Anne Lamott and ten silver dollars

Lately I've been on an Anne Lamott kick. It started a week or so ago after we moved into our new two-bedroom apartment and I was struck by the idea that I could grab a book, any book, and read it in bed. That's because Owen has his own bedroom now and I no longer have to tiptoe into our bedroom in the dark and tangle myself up in headphones while listening to a podcast before bed. Now, I can do the real thing. Every night.

So Anne Lamott. As I said, we've just moved so I reached into one of the many boxes stacked in the dining room and grabbed a book from the top. It happened to be "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year." I couldn't have asked for a better selection. Owen is 17 months old now, months beyond the one-year mark, but so much of what Anne wrote about in her first year as a new mom, both the good and the ugly, struck a cord. She writes with so much heart and humor that I would find myself laughing every couple of pages. Not just laughing, laughing, but laughing in recognition. Like this passage:

I wish he could take longer naps in the afternoon. He falls asleep and I feel I could die of love when I watch him, and I think to myself that he is what angels look like. Then I doze off, too, and it's like heaven, but sometimes only twenty minutes later he wakes up and begins to make gritchy rodent noises, scanning the room wildly. I look blearily over at him in the bassinet, and think, with great hostility, Oh, God, he's raising his loathsome reptilian head again.

Loathsome reptilian head? I laughed aloud at that one. I know that feeling so well as Owen would stir in his crib beside us in the middle of the night, sometimes multiple times, making scratching, whimpering noises as I braced myself, holding my breath, as I waited to see whether he would settle back down or escalate his cries into a wail that would require me getting my weary ass up out of bed.

I also loved how she would describe her son, Sam's attempts at talking as "babbling in Urdu" or "speaking Serbo-Croatian," which is exactly what it sounds like. Owen does that all of the time now. He points at something and looks at me so earnestly as he goes on and on in a flood of incomprehensible sentences. Lately, he's had a lot to say about ceiling fans. He points to them, looks me in the eye and launches into an impassioned diatribe.

I can only imagine what he's saying to me: "Look Mom, see the fan go round and round? That's fascinating to me because it's moving and it's so high. How does it do that? It makes me want to get on my tippy toes and touch it. Did you know that there are buttons on the wall that make it go faster and slower? I love those. Will you lift me up again to play with them? I know it's the 47th time today and it makes your arms ache because I weigh 27 pounds now but nothing brings me such joy. I don't know what it is about making something twirl faster, then slower, but it's just so thrilling. It really fills me with a sincere appreciation for life and all the amazing things that surround us."

After finishing "Operating Instructions," I felt inspired to re-read my copy of "Bird by Bird," Anne's famous book about the writing life. She tells this great anecdote about her brother at age 10 sitting at their kitchen table surrounded with piles and piles of books about birds that he's supposed to have read for a big report he had due for school the next day, looking completely overwhelmed, like he is about to cry. Anne's father, also a writer, sits down next to him, puts his arm around his shoulder, and says: "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

I always appreciate her chapter, "Shitty First Drafts," as it reminds me how important it is to write without censoring myself or listening to the voices in my head that make comments as I type like, "This is so boring," and "Who cares?" and "This is taking forever." You just get on with it, she says, knowing you'll go back and edit and revise until it says what you really mean to communicate to a general audience. But first you have to get it down, without second guessing, because that is where inspiration and creativity come from: messiness.

In her chapter, "Getting Starting," she gives some advice about what to write about. One of the things she suggests is a Christmas gift you remember or a special birthday party when you were a child, which got me thinking about my tenth birthday party. I don't know why we have years and years of birthday parties and years and years of receiving gifts and some we remember and some pass by like they never happened, but I remember turning 10.

My birthday is in June, just after school gets out and I typically had a pool or beach party. But that year I wanted a soccer party. I had been big into soccer ever since my mom signed me up for AYSO when I was seven. I still remember the name of my first team: The Grasshoppers. Our jerseys were green with white numbers and I was in heaven running up and down the field in shin guards and green socks pulled up to my knees, my hair in French braids to keep it off my face.

I loved sucking on oranges at half time and gulping down lemon-lime Gatorade, something Eric and I were never allowed to drink in our sugar-free home. I loved that my coaches called me, "Cunningham" and yelled instructions to me from the sidelines as I ran side to side, back and forth with so much energy, focus and enthusiasm that I wish I still had one-tenth of today. I remember one coach, Coach Norton, was known as a screamer. "Get over there, Johnson, what are you, waiting for a bus?" "Keep your eye on the ball, Hartling, not the boys on the sideline!"

Coach Norton sometimes reduced my teammates to tears with his rants and parents complained he was too hard on us. But I liked Coach Norton. There was something about him I respected, and I ran harder and kicked farther for him as he yelled to critique, motivate and validate us (he was an equal-opportunity screamer.) "Great pass, Cunningham!" he'd bellow through cupped hands.

So at my tenth birthday party, we picked teams and scrimmaged at the soccer field two blocks from my house, then went back to have cake and ice cream in my backyard. I was popular at the time, the second most popular girl in the fourth grade because I was best friends with Jody Budge, the most popular girl in the fourth grade (fifth grade was a completely different story after Jody dumped me one day for unexplained reasons.)

Jody lived in Emerald Bay, an exclusive, gated community in Laguna Beach, Calif., with a private beach. My mom used to drop me off at Jody's house and we would body surf for hours, waiting for just the right wave, then turning towards shore and swimming as fast as we could until the force of the wave overtook us, pulling us up and then under in a swirl of white foam. We'd emerge sputtering with wild, salty hair and readjust the straps on our one-pieces, which always seems to collect wads of sand in the crotch. We called this whole endeavor, "getting munched."

Then we'd lie in the sand on our bellies to get warm, the wet sand coating the outline of our swimsuits. We'd eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which always tasted sweet and delicious and just a little gritty. At bedtime, lying in the dark in the pop-up twin of Jody's trundle bed, I distinctly remember feeling waves wash over me, like I was still in the ocean, the residual effect of our hours and hours of bobbing around like porpoises.

At my tenth birthday party, I was still queen bee and my classmates treated me accordingly. I don't remember much about the party besides playing soccer and sitting in my backyard except for a very special gift that my grandma gave me. As I sat opening gifts on the lawn surrounded by my friends, someone handed me a small square box that was flat, like the kind you'd open to find a bracelet or earrings. But this square box was heavy and made lots of noise when I shook it. I opened the box, removing the cotton padding to reveal ten silver dollars, so shiny I swear I could see my reflection.

I was rich, I just knew it.

Later when I asked my mom how much they were worth, I was crestfallen when she told me, "Ten dollars." I couldn't believe something so beautiful and heavy could be worth the same as a green, wrinkly old 10-dollar bill with Alexander Hamilton's mug on it.

I kept that box of silver dollars in my closet for months, not wanting to spend them on anything mundane like candy bars or colored string to make friendship bracelets. I don't remember what I ended up doing with them, but there was something about them that seemed to mark the one-decade milestone I had reached so appropriately. I hadn't thought about them in a long time, not until reading "Bird by Bird" this morning while Owen was napping.

Thank you, Grandma. And thank you, Anne, for helping me remember.