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 By the time Lamott was due to speak, the church was filled.  She came creeping onto the stage like a loveable little dust ball, so amorphous and dun-colored in her yoga-style clothes and trademark dreadlocks.  She could not have presented a more opposite archtype but this group was her natural audience   -  hundreds of tightly-wound, perfectly-coiffed, stick-thin women in beautiful clothes who were dying for real food.  Lamott gave it to them: 

After doing a short riff on her tooth, which had fallen out  en route in the Chicago airport, and her throat which was dry from being inside too many planes, she said “Maybe I’m not much, but I’m all I think about.”   

Her thoughts then turned to the conference’s theme:  Grace.      “If I am forgiven, everybody’s forgiven, even Dick Cheyney.”  (Somebody in the balcony told me later that several women got up and left during Lamott’s talk.  This might have been one of those moments.)

“We are forgiven for trying to be everybody’s Higher Power; we’re forgive for that level of meddling.”  

“Two things are not on the path  to grace – multi-tasking and perfectionism.  Multi-tasking is as addictive as cocaine .  If you don’t believe me, try leaving your Blackberry at home.  And  perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.”

She told a story about her best friend who was dying of cancer.  At that time, Lamott had a new boyfriend .  She asked her friend, “Do you think this dress makes me look big in the hips?”

“Annie,” her friend said, “you don’t have that kind of time.”

Perhaps the most winning thing she did was to ask if anybody had an extra cough drop rolling around the bottom of her purse.  Several women came forward.  She then stepped away from the podium, sipped water, sucked on a cough drop and waited until her voice felt better.  “I won’t apologize again.  I am in the shape I’m in.”  Once more, the highly apology-prone, multi-tasking, perfectionist women roared with relieved laughter.  

Lamott is the real, genuine article.  Whatever pangs of jealousy I was feeling, as an older, less famous writer dissolved in her presence.  Later, reading her classic Bird by Bird on writing, she has a wonderful  section on her own proclivity toward jealousy.  When her first book was about to be published, she had a friend who was also about to see his book published.  “We both had low expectations.  I had low expectations for his book.  He had low expectations for mine.” 

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It occurred to me this morning as I was getting ready for my daily journal session that the act of uncapping a pen and sitting quietly, then putting down on paper what I think, is a vanishing way of life.  Keeping a journal is like maintaining a Rolidex or picking up the telephone, something that is dying of disuse.  Soon, people will not bother communicating directly at all.  We will dispense with it and begin to act like angels who communicate telepathically.  This way I live, surrounded by books and paper is on its way to the dump, which is where books, themselves are headed.  The movie,  Fahrenheit 451 turns out to be slightly wrong.  We have burned the books ourselves.  In one short lifetime, we have gone from manuscript classes where I learned how to make calligraphy letters with a pen  to paper-free e-mails where one clicks on a font.

In a recent book, “People of the Screen,” the author claims that the brain is wired differently when we read from a screen.  We scan for information instead of immersing ourselves imaginatively into a world not of our own making.  One skims across rather than diving down.