Free Plan B by Anne Lamott Page A

listen, to be clear and fair and parental. But most of all he needs me to be alive in a way that makes him feel he will be able to bear adulthood, because he is terrified of death, and that includes growing up to be one of the stressed-out, gray-faced adults he sees rushing around him.
    â€œNow can we go back to Anthony’s?” he asked, petulantly. We got up and walked to the car. I draped my arm around his shoulders like a sweater.

eight

sincere meditations

 
    S ometimes, if you are lucky and brave, you can watch someone who’s met with serious illness or loss do the kind of restoration that I suspect we are here on earth to do. If you’ve ever seen David Roche, the monologist and pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity, you may have already witnessed this process.
    David and I met years ago through a friend we had in common. The first time we spoke was on the phone, and we talked about God for half an hour. David mentioned that he had a facial deformity, and I thought, Well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to mychurch, and it turned out he had one of the most severe facial deformities I’d ever seen.
    He was born with a huge benign tumor on the bottom left side of his face; surgeons tried to remove it when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.
    David is fifty-five now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes.
    I first saw him perform at a local community center, at a benefit for refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a plum-purple dress shirt, which exemplifies the tender and jaunty bravery I have come to associate with him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, “David, what happened to your face?” When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery, and all those radiation burns.
    He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom of the Opera, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, FreddyKrueger, and Michael Jackson. They’d go places as a group—bowling, or to a makeover counter at Macy’s.
    â€œPeople assume I had an awful childhood,” he continued. “But I didn’t. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren’t. I believe they are universal.”
    Wouldn’t you think that having a face like his totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was stocky, too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic, having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.
    As he told his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip, and a too-large tongue, David’s voice sounded not garbled but strangely like a burr, that of a Scottish person who’d just had a shot of novocaine.
    â€œWe with facial deformities are children of the dark,” he said. “Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.
    â€œAll those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God.”
    David spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep within us that we’re unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can’t make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet