Some Assembly Required Read Online Free

tears. My wild son, who like most boys smashed and bashed his way through childhood, with branches and bats and wooden swords, who shut down and pulled so far away as a teenager that sometimes I could not find him, now taking tender care of his own newborn, a miniature who is both unique and reflective. Sam is still every age he ever was, from the fetus to the infant to the adolescent to the father. And Einstein would probably say that Jax is already every age he will ever be, but in such super-slow motion relative to our limited perspective that we can’t see the full spiral of him yet, only this tan bundle of perfect infanthood with a blue butt.
    One night I ran away from home and told everyone I was going to Bible study at St. Andrew, but instead I went to Macy’s. I tried to shell out money on something really meaningless and bourgeois, like blusher or overpriced Peds, but I was too screwed up mentally. Or too well; I’m not sure. Couldn’t find one thing to buy, so I sat in the parking lot,enraged, bereft, empty, fit to be tied, watching the bad movie in what my spiritual mentor Bonnie calls Theater B. Theater A is where we see goodness in everything, beauty and generosity or, conversely, someone’s need for love. Theater B is where I watch a movie about how this exquisite baby could ruin Sam’s academic career, if the baby even lives, and how Sam would end up at the rescue mission and so on.
Finally
I thought to pray—it had completely escaped me that I believe in divine mind and comfort. I’d forgotten that if I said the Great Prayer—Help—I would experience that God was with me, that, as Muktananda put it, God dwells within me,
as
me. And that Mother Teresa would have seen me as Jesus, in His distressing guise as OCD Grandma, worthy of tenderness. So I broke bread with myself, with a health food oat biscuit I had in my purse, and a paper cup of water from an earlier stealth binge at Taco Bell. I called my dearest male friend, Doug, who lives in Chicago. He made cooing sounds as I described how hard it could be at home right now, and he reminded me of his new battle cry:
Lower the bar of expectations!
I’d forgotten. After we got off the phone, I flew home, in love again with my peeps.
July 29–31
    My baby brother Stevo turns fifty today. He is six-foot-three now, so I am not able to hold him and lug him around as I did until I was ten and he was five. My memories of holdinghim when my parents brought him home from the hospital are as sharp and clear as can be. I have an old photo of me holding newborn Stevo on the couch of our little coffee-colored house, sitting with our older brother, John, and I am crying. I remember that my parents were exasperated with me for crying on this happiest day, but now I think I felt heartbroken because at five years old, I understood what this baby boy was in for. Fresh, and doomed, to be born human at all, let alone into this miserable marriage. He has been my great secret advantage ever since.
    Ray arrived today at one from North Carolina for a four-day visit. I’ve met him before, for dinners and at events to celebrate Amy’s graduation from cosmetology school in San Francisco. He is in his mid-sixties, close to six feet tall; spiritual and outgoing, he works out and is a health nut, but always tan—which to me, the daughter of a man who died of melanoma, is a contradiction in terms. He’s bald on top, with the sides buzz-cut, and he seems like a farmer type from the South. Amy once described him as “ruggedy.” I think she meant “rugged,” but she perfectly captured his rugged raggedyness. His glasses were duct-taped the first time we met, and Amy tells me that duct tape and Gorilla Glue are his two favorite products. He Gorilla Glues his shoe soles when they start to go.
    He describes himself as having been a preacher, teacher, cop, and monk.
    My favorite Ray story is that when Amy went to visit himlast year, he came to the breakfast table without his bottom