Noan

Bibliomancy. Oh, how I love this word. Before last week I didn’t even know it existed. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, but thanks to Noan I now know that what I’ve been doing has a name.

I’ve written about Noan here before. She is my Robin Hood; she regularly leaves treasures for me to find at the entrance of my lonely cottage. In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve already learned so much. Most importantly, I’ve learned that you can feel friendship with someone whose face you’ve never seen and whose voice you’ve never heard. In reply to one of my posts last week,  Noan sent me a piece she’d written for a writing class. I loved it and I asked her if she’d be willing to let me share it–share her–with all of you. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce my first official guest post writer: Noan Cleary.

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Bibliomancy: the use of books in divination

It was spring of 1999, and I was on the search for a surgeon.  My younger daughter, Elizabeth, was seven years old at the time.  Elizabeth has cystic fibrosis and that year she needed sinus surgery, and she needed it as soon as possible.   I had an appointment that afternoon with one of the surgeons recommended by Elizabeth’s doctors, but unfortunately the appointment did not go well.   This surgeon, I learned, was not the type of doctor that answered questions.  When my husband called to see how it went all I could think to say was: What is the difference between God and a surgeon?  God doesn’t think he is a surgeon.

I drove home from the appointment feeling rather beaten down and slightly weepy.  Fortunately – because this type of physician-induced miasma was becoming familiar to me- I knew just what I needed.  I needed a good book.  More specifically, I needed that focused relaxation I feel only when my head is buried deep in a book.  It came to mind that Anne Lamott had a new book out, and since I pass a bookstore on the way home I decided I would stop and treat myself to the guilty pleasure of a full-price, hardcover, chain-store book purchase.  You can imagine my profound disappointment when the bored young clerk at the bookstore informed me, Oh, we don’t have that book in stock.   I searched the store for an alternative purchase, but no other book felt right, and I left empty-handed.

Arriving home, I immersed myself in the nightly tasks of dinner preparation and homework tutoring.  I was up to my elbows in long division and marinara sauce when I heard a voice say, Anne Lamott, and looked up to find Rosie O’Donnell on our TV screen.  Anne Lamott, Rosie announced, is going to be with us tomorrow to talk about her new book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts On Faith.   How funny, I thought; I never remember seeing an author on the Rosie O’Donnell show before.  I’m going to have to keep looking for that book, I thought to myself.

The following day I succeeded in tracking down a copy of Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, and that evening I settled in bed and began to read.  It had been over an hour, and I was just beginning to feel sleepy when I read something that caused me to sit up and take notice:

 On an otherwise ordinary night at the end of September, some friends came over to watch the lunar eclipse, friends whose two-year-old daughter Olivia had been diagnosed nine months earlier with cystic fibrosis.  I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked.  They must live with the fact that their younger daughter has this disease that fills its victim’s lungs with thick sludge that harbors infections.  Two-week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotics are common.  Adulthood is rare.

 What surprised me most about this passage was just seeing the words cystic fibrosis on the page.  I had never come across any mention of a child with CF in any book I’d ever read.  I thought to myself: pay attention.  And I kept reading.

 We stood outside for a while longer, talking about this last flare-up, how frightened she’d felt, how tired.  And I didn’t know what to say at first, watching Olivia go chasing the big kids, coughing.  Except that we, their friends, all know the rains and the wind will come and they will be cold – oh, god, will they be cold.  But then we will come too, I said; we will have been building this barn all along, and so there will always be shelter.

I read that ending two or three times, slightly puzzled.  I would love to say that I found it illuminating, or at the very least satisfying.  But I did not.   I did not at the time want to hear about shelter from the damn storm.  I just wanted the storm to end.  I wanted a sign that better weather was on its way.  But I paid attention because in some twinkle-twinkle-ding-dong kind of way I felt like the universe was trying to send me a message.  Since that day, I have pulled Traveling Mercies off the shelf numerous times and re-read that ending, and it is only now, twelve years later, that I realize it told me exactly what I needed to hear.   

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Thank you, Noan. You have been my source of bibliomancy quite often lately, offering little chunks you’ve gathered from books and life to help me divine my own way and find shelter from the storm.

Noan chose today’s poem: (click link to read entire poem)

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my

ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered…

Tags: cystic fibrosis, friendship, literature, motherhood, poetry