Toward Humility

Toward Humility Bret Lott Once it's over, you write it aU down in second person, so that it doesn't sound like you who's complaining. So it doesn't sound Uke a complaint. Because you have been blessed. You have been blessed. You have been blessed. And still you know nothing, and still it aU sounds like a complaint. You are on a Lear jet. It's very nice: plush leather seats for which leg room isn't even a matter, thejet seating only six; burled wood cabinets holding beer and sodas; burled wood drawers hiding bags of chips, boxes ofcookies, cans ofnuts; copies of three of today's newspapers; a stereo system loaded with CDs. Your younger son, age thirteen, is with you, invited along with the rest of your family by the publicist for the bookstore chain whose jet this is. When you and your wife and two sons puUed up to the private end of the airport in the town where you live, there on the tarmac had sat a Lear jet, out ofwhich came first the pubUcist, a young and pretty woman in a beige business suit, foUowed by the pilots, who introduced themselves with just their first names—Hal and John—and shook hands with each member of your famüy. "You're aU welcome to come along," the pubUcist had said, and you'd seen she meant it. But it was an invitation made on the spot, nothing you had planned for. And since your older son, fifteen, has a basketbaU tournament, and your wife has to drive, it is left to your younger son to come along. 156 Bret Lott157 Your younger son, the one who has set his heart and mind and soul upon being a pilot. The one whose room is plastered with posters ofjets. The one who has memorized his copy ofJane's Military Aircraft. "I guess we can get you a toothbrush," you'd said to him, and here had come a smile you knew was the real thing, his eyebrows up, mouth open, deep breaths in and out, in his eyes a joyful disbehef at this good fortune. AU in a smile. Now here you are, above clouds. In a Lear jet, your son in the jump seat—leather, too—behind the cockpit, talking to Hal and John, handing them cans ofDiet Coke, the publicist talking to you about who else has ridden in the corporate jet. TomWolfe, she teUs you. Patricia CornweU. Jimmy Carter. And a writer who was so arrogant she won't teU you his name. This is nowhere you'd ever thought you might be. Sure, you may have hoped a book you wrote might someday become a bestseUer, but it wasn't a serious hope. More Uke hoping to win the lottery. A pretty thought, but not a whole lot you could do about it, other than write the best you knew how. But getting on a list wasn't why you wrote, and here, at 37,000 feet and doing 627 mues an hour over a landscape so far below you, you see, reaUy, nothing, there is in you a kind of guilt, a sense somehow you are doing something you shouldn't be doing. Riding in a Lear jet to go to a bookstore—four of them in two days— to sign copies ofyour book. Your book: published eight years before, out ofprint for the last two. A book four books ago, one you'd thought dead and gone, the few copies left from the one-and-only hardcover print run avaüable in remainder bins at book warehouses here and there around the country. A book about your family, based on the Ufe of your grandmother, who raised six chüdren, aU ofwhom were born in a log cabin your grandfather buüt, the last ofthose six a Down's Syndrome baby, a daughter born in 1943 and for whom Uttle hope ofliving was held out by the doctors ofthe time. It is about your grandmother, and the love she has for that baby, her desire to see her Uve, and her own desire to fix things for...