Dumb Luck
Originally posted February 2021
Dumb Luck
The Christmas before Covid a buddy of mine threw a white elephant gift exchange party for at least a dozen of her girlfriends. Each of us brought a small wrapped gift and a dish to share for dinner. We piled into her lovely home filled with art, books and hearty plants and caught up with those we hadn’t seen in a while. Then, we filled our plates with crazy good food: a brown-sugar and mustard-slathered slab of baked salmon, gooey macaroni and cheese, roasted winter veggies, salad and scones, followed by desserts out the yin-yang.
With full-bellies, we raffled off the gifts, a game that involved stealing and was both exciting and cringe-worthy. (The gift I offered was swapped out more than once.) Afterward, smooshed onto the couch, draped over chairs, and splayed across the living room floor, our host asked each of us this question: Is there something you really must do for yourself, but you’ve been too afraid to ask for help?
Around the room we went with dreams said aloud. Each woman spoke about what made her spirit sag or soar. One wanted to apply for a big scary job, another to eat healthier food, while someone else decided she was ready to go for her doctorate. Links flew in texts like birds on a breeze. There were those among us with expertise. I did not have a ready answer, and so, I let the others’ enthusiasm and desires fill me. But when my turn came around, I was surprised to hear myself say loudly, “I want to get paid to write!”
I did not mean a writing job. I wanted someone to pay me to write what I wanted to write. I had started a new project, a follow-up of sorts to the novel I had published 18 months prior and I was hot to spend more time with it. Problem was and always is, how do I afford to take time off from work? My friends suggested applying for writer residencies or grants and backed that shit up with connections. I was wowed by the support.
And then COVID landed and began to spread the way pandemics do and the world stopped spinning. Or so it seemed. We had to stay put. There would be no exotic residencies in Minnesota, Iowa or Washington State. Nonetheless, what I wanted came true! The small company where I am employed decided to continue to pay its staff their regular salaries even though we could not do our work from home. They paid me to stay home and stay safe. So, I wrote. I was paid to write my next book. For a while, anyway.
The above is a demonstration of grace. Dumb luck. Grace feels like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a Salvation Army coat pocket. Or not crashing the car during a storm.
The new book I’m writing is a story full of grace, a memoir tentatively titled SWOLLEN APPETITE. It spans five years in the mid-nineties when I moved to San Francisco to become an artist. I stumbled through the streets of San Francisco drunk as a skunk, re-inventing myself here and reinventing myself there. Pieces of me scattered in the Mission, the Lower Haight and tumbled in the dirt beneath the swing set in Alamo Square. How could it be that every morning of my adult life (up until that point) I woke up and vowed not to drink, then by nightfall was drunk again? I could not not drink. But then, one morning I vowed not to drink and I didn’t? All that had changed was I finally asked for the help I needed and it arrived in giant bouquets.
