A Change of Heart: A Valentine's Story

Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, writes about a friend of hers who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart. Her friend tells her that our hearts are like diamonds “because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we are not only portals for this love, but are actually made of it.”

Lamott says, “I absolutely believe this, to a point: Where I disagree is when she says we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that only seem dense and ponderous, but are actually made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light in between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children." And then Anne says, "I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs. I would call my path Diamond Meatball: We would comfort and uplift one another by saying, “‘There’s a diamond in there some where.’”

This is a story about my mom and her life-long friend who know a lot about comforting and uplifting. They are women who know intuitively that (to paraphrase a John Denver song) some days are diamonds and some days are meatballs. Their friendship has seen a lot of both.

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“I can take you back to the beginning,” she said. “It was thirty years ago, and my father had bought my mother a diamond brooch in the shape of a heart. Then they went on a vacation to Connecticut, and soon after they came home, she realized she’d lost the brooch.”

My mother’s best fiend (I’ll call her Ethel) is telling me this story over the phone, she in New York and me in Illinois. She’s from Rockland County, close to where I grew up in New Jersey, and her voice has the sound of home in it.

“They looked everywhere for the brooch but they couldn’t find it. So they filed a claim with the insurance company. And for some reason, I don’t know how they did this, the insurance company replicated the pin for her.”

When her parents became ill many years later, Ethel cared for them. Her sister (I’ll call her Selma) didn’t help out very much, but I only heard this from my mother, not from Ethel. Ethel and Selma had a difficult relationship, but Ethel was loyal and didn’t speak about the particulars of it. When their mother died, Ethel and Selma found a letter in their mother's desk drawer, written before she became ill and was still of sound mind. The letter divided up her jewelry between the two of them.

“She left Selma the heart brooch, but I got another diamond brooch,” Ethel said. “I thought she was very fair.”

A few years later, their father died. Despite bouts of anxiety that made it almost impossible for her to drive long distances, Ethel made it across the bridge to her father once a week. Again, they didn’t see too much of Selma. And then, in the upheaval of dealing with their parents’ house, the relationship fractured to the point that Ethel and Selma stopped speaking to each other.

“Ethel wanted to sell the house and Selma didn’t,” my mother told me. “And, she wanted all the best furniture for herself. Ethel had the house appraised by three realtors, and then told Selma how much it would cost for her to buy Ethel’s half of the house. Selma agreed, but then at the closing, she tried to get Ethel to take less.”

“And then when they were cleaning out the house,” she said, “Selma sent Ethel down in the basement to clear things out while she stayed upstairs carting away the furniture she wanted.”

“We didn’t speak to each other for five years,” Ethel tells me.

While cleaning out their parents’ house, Ethel chose to take her mother’s dresser. “I had it delivered to our house,” she said. “And I was cleaning it out because I had seen that there was a lot of crumpled up tissue paper wedged in the back of one of the drawers. It was her sweater drawer. Anyway, I put all the tissue paper in a bag and carried it out to the garage, and as I was putting it in the garbage, I heard something fall onto the floor. I looked and it was the diamond heart brooch. The original one. It had been there all those years. If it hadn’t fallen onto the floor I would have thrown it right into the trash.”

“Did you tell your sister?” I asked.

“No, because we weren’t speaking to each other. And I was afraid that she would be jealous that I had two diamond pins and she only had one. Even now that we are talking to each other again, I’ve seen her wearing hers but I’ve never said anything. But I told your mother because she’s like a sister to me.”

Ethel wondered if she should call the insurance company who had replaced the pin and my father said they probably weren’t even in business anymore. My mother said she should take it as a sign.

“Of what?” I asked.

“That her mother is looking down on her. That she did the right thing in selling the house.”

I think it's a sign of her Diamond Heart. My mother and her friend call themselves Lucy and Ethel. Every time I see two old ladies shopping in Lord and Taylor, I think, “That’s going to be them someday.” A few years ago, during a time when I was dealing with some anxiety of my own, they helped me through. Sometime around then, Ethel started calling me Lucy Jr. I take it as an honor.