Free Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

was about this theme: that you were tended to, by tending to.
    Rosie thought for a moment. “The girl was the starfish she was throwing back,” she said. Rae nodded.
    They went to welcome the kids for their first lesson. Grown-ups would be meeting with Anthony in his office, for Bible study, faith walks, sacred Taizé chanting, prayer-shawl knitting, and voter registration in town.
    Children had always flocked to Rosie; for some reason, they could sense she had a knack for silly patience with kids, and this group was no different. They clung to her like she was a rock star, wanting to be lifted, noticed, and she saw how helpless and vulnerable they were. Rae had told her that some of their parents were really sick—part of the church’s outpatient ministry to drug addicts. One six-year-old didn’t have any parents, just a guardian named Sue; her single mother had died of AIDS, and she had a little sister who was only three and in with the nursery kids. A couple of little kids were shy as turtles, and you had to coax and trick them into trying out your games or snacks. The thing they loved best was when she threw a few of them at a time into a big plastic bucket with rope handles, which must have been used as a toy box, and dragged them all over the church grounds, up and down steps, over rocks, as they screamed with laughter.
    She called the whole gang of them her bucket kids; she also did arts and crafts with them, and read them stories. She held them on her lap when they fell or got their feelings hurt, and she made sure always to pay the same amount of attention to each child, even though she liked two of them the most. And the money was so great, fifteen dollars an hour, four hours at a time.
    Sometimes she and Alice lifted a pair of jeans or a camisole from shops in Sausalito or the Haight, and now she could tell her mother she’d spent her own hard-earned money.
    Jody didn’t go to the city with them very often, because they always ended up doing stuff that she couldn’t risk getting caught doing. Like the last time Rosie and Alice had been in Golden Gate Park, freezing to death in a sea of fog, they had ended up smoking dope under a tree with some homeless guy. It turned out not to have been a good idea, there was something besides weed in the joint and Rosie was tripping mildly and having scary thoughts, especially one where she saw herself trap a couple of the bucket kids underneath the dome of plastic, to scare them, and to have power over them; she saw herself pound on the sides of the bucket and not answer when they called her name. What was so awful was that she kept having these thoughts well after that day in the park; maybe she’d had it before, too, this bad mind. It just came into her head from time to time, to trap and scare the kids so that they would know how she felt a lot of the time, since you couldn’t very well trap adults under buckets.

    H er early days of summer were more full than she had meant them to be, with VBS every morning, and tennis lessons with Mr. Tobias.
    But she loved the lessons, too, and was good at both. By the end of just one lesson, she had managed to untangle his forehand, at least when she hit him balls from her bucket at the net, but when she tried to incorporate what he had learned, by rallying, he regressed to his former duffer ways, hitting with his weight on the back foot, swinging late, slashing at the ball like a swordsman with arthritis. His serve was like nothing Rosie had ever seen, with a leap straight into the air at the point of contact, a pirouette without the courage of its convictions. But the ball usually went in. The first time Rosie tried to straighten things out for him, to get his body weight forward, he ended up smashing himself in the shin with his racket head, which was how they ended up sitting together in the grass.
    He held a cool can of Coke to the mass below his knee while they sat on the knoll beside the public court, talking about his