The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  (Jan. 11)

  37. “To Spread the Sweetness of Love”

  It’s not a bad earworm to have, Stevie Wonder’s “Come Back as a Flower,” from his somewhat overlooked album The Secret Life of Plants (1979), an experimental eco-treatise, tinkling Casio sound effects, birdsong, brooks babbling, all manner of delightful sonic theatrics. This album comes after the string of records in the early seventies that I will go on record as saying is among the finest stretches of artistic production in history, even though anytime someone says something stupidly categorical like that I always think what an asshole and stop listening. Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Fulfillingness First Finale (1973), Inner Visions (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976). You know songs from these records even if you don’t know you know songs from these records.

  And especially not a bad earworm to have these days, today, walking through the Denver airport on a layover to Santa Fe, feeling a bit anxious at all the camo and hunting gear, which I know, I know, might have a different valence here than where I’m from in southern Indiana, hunters being sometimes among the truest stewards of the land, I know. My anxiety likely has something to do with the impending inauguration. Most likely. Exxon’s Rex Tillerson’s hearing was today. Scott Pruitt’s in the mix. Secret life of plants. Flower power.

  As antidote to my anxiety I was doing laps through the airport, going up and down the stairs, circling the terminal, making friendly eye contact, observing my mind as my legs burned some steam, watching it fixate and defixate, all the while listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Come Back as a Flower” on repeat. As I was climbing some steps I noticed four women, uniformed, maybe kiosk workers, on their break, chatting and relaxing. They looked to me like they were probably East African, and one of them, maybe in her thirties, was gently arranging an older (maybe fifties or sixties—hard to say, you know what we say) woman’s collar beneath her sweater, freeing it from the cardigan’s neck, using both of her hands to jostle it free but also seeming to spend a little more time than necessary, creasing the fold of the collar, the other hand kind of resting on her shoulder, the two of them chatting the whole time, sitting there holding each other, nodding, my head twisting toward them like a sunflower as I finished the stairs and walked by, so in love was I with this common flourish of love, this everyday human light.

  (Jan. 13)

  38. Baby, Baby, Baby

  You’re right to think this delight might be about the Godfather of Soul, but it’s not. It’s a delight about the flight attendant, phenotypically “like” me, who called me baby three times in one interaction during which she gave me a cup of seltzer and two bags of pretzels, which may or may not have been protocol, though I was enjoying, at least briefly, what felt like special treatment. Baby, baby, baby.

  (Almost all special treatment, real or hoped for, especially if it has a racial flavor, makes me think of Eddie Murphy’s SNL skit from the eighties where he puts on whiteface and does some of the best analysis of racial privilege I know.)

  I peeled my ears to hear if she was calling other people baby, and when she didn’t and I started to feel like I was maybe her special baby, I thought maybe we all could be her special babies. But not really.

  And so this delight has many prongs, but I do want to hunker into extolling the loving, familiar despite unfamiliarity (which is itself a theory of the familiar and the proximal), epithet despite inside/outside or otherwise designations or indications. I mean the waitress with her smoky voice calling me hon. My teammate in the pickup five-on-five calling me baby. Love. Sweetie. Kissing cousin, the AAA receptionist who said, when we stalled on the Wertzille Road exit off of 81, for no good reason, which is the best reason, bless your soul.

  And as I was writing the above, and we were taxiing to our gate, the stewardess whose child at least for a brief moment I was, whose baby, baby, baby alone at least for a brief and heavenly moment I was, at the end of her address about cell phones and not smoking real or electronic cigarettes, said: “And let me be the first to tell you that I love you. And have a beautiful day.”

  Which is to say, sadly, delightfully: we were all her babies.

  (Jan. 15)

  39. “REPENT OR BURN”

  Among the rigidities of my long youth, as I’ve mentioned before, was an overt and committed disavowal of the pretty in myself for obvious and less obvious reasons, probably. But now, adornment in its many guises has become interesting (delightful!) to me not only as a human animal characteristic but as a non-human-animal one (bowerbirds anyone?), not to mention the ballerina dresses of the peach blossoms and the gobsmack of the neighbor’s lilies in the alley. I suspect if we took a little time and had a little imagination we might recognize in all manner of exchange—which is to say collaboration—some kind of adornment or prettiness or sweetness to make the collaboration take.

  And so imagine my delight when walking down Speedway Boulevard in Tucson I saw in the distance a person propelling himself in that gentle sway which is the unmistakable dance of roller-skating. Could’ve been rollerblades, I suppose, but that excited me not one whit, for we need more roller-skating bad. (For the record, I am also a devoted fan of the sneakers that have pressure-activated lights and the sneakers with the wheels on them that make children look like they are floating.) Sure enough, as I got closer I saw the telltale two wheels in front, at which my heart skipped a beat, and skipped several more when I noticed our skater’s skates were a fiery pink merging into purple. (It’s a color I want to call fuchsia but I think that’s wrong. Magenta?) Our skater was casting beautifully back and forth, the dazzling skates carving wakes of joy into the sidewalk, making a left to head down the block before I could offer my out-loud gratitude, watching our skater glide like a skiff toward the horizon. And I noticed the block of sidewalk I stood on had carved into it “REPENT OR BURN” in the zaggy script of a zealot. (I should know.) And I delighted imagining the slight erosion our skater, with his pink and purple glee, made of the zealot’s curse. And, too, the slight erosion was I, admiring him steadfast like this, all the herons in my chest whacking unrepentantly into the sky.

  (Jan. 19)

  40. Giving My Body to the Cause

  Walking with the river during the March, shortly after passing Trump Towers, where not a few it seemed from the booing and hissing we made wanted to cascade projectiles through the windows there and demonstrated a good deal of restraint in refraining, one of our crew came back from upstream with a little boy in tow. He was maybe eight or nine and he had lost his mother and sister. In my head I thought, sitting in this logjam from which I could see people in every direction for blocks and blocks and blocks, Oh kid, you’re fucked, which is probably precisely what he thought, though in the first-person most likely: I’m fucked.

  We determined, after asking what his family was wearing (“My sister’s carrying a pride flag and my mommy’s wearing a shirt that says I’m a Nasty Woman”), to toss him up onto my shoulders where he might be more visible to his family and they to him. His hands rested lightly on my head and I held his shins and patted them yelling up to the kid I couldn’t see, “Don’t worry!” I could feel him shaking at the enormity of the gathering, at which a bunch of mommies gathered around the child on my shoulders to care for him, looking up: “You’ll be okay” and “We’ll find your mommy, don’t worry” and “Do you need a hug?” None of which prevented this kid from sobbing at how many mommies we were, how tiny he was in the midst of this mass of mommies, who quite spontaneously erupted into the chant FIND HIS MOM! FIND HIS MOM! which brought his mother forth—There you are!—everyone weeping at their reunion, the boy hopping from my shoulders and into his mother’s arms, where they held each other for several seconds, the boy wrapping his legs and arms around his mom, his mom putting her hand on the back of his head, their faces pushed into each other’s necks, holding each other, the way we do.

  (Jan. 21)

  41. Among the Rewards of My Sloth . . .

  . . . is tha
t the tree in our backyard that we had cut down because it was mostly dead and waiting to pierce the asphalt-shingled roof and, more urgently maybe, the neighbor’s (and always, yes, mourn a tree by my hand felled, for it is a home, dead or not) is still, about three and a half months later, sprawled in many parts of the backyard. Probably about one hundred little and not so little logs chucked in a pile out near the black walnut tree, very much alive. And a brush pile about the size of a Cadillac Escalade leaning up against the building you’d be very generous to call a garage, twisting slowly apart on its cracked foundation.

  Sometimes the brush pile and logs would make me feel like a piece of shit, perhaps especially when Stephanie looked wistfully out into that yard, remembering, I imagine, when she could visualize a garden there. Not to mention my mother, who, when I first got this house in Bloomington, Indiana, in a kind of terror I have to think is informed by some unspoken knowledge (black husband, brown kids in the early seventies kind of knowledge), pleaded with my brother and uncle to convince me to mow my grass lest the neighbors burn my house down. (Of which, let it be known, there was no danger in my case. Despite the Confederate flags in the windows three doors down. You should see his yard. By the way, if you haven’t seen the movie A Man Named Pearl, you should.)

  Anyway, I’d think, very much pervious to all of the above despite my affect to the contrary, we’ll get a splitting maul and wood chipper and turn a lot of that wood into good mulch, which turns into good soil, trying to make myself feel better about myself.

  But today, going out back to grab some wood for the stove, past my mess, there was a racket blasting from that thicket like the most rambunctious playground you’ve ever heard, and getting closer, looking inside, I saw maybe one hundred birds hopping around in this enormous temporary nest, sharing a song I never would’ve heard and been struck dumb with glee by had I had my shit more together.

  (Feb. 1)

  42. Not Grumpy Cat

  Though simple observation may not seem like it qualifies as a delight, it is sometimes delightful just to observe, though the observation I’m making here is not, especially. I have been carrying around in my front left pocket for the last week or so, and consequently have probably developed some kind of wasting disease in the hip flexor or femur or other equally urgent and tender organs around there, a small photo from the New York Times of Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Neil Gorsuch. I immediately observed that these three silver-haired white men—how good ol’ days it must feel to them—who were all posing for a photo, and were presumably smiling, were actually frowning. I mean their smiles are frowns.

  There is an Internet phenom named Grumpy Cat (adorable, though less adorable than Lil’ Bub, Bloomington’s most famous resident, just edging out John Mellencamp) who has a perpetual and exaggerated frown, which these men do not, though McConnell’s visage is of someone whose penis is in a vise, or of a cat who’s just eaten the parakeet, which is, I guess, a kind of Grumpy Cat in extremis. McConnell’s is what I would call an alarmed smile/frown, while the other Aryans are just smile/frowning. My impulse, as you can tell, is to interpret the smile/frowns. I’m itching to assign some kind of meaning to the smile/frown, which is an easy enough speculative exercise, and one I’m actually quite good at, hovering in the liminal space between sensitivity and paranoia as I do. But I want to resist that (I couldn’t resist McConnell’s) and instead return to the delight of observation, of simply observing, in the quiet way. And in this case, undelightfully, observing that these men, when they smile, they frown.

  (Feb. 6)

  43. Some Stupid Shit

  Friends, we all occasionally say some stupid shit. Some unfortunate shit. But I almost guarantee you will never top the quote I read, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, inside the elevator doors in the Embassy Suites: “The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years,” which immediately struck me, and delighted me as it did so, as a questionable advertising campaign for a hotel.

  Not to mention, which is to say, I delight in mentioning, the fact that this elevator extolling Thomas Jefferson’s extolling of Thomas Jefferson was bringing together two African American poets (I was visiting my friend Crystal Williams), which, according to this Great American (Jefferson, not me), would have been unthinkable. The African American poets part.

  Oh, I haven’t even gone in on the plain doofishness of Jefferson’s sentence, which, among other things, neglects the fact that one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body. Or, as someone else’s hand (or your own) moves ever so slowly (or quickly) across (or into) your body, the clouds drifting by in the puddles you have made of yourself, or your friend(s). Not to mention the holy nap!

  But this Jeffersonian sentence especially glows with stupidity, with cruelty, when you picture him at his desk, up before the sun in his parlor, drinking tea he did not make or pour, eating a crumpet he did not make or put on a plate, scratching this and other pithy statements with his quill dipped into a well he did not fill, because he owned six hundred people, most of whom were probably already at work.

  (Feb. 13)

  44. Not Only . . .

  . . . the peacock that had landed in Ingrid’s yard, whose long neck was what one might call dark turquoise, which would be a lamentable shorthand, for the iridescence makes it another color entirely, and reminds us how all color is a manifestation of, a meditation on, light, these mediations echoed or multiplied in the gauzy oculi looking skyward from its long tail, but Ingrid’s need to share the photo with me as I was walking toward the buffet at Samira, the Afghan place, almost tugging me by the elbow to do so, using her index finger and thumb to zoom into its luminous neck, smiling and looking at it, smiling and looking at me looking at it, me smiling and looking at her looking at it, which is simply called sharing what we love, what we find beautiful, which is an ethics.

  (Feb. 19)

  45. Microgentrification: WE BUY GOLD

  You might have called it a microaggression, or a macroaggression, when about a year ago I was sitting on the far end of the porch/stoop situation outside one of my beloved cafés, which shared the stoop with a pawn shop, I forget the name, in front of which I sat, or to the side of which I sat, where the sun was sneaking under the awning, and while I was blissed out, eyes closed, holding my eight-ounce coffee in my lap, bathing in vitamin D, all the tanks of my immunity being refilled, an employee at the pawn shop interrupted by saying, “Hey buddy, you don’t scare me, but I’m afraid you might scare some of my customers, so I’m gonna have to ask you to move on.” Did I mention there was a pink, neon WE BUY GOLD sign flickering in the window above my head?

  Anyway, I recalled this interaction as I was leaving that very same café, which has now expanded next door into the WE BUY GOLD store, and looked at the porch where about a year ago I had been told to scoot. Not their porch anymore.

  (Feb. 22)

  46. Reading Palms

  As I was passing through airport security this morning, the young man at the giant X-ray machine, waving me through, made an appropriately appreciative observation of my socks, and the person’s socks before mine, and, using my detective skills, I determined, probably lots of people’s socks throughout his shift. Anyhow, to me he said about the floral design on my socks, “You have roses on your feet!” before turning back to the screen to see if and where he had to pat me down. His banter, which he kept up, like a mantra, “roses on your socks, roses on your feet,” betrayed his shyness when I looked over my shoulder to see the groin region on my video-game likeness lit up.

  He walked me over to what was supposed to be a room, and was, though it was a room made of clear plexiglass, with no discernible obstruction of sight, by which I mean privacy, which the forthcoming search, puritanically speaking, might have longed for. The plexiglass room, a short walk from the pat-down holding pen just outside the spaceship X-ray room, actually exacerbated the publicness of
what would be my not-quite hand job.

  He offered, stammeringly, noncommittally, without a hint of eye contact, his obligation, which was an odd kind of consent—I am consenting to feel you up with the backs of my gloved hands, which he held up to me, both of them, all the way up the inside of your inseam, he said, palms facing himself, as though to reify the friendly distance, the pure utility of the massage.

  As he was feeling me up he asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to read poems in Syracuse, which made him look up from his work, which he was kneeling to do, and he said, enthusiastically, if a little quizzically, “You must be good at that if they fly you around to do it!” I was feeling good about myself as we finished—I guess he finished—and walked me toward the hand-swiping wand, rubbing it along my palms and plugging it into the machine they say detects explosives but obviously collects DNA for future cloning. He then told me about his mother taking him to have his poems read, which made us even closer than we already were. He was talking about longer lines and shorter ones, and some broken ones, all of which, admittedly, I was distracted from, given I was cutting it close, checking my watch and listening for the boarding call.

  “I never believed in it myself, but I know some people do,” he said, dismissing me at last, and I laughed and nodded, overhearing him saying to one of his colleagues as I jogged toward my gate, “Hey, Mike, that guy’s being flown to Syracuse to read palms!”