the habit of being

On the night of the Fourth, I sat in the grass on the National Mall, near the Washington Monument and a white trash family with red, white, and blue tie-dye on their daughters. The fireworks were larger than life, and I tried to imagine us all, so many people, as being something other than who we were, watching bombs and air-raids with the same awe. I screamed and cheered as the finale approached. Ash fell from the sky and gave me strange orange-ish dots on my skin through two showers. My mother asked me if it gave me a patriotic feeling, seeing the fireworks up close with all those people, and in a way it did. I’d never seen so many port-a-potties all lined up in my life, and the line to get through the security check point was about a half hour long. Afterwards, we, the not-so-humbled masses, swarmed out of the Mall, covering the sidewalks and the streets.

. . .

I adjusted him in his newbie downward-facing dog (”Down dawg!” he’d say, which annoyed me, but only because I was trying so hard to be annoyed), but that was about as close as I could get without feeling guilt-laced suffocation closing in. Every nice thing he did and said made it harder. I should have known better, but it’s alright. “You just have to believe you’ll be okay and you’ll be okay,” I said. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, and he might have even believed it.

There is never a good enough reason to hurt someone. In an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t be capable of it, but in this one it does more good to protect yourself from being hurt by others than to strive never to hurt anyone else. One is possible and the other isn’t. All the same, I’m so sorry.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The mantra of the AA children remains applicable. I told Marlon, who passed the chips with me in he Young Peoples’ Group (the young people in question being our parents), in a nostalgic instant message not so long ago, “the Serenity Prayer was to us what the Lord’s Prayer was to normal people!”

I recited it in bed last night, the first time I’d heard it spoken out loud in years. It was on a wall somewhere in every house I ever lived in as a child.

. . .

My father called me, after three months in jail, the day after he arrived in a Christian reformatory program designed for teenagers in Michigan. They cut his hair real short and won’t let him smoke cigarettes. A fortysomething who looks sixty, he’s carrying around hard candy in his pocket. He asked me if I still worked in the bookstore (I quit in January) and was shocked when I told him James and I broke up (he was maybe the only one I actually sold the story about how we were really happy to).

My mother called me, after I told her about the 35 year old I’ve been “seeing,” but she promised she wouldn’t get mad. It’s not age but the feeling you get that matters, she said. You’re an emotional girl, she said. In my experience, she said, chemistry leads to fire leads to explosions leads to serious injury. And we talked about the stomach ache, panic, and desperation we associate(d) with True Love, and I told her that I want to have a baby someday, and she said that would make her happy, and she would rock it so I could get some sleep, like her mother did for me. (Just not yet.)

. . .

Some Things I Underlined:

If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair.

If your practice makes you worse, it is ridiculous.

We should not attach to some fancy ideas or to some beautiful things.

You should not mistake medicine for food.