Pamela Jean Owens off-line

It seems to take less than 3 pages of reading Anne Lamott or Melody Beattie before my own thoughts come pouring out, flooding my fingers to get to the paper, or, in this case, the keyboard.  I wonder how many other women, would-be writers or just women with their own private journals, start reading an Anne Lamott book and end up writing their own book instead?  If I thought my musings could be half as helpful to other women as Anne’s have been, I would surely do nothing but write.  But I don’t know if these musings will help anyone besides me, and, on some level, I don’t suppose it matters.  But I’m still vain and I’m still jobless and I still cherish that little girl’s dream of being a Writer, a Writer Whose Books Other People Buy and Read.

How fitting to be reading Anne’s Plan B, with its railing against the Bush presidency, as I’m trying to be figuring out the Plan B for my own life.  I bought Plan B last week at Half-Price Books, on the bookstore trip made with the intention of buying Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. All Rick and Anne have in common, on one level anyway, is that you never seem to run into anyone who has read either of them and been sorry they did it.  My dear friend of a lifetime, Mary Ellen, told me she was reading Warren’s book, and that she had given it to her nephew and was considering giving it to her brother.  She didn’t suggest I read it, but she did offer to stop at the bookstore on our way back from our thrice weekly infusion of Mexican Food from my favorite Dallas restaurant, El Fenix. 

Mary Ellen doesn’t make suggestions.  She just offers thought, asks questions, puts up with me, and loves me.  She’s been doing it since I was about 13 and she was a grown-up, and now that we are both grown-ups, she still does it with the same care and the same prayers.  I don’t think of Mary Ellen as ever having lacked purpose in her life.  So if she thinks it will be helpful for her to read a book by a preacher of the kind of church neither she nor I would go to, who preaches a kind of theology and politics neither she nor I subscribe to, but who is, at root, apparently of our basic brand of Christianity, then I am inclined to think it would be helpful to me.

There’s no doubt that I am lacking Purpose in my Life.  No one who knows me can miss the glaring lack of purpose that has consumed me to an increasingly disturbing level for the past 3 ½  years.  Its beginning somehow was connected both to Bush’s reelection in 2004 and to the events in my own life which preceded and followed that event in the life, or possibly the death, of the nation and the world.  Those events are another story, another chapter, memories, not the present or the future, and I’ve already given them more of my life than they deserved.  Now another election is approaching, another chance for hope and change for the body politic, but the body Pamela is having a terrible time getting on board.

Anne Lamott’s Plan B begins as she turns from 49 to 50 and lacking hope during the early years of the Bush II regime; I am 59 years old, close to turning 60, and I am searching for hope as well.  The careers I earned degrees to pursue are caput. My baby is about to move cross country and become a Daddy, making me a Grandmother.  My husband is having an emotional rebirth, having come to terms with his own sixtieth birthday two years ago, and my older two children have met and committed to their own life partners.  I have just helped my mother, who is not yet 85, move to a lovely retirement apartment where she can have assistance with what she needs and independence in all the rest, and where she can see Daddy every day in the nearby Memory Care facility where we moved him a month ago.  I am writing this in the house I grew up in, now a shell of memories in many stages of dismantling and packing.  But I am having more trouble with this passage of a decade than I have had with any decade turn of my life thus far.

I think I did 30 well, and 40, and certainly I started 50 well, with a new Ph.D.  But the 50’s aren’t ending on the track they began, and I am floundering for purpose.

Fittingly, I am writing it “on” the manual Royal typewriter where I typed my first printed words – I’m not pushing those keys – I don’t even know if my fingers have that kind of strength any more – but to make a surface at the height I needed for my laptop I have placed the Royal in its sturdy black case on top of Mother’s sewing stool, and here I sit tapping away, at the same kitchen window I’ve looked out since exactly 54 years ago this week.  And here I sit, writing for myself, but also writing for an imagined reader who is not so very different from me.

Mine is the situation of countless baby boomers, now the in-between generation, wondering where the America we were sure was Greening went and whether, as my baby thinks, we of the sixties made a huge mess of it all despite our best intentions.  Child of the fifties, radical of the sixties, now I am an aging woman facing my own sixties and I wonder where I am meant to be headed.

So I’m reading Anne Lamott’s Plan B and Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and the best I can say right now is that I do still believe I was put into the kingdom for such a time as this.  Whether I can find out what it is – that I am feeling much less sure about these days, but what can I do besides try?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under My Story, This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.