Anne Lamott: Straight Talk on Aging, Miracles, Humor and More
Anne Lamott, 2021 (photo by her son, Sam Lamott)
As many of you may know, Anne Lamott was my inspiration for starting this blog — and keeping at it the past five years. Starting when 69-year-old Lamott entered her early 60s, she began writing and speaking about the gifts and challenges of aging, along with life lessons she has learned. Her most recent column appeared just a few weeks ago in the Washington Post. If you, too, are a fan of Lamott’s straight talk and whimsy, you might enjoy this small collection of fresh commentaries. (Since some of these pieces have appeared behind a paywall, I’ve included the full text here.)
Scroll down and at the end you’ll find, like frosting on a cake, a salute to Texan political commentator Molly Ivins, one of Lamott’s heroes (and mine). “The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion,” Ivins once quipped.
Age makes the miracles easier to see
The dressing-room encounter that made me get real about aging
How to be hopeful: Anne Lamott on the awe of everyday
How to pray (even when you’re mad at god)
12 Things I learned from life and writing
A portrait of Molly Ivins, maverick Texas journalist
Age makes the miracles easier to see
(Washington Post, January 17, 2024)
Every so often, even in heartbreaking times, the soul hears something so true out of the corner of its ear that it perks up, looking around like a meerkat for the source. Mine did this when, decades ago, I read a quote of Albert Einstein’s: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
There are the obvious miracles all around us — love, nature, music, art. We drunks who somehow got sober call this the central miracle of our lives. Some of you have children you were told you couldn’t have. Some of you were sent home to die, years ago. And have you ever seen a grain of sand under a high-powered microscope? It looks like a jewelry store.
But what do we do with the seemingly unmiraculous? For instance, former president Donald Trump is a bit of a stretch for me. How do we see the miracle in the madness of the months since Jan. 6, 2021? Well, we saw that democracy held. It might have gone either way. We here in the colonies rejoiced, in our quiet and fretful ways.
My spirits are regularly flattened by the hardships of the world, of our country and of the people I love, so I find myself turning to the saints: Molly Ivins, for example. Decades ago, she said, “Freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.” When I heard her say this at a benefit for the ACLU, my soul leaped up off its chair.
I spend a lot of time looking out the window. Age has given me this time and intention. I didn’t have so much of either when I was younger. My brain went much faster. There was so much to do, so much need and striving, and I had my trusty clipboard. Now I study the coral-colored abutilon buds right outside our window, little cups that hold the rainwater. Hummingbirds swing by all day to drink, and so it is a treat both for the eyes and for the spirit, for the bird and for the flower.
One of the blessings of age is that most of us get along with ourselves better than when we were young. It is stunning to accept yourself: I am always going to have a womanly butt and now I appreciate it: It’s a nice seat cushion. When my son was young, I hired a teenage girl to help around the house and one day she was folding laundry. She held up a pair of the nice roomy underwear I prefer and said, with wonder, “Do they even make bigger underwear?” That was 25 years and 10 pounds ago — and yes, honey, they do. I’ll show you where to buy them someday.
The dressing-room encounter that made me get real about aging
(Washington Post, December 20, 2023)
Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of.
My husband and I were recently in Egypt, where the temperature reached 113 degrees, a bit warm for my tiny princess self. Medic, medic! We left Egypt one day before the war broke out in Israel and Gaza. Back home, my dearest friends struggled with health stuff, with family craziness, with damaged children both young and grown.
The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.
I ache for the world but naturally I’m mostly watching the Me Movie, where balance and strength are beginning to ebb and, on the surface, things are descending into grandma pudding. (One morning 10 years ago, my young grandchild asked, “Nana, can I take a shower with you, if I promise not to laugh?” I repeat: 10 gravity-dragging years ago.)
What can we do as the creaking elevators of age slowly descend? The main solution is not to Google new symptoms late at night. But I also try to get outside every day, ideally with friends. Old friends — even thoughts of them — are my ballast; all that love and loyalty, those delicious memories, the gossip.
When I can no longer walk, I will sit outside with them, gaze into their faces, and look up. That is the perennial instruction: Look up! Looking up gives us freedom and causes the shadows to slip right down our backs.
Recently I was walking along the cliffs above the Pacific with one of these old friends, named Neshama. We go back 50 years. She is 84, short and sturdy with fuzzy hair like mine. Every so often, she bent down somewhat tentatively and picked up small items that she’d then tuck into a small cloth pouch that dangled from her belt.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m picking up micro litter, bottle caps and bits of wrappers. I try to help where I can.”
I reminded her of an old story along these lines, of a sparrow and a horse. A great warhorse comes upon a tiny sparrow lying on its back with its feet in the air, eyes squinched tightly shut with effort. The horse asks it what it’s doing.
“I’m trying to help hold back the darkness.”
The horse roars with laughter. “That is so pathetic. What do you weigh, about an ounce?”
And the sparrow replies, “One does what one can.”
This is what older age means; we do what we can. We pick up smaller things and move more tentatively. We’ve unwillingly become characters from the movie “Cocoon.”
Especially Neshama. Boy, is she old.
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We walked slowly past the reef below, foamy waves lapping at the shore with the indigo ocean beyond. So much has happened in our 50 years together; we have ridden the rapids. Her husband’s early death, her grown son’s and, just last month, her sister’s; my father’s death, my mother’s and a lifelong best friend’s. This last is when my friendship with Neshama deepened, during the two years when Pammy was dying, when it truly felt as if the sky were falling.
Pammy and I went shopping a few weeks before she died. I needed a new dress for a concert with a new boyfriend. At the time, she was in a wheelchair and a wig. I came out of the dressing room wearing a short dress, tighter than normal, and asked if it made me look big in the hips.
She looked me in the eyes, calmly. “Annie,” she said, “you don’t have that kind of time.”
That sentence shocked me into getting real about how I was spending my life. We know by a certain age the great palace lies of the culture — if you buy or do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Nope. Love and service make us rich. My mom did this with her closest friends when I was growing up, taking modest bouquets and baked goods to comrades in decline. Some were sunk into cranky dementia, alcoholism and random disorders — one with a piercing laugh that, to borrow from P.G. Wodehouse, could open an oyster at 50 paces. But my mom showed up for her. She taught me that service makes me happy. So I try to do that every day, and to get outside.
The reef below was sculptural, a bas-relief. Neshama pointed out how the surf got lacy after it hit the reef and rolled onto the sand. “A little like my brain,” I said. She nodded in agreement, poked herself in the chest: same.
We passed thousands of trees and crazy patches of overgrowth, and then a stretch of eucalyptus, somehow towering and delicate. You can’t help but look up. The trees are tall and straight, exquisitely spaced, with funny Dr. Seuss tufts of leaves at the top, redolent of mint, earth and turpentine. I tell you, whoever is in charge of these sorts of things really nailed eucalyptuses.
Neshama wanted to take the shortcut to the lake. We didn’t used to. There were eucalyptus pods underfoot, wet from dew, and we trod carefully. She bent tentatively to pick up some of her bits of litter and started to slip, but I caught her and we laughed. We are so physically vulnerable in older age. We have caught each other a lot, have come through some periods of darkness and unsurvivable losses, but friendship makes it all a rowing machine for the soul. We can take it, as long as we feel and give love, and laugh gently at ourselves as we fall apart.
We saw some rabbits, and small lizards the exact color of the earth.
And then we came around a curve of dense forest and reached the lake, dark near the shore beneath jutting tree branches, then emerald.
She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank.
“Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now.”
She scooched her butt over a tree trunk, like the world’s most graceful Komodo dragon, lifting one leg over and then the other, and then slipped into the water.
“Don’t you go drown now, because I am not getting into that freezing cold water,” I called to her, although we both knew I would. Then she dipped down to her shoulders and swam a few breaststrokes forward, as if gliding into the arms of a sweater of cold water. She paddled slowly out from underneath the dark porte cochere of trees at the shore, turned over onto her back and floated awhile with her face turned up to the sky.
How to be hopeful: Anne Lamott on the awe of everyday play
(The Guardian, December 20, 2019)
Hope changes as you get a little older, from the hope that this or that happens, to hope in life, old friends, laughter, art, goodness, helpers. I hope and am amazed, some early mornings, at just finding myself alive. I thought as I approached 18 years old that I was a goner, for sure. And here I am, still alive, still here and often in a good mood. Other early mornings? Not so much. My back aches, my vision fades, I can’t concentrate. It’s like in the Samuel Beckett novel: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Recently, the car needed a new bumper, because I keep backing into the same goddamn tree that insists on standing too close to the driveway and rushing at my car as I pull out, so I dropped it off at the mechanic’s and walked down the street to a coffeehouse where a friend would pick me up. As I did, I passed a weedy empty lot where kids were playing a game involving tin cans and a deflated soccer ball. Watching them, I remembered the incredible boredom of childhood, and thought of the effervescent response that I had to playing almost 60 years ago, and that I had today. One of the kids flung the deflated ball through the tin-can goalpost, and I shouted: “Goal! Goal!” and got some slightly worried glances out of them. Then they went on with their play. Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.
How to pray (even when you’re mad at God)
The author of Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy explains to Oprah how she finds grace even when things are challenging.
Anne Lamott: It’s very easy for me to see God in my backyard with the dogs and with the very bitter cat that I call my own. But when someone’s sick, when you get the bad phone call, when someone’s heard from the doctor, when the appearance of life is very, very shaky, it throws me completely off my game. It throws me for a loop. I think, “This can’t be right.”
Oprah: And I know you believe that we can pray anytime, anywhere.
Anne: Anytime, and you can say anything. I say to God sometimes, “You have got to be kidding.” Or I say, “Would it be so much skin off your nose to cut this person a little slack?” And I think you can say anything. You can say, “I’m mad at you. And I’m not going to be a good sport about it. How about that?” And that’s prayer. Silence can be prayer. Rage can be prayer. It’s truth. It’s all prayer. When we are talking to something that the rest of the world may not be seeing right then, and when we’re talking from the deepest part of our hearts, we’re trying to tell the truth. That’s prayer.
12 Things I learned from life and writing
(6, 857,682 views | Anne Lamott | TED2017 | April 2017)
A Portrait of Molly Ivins, Maverick Texas Journalist
NPR, September 15, 2019 — “Today, it’s almost hard to remember just how different the Texas government was back in the 1970s. That’s when Molly Ivins scorched a trail through good-ol’-boy politics like a flamethrower through a cactus patch.
“The legislature was fairly corrupt in those days,” she said to NPR in 2006. “And the fact that it was, and that everybody knew it, and that people laughed about it, struck me as worth reporting. And I thought: Why not put it in the way it is?”
That simple but radical idea set Ivins’ writing apart all her days. And a dozen years after her death of breast cancer in 2007, there’s a new documentary about the liberal Texas columnist, speaker and political gadfly. Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins is opening around the country.
In an interview not long before she died, Ivins recounted her life and career.
“Being tall helped — being 6 feet tall,” she said. “You know, nobody ever looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you poor, sweet, dainty, fragile little thing — we couldn’t possibly send you out to cover a fire.’ It was always, ‘Ivins, get your ass out there!’ “
Ivins was affable, funny and a hell of a good storyteller. And politicians liked having Molly around.
At the day’s end, she’d drop by the offices of the lieutenant governor or the House speaker and have a drink or two. She’d tell a story, they’d tell her one; the drinks and conversation would flow. And by 7 p.m., happy hour was over and she’d know things no other reporter did.
“I have drunk enough beer to float the battleship Texas in pursuit of political stories,” she said.
At the left-wing Texas Observer in Austin, Ivins’ prose took flight. She despised politicians who used their influence to further marginalize the powerless.
Ivins was completely unafraid of them. And she used humor to turn her targets into punchlines.
“I think the meanest thing I ever said about one of them was that he ran on all fours, sucked eggs and had no sense of humor,” she said. “And I swear I saw him in the Capitol the next day and all he said was, ‘Baby, you put my name in your paper!’ “
Here is a small sample of Molly Ivins’ many “raise hell” quotes.
I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.
I know: “Guns Don’t Kill People.” But I suspect that they have something to do with it. If you point your finger at someone and say, “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” not much actually happens.
It’s all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersections, no fish and no ducks. OK?
It’s like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you’re wrong.
How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion.
I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.
Texas is a fine place for men and dogs, but hell on women and horses.
The first rule of holes: When you’re in one stop digging.
The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one … When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as a solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats.
Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short.
Conservatives are fond of pointing out there are problems in this world can’t be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that can’t be solved by dropping bombs on them.
Nice is a pallid virtue. Not like honesty or courage or perseverance. On the other hand, in a nation notably lacking in civility, there is much to be said for nice.
There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity — like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule — that’s what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.
The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children’s blood.
So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
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