An appeal from the author Why you should become a Salon member. By Anne Lamott

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T A B L E++T A L K

Single moms discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of raising kids solo in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Forever young
By Joan Walsh
In defense of My Twinn: Why the doll that horrifies parents appeals to children
(12/22/98)

Star quality
By Debra Ollivier
A "Little Prince" among men
(12/22/98)

Forever young
By Joan Walsh
In defense of My Twinn: Why the doll that horrifies parents appeals to children
(12/21/98)

Airstrikes of mercy
By Geraldine Brooks
A former Middle East correspondent explains how Saddam Hussein turned her from a pacifist into a hawk
(12/21/98)

Second Thoughts: Rolling out the years
By Sallie Tisdale
No one has time to bake cookies. That's why you need to
(12/17/98)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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[_W O R D__B Y__W O R D_]
BY ANNE LAMOTT | This is not a story about the best Christmas present I ever received, or thebest one I ever gave. It is about the best Christmas present I ever saw.

I have had a friend for over 20 years whom I don't know very well, but whom I have been fond of all that time, as I know she has been fond of me.Her name is Carol Wagner, and I would guess she is in her mid-50s. I first met her 20-some years ago when she used to pick me up hitchhiking outin West Marin, where we lived. She had unruly curly hair and was a great reader and a down-to-earth modest proleteriat type who worked at the post office in Stinson Beach. I was a little afraid of her at first because she was also on the school board, where she could be tough and crabby, but I always liked talking to her when she gave me rides, because she was wry and smart and abided no bullshit, all of which I have always loved in a girl.

There is a beautiful plainness to her, a sense of someone who is solid and true, who has had a lot of losses in life and reasons to be bitter, but who isn't. A beauty of intelligence and soul shows in her face, the kind thatpushes through and becomes visible when someone has handled their stuff and their suffering with tenderness and courtesy. Also, she has seen many peoplethrough their hardships over the years, and so she is loved and appreciated. People liked to see her at the post office when they'd pick up their mail, because she was just who she was. What you saw was what you got. And that is so rare, and so lovely, that it can be a little alchemical: Molly Fisk once wrote in a poem about the post office, "When I open Box 592, there was Carol's curly hair and one third of her forehead, like an Advent calender in springtime."

Several years ago, she got leukemia. She did all the standard medical treatments, including enough chemotherapy to last a literal lifetime. She shook and she baked and lost all those wayward curls, and she got very sick from the cures. But they seemed to be working for a time, and the people of Stinson Beach -- the town where she lived -- cooked and shopped and drove and kepther company and donated buckets of blood. She sloughed off all the nonessential aspects of her life, tossed them out of the airplane so she could fly a little higher, but the cancer stripped her way down, as it does, and when the chemo was over, she built her life back up. Then there were a numberof recurrences, and she would need more rounds of treatment, and life would get stripped back to surviving the disease and the cure, and then she'd build her life and health back up all over again. All the while, you would think that God or life would hold everything else back, like a traffic cop holding back the traffic so the baby ducks can cross, but this was not the case. Reallife reared its head: First, some of the people Carol loves the most also got sick, and Carol did what had to be done to help them even as she tried to get well again herself. But as the psalmist tells us, Joy comes in the morning, and it did. Her daughter gave birth to a big darling hunky chunky boy, and all that soft unarmored baby skin was very healing for Carol. But of course what the psalmist does not say is that at the end of the day, dusk will come again, too, and then night -- and I think for a lot of us, this is the one real fly in the ointment.

When I saw her last at a concert, she was doing whatever was essential andnot too much else. She was living with the "what if" that everyone shudders to consider, and doing pretty well with it. You had the sense that she was still a pretty tough customer in her private life, but she was visibly softer.I think it was partly due to that luscious succulent blue-eyed baby boy, of whom she spoke with great joy, but it may also have been that cancer can wedgea certain kind of person open, so that many new things can get in. My guess isthat what got into Carol was the knowledge of how loved she is, and therefore,how safe, and you could feel that she was very thankful that it had, even at its exorbitant cost.

But then she wasn't OK again. The cancer came back, and eventually, asa last-ditch effort, the doctors gave her a bone marrow transplant. And the people of Stinson Beach circled their wagons around her once more. Meals wereprepared and delivered, rides and more blood were given. But a few weeks ago, tests determined that the transplant hadn't worked.

N E X T_ P A G E: Being there for her own memorial service

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