SALON

Anne Lamott

Sunday, Mar 10, 1996 3:27 PM UTC

We are all precious in his sight, even Pat Buchanan

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have the teeniest suspicion that some of you out there might not be heavily into Christianity, so perhaps I should begin by saying that right now it is Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday, which is the day that John the Baptist baptized Jesus, after which Jesus walked in the desert for 40 days mulling things over. So during Lent one is supposed to mull things over just like Jesus did.

Catholics are big on giving things up for Lent, but we Protestants mostly just mull. So I personally get to mull over my craziness and my pathological self-justification and my profound lack of willingness to forgive.

As I said to an audience in Indianapolis, I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness. And someone later asked me, “What kind of Christian are you?” and I said, “I’m the other kind.”

So during this Lenten season, I have to deal with all the rage I feel against Republicans. I asked my friend the priest if it was a problem for Jesus that I hated the Republicans and he said, Oh no, Jesus hates them too. But I thought that despite what this holy man of God said I should take a look at my incredible anger at the Grand Old Party, as I believe it is called.

Unfortunately, by this incredible coincidence right before Lent I wrote a review of the new thriller by Pat Robertson, and in it I said that Pat was perhaps just a wee bit rigid and maybe he had not listened to the Dylan classic “With God On Our Side” enough times.

The review came out and Lent began and I was asking Jesus to help me see that it’s madness to have such overt hostility to Republicans, and I was praying to Jesus to make me more like Him, welcoming all beings, even Pat Buchanan. Because that is the truth: Jesus welcomes Pat Buchanan in exactly the same way that he welcomes my tiny princess self, even though Pat Buchanan is batshit crazy.

So then the phone calls began. I appear to have gotten on some right-wing Christian telephone hate list and my phone number is being faxed all over the country and these women call up and say, “You don’t know me, and I guess you think you have a funny tongue inside that mouth of yours, and I guess maybe the devil does too, and I think that all I need to say is that I will see you at the throne of judgment.”

And the voice is so warm and friendly, it’s like one of those flight attendants you get when you fly out of Atlanta, and she’s asking me if I would like some orange juice and by the way I was going to rot before the throne of judgment. All the callers mentioned that throne, I think they may have had a script, and one time it was a man’s voice and for a while I thought it was my brother Steve trying to make me laugh, and when I realized it wasn’t I also realized that I couldn’t find the portable phone, which my son Sam had put in a box for what were no doubt very good reasons of his own, so I was looking like a madwoman all over the house as this voice kept coming from my answering machine filled with contemptuous rage and hatred, and I noticed dimly that it exactly matched the contemptuous rage and hatred that I was feeling.

I finally found the phone and hung it up and stood there in the bedroom and realized that there was no difference between my callers and me, that we were both trapped by rage and judgment and profound lack of willingness to forgive.

And it was at that moment that Lent actually started for me, and once again I became so relieved that I have a Savior.

Saturday, Feb 24, 1996 6:12 PM UTC

Potatoes, potahtos, let's call the whole thing off

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Sam, stop ringing the doorbell, later you and your
young friend can be raucous like when you’re 16, but right
now I am trying to talk to Arthur.

First you should know that children do not like
potatoes; it’s all on the lists of the things kids won’t
eat. That’s because children don’t know French Fries are
potatoes; they think a French Fry is a special kind of
plant.

So you have to keep this mind when I tell you that I
had my friends Bill and Adair over for dinner, and Anne
Lamott the feminist huntress went down to get Chinese take-out because to tell you the truth I don’t cook very much. I
also got baguettes and cheese and we were sitting in my
living room eating this very acceptable pre-dinner foodstuff
when Sam and his friend Jack appeared, and they each had a
knife and a potato, and they were peeling the potatoes.

I should say that I do buy potatoes from time to time
because I think I’m going to cook them but I don’t get
around to it and they form tendrils and it’s all very
spiritual and I give them to Jesus eventually, that’s the
way I look at it.

So then Sam and Jack got the untwisted metal
coathangers that we use for roasting marshmallows and they
put the peeled potatoes on the coat hangers and stuck them
over the fire in the fireplace for about 45 seconds. And
then they disappeared into the kitchen and Sam said, “OK,
don’t come in.”

So we sat making light conversation and hardly
wondering what was going on, and then Sam yelled, “Mom,
what’s a good dipping sauce for potatoes?” — he’s a very
advanced child — and I yelled back “ketchup” because as I
said I’m not very much of a cook.

So some more time passed and then Sam appeared with a
huge plate just heaped with slices of raw potatoes that were
burned black at the very edges, and on each slice was a
dollop of ketchup, and this was all surrounded by Pringles
potato chips and because I have many friends in the food
service industry, also orange slices.

Then he said: “And that’s not all!”

So he went back in the kitchen and I took a huge
handful of raw potatoes and stuffed them in my pocket and
probably stained my jeans with ketchup, I haven’t had the
heart to look, and when Sam came back out I said, “Oh, those
were really good,” and then right behind Sam came his friend
Jack with a huge plate of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches
and right in the middle of the sandwiches was a mound of
unpeeled bananas.

Bill and Adair and I really did eat some of the
sandwiches and the bananas even though I had paid big money
for the Chinese food that was getting glutinous in its
little cartons out in the kitchen. And Sam asked, “Were the
potatoes really good?” and I said, “Oh yes, honey,” so he
took a bite of this raw potato with the burned outside and
the dollop of ketchup and he chewed it and he said, “I guess
I still don’t like potatoes.”

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Saturday, Feb 10, 1996 6:28 PM UTC

Loving someone who doesn't love you back

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There is Anne Lamott, the author of “Bird by Bird” and
“Operating Instructions.” There was the idea that she write
a sort of diary for SALON. There was her reluctance to do
so. There was another idea, that she’d just sit down and
tell a story and we’d arrange it into paragraphs, trying to
keep it as true to her voice as possible. And since her
speaking voice resembles her writing voice, it would be
something like her real diary. We’ve never tried anything
like this before, but we’ve never eaten haggis either.
This is the Valentine’s issue and so we asked her to tell us
a story about love.

This is a story about love and confusion and pain and
snack platters. It starts in Chicago, when I was on tour
promoting “Bird by Bird,” every home should own one, and I
took my six-year-old son Sam along on the tour.

A woman came up to me at a bookstore reading with a
boy, her son, he was exactly Sam’s age, the same
birthday, and it turned out she’d made her own
Play-Doh for her son. From scratch. And she asked me, “Do
you make Sam’s Play-Doh?”

And I said, “I don’t make Sam’s dinner.“

I think she was taken aback just a little. She said:
“What does Sam eat?” And I said, “Snack platters,” which is
true.

And it happened that this was the very day in October
when daylight savings ended, so we gained an hour the next

morning which made Sam and me very happy, but then we had to
fly to Indianapolis which is about 25 minutes away and we
lost the hour right away, like we never had it at all, and
that made us both deeply confused and depressed. And then we
spoke before about a million people at the Indianapolis
Public Library where I discussed my personal problems which
are legion, and then I signed books and by that time I was
channeling Tricia Nixon, I was&nbspTricia Nixon, just smiling
and smiling no matter what. Then we went back to the hotel
and I did the only sane thing to do when you are very tired
and confused and you don’t know what time it is and you
still have bits of Tricia Nixon on your shoes: I over-ordered room service.

This is how Sam gets his snack platters. I order two
entrees for myself and then I make up bits from both entrees
and that’s Sam’s meal. Club sandwiches are really good for
that. And I was so tired I could not brush my teeth or take
off my clothes, I just lay there boneless on the bed with
the entree crumbs desperate for sleep.

And Sam said, “Can I ask you something?”

And I said, “Honey, can this wait?”

And he said, “Have you ever loved anyone who didn’t
love you back?”

Sam was undergoing a spiritual crisis because the girl
I like to call “the slut who broke my child’s heart,” who
was at that moment two or perhaps four time zones away, had
chosen someone else to be her boyfriend.

So I dragged my pathetic body up into a sitting
position and said yes, I had loved someone who hadn’t loved
me back, and how it felt like a knife in my heart and I
never learned what to do about it, and I was hoping that my
willingness to tell the truth and say how messy and
inconvenient and confusing love is would somehow match this
Shakespearean level of despair he was feeling at whatever
time it was in Indianapolis.

So he said, “Can I ask you one more thing?”

With great dread I said, “Yes.”

“Do you think you and me will die at the exact same
moment?”

And I thought that was the question that we always want
to ask but we never do because we know better, but it’s the
question that really does paint a map of the human heart,
how terrifying and touching it is to love another person.

So I told him no, we wouldn’t, and the next day we went
to the zoo, and it was the happiest day of the year.

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