Traveling Mercies - Book 15

Anne Lamott is a person who has lived a lot of life and managed to come through the other side. Thanks to her good sense (and good sense of humor) this book is not so much a victim-y detailing of her descent and recovery, as much as it is a compelling story of how she began to catch glimpses of grace in everyday living. To this end, she offers a series of short vignettes on various topics including hair, beauty, illness, kids, family relationships, politics, music, drugs, eating, sex, etc. All are informed by her trademark self-depricating humor. This is a good book to read when you feel like you'd like to see the world differently from the way it usually presents. I bought a copy of it about 7 years ago shortly after a dear Aunt of mine died, but never quite got around to reading it until last week.

I had been thinking my Aunt quite a bit in the last week or so, missing her more intensely than I normally do in the normal course of life. One day I was waiting for the red line train at Belmont, heading south towards downtown. As is pretty common these days, it was slow and running on the wrong side of the track due to construction on the line. When it finally came, I boarded hastily looking for an empty seat and as I sat down I looked up to find a woman who looked remarkably like my Aunt. Same age, hair-do, style of scarf, lipstick type. Then she started to talk to me, just as my Aunt would have talked to a total stranger, about what she was doing that day, where she was going, her kids, her earlier life, crocheting caps for cancer patients and so forth. It could have been my Aunt. Really. Even though I knew better, it felt like it WAS my Aunt, so much so that I felt a real pang of loss, again, and had to choke down a few tears as I climbed up the subway stairs and hurried down the street to my appointment.

I thought about it all week. At the end of the week I learned that in the christian church All Saints Day (November 1) is supposed to signify a time when the boundary between this world and the next, the material and the spiritual is said to be very thin. I don't think I ever heard that in all the years I spent in Catholic Church as a kid. It's a good spin. I wonder if it holds in the subway too. Anyway, I lit a candle on Sunday in memory of my Aunt, feeling more at peace about her than I had for quite some time.