CHAPTER ONE: YOUR BIGGER STORY: Witnessing

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world —God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.

FULTON OURSLER,
IN THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BOOKS

WHEN I ENTERED ninth grade, my sister and I were bused from our village school to Belmont High, a regional high school two towns away. This was the year I leapt the fence. I was tired of being the “good girl,” virtually the only one in my class who paid attention, who sympathized with the teachers, who tried to help hold chaos at bay. The first-through-eighth-grade elementary school we attended in this New Hampshire village was a war zone, where second graders threw ice balls at the teachers and hit them. Where my classmates ridiculed the teachers to their faces. Where the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old eighth graders cornered me and my siblings, threatening to beat us up every week. But I was in high school now. A new school. Another town. People were civil here. Maybe I could have friends. I sidled up to the popular kids. Occasionally I went to their houses on the weekends, where we’d sneak drinks from the liquor cabinet, smoke cigarettes, and saunter down the street at midnight. I was fourteen and weary of being an outsider my whole life. But I never made a good bad kid. I loved school too much. Especially my English class.

Mrs. Butler was my ninth-grade English teacher. I see her now, in her gray cardigan buttoned at the top with a single button, a single strand of pearls around her neck, her sensible pencil skirts, her oxford blouses, her sturdy shoes, her brown hair in a kind of bouffant that ended up swirled in a bun behind her head. (Surely there was a secret sartorial manual circulating among women teachers at the time —and it was never updated past the late fifties). It was the early seventies then, and boys and girls alike were slouching about with a world-weary irreverence, wearing cropped tops and flared hip-huggers quilted with patches, their long hair parted in the middle. Mrs. Butler, on the other hand, wore a general bewilderment about the age and the wildly dressed students she found herself among.

I felt sorry for her, even as I showed up in my own kooky clothes: a gray rabbit-fur, ankle-length coat I found in our attic, which I paired with purple hot pants and platform shoes. Or a pair of old floral pants my sister had sewn that I painstakingly turned into hip-huggers. I had no money at all, but I had a bone of daring, a scavenger’s habits, and a flair for the theatrical. All my efforts pitched to hiding our poverty.

Despite Mrs. Butler’s disapproval of our wardrobes and our mien, she was unflagging in her efforts to teach us English. She taught grammar, mechanics, writing style —all the usuals —but underneath her formality, she cared deeply about literature and creativity and did everything to foster interest in both with creative-writing projects. I remember one story I wrote: about a girl who lived down a snaking dirt road in an unheated house. Every morning she rose in her below-freezing room, her breath a fog, to curate her small collection of garments, to apply makeup secretively in a hand mirror. An hour later, she emerged at the bus stop a mile away, transformed.

I thought my story was a clever fabrication. I had no clue, even as I read it aloud to my class, that it was a story about me.

*   *   *

I have always known the facts of my life, but what it meant and how it mattered —I couldn’t tell you. I’m guessing that you’re the same. Of course, you know the sequence of your life, who your parents are, where you grew up, where you went to school, all that’s happened since. But I’m quite sure you still don’t know “the story” of your life. I’m talking about more than events. I’m talking about the meaning, the wonder, the arc of your life. Where you’ve been beyond all the places you’ve been. I’m talking about who you really are. What your true name is. Where you’re going. What you have to pass on to those around and behind you.

I’m starting this book here, with you, with why you need to find and tell your story, because you may be the biggest obstacle here. (Am I right?) I’m guessing this because this has been true in my own life. I’ve always believed in the power of Story, but for years, I resisted writing my own. I spent years in undergraduate and graduate programs focused on writing and narrative, on other people’s stories. But I began to feel restless. I was living a strange, divided life that begged to be named, explored, written. During the summers, I lived in the wilderness with my husband, working as a commercial fisherwoman on a stormy ocean off the Alaskan coast. Winters, my husband and I traveled, and I taught; we were in graduate school. I needed to bring language and clarity to this bifurcated life, but I was scared. My life was dangerous and risky in so many ways. As a commercial fisherwoman in Alaska. As a married woman who knew little about how to be married. As a daughter from an unraveling family. There were mines by land and by sea. How could I write about any of this?

Almost ten years after college, I enrolled in one more graduate program to figure it out. Saying, “I want to learn how to write a nonfiction book” felt like saying, “I want to learn how to swim on the moon.” But I did it. Wrote the book. (And don’t you love language, the way I just compressed two years of agonizing work into a three-word sentence that makes me sound like some kind of genie who blinked and nodded this book into existence?) Oh the labor of it! The insecurities! The uncountable drafts!

But it was safe! I wrote about Alaskan women in commercial fishing. I told the stories of forty others, women who were tougher, more authentic, more worthy of attention than me. When a university press called to accept the manuscript I had sent on a fluke, I was stunned. I was sure it was a mistake. I didn’t know any writers. No one in my family was in the professions or the arts. We were ordinary, invisible people. If there was a cardinal sin in my house growing up, it was pride. Calling attention to yourself. Thinking that you were special in any way. (You’re going to publish my book?)

I was thirty-eight when it released, and underwater with babies, toddlers, and teaching. But I had hope now. And I couldn’t stop writing. I began another book, this one a sure hit with the New York publishing crowd: a collection of essays about hunting, carrying water, digging an outhouse pit, washing fish-fouled jeans in a semicomatose wringer washer. In short, my life in the Alaskan wilderness, none of it the purview of well-showered and high-heeled urbanites. But improbably, Awake on the Island of Listen landed me a hot New York agent. (The heat cooled, though, when I had to make an appointment six weeks in advance to snag a fifteen-minute call with her. I was clearly on the bottom of the dogpile).

But Kate[2] did me an enormous service. Here’s how our first official phone call went:

“Leslie, I really like these essays, but there’s one problem: You’re not in them.”

“I know,” I replied. “That’s the point. The book is the story of a place. About topics much bigger than me: about the ethical dilemmas of killing animals, about water, so many other things. It’s about universals.”

“Yes, but we don’t care about universals unless we care about you. You’re completely absent from this work. No one’s buying essay collections. You’re going to have to turn this into a memoir. This needs to be about you.”

“A memoir?” And in the next few seconds, I silently listed every objection to writing about my life that you may be listing right now. Let’s see how closely our lists align:

Kate was much too busy to hear all these complaints, so I kept my answer short.

“Uhhhhh, no, Kate. I can’t do that.” And I hung up.

Memoir was a dirty word. I equated it with first-person, tell-all stories by strippers in smoky bars, and tabloids featuring disgraced politicians and ravaged movie stars flinging fresh scandals at every shopper in the checkout line. I couldn’t do it. I would continue to write impersonal essays detailing the complexities of the natural world, with no cost to myself. And, for extra measure, without revealing my Christian faith, which was suspect in most quarters and would harm my fledgling literary reputation, if I possessed such a thing.

But here is the beginning of my conversion. A writer came along, Frederick Buechner, who spoke such sense and truth that I began to reconsider my antipathy toward personal writing. In his book Telling Secrets: A Memoir, Buechner writes,

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all the particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.[3]

Buechner’s memoirs recount quiet moments, moments no one else would notice, yet through his questioning eyes and pen, he captured a sacredness and a beauty in the midst of the quotidian that opened my own eyes. In Secrets in the Dark, he identifies a choice that is presented to us every day: “Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice.”[4] I already believed that washing clothes, fishing for salmon, hand-digging a well were all sacred in some way and worthy of exploration and record. But could it be possible that my story was “holy with meaning” as well?

Then I encountered the memoirist Patricia Hampl, who nudged me further. She wrote, “For we do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something —make something —with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.”[5]

Who does not carry these burdens? Might it be possible to make a home for them? And might the burden be lighter because of it?

It took a month to get another phone appointment with Kate. The next call went like this.

“Remember you asked me to turn that essay collection into a memoir?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, I’ll do it. “

“Good. I knew you would.”

Then I got brave. “So, how do you write a memoir?”

She laughed, or something equally unhelpful. “You’ll figure it out.”

It wasn’t easy to invite that I into my house. I had to learn so many things. (One of which was, don’t clean the house before you let her in!) But deciding to write my own story changed my future. It changed my past. I believe it will change yours as well.

For now, remember the first time you ran away from home with your little brother, when your mother had kicked you out of the house? And how you held hands, terrified, down the winding road while cars rushed past, and you turned around when your fear of the cars finally overcame your fear of your mother?

And who else knows how you’ve cared for your daughter with cerebral palsy all these years, feeding her every bite of food, singing Beatles songs with her?

Remember when you took your son to the mountain outside town to watch the Christmas fireworks and he lost his shoe over the cliff and you ended up piggybacking him down the rest of the trail while you both sang “Deep and Wide”?

Do you see? It all matters. In a divine economy, none of these moments are wasted. Not the fall of a chickadee from your tree or the wandering of a rebellious sheep or the loss of a strand of your hair goes unnoticed by God.[6] And since the One Who Is Running All Things, including galaxies, takes care to notice lost sheep, dying sparrows, and falling hair, we should notice as well. Writing helps us notice what God notices. So write your story because God attends to every moment of your life, and you should too. Writing is a form of attention, a form of prayer, a form of listening to God. Even when God feels distant, through writing, through this book, we have a new way to aim our eyes, to tilt our heads to hear.

If you could see me here, you’d see me leaning in close, and maybe even whispering: Writing the stories from our past enables us to live them again, but this time we live them wiser, better.

*   *   *

The bus my siblings and I took to school and back every day didn’t take us home. Every afternoon, those two-way doors would whoosh open and deposit us at the bottom of a hill. It was almost a mile up that steep, winding road to our house at the top. At an elevation of eight hundred feet, the hill was almost a mountain. Our legs knew it was a mountain. Every morning we ran down that mile-long mountain to catch the bus, and every day after school we waited forty-five minutes for the second run of the bus, and we were at the very end of the forty-five-minute ride. Then we slung our books against our chests, put our heads down, and pushed ourselves up that last long mile. We leaned against that mountain during rainstorms, lightning, and thunder, in zero degrees. Our gas budget —a dollar a week —wouldn’t allow a daily drive up and down the mountain. And we had legs, didn’t we?

Our bus driver was Mrs. Fifield, a tall, heavy woman with short, black hair. I was afraid of her. She’d yell at the rowdy kids who sauntered on board with greasy hair and crooked grins, insults and fists, ready to fight. We’d slink into our seats, hoping they’d leave us alone. But she was not to be tampered with. She kept an eye on us, glancing up at us often in her oversize overhead mirror. Her watchful gaze made me feel safe.

For the first fifteen minutes every day, we were alone in the bus. My brother Todd and I always chose to perch in the last row. Mrs. Fifield drove fast enough, even on the dirt roads, that when the bus hit the potholes, we were launched for two full seconds of flight. It was our favorite moment of the day.

One winter day, the snow came especially hard. I was in seventh grade. School was let out early for the blizzard. The heater on the bus roared as we slid and rounded Route 3B, slowed by the sideways blasts of wind, past the collapsing house, to finally end up at the bottom of the hill. We were the last ones off.

The snow fell like banners from the trees, the road was barely visible, and as the bus crunched to a stop, five of us pulled on our mittens and hats, cinched our coats tight, and readied to enter the storm. I saw Mrs. Fifield looking back at us and then looking out the windows, shaking her head —and then the unthinkable happened. The engine roared, and we lurched forward as Mrs. Fifield pulled the massive wheel to the right. She was turning up our road. Our jaws fell open. We caught one another’s eyes. No one gave us rides up the hill. Ever. Now, in this blizzard, the bus was going to climb our treacherous mountain? It was madness. Maybe we wouldn’t even make it. But I was filled with an inexpressible light. Mrs. Fifield was carrying us up the mountain. I didn’t know anyone could be this kind. And I wonder now if Mrs. Fifield hit those potholes running just for us.

*   *   *

How strongly the past pulls, even now. But don’t worry. I will not urge you to wrangle a shiny lining from the death of your sister, from your prodigal son or your lost marriage. As I talk about finding a bigger, better story, I’ll be talking a lot about telling the truth. After thirty years of writing and naming, I know this: Often, redemption comes simply by bringing language —which is bringing light —to the silence. Every time we lock up a person, an event, even an entire decade in the Closet of Forgetting and Denial, we’re robbing ourselves of the strength and wisdom that can come from those experiences.

Those events came to us, I believe, with some kind of meaning, maybe even purpose. If God is in and through our stories, surely he means something by the “burden of our witnessing.” Just as we’ve been shepherded into pastures by quiet rivers and through shadowed valleys, we get to shepherd and steward these burdens, all of them —the beautiful, the brilliant, and the horrid. Through telling and writing, we have another chance to reclaim and redeem those moments. And sometimes they are redeemed simply by being faced and called out of the dark. When we can name our ghosts, they haunt us less.

Do you need one more reason to write your story? Here it is, from an astronaut who came to one of my workshops in Alaska. She had flown four missions to the space station and held the record, at the time, for the longest stay in space. She had been on the cover of Newsweek and the subject of dozens of articles. “I have to write my story because if I don’t, someone else will,” she said, with a steely gaze. “And they won’t get it right.”

I have so much to share about all of this. Know this for now: Your stories are bigger, more important than you know right now. Bring them out from the dark. From silence into words and voice. Notice what God notices. Answer back. Your story will only get better.

Your Turn!

I’m going to guide you through this writing process chapter by chapter, but my words are only invitations to yours. In the end, your words in response to mine are what will matter most. (I can’t wait to read some of the stories that will come from these pages!) In this section, at the end of every chapter, I’ll include writing prompts and assignments. Most of the chapters will include two sample life stories written mostly by people in my classes —people who are not professional writers but who, like you, are finally answering the call to pen their story.

As you write, let go of any fears about writing perfectly or even well. We’re not attempting grammatical or literary perfection. We’re simply remembering, writing freely and joyfully and with encouragement for one another. Here’s the card to make it official:

A card depicting a winged car flying out of an open bird cage. On the card are the words: Get Out of Grammar Jail Free. This coupon entitles the bearer to write freely and joyfully without guilt or anxiety about grammar, sentence structure, or anything else your English teachers didn't like. Redeemable everywhere. Never void. Your story matters.

As you write, spend as much time or as little time as you want on these writing prompts. Write one story or ten. Make it one page or ten. This is guilt free. Go and write, and see what happens!

  1. 1. Let’s begin with a simple question: Why did you decide to read this book? What are your goals right now for reading and working through this material?
  2. 2. Many people who show up in my classes have been waiting for years to write their story. If this is you, too, what are some of the reasons you’ve waited? Make a list of your concerns and obstacles.
  3. 3. Because you’re holding this book now, I suspect you’ve already answered some of these fears and concerns. Write down your responses now to those fears. If some are yet unanswerable (like “What will my father say?”), leave them blank —for now. As you go through this book, I believe you’ll write past and through every one of these concerns. You are going to do it: Write the stories you have waited so long to write!
  4. 4. In this chapter, I recount riding the school bus. How did you get to school each day? Describe that process in writing, and any particular stories that come to mind.
  5. 5. Read the following essays, which are both about a childhood experience with God. Then write about an early encounter you had with God, or with a sense of something beyond your understanding. What happened? Write to discover —who knows what you will find!

GROWING TALL

By Arabah Joy

I was only four, but the memory is clear. Church was over. I found myself once again out back with Michelle O’Reilly. I don’t remember who started the fight, but she shoved me facedown into the bush. Blades from the scratchy plant bit my bare legs. She stood over me for a moment, sunlight filtering through strands of her hair, obscuring her face. The bush tangled around me, and the fire ants found my legs before I did.

Propelled by flames, I charged after her. I soon caught her, grabbed her arm, and took revenge the only way a four-year-old knows how —I bit. Sinking my teeth right solid into her arm felt glorious . . . but the satisfaction was short-lived. Michelle screamed and ran to her father, yelling, “Arabah bit me!”

The crowd who gathered, filled with holy indignation, expected, even demanded, punishment for such a blackhearted deed. Back in the midseventies, God was foremost a God of justice . . . or at least, that’s what my child heart understood.

The O’Reilly family folded their arms slow and tight across their Sunday best and leaned back against the hood of their truck. The Beck and Morrow families followed suit. Dread coursed through my body at what was coming.

My father, with tight lips, walked me to the side of the church to the oak tree, the young one with the tender branches.

“Pick your switch,” he told me. This is how it always was: slow. Calculated. Bone-chilling. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand which branches, in their seasoned years and weathered maturity, were allies. I picked one I could reach, young and vulnerable, like me.

For the third time that holy day, my legs stung, red welts blistering to the surface up and down my thighs and calves. When my punishment was over, I dutifully apologized to Michelle and her family, face hidden in shame, before being sent to the back seat of the car. The adults still had their conversation to finish. Justice demanded I, the sinner, sit with my guilt.

Peeking through the glass of the back-seat window, I caught the looks of the church crowd. They approved of my father’s immediate and appropriate action. I watched him shake his head at his worm of a daughter.

Then Jackie came to wait with me in the car. Jackie, the man whose approval I desperately wanted, the one who groomed me to need it and then took advantage of it for years after. His eyes crinkled in mirth as he saw my legs. “Did you get a switchin’?” He laughed at me.

It wasn’t funny to me. Back then life wasn’t funny, and God wasn’t either. I’m not sure how one can grow smaller, but in the back seat of the car with Jackie that day, it’s what I started doing. That’s the way I grew all during childhood: small.

But something changed one day a few years later. Every day I would ride the bus to the Christian school to be taught what good Christians should know and do. I learned how to act. I learned how to do good, all the while knowing deep down I’d never be good. I was too deeply stained for that. The gospel simply wasn’t for me.

This day we were traveling down Sydney Washer Road, that long strip of gravel that took us from our rural town into the big city. Mrs. Myers had the lights on in the bus, which meant we all had to be silent because she was having a bad day. We passed Janice’s house with the big, green pond out front. I knew the Owenses’ trailer park was coming up soon. That’s where Michael lived with his alcoholic father. One. Two. Three. I tried to count the trees along the embankment as the bus sped down the road. Counting was a great distraction, and soon I was breathing easy again.

Everyone was silent. Perhaps the silence that morning provided the margin for me to hear, for somewhere around that run-down trailer park is where I heard the still, small voice.

“Heidi.” He spoke directly to my heart, calling me by my given name. “I love you.”

I wondered at the words I’d just heard. I’d never heard them before. I didn’t hear them again. That was it. It wasn’t an exegesis of the gospel or a four-point message delivered by a pastor. It was four simple words spoken straight to my shattered, hopeless heart.

With those four words came enlightenment. Understanding. No, I still don’t understand how children are abused and no one seems to care. I don’t understand how mothers and fathers can despise their own blood, or how pastors can be self-seeking and Christians can be so hypocritical and this world can be such a horrific place. There are many things I don’t understand.

But this is what I did understand that day: I understood that the heart of God is good. I understood that my life mattered to him. I understood that I was seen and known by a God I thought I’d never be good enough for.

On that dusty back road in the middle of nowhere, to no one else and without the slightest fanfare, the God of the Universe whispered that the gospel was for me. Yes, even for me.

INNOCENCE

By Ann Conway

I do not remember the precise moment that I felt God as a child because I cannot recall him not being present. Very early on, I felt God was incarnated everywhere, that he was waiting to be seen.

This was not because my family was devoutly Catholic, and our lives infused with religion, but because of a primal sense of grace, embodied in the presence of my aunt Gabe, my mother’s unmarried sister. She lived with my parents, two brothers, and me in a small, gray house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. My mother had gone back to work as a teacher when I was four, so I was cared for largely by Gabe, who worked a split shift at a nearby hospital cafeteria and thus was free during the hours between breakfast and “dinner,” as we called lunch, and before supper.

Gabe was in her forties when I was born. She was perhaps an unlikely candidate to be God’s emissary —handsome, wisecracking, full-bodied, and pretty much toothless. My aunt had dropped out of ninth grade and, by the time I came along, had worked for twenty years in a hospital cafeteria.

“I had my fun, kid,” she said of her youth in Prohibition-era Providence. After a day on her feet, in the evenings Gabe often drank Narragansett beer and smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. She loved delicacies like liverwurst and pigs’ feet. But she always went to Mass, never swore, and never wore pants.

Gabe had a lot of the child in her and was without pretense. “I’m the dumb one!” she’d crow, speaking of her more educated brothers and sisters. She was never ashamed of who she was or what she did, which to me meant that God was close by. Security in the self can bespeak deep faith.

The outings I took with Gabe as a small child reinforced my sense of grace. I seemed to smell God everywhere, especially via the luscious scent of moist earth and ripening tomatoes in the hospital greenhouse. I felt God in the small rippling brook in the middle of Pleasant Valley Parkway, where my aunt and I floated twig boats during her breaks. I heard God in the ticking grandfather clock that graced the large, empty dining room where I sat and colored while my aunt, who was the cashier, sat at the head of the adjacent cafeteria line. I felt God when I sat with my aunt after work in her tiny bedroom off the parlor, where she polished her shoes with white liquid polish and let me make dolls out of all her Kleenex. It was peaceful and safe, and I felt I was under the shelter of God’s mighty wing.

On her days off, we strolled down Chalkstone Avenue, the main shopping district of Mount Pleasant. What may have seemed mundane to an adult was to me emblematic of the world’s splendors. I felt that sumptuousness when we visited Walcott’s 5 & 10, with its numberless shelves of cheap toys, cosmetics —including the rouge, powder, and crimson lipstick my aunt favored —and all kinds of school supplies and stationery.

I felt God when we visited the cobbler, a bent, old Italian man who sat at his bench in a tiny storefront on the corner of Chalkstone and Academy avenues, and in the Superior Bakery with its enormous glass cases full of row upon row of jewel-like pastries —amaretti, sfogliatelle, tiramisus.

Like many in the neighborhood, Gabe loved to tell stories. When I learned to read, I was amazed, thinking that through these new stories, I could go anywhere: back in time, forward, to all countries. I believed that the startling miracle of reading came from God.

Throughout her life, my aunt took on special requests from God, such as loving people who were difficult or lonely. She was always running errands for somebody. In my early life, she shopped for Kate Mohan, an ancient, miserly spinster whose family had owned the The Beehive, a barroom down the street.

I remember Kate, impossibly old, hunched in a kitchen chair near her manic parakeet, Jippy. As she dictated a grocery list for Gabe’s trip to the A&P, I wandered through the tenement. The parlor was stuffed with marble-topped tables and old-fashioned lamps with crystal prisms, like in the movie Pollyanna with Hayley Mills, which Gabe and I had adored.

When Kate died, she left two hundred dollars to Gabe and sixty thousand to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which made my aunt roll her eyes and mutter darkly.

She got over it. I have never met anyone so unattached to possessions, to money. Nevertheless, she bought most of my clothes and toys. I recall her standing for hours in front of an enormous doll display at a local Christmas bazaar; she was determined to win the raffle so I could have a doll.

Maybe I had such a vivid sense of God because he was silhouetted against the dark. The years ahead would be difficult for me and for Gabe. In this account of my early years in Providence, I do not mention my parents because I retain no early memories of them at all, although I know I was petrified of my father.

As much as possible, I tried to stay with Gabe, away from both of my parents. They were a bad match from the beginning, and I never saw an iota of affection between them. When my mother returned to teaching in 1958, the marriage had broken down completely. In those days, a wife who worked outside the home was a sign of a husband’s failure. My father had not gone to college and never made enough money. He told my mother that he would “break” her.

Not surprisingly, my two brothers exhibited serious behavior problems. Eventually they were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and were in and out of the state mental hospital.

My parents moved us to the suburbs just after I turned nine, without Gabe. From my preteen years onward, I’d be trapped with my warring parents and disturbed brothers in a 1,100-square-foot ranch house. Gabe did the best she could to continue to provide a refuge, but the next nine years were very difficult.

However, that story is no longer my life’s central narrative. I wrote this essay because I know why I am alive —because of Gabe and God. Though I have long since returned to my religion, for many years, I turned my back on God. It took a long time to get over feeling buried by all that had happened to me since I was a shy, cossetted little girl nurtured and cared for by a “nobody,” an ordinary aging woman who spent her days on a high stool, handing people change from an old-fashioned cash register.

When I accompanied my aunt on our simple excursions, Gabe always remarked, “Isn’t this lovely?” as if to underscore the experience. I thought that her love, which was God’s love, was lovely.

When I held tightly on to my aunt’s hand, I knew that God was a miracle of opulence, although I also understood scarcity —of love, of money, of parents who were parents. But sparseness caused love and goodness to stand out more clearly against the darkness in the world. I knew that goodness and spiritual largesse should never be taken for granted, ever. In my mind, every instance of them was cause for rejoicing.

When I was very small, I sometimes looked in the mirror and thought, Me! I was thrilled to be alive.

Looking back, I do not think this was narcissism; it was innocence. I was amazed that that God had created me and every other unique person; indeed, he had created everything else in the universe throughout time. Evil was real, but how beauty and virtue flourished, how they shimmered and vanquished the dark. It astounds me still.