Anne Lamott

Besides the big brokennesses in people’s lives this year, I’ve noticed
all sorts of really dumb things breaking lately. Since Advent began
at the end of November, I’ve had a dozen calls reporting broken cars,
water heaters, a window, even a finger. So I was on the lookout for something
wonderful to happen, because of this great story I heard recently about dumb
things going wrong: Carolyn Myss, who writes about healing, went to Russia a
few years ago to give a series of lectures. Every single aspect of getting to
Russia that could go poorly, did. Then in Moscow it turned out that her
reserved room at the hotel had been given to someone else. She ended up
sleeping on a stranger’s floor. Two mornings later, on a train to her
conference on healing, she began to whine at the man sitting beside her about
how infuriating her journey had been thus far. It turned out that he worked
for the Dalai Lama. And he said gently that he believed that when a lot of
seemingly meaningless things started going wrong all at once, it was to
protect something big and lovely that was trying to get itself born — that, in
other words, perhaps it needed for you to be distracted so it could be born
perfect.

I totally believe this to be true; and I especially believe it when other
people’s things are breaking down. When it’s my stuff, I believe the cause is
that I’m a bad person. For instance, when the new car I was leasing had a
complete nervous breakdown a month ago, a friend helped me get the lease
rescinded, but while trying to figure out what to drive next, I rented what
was billed as a quality used car. Two days later, when it broke down by the
side of the road, I did not find it very inspiring: I did not look around to
see what lovely thing was getting itself born. I was just deeply disturbed. I
decided I was jinxed, that I had bad car karma. This was right after Advent
began, when all around the world people awaited the celebration of the birth
of the King to a raggedy homeless family. It was also in the days just
before the great rainy weather of El Niqo began.

Now I’m not sure why, looking back at all those broken cars, with the
rains about to come, it seemed like a good idea to buy a used Volkswagen convertible. Maybe it was the realization that the luxury tank I’d leased in an effort to
feel safe had — quelle suprise — failed me. That there was no safety out
there — that it was going to have to be an inside job.
Or maybe it was because so many things had broken or been so troubling this
year that I just wanted to feel lighter. Or maybe I wanted to have a little
fun.

I’d always loved Volkswagens. I learned to drive on a 1962 VW bus. I’ve
had a number of VW’s over the years. They’re cheap and they run forever.
Remember in “Sleeper,” when 200 years from now Woody Allen and Diane
Keaton come upon an old ’60s VW bug rusting away in a cave, with the key still
in the ignition, and the car starts right up?

This is what I wanted: something cheap and reliable that didn’t waste
gas, something funky and smart, a little rusty, a little banged up, like me.

However, I didn’t set out to get a convertible; I mean, what with El Niqo
and all. I started thinking about old Volkswagen Jettas, because they’re
sporty but in a touching, hippie way, like Pete Seeger wearing new Reeboks.
They’re supposed to be a great car. Then, on the day the rains began, I heard
about a ’92 Cabriolet, which is basically the convertible form of the Jetta.
This one only had 39,000 miles on it, five speeds and white fake-leather seats.
Teal green, a white naugahyde top, a nice sound system and it was
inexpensive. I called the owner, who was Iranian. She was selling it for her
uncle, who lived in Southern California.

It seemed like a great deal. The Iranian woman and I took the car for a
ride and it drove like a dream. I could afford it without needing a bank
loan and it would run forever. I took it in to a deeply anal, obsessive
Volkswagen diagnostician, and even he said it was a terrific car.

So I bought it. By then it was the second week of Advent, of waiting
with the rest of the world for the birth of the child whom, the Old Testament
tells us, would be called Emmanuel: “God with us.”

And the rains came pouring down.

Sam loved the car, and it didn’t leak at all. We tooled all over town in it,
listening to oldies on the radio, fantasizing about trips to the beach. I
decided to spring for brand new tires, in deference to the bad weather, and
the front wheels needed re-aligning anyway. So I took it to a tire shop in
Marin where there are always a million new tires stacked in front. I bought
four tires, arranged for the realignment and bonded like mad with the woman
behind the counter. Her name was Matty. She was the sister of the man who
ran the whole operation, the daughter of the man who owned it. She lent me an
old Cutlass Supreme to drive. She was my new best friend.

I picked up my car that night and said goodbye to my new best friend.
“Come back in 40,000 miles, and we’ll cut you another great deal,” said my new
best friend’s dad. He looked like an old golf pro in a 49ers jacket.

Two days and 40 miles later, on a Saturday afternoon, Sam and I were
cruising around town when all of a sudden, at the stop sign of a busy
intersection, there was a sound from the front of the convertible. It was a bad
sound, a slippery crashing, as if it had prolapse, and all of its internal
organs were trying to fall out of its vagina. And the car wouldn’t go
forward. Sam and I gaped at each other. I tried to ease the car into first,
but it made the bad sound again and would not move forward an inch. Cars
behind me started to honk. “Move your fucking car,” someone shouted.
Everyone started honking. It was my own private New York City.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

It would be hard to capture how I felt at this moment. I told people
later that I felt like hanging myself. It was like PMS on bad acid:
psychosis and bloat and Bad Mind. Bad Mind can’t wait for this kind of
opportunity — “I told you so,” Bad Mind says. Bad Mind whispers to me that I
am a loser, that I am doomed. And Bad Mind has a tiny problem with paranoia.
“The woman you bought this car from,” it whispered, “is on a plane back to
Iran.”
Horns honking, metal grinding under my hood, Bad Mind sharing. “I’m
freaking out,” I said to Sam. I turned on my hazard lights and did Lamaze.

“Move the goddamn fucking car,” someone shouted.

I did not know what to do. I tried to get the car into gear; it brayed.
“Will you pray with me?” I asked Sam. “So I can calm myself?” Sam has been
talking about Jesus again a lot since Advent began. It’s very touching.

“OK,” he said, “but wait a minute.” Then he stuck his head out the
window, and shouted, “Stop yelling at us, you fucking assholes!”

We said a prayer together, that we find a solution, that we feel calmer.
I don’t believe in God as an old man in the clouds, “bespectacled old Yahweh,”
as the late great John Gardner put it, “scratching his chin through his
mountains of beard.” But I believe that God is always with us, that goodness
guides, provides, protects. If you had my friends and son, you might too.

“Do you need a hand?” a man asked a few minutes later, bending down to
peer in the window. I nodded. “OK,” he said. “You steer. I’ll push.”

And he did. I am not going to say some dumb half-baked thing about who I
think had, in disguise, come to help us.

When we were out of the road and the man had left, I called Triple-A from
the car phone. It went dead. I looked at Sam and sighed. Then, on the screen
of my mind, Matty’s face appeared. Matty, and all those tires.

“I know where to go!” I said. “To the tire shop!”

“Is there something wrong with our tires?”

“I don’t think so, honey. I just know that’s where we’re supposed to
go.”

So, holding hands, we ran down the street in the rain. We ran until we
came to the tire shop. Matty wasn’t there. But her father was.

“Remember me?” He nodded. “My car broke down six blocks away.”

“Listen,” he said, nicely, “we’re a tire shop.”

“But you fixed other things on Thursday, too.”

“But nothing mechanical,” he said. “We have no mechanics on duty. And
we close at 3 on Saturdays — that’s just over half an hour.”

Sam peered at me with the mix of faith and worry that I felt. Finally, I
said, “I’m not trying to con you into helping us. All I know is that we were
supposed to come here. That if we came here, we would be helped.”

“Well,” Matty’s dad said finally, “there’s this Mexican guy in the
back.”

My soul heaved a huge sigh of relief: Of course there was this Mexican
guy in the back, I thought, and absolutely knew that he was our connection.

“I suppose I could go get him,” said Matty’s father. And I smiled.

The Mexican man came out a few minutes later, tall and beautiful, in
greasy coveralls. His name was Joaquim. He asked how he could help me.

“My car broke down down the road,” I said.

“I just work on tires,” he said.

“I need you to just come with me and take a look.”

“OK,” he said. So we piled into the old Cutlass Supreme and we drove
to my car. It had stopped raining. Joaquim opened the hood, peered in, then
peered under the car. “Ohhh,” he said, and what I think he said next, since I
do not speak Car, and he spoke halting English, was that some major bolt
worked loose, but that if the threads were not stripped, he could fix it.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We need to go get Al,” he said.

Oh, I thought, of course. Of course we need to go get Al. Duhh! We
drove back and picked up Al, who was small and did not speak any English at
all. He drove us all in a dilapidated truck back to my car. Al found a
pitiful short piece of fraying rope in his glove box. It was like girl rope;
it was like a bit of rope I’d have in my purse, that you couldn’t do anything
with except maybe tie up your hair. And Joaquim used it to tie my Volkswagen
to Al’s crummy truck. It was like the traveling Dr. Zeus Repair Shop, à la
Rube Goldberg.

Joaquim and Sam got into the VW. Al and I started towing them. Smash crash,
it was like the Demolition Derby. And I just smiled, I couldn’t have been
happier. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t alone.

We lurched and crashed along until things finally began going more
smoothly. Joaquim and Sam were no longer bumping into us. This is grace at
work, I decided rather smugly, then turned around to discover my new car half
a block behind us, on the other side of an intersection. Sam and Joaquim had
their heads stuck out the windows and were waving to us as if they were on a
float, or the honorary Fire Marshalls in the Damaged Parade.

We went back and tied them to us again; they came untied again. And
coasted right passed us. After they’d come to a stop, Al drove up to my new
car and nudged it forward a ways. Then he caught up with it and bashed it
forward. I could see by the back of Sam’s head that he was staring straight
ahead, trying to be polite. Al nosed and bashed my car all the way up the
street, into the greasy work deck of the tire shop; right past all those
tires.

The next thing I knew my car was on the lift, in the air. Joaquim and Al
peered up into its innards with flashlights, consulting in hushed tones, like
doctors. Joaquim came over to talk to me gravely, like I was the next of kin.

“We are only open for 20 more minutes,” he said.

“OK,” I said, magnanimously. “I can leave it over the weekend.”

“No,” he said. “What I mean is, come back in 20 minutes.”

So I did. Sam and I played in the parking lot of a bank nearby, playing
soccer with a old tennis ball that was losing its nap. I felt entirely
happy.

It all made me think of Eugene O’Neill’s line, “Man is born broken. He
lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

When we went back to the tire shop, Matty’s father gave us a bill for
$36. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a terrific car.” I wrote him a check,
and slipped Joaquim and Al each a 20. You cannot under-tip Jesus.

So, back in the saddle again. It’s the story of my life. The car is
running great and it’s fun to drive. And I’m beginning to get an idea of
what was trying to keep me distracted so it could get itself born, but I can’t
put it into words yet. All I know is that I’ve been happier in the ensuing few
weeks than I’ve ever been before. I feel quite often these days as if I’m on
a mild dose of magic mushrooms, which is the only comparison I can think of for
feeling this much wonder, this much love. Bad Mind tells me that it’s
probably the result of a brain tumor, or a breakdown. But I think it’s the
gift of grief, the gift of failure, of all that crying and rage — of having
dealt with so much pain. Maybe all those tears washed me a little bit cleaner,
like an inside shower. And maybe they somehow also watered the soil
beneath me. Who knows. But I will keep you posted; more will be
revealed.

And in the meantime, I’m going on sabbatical for four or five
months, to finish a book on faith. So take good care, and thanks. And
traveling mercies to you.

And that Obama is nothing if not brilliant. This guy has had some liberal victories legislatively, and when word of these victories — the realities of healthcare, financial reform, student loan reform, etc. — trickles out, we will have pride and stamina again. We will experience grace again, the grace of generosity to the underdog; the grace of second winds, and psychic WD-40. The grace of unseen water wings.

I say, buckle up, buckeroos and buckerinas. Fingers crossed and heads high. Once more into the breach. Also, figure out how you, in your area, can help mobilize the Latino vote. We owe Harry Reid to Hispanic outrage and get-out-the-vote efforts — send someone money today. (I love Mi Familia Vota, but there are organizations in every state.) Or go somewhere nearby and register Latino voters, and the youth, who accidentally forgot to show up on Tuesday — the “yout,” to quote the great Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinnie.” Help whip up the Youts for 2012. Lots to do! Kids to mentor, wars to protest, homeless people to help through the coming winter night. Time to rest and get ready.

So goodnight, moon. Goodnight, long national nightmare of the last two months, when it looked like we might lose John Dingell, and Barney Frank, and HAR-RY. Good night, Carl Paladino, with your cute red bat! Goodnight, Christine O’Donnell, with your election night list of demands — fabulous! I don’t know a living writer who could have thought that up, or the “I Am not a Witch” campaign. Maybe the late, great Terry Southern? But anyway, excellent — and goodnight. Goodnight, Dino Rossi, but can we keep the name? And goodnight, icky Meg Whitman, thank you from the bottom of my heart for not being my new governor. Money and power and ego can’t buy ya love, huh? Does that suck, or WHAT? And we all know what it’s like to spend money unwisely — who among us does not have some crazy purchase in our closet or drawer and garage right now? The stories I could tell — the blisters, the eyeglass frames that look so adorable on Justin Timberlake. Oh well, good night, Meg; and thank you for your courage, Meg Whitman’s housekeeper. And good night, Joe Sestak — but DON’T go very far away. You’re the real thing. Good night, Joe Miller, even with all those rascally votes still to count. But goodnight, and thank you for sharing.

Let’s all go have some well-earned rest. A new day dawns.

I’m not thinking of the San Francisco Giants here, although I have been following them with love and a sick stomach for most of my 56 years. This year they are almost certainly going to the Series, a great and unique team. Yet some of my earliest memories are of coming into the kitchen of the small coffee-colored house we rented in the late ’50s, to find my parents and older brother seated around the radio, with their arms folded across their stomachs. They’d be doubled over with worry as the Giants seemed poised once again to throw away victory, blowing a comeback at the last possible minute.

I’m not thinking about how much being a lifelong Giants fan is like having been a lifelong Democrat — they are both such beautiful teams, from the Willies May and McCovey in that coffee-colored house, to Tim Lincecum and Pablo Sandoval; from Adlai Stevenson to Lynn Woolsey and Russ Feingold. They have taught me that when it comes to playoff games and midterm elections, you can’t let your hopes get too high — but of course you do, and once again, the Giants or the Democrats break your heart — or totally, hilariously kick butt.

The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait — I didn’t intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan. There is a certain delusional nobility in the wild ride.

And I’m not even thinking of a recent discussion I had with my Sunday School kids, about how when we as individuals or nations get so terribly lost, we have prophets to call us back. The prophets aren’t like the guys on Christian radio, predicting the end of the world for sometime next Thursday, right after lunch. They are truth tellers, lights, Dr. King or Nelson Mandela, calling us back to decency, sanity, to each person being treated exactly the same.

All I started out to say was that I remember so many matches I played as a junior tennis star, when I got off to a bad start, and was losing big time to someone I either should have been able to beat, or needed to beat to keep up my ranking. My opponent was frequently an awful arrogant, stupid person, which I say without judgment. It was simple reality — most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock — great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

Future Democrats, and Giants fans.

Anyway, you’d be losing by a set and a service break, say 6-3, 4-1, to an athlete whose practice partner has come to watch her, and whose father was hiding behind a bush nearby, giving her hand signals (whereas your pathetic Giants-and-Adlai-Stevenson-fan father has such bad nerves that he couldn’t even watch you play, even when you were in the finals). Your stomach ached, but you held serve, 4-2. Then, about to serve for 5-2, your opponent got a little cocky, began wondering who was winning the match over on court 12, which would be her next opponent on the march to the finals. And so your opponent double-faulted. Love-15. And because you had nothing to lose, and the game was surely over, and you did not have much of a chance, let alone great hair, long legs and braces on your future perfect white choppers, you secretly got back in the game. You secretly dared to hope.

When your nonplussed opponent crossed over to ace you from the backhand side, you’d nick one of your stealth serial killer moves with your eyes looking away quickly. Then she caught your eye as she aimed at a spot on your service court. You flicked your eyes over to the left, and it threw her. She served long, and her second serve is weak, and you suddenly have the advantage, because you have nothing to lose. And you rallied hard for, and eventually won the point.

Now it’s love-30, and your opponent starts to fall apart. Her nerves fail her, and her left arm on the next toss is as herky-jerky as a tennis ball machine, and she actually has to change down the toss to hit it, or do it over. She’s reduced to pushing in her serve, and you make winners. And she begins to come apart like a two-dollar watch. She’s grinding down those teeth, and her father is losing his mind in the hydrangeas, signaling for her either to serve as hard as she can, or smash in your head at the net. You can’t tell, but he’s furious. Oh, well. Ha ha, as we Christians like to say.

I won a lot of matches when there was almost no hope, and even less time, and it always started with winning one point here, and one point there. It always depended on not giving up, on getting my focus and courage back. It was the greatest feeling on earth, and, I imagine, it would still be so today, to take such a risk, and God only knows, maybe prevail.

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be the mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. These mothers are on a diet.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. (Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.)

Don’t get me wrong: There were times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes, for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children. But if you are going to include everyone, then make mine something like M&M’s, and maybe flowers you picked yourself, even from my own garden, the cut stems wrapped in wet paper towels, then tin foil and a waxed-paper bag from my kitchen drawers. I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.

Anne Lamott’s latest novel is “Imperfect Birds.”

I mean no offense, but the belief that Snowe’s vote made the bill bipartisan was delusional from the start. It was exactly the sort of thing my mother would have come up with — and she was from Liverpool. I rest my case: Those of us with English parents faithfully attend special 12-step meetings to break through the uniquely English forms of denial. The vote of one extremely withholding woman — and I say that without judgment — never changed the nature of the bill, no matter how much you and your staff convinced yourselves it did. It is a Democratic bill — a quintessentially Democratic bill, in that it’s about trying to help those in need. It is about fairness, decency and the common good, the values most Americans were raised on. But you can’t even mention those words and ideals these days without getting laughed at by the Republican leadership — or, worse, tea-bagged.

A great pastor in New York City once said that if you wanted to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor. Teddy Kennedy got his. So did Lincoln, FDR, Shirley Chisholm. And now it’s up to you.

To get Ms. Snowe’s mingy vote, you would have needed to include her little pet rock, the trigger option. But the trigger option was the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps a more precise way of saying this is that the trigger option was a figment, a dodge from greatness. My mother would have called it a “crock.” My 20-year-old son, “Totally bogus.”

I am not saying that continuing to waste our time — while people die every day from lack of healthcare — will keep you out of heaven, although you may get an inferior seat, possibly in the room serving only nursery snacks. How will you face Teddy if you muff this historic moment? Do you think he will share his eclairs with you? His brie?

It’s OK that you wanted Ms. Snowe’s vote so desperately, but the truth is that she was getting high on not giving it to you. She was getting a hit, like a junkie, from withholding. Believe me, I have dated men like her. She had a chance to participate in greatness, which does not happen all that often anymore in American politics, but the possibility is there now — for you, for us, for our country.

A huge majority of people in America and specifically in Maine want the public option. For a few months there, she had the power to kill it. Dude, what was that about? Was it some form of Kabuki theater, wherein you knew she would never give you her vote, but you needed to pretend she might for another week? Was it a multilevel chess game that all the people who voted for you were too dumb to figure out? She didn’t want decent medical care for the poor and middle class: She wanted power. She, like so many of us, is hungry for what she is not giving — for generosity of spirit, the only thing that can fill us up. And yet, she chooses to withhold, this woman who happens to have great government healthcare. I bet she and her extended family never worry when they get sick, or even when they need psychiatric care. Not to mention dental, which just kills me to think about — me and my family, with our terrible English teeth.

So we’ve lost two or three months to that business. And now we have Lieberman. In some ways, he’s even worse, because of — well, you know — the voice.

We do not personally blame you for the fact that we have to listen to him. It’s political life, on political life’s terms. And maybe his therapist or rabbi will help staunch his latest episode of swerving sickness. But recently on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the great Jane Hamsher compared the healthcare debate to a beauty contest in which the contestants who feel ignored start stripping and said that, at some point, one of the directors will convince Lieberman to put his shirt back on. So I am wondering, why can’t that be you? Why can’t you do what Leon on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” keeps urging Larry to do? Take him the ruckus.

Use your most reliable parenting skills: Joe Lieberman is acting like a petulant, icky little kid — I say that with love. Use those classic parental standbys, bribes and threats. Back-channel him. Try reverse psychiatry — “Thank God you stepped in, Joe. Otherwise, we would have been responsible for all those slacker poor people. All those feverish babies and children. All those English expats, with their bad teeth.” If that doesn’t work, maybe you could just remind him of the famous story from 15 years ago, that family with a 5-year-old girl with leukemia who needed blood in massive quantities to stay alive. You remember: Everyone in her family except her older brother was tested and found to be incompatible. But the boy was afraid of having blood drawn in order to test it, and his parents respected him enough to let him come to the decision by himself.

One day he came to them and told them he was ready. They took him to the doctor, his blood was tested, and it was an almost exact match with his little sister. So the two of them were put on beds side by side in a hospital room, and the nurses withdrew blood from his arm, and let it flow into his sister’s. He lay with his eyes closed, in silence for the entire procedure, until the doctor gripped his shoulder and asked how he was doing. The boy opened his eyes.

“How soon ’til I start to die?” he asked.

This kind of profound and innocent moral courage is the most attractive characteristic a person can display, especially a politician. It is time for you to come out vigorously and loudly for Harry Reid by getting your people in line. Reid has managed, with a lot of help from liberals and progressives and too much time lost, to whip most of the Senate Democrats behind what you campaigned for. Now it is time for you to roar. Ms. Snowe and Joe can still choose greatness, too: They have free will, and they may surprise us all. Or, hey, while we are at it, why not hit up George Voinovich? He is not running for reelection and is — or should be — rooting around for a legacy. Otherwise, people will scratch their heads while trying to remember who he was. “Oh, Voinovich? Wasn’t he the guy up on Laurel who had to tent his house for termites?” He could go out a hero, by simply doing what public servants are supposed to do — stand up for the people, for greatness, for compassion, fairness and the common good.

So again I ask you, do the right thing, and do it now. Shoot the moon, Boss: right between the eyes. 

Another troubling thing: I do not know when you first began to insist that Sarah Palin’s baby boy would need to appear before one of your panels, but I can tell you this, Mr. President, it is not going to fly with the American people. If you are going to try to ram the death panels through Congress, I have three words of advice: Easy does it. Certainly there are people we can all agree are of borderline value. For instance, there is this guy I know named Harold who is a total monster. Everyone hates him. No matter how friendly we are to him, he never returns our greetings, but instead gives us the stink-eye, and a sneer. It is hard for me to believe that even Jesus would argue on his behalf at one of your panels. But the little Palin baby? No way, no how.

There would need to be a system of checks and balances so that we could all rest assured that favoritism was not a part of determining who would receive healthcare. Some people would say that if someone more closely resembled an Alturien than an American citizen, that person might be considered for the death pile. But that strikes me as being very cavalier. Life is precious, Mr. President, and just because somebody’s appearance makes you think of space aliens and anal probes rather than car seats and root beer, it is no reason to throw them away, as you have proposed. Obviously, if there is going to be a lot of killing going on in your healthcare program, panels would have to be made up of people with impeccable credentials. Otherwise, this would be a real deal-breaker for a lot us. For God’s sake, what if someone like Harold ends up as a judge on the panel, instead of coming before it, like the little Palin baby, or someone’s perfectly good grandparents?

This death panel of yours will require people of sensitivity, fairness, efficiency and patience. And that is why I would like to volunteer to serve: I am fair, fast and fun. Mr. President, I am at your service.

Best wishes,

Anne Lamott