by Ross Gay
(Mar. 1)
47. The Sanctity of Trains
Something I’ve noticed riding on Amtrak trains, like the one I’m on right now between Syracuse and Manhattan, is that people leave their bags unattended for extended periods of time. Maybe they go to the end of the car to use the bathroom, or sometimes they go to the far end of the train to the café, which smells vomity like microwave cheese. My neighbor on this train—across the aisle and one row up—disappeared for a good twenty minutes, her bag wide open, a computer peeking out, not that I was checking. She is not unusual in this flaunting of security, otherwise known as trust, on the train. Nearly everyone participates in this practice of trust, and without recruiting a neighbor across the aisle to “keep an eye on my stuff while I use the restroom,” which seems to be a coffee shop phenomenon. Trusting one’s coffee shop neighbor, but not the people in line, et cetera.
I suppose, given the snugness of a train, especially if it’s full, one might speculate there’s a kind of eyes-on-the-street-ness at play, although it seemed to me, this morning, when I was first leaving my valuables on my seat for pilfering, my laptop and cellphone glittering atop my sweatshirt and scarf, most everyone was sleeping and so provided little if any eyewitness deterrent.
I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.
(Mar. 2)
48. Bird Feeding
Today I was walking through Washington Square Park, bundled up against, thank god, a seasonably cold day for once, and after a brief conversation with the dosa man, who told me to come back in an hour, I noticed a guy whose back faced me with a pigeon for a head. When I looked closer, a touch alarmed, I realized he actually just had a pigeon on his shoulder. Closer still and I saw that the pigeon was whispering into his ear, not wobbling at all on the slick North Face perch. And closer still—it’s called gawking, yes—revealed, simply, this guy feeding the pigeon, the bird dipping its head into the hand the man must’ve been holding very near his own face, so that the feeding was not only kind of romantic but alluded to that original feeding the bird experienced, a mother dropping masticated vittles into the tiny chirper’s gaped mouth, which is, after all, the first romance. It looked like so many things, I am realizing, writing this—in some way the two looked to be dancing, slow dancing, swaying, turning almost imperceptible circles oblivious to the handful of park dwellers in a semicircle of benches around them, enjoying the sun.
Goddamn, I thought, walking through the giant arch onto Fifth Avenue. Goddamn. How often to you get to see someone slow dancing with a pigeon! And not thirty seconds later, walking toward Eighth, giggling at my good fortune, a tufted titmouse swooped by my head, landing on a wrought-iron gate, upon which a pedestrian walking past me immediately pulled from her snazzy jacket pocket a baggie of crumbs, and the bird hopped directly into her hand, nuzzling the goodies intermittent with tweeting toward its new pal, the bird and woman both nodding at me gawking at them, smiling at my bafflement, as though to say, We’re everywhere.
(Mar. 3)
49. Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass
It is no small delight that this delight is one that previously might have incited in me a kind of misguided disgust, one I will blame on my mother and father’s precarious economic standing during my childhood, which is not blaming my parents but a system that delights in such precarity, and requires it, so that people like the president of the United States and all the billionaires fluffing him can buy islands and very good health care, a system that has helped me to be quite confused and angry and guilty about things like comfort, my own included, though I am being helped in disentangling all this by a very good therapist whom I trust in part because he says things like “Our life on this plane is about getting to pure love.” And that’s a no-brainer.
All that to say what incites in me pleasure, or delight (T-shirt idea: INCITE DELIGHT! Or, INSIGHT DELIGHT!), can also incite in me self-loathing, disgust, and guilt, which is such grade-school, textbook psycho-doofusness as to be laughable, though the bad feeling tends only to be laughable in retrospect. Like, “You’re killing yourself over that? C’mon baby. You’re just fine.”
For god’s sake though, all I want to tell you, share with you, minus the whole psychological encumbrance, is that last night I was sitting on the couch drinking homemade kombucha from a mid-century, probably a fifties-style, water glass, maybe a six ouncer, with a light blue floral pattern. I have questioned my growing affinity for some of the aesthetics of that era, the fifties, the not-so-good old days, as a kind of aesthetic assimilation, questioning I realized was actually a centering of whiteness when I remembered my Papa’s house in Youngstown with the rhubarb plants out back, mid-century par excellence. Aunt Butter’s more or less the same. I did not expect this delight to illuminate my afflictions like this.
Anyhow, the booch had just the right sweetness and fizz—I could feel my tummy’s trillion flora fornicating as it went down. And the glass was small enough to both encourage moderation and highlight the pleasure of the refill, a pleasure, it is important to note, that has an inverse relationship to the size of the vessel. This probably explains why when drinking muscadine wine, the only wine I actually really like, and, a “country wine,” conveniently fitting into my whole class drama, I more or less require a small glass, six ounces or less, ideally with a floral pattern painted on that you can feel when you run your fingers over it, the fermented elixir inside somehow doubly dignified by the humane, by which I mean handmade, aspect of its holding.
(Mar. 6)
50. Hickories
My friend Michael and I met today to put together the order for the nut grove the city has asked the Community Orchard to plant and oversee. Hazelnuts, pecans, buartnuts (a mix of heartnut and butternut), hickories. “How long until the hickories start making their fruit?” I asked Michael. He said, “Oh, they’ll be in full production in about 200 to 250 years.”
(Mar. 7)
51. Annoyed No More
At the Afghan restaurant today I identified in myself a burbling in my reservoir of annoyance when I realized that people were going around the buffet in the wrong direction, which was, the annoyance felt, a kind of wretched incivility, a sign of our imminent plummet into lawlessness and misery. The delight is that I can identify that annoyance quickly now, and poke a finger in its ribs (I have shaken up the metaphor, you are right, how annoying), and so hopped into line with all the other deviants, and somehow we all got our food just fine. Same when Stephanie doesn’t turn on the light over the stove to cook, or leaves the light in her bathroom on, or leaves cabinet or closet doors wide open, or doesn’t tighten the lids all the way, all of which the annoyance regards as, if not an obvious sign of sociopathy, indication of some genuine sketchiness. A problem. But somehow no one ever dies of these things, or is even hurt, aside from my sad little annoyance monster, who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie.
It is beneath your dignity to mention that the annoyance always originates in the annoyed, which is why I have personified it and housed that personification in the body. Maybe it’s an unacknowledged lack-of-control feeling that stokes it. Maybe it’s dehydration or hunger or sleepiness, poor baby.
The second delight is the teaching I received from Stephanie’s then fifteen-year-old daughter, Georgia, and her pal who were complaining about something, probably someone, being annoying, and when I asked what was annoying about the perso
n, they said, “It’s just annoying.” And when I said, “Well, do you know why it was annoying,” they said, “Because it was annoying.” And when I said, annoyingly, “I get that, but what about their behavior made it annoy you,” they yelled, throwing their gummy bears at me, “The annoyingness!”
(Mar. 9)
52. Toto
If ever there was unequivocal, almost blinding evidence—a kind of opposite evidence—of the nearly requisite attractiveness of contemporary popular musicians, by which I’m saying if you’re not considered hot, get outta the game, it is the band, the very good band I will add, Toto, whose videos we went on a little jag of, starting, of course, with “Rosanna.” (We got around to that pre-postcolonial hit “Africa,” a landmark in the genre of kinda racist but.)
Watching the video it takes you all of ten seconds to realize you are in the presence of some very average- looking gentlemen, and if you’re like me and corrupted just enough by our era to think good music mostly emits from conventionally, or boringly, attractive people, you will be waiting for the hunky other lead singer, or the hottie other bassist, neither of whom you will find, for they are not there, and needn’t be in that era before the visual market was what it is, before your looks mattered more than your musicianship. (The youngest of you scarcely believe there was such a time. Much the way Jesus made a paste of spit and mud with which to remove the scales from the blind man’s eyes, I offer you the “We Are the World” video.)
The Toto boys’ fashion sense reminds me of the guys I grew up around, a touch nervously, from Penndel and Parkland, who were called heads, short for motorheads, shorthand for burnouts. In fact, I swear the guy with the great voice and rambunctious mustache, who in this video belts his pretty tenor at Rosanna strutting on the other side of the fence—I am happy to report that they were mostly in the cage, not she, which did not preclude them from exiting the cage to singingly stalk her (kinda sexist but)—used to sit in the back of our bus writing AC/DC and Mötley Crüe on the green vinyl seats with his pencil eraser in between bouts of hair care, administered with a comb slid from his back pocket.
All of this might sound like a lament, but it’s just an observation. No it’s not. It’s a lament. I was recently flipping through the New York Times Style Magazine, looking at the ads for what I assume are highly coveted brand-name goods. Studying the waifish, despondent-looking children being used to hock those goods (why are they called goods?), I thought, we’re so fucked.
(Mar. 10)
53. Church Poets
It might betray something about my religiosity that when I saw the announcement on the church’s marquee (somehow I think marquee is the wrong word) FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES MANY JAMS, I did not for even half a second consider jam meaning problem, jam meaning blockage, jam meaning trouble (nor did I immediately consider jam meaning party or celebration). I thought they were having a jam sale fundraiser. Which, in retrospect, I’ve never seen, though it’s a good idea.
(Mar. 11)
54. Public Lying Down
I was just now looking out the window of the café, and on the sidewalk on the west side of Maple I saw a man lying down. His feet were pulled up, his heels near his butt, his knees swaying back and forth. There is a desk on that sidewalk, probably with a FREE sign stuck to it. (I adore this genre of donation, people leaving things on the sidewalk for whomever.) From here it looked like, because his hands were extended behind his head, he might be fiddling with one of the desk legs—hard to quite discern because we’re far enough away that depth is tricky—which struck me as extra-generous given the desk was being given away.
This made sense to me. Lying down on the sidewalk to fiddle with a desk leg. Otherwise, this was the thinking, lying down on the sidewalk is evidence of some version of deviance. An inappropriate relationship to the social codes that, depending on how one relates to that relationship, might be called craziness.
There are places where public lying down is not considered crazy, and the sweet river town of Frenchtown, New Jersey, where I’ve spent a lot of time, is not one of them, as my friend one time made abundantly and playfully clear when I was three-quarters lying down on a sidewalk, my head and shoulders propped against a wall, reading my book and blocking the sun from my eyes at the same time. She snuck up on me and tossed two quarters on my belly.
Lying down in public parks, though, in good weather especially, is okay. On the grass. Sometimes on a proper blanket or towel. Or, possibly, on a bench. Especially if it looks like you have somewhere else you could be. A cellular phone that does not flip open helps with this. Yoga or business attire also. But reclining on the sidewalk, regardless of your attire, even if you’re not interfering with foot traffic in the least, is deviant.
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel, in their book A Pattern Language, offer a place for public sleeping as one of the patterns by which thriving towns are made. I adore this book not least for the beautiful sketches and photographs that accompany the entries. As I recall, the public sleeping entry shows a man in boots reclined with his hands folded across his chest. I think a hat is slid down over his eyes. This might be, I am afraid, a somewhat gendered delight, as feeling safe sleeping in public might mostly be a pleasure afforded to cisgender men. When I wondered this to Stephanie, she said she has taken plenty of public naps (not on sidewalks), mostly in public parks, with a bit of a fuck that look that delighted me. All the same, none of this negates the fact that public sidewalk napping is mostly perceived to be indication of something other than sleepiness or comfort or feeling unthreatened, regardless of the body doing it.
Among the most fulfilling naps of my life have been sidewalk naps. (My deepest naps, though, have always been, when I used to watch it, during that nationalistic celebration of brain damage, the Super Bowl, which I would usually drift into by the middle of the first quarter and emerge from about the beginning of the fourth, refreshed and ready for the New Year.) One of those sidewalk naps happened while my friends Lisette and Katie were visiting the shops around Piazza Navona or the Spanish Steps and I reclined next to some fountain or other, the water trickling me into a heavenly sleep. The other was on Pine Street in Philadelphia, between about Nineteenth and Twentieth, my backpack under my head, drifting off as I was waiting to get the key to a summer sublet while a marathon reading of Ulysses was underway, Bloomsday it’s called, probably the perfect way for me to read that book. I was moving in and out of sleep, dappled by the May light limning the leaves of the big street trees above me, held by the warm limestone I was half-propped against while this reader or that read what struck me, half-dozing, as a beautiful poem, my legs drifting like sails on a boat, like the man lying down on Maple, who just now hopped up, a springy middle-aged guy, looks like, who, it looks like, had lain down on the sidewalk to cuddle with the tiny Pomeranian I couldn’t see from here.
(Mar. 14)
55. Babies. Seriously.
Today, while I was reading on the airplane with my knees smashed into the seat in front of me, a toddler toddled down the aisle in her pink onesie with the panda-head hood. She was a remarkably postured little creature, like so many of her ilk, and bold, toddling toward the back of the plane in front of her mother, who was doing a good job of letting the tot explore. But as the baby got near my row, the man in front of me with his sleeping mask slid up on his forehead widened his eyes and smiled manically, making kissy noises at the baby. He spoke a language I didn’t understand, but the sounds he was making to this baby, which, with his traveling companions, became a chorus of sounds, made me wonder if baby talk is a universal or universalish language, for I understood exactly what they were saying, and how nice of god to make this exception around the language adults speak to babies. Anyhow, the man was so enchanted with this petite creature with wisps of hair feathering north and big eyes that he couldn’t resist first poking the child’s tummy before scooping the squirt onto his knee, where she stood, bouncing an
d grinning, looking back to her mom, who looked a touch nervous, before being set free and retreating back down the aisle, and returning again, upon which the choir of babbling would commence, everyone reaching toward the munchkin (picture the halftime show at a basketball game when the mascot bazookas T-shirts into the crowd), scooping her up, and again, and again, until I was so flabbergasted by the endurance of love and delight incited by this child to whom I presume none of these people was related, a love and delight that seemed analogous to the one that makes some people struggle not to eat the faces of babies, that I found myself, despite the very engrossing book I was reading about something horrible, laughing out loud and babbling with them and convinced again of something deeply good in us.
(Mar. 16)
56. “My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine”
Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it, and everybody loves it, and folks get brown in it, and folks get down in it, and most convincingly to me, and that which elevates it to the metaphysical, even the holy: just bees and things and flowers.
(Mar. 20)
57. Incorporation
I am what one might call an enthusiastic gesticulator, verging on the bombastic, lots of pointing and conjuring and whacking, sometimes maybe even too much, as the kid at the salad joint probably thought when I asked if I could sub out the roasted chicken for sesame tofu and he teased me by saying, with a very straight face, no you may not, before grinning, which made me smack the sneeze glass a little too hard with laughter. Or, also usually with laughter, striking my own body, most often the region near my heart, which I’ve only just identified as a significant place to smack with glee. I only mention this to confirm that I present no particular gestural void or vacuum. I am not, in this way, in other words, in need. And so imagine my delight when, today, after chatting with my friend Walton for about an hour, I found myself, a few hours later in another conversation, employing—embodying—some of his elegant hand gestures: the emphatic hand swimming through the air, or pointing and plucking at something simultaneously, or, always, some kind of beckoning. I’ve been told there is a term for this among behavioral psychologists, which foregrounds the behavior as opposed to what intrigues me, which is the fact of our bodies’ ubiquitous porosities, how so often, and mostly unbeknownst, our bodies are the bodies of others.