These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

“About that time I read something Dorothy Day had said. She said what she wanted to do was love the poor, not analyze them, not rehabilitate them.

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.

You can’t tell a doctor anything, and they text while you’re talking.

The interviewee would call from the lobby and say “I’m your eleven o’clock,” and then go up to the room and knock on the door. It was impossible not to feel like a hooker, especially since the search committee members sat on one bed while I sat on the other. I remember arriving to one interview soaking wet from a sudden downpour on my way to the hotel, and when I started to take my raincoat off, the chairman said, “Have we told you about the wet T-shirt portion of the interview?” I pulled my coat back on and sat down on the bed, making a giant wet spot.

I felt like I had found a magic portal, and all I’d had to do to pass through was believe that I wasn’t too big to fit.