor, few bulwarks or patterns set up to protect him; sometimes I feel like I am made up of nothing but. I remembered then that these people I konw wth sick children have had most of these bulwarks stripped away, and when this happens, thwy were left with a lot of spirit, when they were lucky, or suicidal depression. Often both: I've been watching our frinds pass through the latter and survive with spirit and mostly enormous dingity. I shook my head in wonder. These friends had been pushed down into the depths so entirely that it left them wide open and hopeless. Then their best friends would come by, and that would help them hook onto something besides their own terror. Their friends love turned out to be the sound of God at the mouth of the cave, a breeze to sustain and help guide them.

I spet the next two days taking care of us. We ate a lot of muffins in lieu of hearthcakes, and drank a lot of water. I went into the bathroom a lot to pray for patience. People came by and sometimes they sat with me on the floor of my bathroom. It was like the old days when we were all on LSD and sat close and beathred together. It would be great if we could go in and out of this place without needing drugs or Ahab on our trail- go into the mystic of the eternal present or whateer we might call it out here in California. But mostly it seems we can' do it when we have our act together, because we can't do it when we're acting.

I also remembered that sometimes wen you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort. What is that old song? "Same old, same old pair of slippers, same old , same old bowl of rice, same old, same old glimpse of paradise." I washed the windows so we could see the trees more clearly., I gave the dog a flea bath, I lay on the floor and drew with Sam. It took such great muscular effort to appear unruffled., to hide my fear about his health , that I thought I might get a charley horse. I was faking it, not quite making it, but not going under either.

And soon my prayers were answered, first when patience miraculously descended like a soft, chick-yellow parachute silk. Before, I had been fretting and pacing while waiting to hear from the doctor. But patience is when God- or something- makes the now a little roomier. Looking at the one beam of sunlight streaming into the living room, casting warm light on our pets, two plants, one old friend and a small boy drawing on the floor, I finally realized I was more or less OK for the time being- and this was an amazing difference.

And then two days later the doctor called with the great good news that she'd canceled our appointment with the oncologist in San Fransisco. Yes, Sam had to go back for more blood work- had to be sat upon one more time bt Ira - but she no longer believed that he was in any serious trouble. He was eventually diagnosed with a really uninteresting allergy.

God: I wish you could have some permanence, a guarantee or two, the unconditional love we all long for. "It would be such skin off your nose?" I demand of God. I never get an answer. But in the meantime I have learned that most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of people.

I called my Jesuit friend and told him our good news. He groaned with relief. "Oh, honey." he said. Both of us were silent for a while. Then he said "Baby? Sometimes deliverance is as cool as the air in a redwood grove."



"Hearthcake" from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott... p161-168