Wildflowers, grandsons, and Ann Lamott

 

From my desk, I can look out at these beautiful, wonderful wildflowers in full bloom. It makes me smile just to see their yellow brightness. Across the walk is another bunch, lower and closer to the ground but every bit as bright. The yard guy didn’t remember what he planted, so I’m waiting for a friend, knowledgeable about flowers, to come tell me what they are. My view is about to be obstructed just a bit by the oak leaf hydrangeas right by my window—they are flourishing and have grown tall, covered with about-to-be blooms. After the last few years when we had frigid winters and blistering summers and nothing did well, seeing my garden in bloom is a real joy. Jordan has bought potted plants for the patio, and Christian has lined the deck with flowering plants—a bougainvillea that is trying hard to break out in blooms, a plant that had purple flowers until they opened full up and turned white, and a couple of smaller plants.

My dad was a gardener. When he bought the house I grew up in, he bought the lot next door, and that was his garden. Every weekend would find him, on his hands and knees in awful, grubby clothes, working away. It was always beautiful. In pleasant evenings, we’d sit in the garden before supper, and he’d tell us about each plant. I didn’t inherit that gene. I’ve often felt deficient that I don’t get the calm, soothing healing from working in the garden that many do. But I love to have someone else to do the work, so I can enjoy it. In my defense, maybe the cooking and writing genes were my creative inheritance.

 

My grandsons are on a roll. Jacob played in the last golf tournament of his senior year this week—and shot a 70, his career best! And as my brother said, “Pretty damn good. I know lots of seasoned golfers who’d love to shoot anywhere near that.” My youngest grandson, Kegan 

Kegan David

David, a junior in high school, made the National Honor Society. And the oldest of the boys, Sawyer, will be off to Denver this fall to study music business—he is so very excited about that, and I am excited for him. (Confession: he looked at both University of Denver and Colorado University/Denver, and I’m not sure now which he chose.) But he will be in Denver with us Uncle Jamie and his cousin Maddie. Good times coming. We have yet to hear from Ford, the next to youngest, but he is an outstanding student and will probably outshine them all.

Sawyer Hudgeons

The three girls are doing fine, thank you, but it’s the boys who shine right now.

I’ve been reading Ann Lamott’s newest book, Somehow, and I am enthralled. If you don’t have it, please rush right out and get it. She has an uncanny ability to juxtapose the sublime and the mundane and leave you laughing but also a bit wiser. She is, as my writer friend Susan Albert says, reverent and cheeky at the same time. One of the things writers worry about—or should—is finding their own unique voice. Lamott has done it in spades.

While I was in the midst of the book, I watched two interviews with her. She is not at all pretentious. In fact my impression is that she’s bit unsure, a bit self-conscious. She assured Yoda and Jenna that she was not nervous, an indication that she expected she might be. There are probably others, but she is the only Anglo woman I’ve ever seen with dreadlocks. I kind of want to ask her how she does that. Her dress is equally individual, as though she put on whatever appealed to her that morning and never looked back. She is honest about her life—her hard-won sobriety, the joy of her late-in-life marriage, the trials she went through with her son’s addiction, and most of all her rock-solid faith. This is not a woman who plays around with the concept of God, mulling the meaning. She fully believes in God, prayer, the afterlife—and she is anxious to share that with all of us. I for one am a ready recipient of her words of belief.

She also doesn’t mince words and there is profanity scattered throughout the book. I remember many years ago when a group in my church read, Bird by Bird, Lamott’s classic how-to-write book. One good church woman complained, “Could she just say it without all the profanity?” (I’m sure she meant the f-bomb.) It was hard for me to explain that no, she couldn’t. That vocabulary was part of her voice, part of who she is. IF the title, Bird by Bird, puzzles you, it came from her young brother’s assignment to write an essay on birds. He left it to the last minute and then was predictably overwhelmed. “How can I do this?” he wailed. (I’m paraphrasing—it’s been a while since I read the book.) His father said, “Just take it bird by bird, son.” You can see where Lamott gets her writing skills.

Some lines I particularly like: “Courage is fear that has said its prayers”; “I hate it when God does not agree with my particularly good ideas”; and, admitting that there are annoying people in this world, she writes, “Jesus frequently had to lie down with a cold compress on his head.” The image of Jesus taking to his bed with a compress is so hysterical—and yet so humanizing. I wish I had one-tenth of her skill, her quick mind. But meantime, I’ll keep letting her inspire me.