David learned how to walk again and talk again, only sometimes in gibberish. Whenever I went to visit him at the hospital, he told me how glad he was to meet me; any friend of his mother’s and all that.

  The people in the town asked after him constantly, and at first my friend dreaded giving them the bad news, that he would probably always have to be institutionalized. But people said, “It must be really hard.” They cried for him, they went to visit him. His mother felt like an apprentice or novice at taking in community concern. But answering questions and accepting people’s love and agreeing to convey it to him transformed the square of ground on which she stood into a wider swath. It became a dirt road of caring. People said, “Just say the word, and I’m here.” And then they were: for rides, errands, good ideas, unforeseen needs, some urgent.

  Helen was there, too. She had come through devastation to a new life that she might not love as much as the old one, but (a) who asked? and (b) it could still be a good life that might start to grow on a person, down the road.

  Slowly, my old friend began to see her son as tarnished, tweaked, yet also poignant. She had not had any idea how loved David was. She had thought she had a bead on his small, dubious life. But the people in her town had different perspectives.

  They told her, “He always came and fixed things for me.”

  They said, “He was always courtly to me, like a man from another era.”

  They said, “I loved seeing him on his daily walks, those sturdy brown legs, his pleasure in being outdoors.”

  She started to learn after all these years who her child was, a strange and friendly man to many people. The more that townspeople shared their details with her, the better she could see him reflected in their faces, in the great insect eye of the town that saw her son from so many directions. He went from being her loved but ruined child, a loner, to also a childhood comrade remembered from the past, a friend to an old lady, a naturalist and someone who helped people repair their electronics, usually for free.

  My friend tried to find a good place for David to live when he was well enough to leave the hospital. After a rocky trajectory she put him in a home mainly for aged people with Alzheimer’s. He was given strong meds to prevent seizures, escapes and outbursts.

  Once again, she dreaded people’s questions. What was she going to say? “I put him in the bin. However, it’s a nice bin.” But these people cared. They didn’t say, “How can you consign him to a life of locked doors?” What they said was, “We miss him. We care about him, and you.”

  Because they were there, she felt part of something bigger than her own private suffering. Because she could look at Helen and see that she had survived, and that her husband had had good care until the end, she felt that maybe things might work out for David, too.

  And they did. My friend drives to see her son at the home in San Francisco every two weeks. They go for short walks, and they talk about whatever comes up. Sometimes he makes very little sense. It’s a beautiful drive, beside and under endless tall trees, past pastures, cows, horses, ponds, farms. Flickering screens of color rush by, dappled patches of road, then such brightness that even dark glasses can’t help.

  These two women’s lives were sometimes too hard and scary for words; that life can be that way is an unfortunate detail someone forgot to tell you. Their lives had come apart into pieces in a way they’d never agreed to. But out of the pieces they each sewed something together. The parts were rough and homely, because that is the nature of dementia. That is why I’ve always loved funky rustic quilts more than elegant and maybe lovelier ones. You see the beauty of homeliness and rough patches in how they defy expectations of order and comfort. They have at the same time enormous solemnity and exuberance. They may be made of rags, torn clothes that don’t at all go together, but they somehow can be muscular and pretty. The colors are often strong, with a lot of rhythm and discipline and a crazy sense of order. They’re improvised, like jazz, where one thing leads to another, without any idea of exactly where the route will lead, except that it will refer to something else maybe already established, or about to be. Embedded in quilts and jazz are clues to escape and strength, sanctuary and warmth. The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

  Five

  REMNANTS

  Many people did help me to stand up in July 1986 when I stopped drinking.

  For the first thirty-two years of my life, I sought insight and meaning from men and women much like the people in my family—which is to say, they were overeducated and fun to be with, and they drank. Then I got sober, and a few years later had a child—the two most extreme decisions of my life.

  Afterward, it turned out that some of the sober people who mentored me through sobriety’s monkey mazes had not been housebroken for long or practicing good dental hygiene. They taught me that I would often not get my way, which was good for me but would feel terrible, and that life was erratic, beautiful and impossible. They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems. They taught me that truth was not going to fit on a bumper sticker, much as I would have liked. They taught me—or tried to teach me—humility. This was not my strong suit. Humiliation? Check. Egomania? Check. With their help I learned that raising children is hard, that people are ruined, and that friends die, and that still I didn’t need to pick up a drink. The best people could become completely unhinged or act like total asshats. And no matter how great we looked, everything would pass away, especially the stuff we loved the most and could not live without.

  They also taught me that God or life or something had set up a system of emergency tents among us, like M*A*S*H tents, and would help us work together, and help us work through our more repellent shortcomings, although this, unfortunately, would happen only over time.

  They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

  So I pay attention to almost every Oregon junco I see on my hikes, these most ordinary tiny gray birds, the males with black heads. They weigh only an ounce, even with all those bones and feathers, all those birdy insides, feet and beaks. They hop around on the ground, near trees, in forests, on lawns. When I watch and listen, they make me laugh, and this fills me with hope.

  I have always given everyone in the world lots of help and hope and my own supplies of life force, but the sober people taught me it was okay to ask for help, even a lot of help. This was stunning. And it turned out that there was always someone around who could help me with almost everything that came up, and that some people seem to have been assigned to me, as I had been assigned to other people.

  These people, like God, have skills and know things. One friend is a brilliant editor. One friend can fix anything that breaks down in my house. One friend makes exquisite purses.

  One friend, my spiritual mentor and indefatigable advocate Bonnie, has answered every tough parenting and spiritual question I’ve asked her. Her words, like goldenseal, have helped heal my mind to the extent that I no longer have to refer to her very often as Horrible Bonnie, just because she loves me so much.

  My friend Neshama sews. She is a skilled seamstress, in an eccentric sort of tribal-arts way, native funk and flash rather than McCall’s patterns, although she made the creamy-white beaded gown for her daughter’s wedding from one of those. She repairs and restores all of our stuff, her family’s and mine. She altered my baby’s clothes, and she fixes my baby’s baby clothes now.

  She has let out more pairs of my pants than I care to remember or will admit to.

  I had four sheer white floor-length curtains from India—via Cost Plus—for the tall, wide windows in the front room of my house. They were lovely. The top halves were designed with heavily appliquéd ovals, filled with white stained-glass foliage. The bottom half was simple, just sheer, calm cotton. My windows look out onto the street, so without curtains, I am exposed to passersby. The curtains are both pretty and as utilitarian as underpants.

  I say “had” because I also have a large, moronic black-and-white mutt named Bodhi, who ruined the bottom half of one curtain within months by shredding it with his tusklike toenails, while trying to protect us from the invading postman and the dreaded Oregon juncos. When he was done, the curtain looked like a grass skirt.

  I went back to Cost Plus, but the curtains were out of stock, and the store was not getting more till next season, if at all, and they were sold out online.

  I took the shredded curtain down but couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. The top, appliquéd part was still pristine. Life had not gotten its mitts on this one. This is the only way to keep these things nice and unsoiled—fly them up high where fewer tusks can get to them. Better yet, don’t use them at all, and definitely don’t have pets.

  I took a curtain from the side window and filled in the gap.

  About a year later, an assassin, or possibly a junco, breached the front gate, and Bodhi managed to plunge through a formerly tiny tear in the replacement curtain and got stuck in the now enormous hole so that he looked like one of the hippos in tutus in Fantasia.

  He was very sorry, but these things happen.

  I left the curtain with its Bodhi-sized hole up for a while, as a sight gag. I happened to mention to Neshama that there were now two top halves of appliquéd cotton, and no bottoms. She wondered if the two tops could be mated, and ended up taking them home to see what she could do.

  This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up. For instance, when I was in school, there were a few teachers along the way who must have seen in me a hummingbird of charming achievement, all eyes, bird bones, frizzly hair and a desperation to please and impress. They knew that there was power and beauty deep inside me, but that I was afraid of this and I was in fragments. Men and women alike, old and new at teaching, were like aunties or grandparents in their firm patience with me, in their conviction of my worth. They had a divine curiosity about me—“Hey, who’s in there? Are you willing to talk straight and find who you actually are, if I keep you company? Do you want to make friends with your heart? Here—start with this poem.”

  This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

  A month later, Neshama brought back the homely and extraordinary curtain she had fashioned from the two top halves, along with this story:

  She had begun the way one does most challenges and works of art, by laying things out, studying them, mulling over possible fixes, rolling back her sleeves, trying things out.

  She pinned the two intact appliquéd tops together the best she could, as there were varying layers of appliqué. It took forever. She would measure, pin, groan, give up, try again. Finally she sewed the first primordial horizontal seam, on her old sewing machine.

  There was an inch-wide gap in length, so she filled it with a bandwidth of cloth. Then it turned out that the curtains were slightly flared, so she needed to make two long patches for the sides. In a few places there were lumps where too many seams met up. The major seam between the top and bottom contained patches and lumps of appliqué.

  She said that a great seamstress would have been able to avoid all these problems with precision measurements. But because she relies on trust and instinct, she worked around all the eccentric problems with bits of odd patchwork funk.

  Sewing is a finger-and-heart equivalent of putting one foot in front of the other. If you come from a relatively healthy and loving family, you can make a mistake, go back, take it out or patch it. But there is no one fitting that description around here. I had to be taught that it was even okay to make mistakes at the age of thirty-two, by the people who fished me out of the sludge of alcohol, confusion and perfectionism.

  These people who did not have perfect records of good dental hygiene knew that the same strength that held me down, like the Lilliputians tying up Gulliver, was the energy that would help me get my life back, help me get me back. When that life force was going downward, like an elevator heading for the basement, it was about resisting life, staying numb, shutting out the vague lifelong shame, with old patterns that saved me from hurting worse than I had hurt. The people helped me find meaning and a messy redemption in all the dark nights I had come through, all the brokenness. It was not pretty or impressive, but rather surprising.

  As Neshama pressed on with the curtain, she gave me periodic updates on how she was doing: I could tell it was going to be an original life-on-life’s-terms creation. If I was going to use this curtain, I simply had to accept that there was no way to fuse the remnants, one with the other, without the seamy lines of overlap and hodgepodge showing.

  She stitched a lot by hand, as the thickest lumpy sections did not quite fit under her sewing machine’s presser foot. She took small sections, pinned them, stitched them together, undid it, patched, pinned, stitched. Then she did this over and over, again and again.

  Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. In the afternoon, if we have left, we come home, put down our keys and satchels, let the dogs out, take off constrictive clothing, make a drink or put water on for tea, toast the leftover bit of scone. I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.

  The newly sewn curtain was fabulous, and crazy. Whereas before it had been logical and tranquil, with a lot of fabric art above, dropping to the quiet bottom half, now it was one wild lake of designs. Once it was two torn-up curtains, and now it was a whole, although a whole with issues. It was all oval white stained-glass appliqué with a lumpy tummy. The seams were straight, with overlaps and shadows. It looked like a tumbling trick instead of a delicate Madonna in repose, a Cirque du Soleil finale instead of the Pietà. I love it.

  Beauty is a miracle of things going together imperfectly. Now when I look at the curtain, many times a day, I always remember that a large berserk dog had been trapped in the once gauzy bottom. I know there’s solace in making do with what you’ve got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people’s eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

  You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next.

  Without stitches, you just have rags.

  And we are not rags.

  Six

  FORWARD

  The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

  This idea overwhelms some people. I have found that the wonder of life is often most easily recognizable through habits and routines. For instance, if you do your morning in sequence—let out the dogs, get the paper, put water on, feed the cat, have breakfast, get to work—then at some point it is late enough for dessert. Ice cream, June peaches, Brie, Toblerone or a Sauternes. (I would join you in the Sauternes if I did not have to get married or jailed afterward.)

  Order and discipline are important to meaning for me. Discipline, I have learned, leads to freedom, and there is meaning in freedom. If you don’t do ritual things in order, the paper doesn’t read as well, and you’ll be thrown off the whole day. But when you can sit for a while at your table, reach for your coffee, look out the window at the sky or some branches, then back down at the paper or a book, everything feels right for the moment, which is maybe all we have.

  Seeking and searching for fame won’t yield much. We won’t be remembered, and that turns out to be good news. Who reads the great Stanley Elkin one generation after his death? Or May Sarton? Or Dawn Powell? Who was Truman’s vice president? (Alben W. Barkley.) Becoming famous is of momentary reward, and then stressfully unimportant, like winning the set of steak knives in Glengarry Glen Ross.

  So there’s attention, creation, love and dessert. Love is the question: How can it possibly be enough this time, in the face of such tragedy, loss or evil? And it is the answer: It will be. How can this family or town make a comeback? The next right action, the breath of time passing, love. Go figure.

  The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise life passes by in about seven weeks, and if you are not paying attention and savoring it as it unfurls, you will wake up one day in deep regret. It’s much better to wake up now in deep regret, desperate not to waste more of your life obsessing and striving for meaningless crap. Because you will have finally awakened.

  There is meaning in focus, concentration, attention. I now notice almost every single bird that flies by, as well as every single butterfly. I pay attention to most plain old butterflies, not just the ones in tiaras or argyle socks. Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

 

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