Succor

On New Year’s Eve I went to a mountain party to which only women were invited. Each had written down some quality of her personality or way of thinking that she wanted to give up, so she could burn it in the fire and purge herself. Some wrote complicated letters. Some wrote a poem. Some wrote only a word or two: Intolerance. Hatred. Judgment. Resistance.

Around the fireplace at midnight, the women told of work they wanted to do in coming years. Largely they wanted to help with huge projects like ending war or starvation, defusing racial tensions, enhancing education, raising environmental awareness. They wanted to strengthen their marriages or partnerships, their neighborhoods, their communities. They wanted to love the broader world.

This outward-focused generosity caught me off guard; I don’t know why. They were women, after all, born with an instinct to nurture, to take care, whether their children were of their bodies or their hearts or their intellects. Most were mothers; many were professionals: doctors, professors, artists, social workers. I suppose I expected more personal concerns: I need money to get my kids through college. I want a new boat. My son is an alcoholic. My mother has cancer.

Spontaneous generosity always takes me by surprise. I’d carried a load of debt with me to graduate school, so when I went for an appointment with a new doctor I was worried because I needed to pay the bill in parts. For fifteen minutes I lay shivering in the air-conditioned examining room, naked as a jaybird under the sheet, so consumed with anxiety that as soon as Dr. Wiley entered the room I blurted out my situation and then burst into tears. He raised his eyebrows, then chuckled and handed me a box of Kleenex.

“Good grief,” I said after I regained my composure. “Now you can see why I need that Prozac.”

“Yes,” he said, and then he took my hand and patted it and looked me in the eye. “Set your fears to rest, dear heart,” he said. “Tell the nurse I said to charge you only for the lab work. It’s twenty-six dollars. Can you afford that?”

I blinked. “But I want to pay for your time. I just need—”

He smiled and waved his hand. “I have enough money already.”

I cried and cried.

“Amy, Amy,” he said, shaking his head. “Has it been that long since anyone has been nice to you?”

Trapped! Far more romantic than feminist, the modern woman in me winces when I’m forced to admit it. Yet to quote my old boyfriend George, there I was, “standing in the truth of my life,” sobbing with relief over yet another instance of theunexpected generosity that has followed me for as long as I can remember.

And where is the harm, I argue to my independent self, in letting myself be cared for when I need it? I think I lose no part of myself in being loved.

Becoming acquainted with a professor at school, I noticed two small Zen paintings on the wall above his desk. They were not framed and had yellowed from age. In one, a figure was walking over a bridge suspended between two cliffs. He was bent under the weight of a large bag, which he carried over his shoulder. Beneath him was only the vastness of space, and the bridge was narrow and difficult. “That’s really how it is, isn’t it,” I said, chuckling at the painting. The other picture, the barest suggestion of a distant mountain, was equally arresting.

“You like those?” he said.

“I love them. They’re so true.”

He took down the pictures and handed them to me.

“They’re lovely,” I said again, and handed them back.

He refused them. “They’re yours.”

“But Jerry. You hardly know me,” I said awkwardly. “You can’t just give me these.”

“Why not? Listen. A colleague brought those to me from Japan twenty years ago, but even after all this time I’ve never been able to appreciate them.”

“But they’re exquisite. I can’t just take them. It’s too much to give.” I put the pictures on the desk and slid them toward him.
“No.” He pushed them back. “They’re yours. I’m a firm believer in things belonging to people who can appreciate them.”

My friend Carol once told me that when she read my books she was always amazed at how much I was loved and yet I never seemed to see it.

“What do you mean?” I said, hoarse with embarrassment. We were in the middle of a live radio interview in Kansas City. “Who loves me?”

“Everybody,” she said. “Everything. The world. Your life. The people around you. Sometimes I just want to shake you. Don’t you get it?”

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