These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

He taught me that to ask someone to read my work was to ask them to give me their time, and so I resolved to never ask anyone to read anything I’d written until I had done every last thing I could to make it better.

Elissa told me the story: After leaving India the year before, she decided she had enough stuff, or too much stuff. She made a pledge that for a year she wouldn’t buy shoes, clothes, purses, or jewelry.

The unspoken question of shopping is What do I need?, but I didn’t need anything. What I needed was less than what I had.

I could buy plane tickets and eat out in restaurants. I could buy books because I write books and I co-own a bookstore and books are my business. Could I have made it a full year without buying books? Absolutely. I could have used the library or read the books that were already in my house, but I didn’t, I bought books.

I remembered my parents trying to teach me this lesson when I was a child: If you want something, wait a while. Chances are the feeling will pass.

For every funeral, Father Dan gave the exact same homily. “We knew it word for word. We could mouth it along behind him,” Charlie said, and though he is in his seventies now, a good distance from his altar-boy self, he began the recitation: “Father Dan would say, ‘We’re on this earth to get ready to die. And when we die, God’s not going to say, “Charlie (Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank), what did you do for a living? How much money did you make? How many houses did you have?” God is only going to ask us two questions: “Did you love Me?” and “Did you love your neighbor?” And we can imagine that Charlie (Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank) will answer truthfully, saying, “Yes, Lord, You know I loved You. You know I loved my neighbor.” And then God will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Now enter into the kingdom of heaven.”’”

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“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. When I read that it was like a light clicking on. I thought about Mrs. Hopwood. I realized that Doy was not my problem to solve but my brother to love. I decided on the spot that I was going to love him and not expect anything from him, and overnight he changed. He stopped the cussing, stopped the violence. I feel we became brothers. I was his servant and he was my master. I was there with him when he died.”

“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.

The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love.

“I wonder if we could just pretend to move,” I said to Karl that night over dinner. “Would that be possible? Go through everything we own and then stay where we are?”

Our never-ending stream of houseguests frequently commented on the tranquility of our surroundings, and I told them that the secret was not having much stuff. But we had plenty of stuff. It’s a big house, and over time, the closets and drawers had filled with things we never touched, didn’t want, and in many cases had completely forgotten we owned.

This is why we have to go back, because even as the text stays completely true to the writer’s intention, we readers never cease to change. If you’ve read these stories before, I beg you, read them again. Chances are you’ll find them to be completely new.

The past is made of stories that are unlikely to happen now,

“When a woman tells you she’s pregnant, the answer is always ‘I’m thrilled,’ or you’re a complete idiot.”

Teaching made me a better reader and a better thinker.

Here’s something they didn’t teach me in graduate school: if you want to save reading, teach children to read. Engage children in reading.

Nell went on to tell me that she had just finished reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to her son, and that it had cracked them open and made them better people. “You have to tell her that for me,” Nell said. “Will you do that?” I didn’t have Kate DiCamillo’s e-mail address, but I was pretty sure I could find her. Except that I didn’t want to find her. I knew she was a fan of my work, but I hadn’t read anything she’d written because in my adult life I’d never made a habit of reading children’s literature. Even after having lunch with her and hearing her speak, it hadn’t occurred to me to read one of her books. I’d been operating under the assumption that children’s literature was a matter for children, but what if I changed my mind? If owning a bookstore had taught me anything, it was to broaden my interests and forget my assumptions about what I liked and didn’t like. Instead of going to look for the author, I decided to find the book.

Whenever I finished a stack, I passed them along to a young neighbor, who in turn drew me thank-you notes.

The suffering and cruelty the characters endure was a kind of clear, bright bell. How could she be telling these stories to children? Ah, yes, because children suffer. We had grown up and grown out of it, while they were still in the dark woods, listening for the voice of solidarity.

I’ve often wondered why the people who seem most certain of the existence of God are the ones who want to keep the respirator plugged in. If you were sure that God was waiting for your father, wouldn’t you want him to go? Wouldn’t you want him to go even if you didn’t believe in God, because death is the completion of our purpose here on earth? He’s finished his job and now is free to send his atoms back into the earth and sea and stars. Isn’t that really kind of great?