I just felt like being a little lazy today, so I'm copying and pasting one of my favorite chapters of any book I've ever read. I've read this chapter probably at least 10 times (and the book "Traveling Mercies" only once) and it affects me the same amount each time I read it. But after re-reading it a week ago, it meant something a little different this time around given what I'm doing here in Cambodia.
I'm sure you'll get something different out of it than I do, but it's something beautiful I'm always happy to share (as some of my friends can already attest to :)).
I have a story about alchemy.
Sam and I were an hour from shore on the Sea of Cortez last year. We were on a snorkeling expedition to Seal Island, where we had gone with twenty other people to swim with the seals. Sam was the only kid, and there was only one child’s wet suit, and it was just a crummy pretend wet suit. First of all, it was bright pink, which I told Sam was considered an extremely manly color in Mexico. But the main problem was that it had no arms or legs, just a torso, and it was very thin. It couldn’t be very insulated. So when we anchored off Seal Rock and everyone else got in the water and began bobbing along in their thick intensely buoyant wet suits, I got a sinking sensation.
But I am old and tough, and I said a little prayer and climbed off the tailgate of the cruise boat into the frigid water. By then almost everyone else was already in the cove where the seals were lounging around on the rocks, barking like drunken guard dogs. Sam was more excited than I can remember him being in a long time. He stood there on the boat in his snorkeling mask and his manly bright pink wet suit, with his skinny little arms and legs, looking like a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Pee-Wee Herman. And then he slid into the water beside me.
God, it was cold. And the current was stronger than I had imagined; it was so hard to tread water without being moved along in the flow that I felt really afraid. It became clear that Sam would need me to hold onto him while we were in the water, whereas I had been imagining that we would swim along together side by side. But courage is fear that has said its prayers, and so I prayed and kept one arm around him and we bobbed in place for a moment as best we could. Sam is a very strong swimmer for a young boy, and finally we began swimming to the cove. Dozens of seals barked from the rocks, and we headed toward them, toward the other people who were in the water right near them. But after we’d gotten twenty feet away from the boat, Sam cried out in despair that one of his flippers had come off, and as I peered through the bottomless water I could see it below us floating downward to the depths. I almost let him go to retrieve it, but it didn’t make sense to leave Sam at the surface even for an instant in his crappy pink nonbuoyant wet suit while I went after it, so I watched the flipper sink.
We bobbed together for a moment, me and my boy, and the tide was pushing us along, not toward shore but toward the sea. By then I was hearing the soundtrack of Jaws beginning to play, and I had to decide whether to make a break for the cove where the seals were or to head back to the boat. Sam begged that we swim toward the seals, and my head thought we could do it but my heart was afraid.
And so we headed back. I kept hoping that someone would swim up alongside us, a big guy who was such a strong swimmer that he could accompany Sam to the cove, but no one came.
We reached the cruise boat, got out of the water, and sat on the tailgate. Sam’s shoulders were hunched together, little wings in pink polyurethane, and he bit his lower lip, pretending to be interested in something way out over the horizon. And I said to God, “Do something—I mean, for God’s sake.” About five minutes later, the snorkeling guide Rafael came over to say he’d take Sam with him when he headed over and that if I wanted, I could head off alone. Sam gaped at me with joy, and I was only a bit worried about whether Rafael could actually swim, or had a drug problem, or a history of pedophilia. But because Sam’s face had lit up again, I took a long deep breath and smiled. A few minutes later I adjusted my mask, slid off the boat, saluted Sam, and took off for the cove.
I swam ahead of Sam and Rafael to where everyone else was, looking back once or twice to locate the two of them in the water near the boat. My heart was so happy for Sam. Seals swam up quite close to me and barked and were properly silly, as they are paid to be, and it was goofy and sweet, and I bobbed along with the other people for a while and then tried to locate Sam in the water. I scanned the sea, looking for a little guy in a bright pink wet suit, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.
Finally I realized that this tiny blue bundle back on the tailgate of the boat was my boy. And I knew it hadn’t worked, that he hadn’t been big enough to make the swim after all.
I swam back. I was panting with the effort of swimming against the tide, and I realized it would have been terribly difficult for me to maneuver Sam back to the boat by myself. But my heart felt broken for him, and my mask got all fogged up. I climbed back on board and sat down beside him. He was wrapped in a blue towel. Someone had brought him a Coke and some tortilla chips. It turned out that he had started getting hypothermic a minute or two after getting in the water, and Rafael had brought him back to the boat. Sam was grievously disappointed but was being very brave. I was desperate to fix him, fix the situation, make everything happy again, and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn’t there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence, so I prayed for the health simply to enter into Sam’s disappointment and keep him company.
And it was about one moment later that the extraordinary happened: dozens of seals started swimming up to us. “Ahhh!” Sam cried, as the first seal bobbed a few feet away, and this time his cry was one of total amazement. And then another seal emerged a few feet away, right next to the first one, and they bobbed near each other, looking right at us with their moist doggy compassion. Sam started laughing, and I felt the moment go from cramped to very spacious. Sam cried out with laughter. The seals’ heads looked like old men’s bald pates that you wanted to pat. As they bobbed up and down in the water, hiding from us, then emerging again, I shook my fist at them and called out, “Hey—what d’ya think you are—a couple a comedians?” They kept swimming up to us for the next fifteen minutes, popping up out of the water like furry lightbulbs of a good idea.
After a while, all the adult humans swam back to the boat from the cove, and the seals went under the waves, and soon we were on our way back home.
Sam and I sat side by side on the deck as we sped along on the endless blue. Then Sam leaned forward, craning his neck to see something over the side of the boat, and I thought at first he imagined he saw the seals following him out here into the ocean, or maybe their friends or cousins, notified by underwater telegraph that a disappointed kid was passing by. But it wasn’t seals that he saw. Instead—God must have been in one of her show-offy moods—the next thing we knew, the boat was surrounded on both sides by dolphins, literally hundreds of dolphins leaping out of the waves everywhere you looked, in arcs like rainbows, vaulting in and out of the water like aquatic clowns. It was almost too much; I hung my head and laughed. Everyone on board was crying out in joy as more and more dolphins leapt on both sides of the boat; it was like the end of the Fourth of July when they set off every last firework they have, and a new explosion follows before the last has even disappeared.
When we were back in our room, I said, “Honey, you need to write this down so that we never forget what happened today.” He didn’t want to at first, as he does not really like writing very much and has a terrible time with spelling, so I had to bribe him with the promise of a virgin piña colada. Then he finally sat down and began to write. I lay on my bed pretending to read but watching him work: he is a very slow writer, looking like a thoughtful old person with arthritis and bad vision. After a while he got up from his desk to get his crayons, and then he drew a picture below his story, bending in very close to the page again, his face not more than two inches from the paper. I let him work in peace for as long as I could stand it. Then I said, “Honey, what are you drawing?”
“What do you think? I’m drawing dolphins.”
This is the story he wrote, painstakingly, above his drawing of the dolphins leaping over our boat: “I am going to see the seals. I took a boat to see the seals but I could not make it to the shore. But they came to me. And on the ride back we saw some dolphins and it was magic to us.”
So you see? Alchemy: dross to gold.
Lamott, Anne (2000-09-05). Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
I'm sure you'll get something different out of it than I do, but it's something beautiful I'm always happy to share (as some of my friends can already attest to :)).
BABY
I have a story about alchemy.
Sam and I were an hour from shore on the Sea of Cortez last year. We were on a snorkeling expedition to Seal Island, where we had gone with twenty other people to swim with the seals. Sam was the only kid, and there was only one child’s wet suit, and it was just a crummy pretend wet suit. First of all, it was bright pink, which I told Sam was considered an extremely manly color in Mexico. But the main problem was that it had no arms or legs, just a torso, and it was very thin. It couldn’t be very insulated. So when we anchored off Seal Rock and everyone else got in the water and began bobbing along in their thick intensely buoyant wet suits, I got a sinking sensation.
But I am old and tough, and I said a little prayer and climbed off the tailgate of the cruise boat into the frigid water. By then almost everyone else was already in the cove where the seals were lounging around on the rocks, barking like drunken guard dogs. Sam was more excited than I can remember him being in a long time. He stood there on the boat in his snorkeling mask and his manly bright pink wet suit, with his skinny little arms and legs, looking like a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Pee-Wee Herman. And then he slid into the water beside me.
God, it was cold. And the current was stronger than I had imagined; it was so hard to tread water without being moved along in the flow that I felt really afraid. It became clear that Sam would need me to hold onto him while we were in the water, whereas I had been imagining that we would swim along together side by side. But courage is fear that has said its prayers, and so I prayed and kept one arm around him and we bobbed in place for a moment as best we could. Sam is a very strong swimmer for a young boy, and finally we began swimming to the cove. Dozens of seals barked from the rocks, and we headed toward them, toward the other people who were in the water right near them. But after we’d gotten twenty feet away from the boat, Sam cried out in despair that one of his flippers had come off, and as I peered through the bottomless water I could see it below us floating downward to the depths. I almost let him go to retrieve it, but it didn’t make sense to leave Sam at the surface even for an instant in his crappy pink nonbuoyant wet suit while I went after it, so I watched the flipper sink.
We bobbed together for a moment, me and my boy, and the tide was pushing us along, not toward shore but toward the sea. By then I was hearing the soundtrack of Jaws beginning to play, and I had to decide whether to make a break for the cove where the seals were or to head back to the boat. Sam begged that we swim toward the seals, and my head thought we could do it but my heart was afraid.
And so we headed back. I kept hoping that someone would swim up alongside us, a big guy who was such a strong swimmer that he could accompany Sam to the cove, but no one came.
We reached the cruise boat, got out of the water, and sat on the tailgate. Sam’s shoulders were hunched together, little wings in pink polyurethane, and he bit his lower lip, pretending to be interested in something way out over the horizon. And I said to God, “Do something—I mean, for God’s sake.” About five minutes later, the snorkeling guide Rafael came over to say he’d take Sam with him when he headed over and that if I wanted, I could head off alone. Sam gaped at me with joy, and I was only a bit worried about whether Rafael could actually swim, or had a drug problem, or a history of pedophilia. But because Sam’s face had lit up again, I took a long deep breath and smiled. A few minutes later I adjusted my mask, slid off the boat, saluted Sam, and took off for the cove.
I swam ahead of Sam and Rafael to where everyone else was, looking back once or twice to locate the two of them in the water near the boat. My heart was so happy for Sam. Seals swam up quite close to me and barked and were properly silly, as they are paid to be, and it was goofy and sweet, and I bobbed along with the other people for a while and then tried to locate Sam in the water. I scanned the sea, looking for a little guy in a bright pink wet suit, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.
Finally I realized that this tiny blue bundle back on the tailgate of the boat was my boy. And I knew it hadn’t worked, that he hadn’t been big enough to make the swim after all.
I swam back. I was panting with the effort of swimming against the tide, and I realized it would have been terribly difficult for me to maneuver Sam back to the boat by myself. But my heart felt broken for him, and my mask got all fogged up. I climbed back on board and sat down beside him. He was wrapped in a blue towel. Someone had brought him a Coke and some tortilla chips. It turned out that he had started getting hypothermic a minute or two after getting in the water, and Rafael had brought him back to the boat. Sam was grievously disappointed but was being very brave. I was desperate to fix him, fix the situation, make everything happy again, and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn’t there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence, so I prayed for the health simply to enter into Sam’s disappointment and keep him company.
And it was about one moment later that the extraordinary happened: dozens of seals started swimming up to us. “Ahhh!” Sam cried, as the first seal bobbed a few feet away, and this time his cry was one of total amazement. And then another seal emerged a few feet away, right next to the first one, and they bobbed near each other, looking right at us with their moist doggy compassion. Sam started laughing, and I felt the moment go from cramped to very spacious. Sam cried out with laughter. The seals’ heads looked like old men’s bald pates that you wanted to pat. As they bobbed up and down in the water, hiding from us, then emerging again, I shook my fist at them and called out, “Hey—what d’ya think you are—a couple a comedians?” They kept swimming up to us for the next fifteen minutes, popping up out of the water like furry lightbulbs of a good idea.
After a while, all the adult humans swam back to the boat from the cove, and the seals went under the waves, and soon we were on our way back home.
Sam and I sat side by side on the deck as we sped along on the endless blue. Then Sam leaned forward, craning his neck to see something over the side of the boat, and I thought at first he imagined he saw the seals following him out here into the ocean, or maybe their friends or cousins, notified by underwater telegraph that a disappointed kid was passing by. But it wasn’t seals that he saw. Instead—God must have been in one of her show-offy moods—the next thing we knew, the boat was surrounded on both sides by dolphins, literally hundreds of dolphins leaping out of the waves everywhere you looked, in arcs like rainbows, vaulting in and out of the water like aquatic clowns. It was almost too much; I hung my head and laughed. Everyone on board was crying out in joy as more and more dolphins leapt on both sides of the boat; it was like the end of the Fourth of July when they set off every last firework they have, and a new explosion follows before the last has even disappeared.
When we were back in our room, I said, “Honey, you need to write this down so that we never forget what happened today.” He didn’t want to at first, as he does not really like writing very much and has a terrible time with spelling, so I had to bribe him with the promise of a virgin piña colada. Then he finally sat down and began to write. I lay on my bed pretending to read but watching him work: he is a very slow writer, looking like a thoughtful old person with arthritis and bad vision. After a while he got up from his desk to get his crayons, and then he drew a picture below his story, bending in very close to the page again, his face not more than two inches from the paper. I let him work in peace for as long as I could stand it. Then I said, “Honey, what are you drawing?”
“What do you think? I’m drawing dolphins.”
This is the story he wrote, painstakingly, above his drawing of the dolphins leaping over our boat: “I am going to see the seals. I took a boat to see the seals but I could not make it to the shore. But they came to me. And on the ride back we saw some dolphins and it was magic to us.”
So you see? Alchemy: dross to gold.
Lamott, Anne (2000-09-05). Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Thanks for this reminder, pert. I had forgotten all re: this chapter. Next time I'm disheartened by the ocean of tribulation, I'll need to remember the boy sam in his pink wetsuit; dross into gold; (and in my case) orcas + baby belugas.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this reminder, pert. I had forgotten all re: this chapter. Next time I'm disheartened by the ocean of tribulation, I'll need to remember the boy sam in his pink wetsuit; dross into gold; (and in my case) orcas + baby belugas.
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