The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  (Nov. 25)

  23. Sharing a Bag

  I adore it when I see two people—today it was, from the looks of it, a mother and child here on Canal Street in Chinatown—sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles. It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering, as the uninitiated, or the impatient, will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack, which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter—the good and sole rhythms we might swear we live by—to the one on the other side of the sack.

  I suppose part of why I so adore the sack sharing is because most often this is a burden one or the other could manage just fine solo—which makes it different from dragging Granny’s armoire up two flights of steps, say, or wrestling free a truck stuck hip-deep in a snow bank. Yes, it’s the lack of necessity of this act that’s perhaps precisely why it delights me so. Everything that needs doing—getting the groceries or laundry home—would get done just fine without this meager collaboration. But the only thing that needs doing, without it, would not.

  (Nov. 26)

  24. Umbrella in the Café

  I’m on my way to New Brunswick for a reading and decided to stop in Jersey City at a bakery on Jersey Avenue called Choc-O-Pain, with croissants and quiche that smelled so good as I walked in this morning I closed my eyes and reached out like I was falling. This place is kitty-corner to a place called Nicole’s, a West Indian joint where they have the best roti I’ve ever eaten, and when I stopped in yesterday on my way into New York to get one, the owner, Nicole, said to me, “I was just thinking about you on Sunday.” Had she not added Sunday, the cynic in me might have thought she was just being a good businessperson, but that Sunday made it precise and kind of holy, like maybe she was praying for me, and however it was I flitted through Nicole’s mind, a little butterfly, a little flutterbye, delights me, given the cancer she has been afflicted with these past several years. How beautiful and dark she looked, like maybe she’d gone home for a few weeks, I wondered.

  In the bakery—let me interrupt myself to acknowledge how often thus far in my journey of delight a food or food-type establishment and experience is the occasion of a delight, that it might form a kind of atlas or map of delights, which is a very good idea for a book, perhaps a companion book to this one; the map of delights!—I was sitting here reading C. D. Wright’s last book, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, which I love and mourn its being the last one, forever the last one. And where I am sitting, with my legs crossed (I am long-leggedly tall and sometimes it’s a puzzle where to put my legs), my right foot, in a now very-large-seeming red sneaker, is in the path of every person who walks in the door and out the door, which makes for a lanky and regular semi-distraction from the page. The proximity, the negotiation, the closeness also means mini-contacts again and again as I bob my big red foot down, but briefly, so as not to catch a cramp in my hamstring or calf, which would be dangerous.

  A guy on his way out, after buying his Americano and scooting by my big red bobbing foot, and smiling softly at me, and me at him, looked at the drizzle through the big plate-glass window, put his coffee down, opened his umbrella, put it over his head, picked up his coffee, then realized, I presume, that he was still inside this bakery. (The window was very clean.) I saw him giggle to himself, realizing, I think, what he had done—let me interrupt to mention that a man with a sack of some sort slung over his shoulder just entered Choc-O-Pain and exclaimed, “Good morning, Jersey City family!”—and so lowered his umbrella and walked quickly out, with a smirk that today I read as a smirk of gentleness, of self-forgiveness. Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private e-mail to the group or burned the soup or ordered your cortado with your fly down or snot on your face or opened your umbrella in the bakery, as the cutest little thing?

  (Nov. 28)

  25. Beast Mode

  This morning checking out of the hotel on Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth, one of the bellhops who has become my friend, who I hug never less than three times upon our reunions and is right now applying to grad school in acting, when I asked about his auditions and what kinds of monologues he was preparing, regaled me with the most stunning and delightful rendition of the Lady Macbeth monologue chiding her husband to take care of business. It was the best version I’d ever heard, truly, though he did it kind of quick because he was actually on the clock and we were standing in the lobby, one of the other attendants looking furtively at us. When I asked why he chose that monologue he gave me a mini-lecture on ambition, getting things done, having vision—and he told me that he looked for that in a partner, too—“someone who’s all in, who can go beast mode.” I said, “Yeah, I get that, but dashing the baby’s head against the wall is maybe a little much?” He said, “Yeah, that’s too much.” Then we hugged.

  (Nov. 28)

  26. Airplane Rituals

  I am returning today on an airplane from my mother’s in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Stephanie and I were visiting to care for her after she had minor surgery on her bladder. Before we took off I was running through my rituals, only today occurring to me as delightful (if a bit weird), that I am certain keep the airplane from falling out of the sky. First I picture a large glowing curtain of light the airplane rolls through (sometimes I imagine myself tossing the curtain over the plane, like a bedspread), emerging as a large glowing vessel of light. This glow means the plane’s protected from harm.

  But not totally protected, as I then imagine my hand, large as the hand of god, or the god of aviation anyway, gripping the dirigible like it’s a football, or like it’s a matchbox car, a matchbox airplane, guiding it first down the runway, then lifting off, then cruising safely, then descending to the runway, then rolling smoothly into the gate. Each of these events happen in conjunction with my breath at a 1:1 ratio. Sometimes it takes me a few times to get it right because a part of me enjoys making the plane crash, cartwheeling across the tarmac in flames, bellowing black smoke, which is very much not the intention of the exercise.

  It might seem as though I’ve covered my bases, but not quite, because I also, and finally, pay very, very close attention to the flight attendants, who, by now in the history of handheld devices, not to mention the shiny in-flight magazines, seem to feel a bit violated by my attention as they point with two fingers to the nearest exits, which might be behind you, and point with two fingers to the strips that would, according to them, in a shitstorm, be illuminated along the aisles toward those exits. They especially get creeped out as I study them demonstrating the oxygen mask thing without ever touching the elastic bands to their actual heads.

  And finally, just as I am told, I look through the card, or more accurately, more honestly, I flip directly to the pictures of the child, often a baby, with a faceless adult applying, after they’ve applied it to themselves, that very oxygen mask. Or looking almost giddy in this airline’s pamphlet, the little peanut in pj’s reaching arms up big and tall as the life jacket is being administered, which is sad, because if there is, on an airplane, occasion to put the kid in a lifejacket, we are probably going to die.

  (Dec. 11)

  27. Weirdly Untitled

  Yesterday I read poems at the Abraham Heschel School on Sixtieth Street to a group of seventy or so fairly attentive eleventh graders. Some were very attentive, budding poets that they were, hanging around to chat with me after the reading. One kid was even so bold as to stick around, after the rest of his crew had dispersed, to quietly ask, “Do you ever write stoned?” Though I don’t, I in no way discouraged the child from indulging, which I worried about for a few seconds as I was leaving the school, walking down Sixtieth toward Columbus Circle in a windstorm, hoping I didn’t condemn that child to a lif
e of sorrow.

  My favorite of the stragglers, go figure, was the light-skinned, fluffy-afro’d child with an Africa medallion, straight out of a multi-culti Tribe Called Quest video. Better yet, straight out of a Jungle Brothers or a De La Soul video. That’s it. He was so De La. He also had a Black Panthers pin above his heart on his sweatshirt. He could have been me in 1989, with my Ethiopia pin affixed to my collar, which, in Levittown, Pennsylvania, was as much a fly-in-the-buttermilk move as this child’s here at Heschel’s school, but not so much, given as Heschel marched with King, given as we were in Manhattan, given the long, if complicated, political companionship between blacks and Jews, and Levittown was built as an exclusionary community, a segregated community about twenty miles north of Philadelphia, conceived of almost in anticipation of Brown v. Board of Education (the inauguration of an era of great racist innovation, turns out).

  My brother’s first house, in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, had a clause in the title that prohibited it from being sold to a colored person, which he is (indulge the anachronism; it was in the title), and he seemed to enjoy at least a touch the soiling, the filthing, his body in that space was, the filthing the squadron of filth he calls his family is. Actually, he barely mentioned it. I enjoyed the filthing. I trust you understand with my word choice I am employing, deploying, a kind of harsh irony, which works, if it works, because you discern a proximity to a true sentiment, a familiarity with a true sentiment, the sentiment my white mother’s grandmother, my family, expressed by wiping her hand on her apron after shaking, reluctantly, my father’s hand, which is by now a cliché based on truth. A truth that occurred, among other places, in Verndale, Minnesota, in 1971. As my mother gets older, and in moments of openness, she has begun sharing more of her early life with my father—the family stuff, the this-apartment-is-no-longer-available stuff, the you-have-doomed-your-children-they-will-be fucked-in-the-head stuff. It is no special doom they have inflicted upon us, turns out. Neither is our head-fuck especially special.

  The other night I was driving my mother home from the movie Loving, about the story behind the Supreme Court case that banned the ban on interracial marriage, which my mom kind of loved and I kind of didn’t. (That came out wrong. I love the ban. Or, I love the ban of the ban. The Supreme Court ruling, I love it! I just thought the movie was a two-dimensional reinscription of hetero-boringness.) She told me my dad, to whom she was married for about thirty-five years until he died, said to her early on, “I might be making too much trouble in your life. Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” But, you know, they did.

  (Dec. 15)

  28. Pecans

  Among the delights of this delight, which when I first experienced it made me just about fall down, is that articulating precisely what delights me about it is difficult, though someone behind me on this airplane just said the word swallow, which means nothing to you yet, but hang on.

  She had a camera around her neck and smiled warmly at me, and her utterance—for this delight is an utterance, and all an utterance can sometimes do—was a commentary, a discourse, on the South, patriarchy, and pecans. Or Jim Crow. Or pornography. Or the possible weaponization of ejaculate that some pornography, some would say, endorses. Or simply on oral sex, presumably with a male member involved, fellatio is the Italian word, presumably in a relationship that is, at the very least, ambivalent. At the very least. I told you this was going to be difficult.

  We met when a few of us were standing around signing books after a reading at the Arts Club of New York, a place where you are required to wear a jacket to get a drink after 5:00 p.m. She introduced herself and let me know she was the roommate of someone with whom I was on a panel about land and race in a backyard in New Orleans where a pecan tree was dropping its nuts. Remember that phrase. Naturally, I had started cracking open the pecans by stepping on them and plucking the meat from the freckled shells, always to me like eating yummy little brains. A few people had joined the harvest, among them my whisperer’s roommate, my copanelist. My whisperer told me her roommate had, from that very tree, brought a bag of pecans back to Harlem—now, I understand that Harlem no longer necessarily conveys the racial significance it once did, by which I mean to say, if you didn’t know my whisperer was black, now you do, just as I am, though a biracial northern man, and she a Southerner—which made me, truly, throw my hands in the air and cheer, for I delight in few things more than the awakening, or flourishing, of a horticultural spirit, which this act of gleaning, to me, represented.

  I was imagining myself, with some pride, as the inspiration of said foraging, said return to the bounty, both material and spiritual, of the land, which, it turns out, that panel had been about—black people returning to the South. And that bag of pecans foraged in New Orleans and stowed in a satchel across the Mason-Dixon Line represented to me some small though significant healing, some salve on the centuries of violence and terror—still underway—inflicted upon black people through the land.

  “How beautiful,” I probably said to my whisperer. “That’s so lovely,” I probably said, to which she leaned in and said, “Pecans taste to me like the South’s coming in my mouth.” And then she told me she’s a hugger, so we hugged.

  (Dec. 16)

  29. The Do-Over

  There is an action I love—is it a rule? a law?—common to many children’s games that I shouted (it’s a speech act, too) playing around-the-world the other day at the basketball courts down the street. It’s an action that, after I shouted it, delighted me in part because among the sorrows of adulthood is this action can feel more fantasy than possibility. It is an exception, I mean. The action is called “the do-over,” and it might be occasioned by someone rolling the kickball toward the plate while the kicker is still tying her shoes. Or by serving in foursquare while your opponent is still admiring the V of geese squawking overhead. “Do-over!” we’d call, and infrequently be met with protest—“Get your fucking head out of the clouds, Goosey! No more do-overs!”

  (It is now occurring to me that the do-over, or the spirit of the do-over, is employed by some pickup basketball players who, every time they miss a shot, cry foul. Just call do-over, asshole, I never say, but want to. The misapplication of the do-over is one of the sure ways of destroying the governance, which trends toward real democracy, that the best games enact, because rather than the do-over being used to preserve the integrity of the game, it is used to preserve the status of the individual, and someone might retaliate to one’s overuse by refusing to honor the call, or breaking glass bottles on the court, which is one of pickup basketball’s nuclear options, a way of saying no more do-overs, asshole, after which almost everyone wishes for a do-over, even, often, the bottle breaker.)

  “Do-over!” you might say in the version of wallball we in Levittown, Pennsylvania, called suicide, which was elsewhere called, more literally, ass-ball, in which, if you dropped the tennis ball or racquetball that rebounded your way, taking your eyes off the orb as you were prematurely hopping into your Tug McGraw sidearm whip at the wall, you had to touch the wall before your nemeses, or teammates, or friends could recover the ball and peg you with it, trying to imprint Slazenger or Wilson forever on the bare skin of your hamstring or the pudge of your love handle, which stings, but don’t you dare cry. The more I think of it, the do-over in suicide is as prevalent as it is in any children’s game, and isn’t that about the saddest thing?

  (Dec. 19)

  30. Infinity

  Though the title of this delight is both abstract and over-the-top, it is, in my opinion, warranted, given as it is the first day of winter, which is also the shortest day of the year, and so represents to me a kind of deepening, a kind of engagement with an interior, out of which we will emerge, to return to again, to emerge again, ad infinitum. One day we won’t emerge, by which I don’t mean me, I mean we. And so in some way the equinox celebrations, often an acknowledgment of the precarity of the whole thing, are an appeal to the gods that they might grant us another spring, which is a pr
ofound generosity on their parts every time they do.

  But I am also referring to this already darkening day to chart the almost impossibly lovely infinity scarf, lavender, knitted, or crocheted (sorry to whom I’ve offended with that stitch of ignorance), by my friend Danni. It appears to be made of two shades of yarn, one darker, one lighter, though it may be that these colors are different aspects of the same color yarn. I suppose part of this delight derives from my unfamiliarity with the process by which this beautiful and beloved scarf is made, and so it is a praising of the mysterious and tender touchings we are so often in the midst of.

  I’m also delighting in this accouterment fluffing around my neck because it represents a different relationship to an idea of masculinity I have inherited, and for much of my life watered, which makes it a garden. A garden of rocks. A garden of sorrow and hypertension and prostate woe. Some of the tenor here might be influenced by the sun’s brevity today, but just a little. For I kid you not, ten years ago I no sooner would have worn this plush purple thing around my neck than jump off a bridge. I mean, not quite, but you get me. Tied into this weird and imprecise moratorium on the pretty were surely currents, strong ones, of misogyny, and probably homophobia. It’s true, I often wore my long hair in cornrows with beads, but that sartorial affect represented some other intersection that did not scare me in the way this very cuddly scarf would have. I sometimes wonder how this happened, if there were very specific moments in my life—the older boys holding my hands and painting my nails; my mother regularly praising that she had sons instead of daughters; my father accidentally making me cry by squeezing my leg too hard after a joke and asking with disgust, Are you kidding?—that constituted a minor tilting of an axis. But no tilting of an axis is minor, as you know.