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If there’s one thing Lucille hates, it’s how science has to rain on whimsy’s parade: Rainbows not a gift from leprechauns offering pots of gold, but only a trick of refraction. A blue sky not a miles-wide painting done by a heavenly hand, but molecules scattering light. Still, when Lucille sees the stars strewn across the sky on a night like tonight, they’re diamonds, and she thinks they might end up under her bed yet.
People forget about the value of adversity. It was something she always tried to teach her fourth-grade students, how adversity can strengthen character.
There was a time when she was in her late fifties and a woman from church, who was approaching ninety, told Lucille in a tremulous voice, “I still need love, too, you know.” And Lucille felt a kind of embarrassment mixed with disdain, she must admit she felt some disdain. Because she believed the woman should be through with all that. What she knows now is that no one is ever through with love. No one ever should be.
But people need something to depend on. They need something to love.
She will not think of the entropy that everyone predicts, not now, because these days nature is her religion. And Black Elk Speaks is her Bible, she has always loved that book, and its theme of a spiritual journey has special meaning to her now. She likes the way the book teaches that you are only one part of a greater whole. That idea gives her strength,
Never underestimate the joy of being the one who is cared for,
One love departed, and all this followed. Seasons of the heart, she supposes.
My dad says real love is when the other person is your best friend and you shouldn’t have to work hard around them, it should be, like, more natural, and you just want to be with them even if you’re not doing anything.”
When Lucille was a girl, a carnival came to town one summer and they had a ride called the Whirligig. You sat in some wooden contraption that jerked you here, there, and everywhere. One minute you’d be going forward, the next backward or sideways or tilted over so far you thought you might fall out. It was never still and you had no idea what might come next. That’s life. You’re born, and you get a ride on the Whirligig.
He didn’t say the man in his dream was wearing a plaid shirt, and he said nothing about seeing any wings. Maybe she and Lincoln just shared the same kind of dream because they were sleeping under the same roof. It could happen.
It has begun to occur to Iris that Lucille is a friend, Lucille and Tiny and Monica are all friends. Astonishing—and humiliating!—to see that she didn’t have friends in Boston.
“I thought I wanted to teach, but I don’t think most of my students go home and do what I tell them. They just come to socialize. It’s a different world. People don’t bake from scratch anymore.”
Jason feels a kind of irrational burst of anger: the casino! But you can’t custom-order people’s kindnesses. People do what they can, they give what they have. He has no right to be angry with someone who is just trying to help. He’s not thinking the way he usually does: he has become someone unconsciously—or not so unconsciously—searching for something to be mad at, from cold coffee to the infuriating vagueness expressed every day by the medical community. Hard to say. Can’t be sure. Just have to wait and see.
Abby was saying that all her illness had done was to make her love Link and Daddy more. And appreciate everything more. And to understand, in a way she never had before, that death was a natural part of life, just like the seasons in nature. And everybody’s job was to love life while you had it and never to take anything for granted. It was hard to remember to do that, but it was worth it to try.
What Maddy has come to believe is that certain life circumstances make for people who walk with a psychic limp for all of their days. Never mind the progress they seem to make, peel back a few delicate layers and there it is: a stubborn doubting of worth; an inability to stand with conviction behind anything without wondering if they should be standing there at all; a sense that if they move in this direction, it’s wrong; and if they move in that direction, that’s wrong, too.
