Operating Instructions Read Online Free Page B

of my sweater, and dart away.
    Anyway, after I introduced Sam to them and sat down on my doughnut seat in the front row with Peg, I really got into the service. The baby was sound asleep in my arms, and I stood for the first hymn feeling very adult—an actual
mother
, for God’s sake—only to discover that the doughnut seat was stuck to my bottom, and milk was absolutely pouring out of my breasts. I was not yet secure enough to hold the baby with one hand, so I was cradling him in my arms and couldn’t free up either hand to pull the doughnut seat off. So I stood there bent slightly forward, warbling away, with my butt jutting out and ringed by the plastic doughnut.
    •   •   •
    But what I wanted to record today was how gorgeous, how heartbreakingly beautiful Sam’s sounds are. He sounds like a baby dolphin. His breathing is so beautiful and
hard
. Pammy, who is here every day, says it’s his baby Lamaze.

S EPTEMBER 17
    S am was an angel today, no fussing, no colic, sweet and pretty as a movie baby, all eyes and thick dark hair. We went to church and a blissed-out Alma got to hold him almost the entire time. She keeps shaking her fist and saying, “This is
our
baby,
our
baby.” Alma is about eighty, very very black, about four-foot-two, and wears these amazing outfits and hats that are like polyester Coco Chanels. Our pastor Harrell showed a ten-minute movie that was one of the purest statements of faith I’ve ever seen. It was about a tall, sweet-looking, blind man running in the Dipsea race on the arm of his best friend, who could see. The Dipsea race goes over Mount Tamalpais and ends up in the Pacific Ocean at Stinson Beach; it is grueling beyond words, very steeply uphill and then equally steeply down, exquisitely beautiful to look at, all woods and redwoods and rich rich earth and millions of wild animals. The trail lies on rugged, rocky terrain; it is hardto
hike
up and down it, let alone run. I always end up feeling like Rose Kennedy after one of those hikes, incredibly old in the joints, especially in the knees, hobbling, panting, out of it. This movie tracks the two men amid the several thousand people who run the race every year, serious runners and
King of Hearts
types together, as they leave downtown Mill Valley and head up the steps that lead to the mountain path. The footage shows this landscape to be almost biblically beautiful and difficult, just like real life. I have come to believe more with every passing year that despite technological evidence to the contrary, it is still secretly an Old Testament world out there.
    The seeing man called out every root, every rock, holding the hand of his blind friend. They ran together joyfully, the seeing man calling, “Step, step, step, step, step,” as they went up and down eighty-degree steps and “Roots roots roots,” as they navigated trails laced with huge tree roots. They ran bobbingly, like football players stepping quickly in and out of tires during practice. “Good good, uh-oh
rock,”
the seeing man would say. They both tripped a bunch of times, and the blind guy fell once, but mostly they seemed connected and safe.
    I know it is odd to a lot of people that I am religious—I mean, it’s odd to
me
that I’m religious, I never meant to be. I don’t quite know how it happened: I think that at some point, a long time ago, I made a decision to believe, and then every step ofthe way, even through the worst of it, the two years my dad was sick with brain cancer, the last few years of my drinking, I could feel the presence of something I could turn to, something that would keep me company, give me courage, be there with me, like the seeing man in this movie. The movie so exactly captured how I feel these days, that Jesus is there with us everyplace Sam and I go.
    When people used to say shit like this to me, I’d look at them politely and think, Well, isn’t that special. Did we take our meds this morning? It was no different for me