Amazing
Amazing Grace / how sweet the sound / that saved a wretch like meee . . . Her great-uncle’s voice creaks as he smiles out of the corner of his mouth – the mid-song equivalent of an elbow in the ribs. Do you get it, Gracie? How ‘bout now?
The eleven-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the old brown carpet beside his recliner, shuffling a well-worn deck of blue-patterned cards. She smiles back out of habit at the ancient joke, companion to the one about how God thinks he’s Arnold Palmer, and the tired fact that her sister’s birthday was the day he was discharged from the army. He rocks the recliner back and forth as he continues to sing. When he stretches up to reach the high notes, his eyes close.
The seven-year-old gymnast doesn’t understand the pop culture reference that might as well be a thousand years old. When her mother tried to explain, the name “George Burns” means nothing. She only connects it to Coach George, the big black man who can bounce on the trampoline and touch the ceiling; when at the end of class he booms: “Say goodnight, Gracie!” The little girl is told that the correct response – and here the adults chuckle – is “Good night, Gracie.”
Years later, Wikipedia informs her that Gracie Allen really just said “Good night.”
At thirteen years old, she really wants to believe in God. She reads prayer cards and sings hymns at mass and carefully recites the Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s while Grandma says the rosary. She gets a thrill murmuring the words and making the sign of the cross – forehead heart left shoulder right shoulder – especially alone in her room, when she feels like it’s just between her and God. It’s like a sign when she’s asked to speak the words before the meal: “Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts . . .”
“Why don’t you say grace . . . Grace,” her grandfather says with a quiet grin. She smiles because somehow that makes it another thing that’s just between her and God.
For her fifteenth birthday, she has a party in her basement – in a time before there were questions about alcohol in concealed water bottles and the necessity of finding a makeshift ashtray. The pool table, dartboard, and foosball are ready. Snacks are in bags and bowls upstairs in the kitchen. Sodas are in the cooler on the patio outside. The only thing she worries about is the music. Two years in a new city have taught her that her music isn’t cool, but haven’t provided her with a suitable alternative. She doesn’t know how to talk about this with anyone except that one person who has always taken the time to help her navigate the perils of this new kind of adolescences – the kind where you have to worry about what other people think. So she’s called this one person. Said: hey, I don’t really have any music that I think everybody will like . . . do you think you could bring some over?
Her friend brings over a full CD case, and into the stereo go the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and before the other guests arrive, she gets her first present: three mix CDs: an introduction to R.E.M., Barenaked Ladies, Cake, and Dido. The last CD reads, in purple and blue and green thin-tipped Sharpie: Full of Grace. She listens to the title track, falling into Sarah McLachlan’s voice before the door opens to everyone else. It’s a beautiful expression of something that is uniquely hers.
She’s twelve when she walks into that classroom for the first time. She’s never sat in school all day before. She’s never met these twenty-eight seventh-graders before. She’s never drunk coffee, used the F word, seen an R rated movie, or watched anyone she knows inhale any kind of smoke. She doesn’t know that these people around her, adolescents gawking at the new kid, are going to change all of that.
Their voices are a blur – a female blur, because the boys are outside playing basketball, even though it’s December – and they are busily discussing where she’s from, who she is, and who for goodness’ sake is she going to sit next to, and it doesn’t feel like she’s there at all, or maybe she’s just invisible. The invisible center of attention.
And then, just like that, she’s standing there, still invisible, listening to a daily recap of obsession-worthy celebrity hotties, not that she has yet developed the vocabulary to discuss talk about such things herself. She is in an unfamiliar world.
Within a few weeks, she will be connected through her name, to two pieces of entertainment culture she has never encountered. She stands in line for choir next to a boy named Will, and while the others hoot and holler, only years later will she understand the reference to Debra Messing and gay men, and laugh incredulously at the thought of that Will and Grace juxtaposed with the two awkward seventh-graders. Then there are those three girls – not the scary, skinny ones, but smart, pretty, and sporty respectively – who call her Gracie Lou Freebush. She hasn’t seen that movie either. When she does watch it, she doesn’t mind the comparison. The nickname resurfaces seven years later, and when he greets her “Gracie Lou” it makes her smile inside and out.
She thought she remembered her parents telling her she would have been a Noah. It might have been in the whirl of names that were almost her baby sister. That’s when it would have come up around the kitchen table, Mom penning lists in the back of a college-rule notebook: names for boys, names for girls. “Lily,” she said. “Lucy,” Dad said. It would have been the ideal time to broach the subject.
The only thing is that her parents don’t remember. “You were always Grace,” her mother says, and she wonders if she just made Noah up. She doesn’t think she did, because she remembers musing about how they’re both sort of religious names. She doesn’t want to think she did, because she likes the idea that she might have been Noah, because he is full of the potentiality of somebody totally different.
She’s just turned fourteen, and at the end of eighth grade, they go on a class trip. They fly to Salt Lake City, and eat Mexican food before riding the rest of the way to Moab, Utah in a retired school bus that at some point may or may not have been employed by a detention center. They talk too loudly in the hot enclosed space, and she takes pictures out the window until it gets too dark to see.
These days, there are two boys who call her Swiss G, which is short for Swiss Army Grace, which they think is clever because they say she has a tool to solve any problem. She feels flattered and continues to help them with their homework.
They get to Moab late at night and are up early the next morning, headed upriver. A quick orientation, lunch, load and launch are the order of the day. Out on the river in a fleet of rafts: that’s when they have the time to start getting to know Billy.
When they race, Billy paddles the hardest. When they sing Paul Simon songs joyfully out over the water, Billy is the loudest, if somewhat apologetically off-key. When water wars ensue, Billy quickly hones the art of paddle-splashing, and immediately volunteers to be stationed in the bow of the raft, armed with the bailing bucket. When the water gets deep enough, Billy is the first to attempt a backwards flip off the back of the raft. After he clambers back in, cold and dripping, he tries a frontwards one.
He’s the guide with them, working for the company that coordinated the trip. He’s that ideal age where he’s too old to be a brother, and too young to be a parent, deftly avoiding both the competitive air of sibling rivalry and the conflict that can arise from an overly authoritative dynamic. He has shoulder-length sun-bleached hair, a pretty serious tan, and he makes up nicknames for everyone, baptizing them with Colorado River water.
John Stabenow, plagued by an infected toenail, is christened Stub-a-toe. Another boy becomes Toby-wan Kenobi. Billy is informed of the existence of “Swiss Army Grace,” and the boys eagerly explain their wit. Billy looks at her for a while without saying anything. Then he says, “You know what I like better?”
For the rest of the trip, he calls her “Amazing”.
So, courtesy of the blog Stuff White People Like, comes the anti-Starbucks man, who is, ironically, he from whom the concept of Starbucks initially sprang (sprung?). College students sit and study with laptops bearing cynical, sarcastically political stickers. A twenty-something yuppie couple sit and compare notes on their busily professional lives. He narrowly avoids suspicion by finally allowing her to check his datebook. Men and women, running the gamut from suits to sweatpants enter, order, and exit with an air of routine.
