Sam’s birth, on August 29, 1989, was by far the most important day of my life, and Jax’s was the second. Sam and I are quite close, and I’d always looked forward with enthusiasm to becoming a grandmother someday, in, say, ten years from now, perhaps after he had graduated from the art academy he attends in San Francisco and settled down into a career, and when I was old enough to be a grandmother. I was a young fifty-five. Maybe a medium fifty-five. Let’s say a ripe fifty-five, with a child just one year past his majority.

The day before Thanksgiving 2008, I had heard that Amy was expecting, when I got a call from Sam, in despair.

“Mom, I’m going to be a father,” he said.

I was silent for a time. “Oh, Sam,” I said finally.

Continue Reading...

Perhaps "afterglow" is not exactly right. Or "awash."

Maybe I mean "profound relief." Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, and Michael Bennet (amazingly) in Colorado, Patty Murray hanging on, and most of all, Harry Reid, HAR-RY, HAR-RY, HAR-RY. My man. Dawg! For me, holding the Senate and Harry Reid is almost up there with the Giants winning.

So maybe they have the Aqua Buddha, but we have two months to go with this House, this Senate, this president. People say that 10 days or two weeks is an eternity in politics, so two months is four or five eternities. Two months is eternity-plus-plus.

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.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

I hate to complain, and I certainly do not want to sound cranky. But time is awasting, so here goes: Nearly 70 million people voted for you because we supported your commitment to ending the war in Iraq, closing Gitmo and creating universal healthcare. Only a couple thousand of them were passionate about the whole bipartisanship thing, and based on my scientific research, exactly 38 believed that Olympia Snowe's vote on the healthcare reform bill would even make it bipartisan. Thirty-eight people! (And you should see them.) So now the other approximately 66,999,962 of us are left wondering, Why did you lose so much time courting her vote?

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.

Continue Reading...

Like many Americans, I was initially shocked upon hearing of your proposed death panels. But after a short cooling-off period, I have come around.

It troubled me at first to hear that your followers would be deciding the fate our grandparents -- i.e., who would be rescued, and who would be thrown on the death pile. Then I began to wonder if there might be some sort of rebate program for those of us whose grandparents are all dead. Since no one in my family from this generation will need to be processed, I wonder if the government might be willing to pay $100 in savings per grandparent -- sort of a variation on the "Cash for Clunkers." You and your people would make it worthwhile for us not to have random old people lying around. It goes without saying that this would only include American grandparents. My mother's father, John Wyles, died in Liverpool in 1933, and would therefore not qualify. I think we could all agree on this.

Continue Reading...

You can't exclaim too many times, you cannot sing the anthems too many times: They will never lose their power. If you're a nice Christian girl, you're supposed to say that only Jesus' blood will never lose its power, and perhaps I will get a shitty place in heaven specially reserved for the blasphemers, with only aerosol cheese and Tang at every meal, but I do believe it to be true.

The people of my church sang "Lift Every Voice" to begin our service on the Sunday after the presidential election, and people sang it from the very mountains, thrusting their fists into the air, clapping, clapping not to try to beat he devil, like the old saying goes, but because we already did beat the devil.

Continue Reading...

I've been feeling like that lately, in these last weeks before the election. I feel trapped on the bottom of the TV jar, frantic, buzzing, bummed. It was largely due to having to see and hear Sarah Palin every time I turned on the TV or radio. Has there ever been, at least in the last 10 years, a more thoroughly repellent American? I mean, besides Lou Dobbs? But Lou Dobbs is easy to avoid, and he's not a moron, he's a jerk. But Palin is as ridiculous as the competitors from Monty Python's Upperclass Twit of the Year competition, jumping over hurdles that are nothing more than a stack of matchbooks. Yet many suggested Palin's debate was a tie, that she had "succeeded," apparently, because she failed to lapse into witchcraft incantations or talk about her lady parts. Camille Paglia, writing in this publication, referred to her as nothing less than the new feminist idea.

Continue Reading...

She would have had such a ball with Sarah Palin -- the trooper scandal, her love of moose (between buns), the flamboyantly botched television interviews, the bravery of people who hunt wolves for sport, from the air. Even though Molly was a Texan -- who would have been on guard for the sneering tone of liberal criticism toward anyone with a gun or a double-wide -- she still would have obliterated Palin as a faux populist wingnut with a tanning bed instead of a heart. She would have made great hay with the capacity of certain politicians to reinvent themselves in entirely new realities, as newfound populist Brotherman McCain has done, and his desperate, icky laugh of contempt might have raised some worries for her.

Continue Reading...

I sat outside a 7-Eleven and had a sacramental Dove chocolate bar. Jeez: Here we are again. A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise -- lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world -- are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what's left of our precious freedoms.

When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, "Don't you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?"

And he said, "Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian."

Continue Reading...

My nearly 17-year-old son, Sam, and I had a fight last Saturday that was so ugly and insane that it left me wondering if anyone in the history of time had ever been a worse parent, or raised such a horrible child. I believed the answer was no, because I had not read anything that would dispute this, except perhaps for Lionel Dahmer's great memoir of the mistakes he made in raising his son Jeffrey.

Our fight was ostensibly about the car. We have an old beater that I let Sam drive whenever he wants, although because I pay for the insurance, I have some leverage. It's a good deal for him. But I had taken away his car privileges earlier that week because he'd been driving recklessly, hit a curb going 20 and destroyed the front tire. So he felt mad and victimized to begin with, my huge, handsome, brown-eyed son. And actually, so did I. That morning, I asked him to wash both cars, as partial payment for the tire I'd had to buy. It was a beautiful sunny day, and he had other plans, which I made him postpone. Then, with perhaps the tiniest bit of sanctimony, I went for a walk with the dog, to let him work in peace. When I got back, though, the cars were still gauzy with dirt.

Continue Reading...

However, maybe there is the chance of a calm, polite revolution, and perhaps in lieu of "divine love" we could use the idea of simple "kindness." Consider, just for the sake of argument, how good people, in a democracy that has been taken over by cold, rich, scary, armed white men, might proceed.

Good people who have watched their country's leaders skid so far to the triumphal right would have to do something. I mean, wouldn't they? Am I crazy? Otherwise, those people's children will ask them someday, when we are all living in caves, "What did you do to try and save us?" And the children will be so angry, and they are so awful and unpleasant when they are mad, even in the dark.

I, for one, do not want to answer that I did nothing, or that I ranted and flailed, showing up to support my own interest groups, candidates and concerns.

Continue Reading...

"This is perfect for the nursery school at my church," I enthused. The man was middle-aged, plain and so quiet that at first I thought he might be mute. He gave me a receipt, and we said goodbye.

That Sunday, I dropped the rolled-up carpet in the room where the little kids meet. One of the mothers called the next day. She said that when they unrolled the carpet, it had a moldy spot right in the middle, and so she had returned it to the carpet guy.

"Did you get our money back?"

"No, his accountant wasn't there. But he'll have the money by today. Can you pick it up?"

I stopped by the next day. "Hi," I said to the man. "I'm from the church school. We had to return the green rug, and the woman who dropped it off said you would reimburse me."

Continue Reading...

"That's terrible," I said, "to wake me, just because you can't sleep."

"But you're my mom," he said. "I'm supposed to come to you with my problems."

The first year after my mother's death, I felt a lot of sadness that I hadn't had a mother to whom I could take my problems. She was my problem, or at any rate, this is what I had always thought and continued to think. Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.

Continue Reading...

The truth is that many of us left-wing Christians with fragile nerves and bad attitudes are becoming ever so slightly tense about the distinct possibility that this country we love is becoming, under the Bush administration, a theocracy. Those of us with public lives are constantly asked, "Don't you think the radical right has appropriated God, and if so, what is your response to that?"

My answer to the first question is no. No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way. The people currently in charge of this country have so spiritualized their hysteria that their antics make for much better news coverage than the rest of us. Terri Schiavo ("Has America begun murdering its handicapped?" they thunder, and we say meekly, "Well, um, no"). "Lord of the Flies" rallies against gay marriage. Pro-life violence. And -- my personal favorite -- the frenzied opposition to stem cell research, based on the right's conviction that it is an atrocity to save actual human lives by creating new stem cell lines using frozen embryos slated to be thrown out after couples undergoing IVF conceive or give up.

Continue Reading...

Sam's wrestling practice got canceled one recent afternoon, and he was driving me crazy with his pent-up energy. I was puttering and picking up the house, which is my main spiritual practice, and he kept ambushing me with demands for food, or attention, and demonstrations of wrestling menace -- grabbing at me as if to put me in a hammer hold, or coming at me as if to pile-drive me into the kitchen floor like Hulk Hogan: "I'm not going to hurt you," he kept reassuring me, like a serial killer, flinging his leg around the backs of my knees so that I was afraid they would buckle. I'm 50, but already I'm turning into an old dog, with poor vision, dysplasia, achy knees, a weak back and flatulence, while he's raw, robust animal health. Something in him wants to flip me, pile-drive me into the ground, Samoan-drop me into the carpet. I put up puny Rose Kennedy dukes, and asked him if he wanted to go for a hike on the mountain. He said yes.

He's 2 inches taller than me now. The other day he gave me a goodnight hug, and noticed that he was looking down into my eyes.

Continue Reading...

Or rather, I was offering to take $100 bets. No one actually took me up on it. My friends are not a betting people. They are activist worker-bee Birkenstock types. So I decided to take another kind of chance, and take all the last-ditch money I'd planned to donate to various groups, and spend it all on a Democratic fundraising event where Ted Kennedy was to be the guest of honor.

A dear friend of mine, whom I've known for 30 years, got me to sign up for this. I can't really wrap my mind around that last sentence -- Was I even out of school 30 years ago? Was I even born? So let's just say that this nice -- and very familiar -- woman got me to pay a bundle to eat dinner at Oliveto, one of the great restaurants in the Bay Area.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

"Going out and doing intensely cultural stuff is a subversive act -- since if Bush does win, libraries and museums will be closed. Also, I think we should go because Bush especially hates the Japanese."

"How come?"

"Because his father threw up on them."

We met outside the museum, and sat in the sun for a while, eating grapes and waiting for Buddy. He was returning from a bus trip to Sacramento, Calif., where he was protesting a speeding ticket, and might be late.

"What would Jesus do right now?" I asked, referring to the state of our union. "Do you think he would take one look around, and just run for his life? Muttering that we'd missed every single point he had tried to make?"

"No," said Tom, "he would want to, but he'd stick around, to take care of everyone who was hungry. I think he'd start by making soup."

"Then what?"

Continue Reading...