by Ross Gay
I fell to the ground and rolled my eyes into my head, which I spent a lot of time practicing with my brother on car rides, making it so only the whites showed. My other grandmother, my nana, who had more of a reputation for clocking people, sat next to my granny on the couch, singing high-pitched notes of approval. I could hear in my curly-headed labyrinth of revenge my granny whispering my name, in the diminutive of course, Rossy, Rossy, and gradually getting louder, which I used as encouragement to crank my eyes even further even longer, a good show my mom ruined by saying something like, “Oh please. Give me a break.”
The dumb plasticness of the toys, which are often in the likeness of famous athletes, makes me wonder if it’s the toy itself that delights me or if it is the fact that the toy alerts me regularly to the fact that people are delighted by such goofy, ridiculous things, which reminds me of a fairly common childlike-ness, which encourages softheartedness, I think.
(Apr. 25)
69. The Jenky
Yesterday I was working in the yard, getting it into some kind of order (order a very loose usage in this case), and I noticed the goumi bush, with its thousands of unripe speckled berries, crowding the blueberry bush, shading it almost completely. I grabbed a rickety one-armed magenta rocking chair I’d plucked from the street on trash day a couple years back and wedged it beneath the light-hogging goumi branches such that nothing needed to be cut, and the goumi branches became a kind of arbor over the rickety one-armed chair in case someone decided to sit in it, which I wouldn’t recommend. As I stepped back to admire my work, I thought, rubbing my chin, Now that’s jenky. Just like the pear tree whose limb I spread with my friend Brooke’s old Adidas trail runner, with her permission of course. And like the old window I propped on a stray log to make a little hot box for my squash, cucumber, and watermelon starts. So jenky. One of the many delights of a garden, I am finding, are the ways it encourages jenkiness. Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators’ swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one’s relationship to commerce, perhaps. The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.
(Aside: Shouldn’t we pause to admire the onomatopoeicness of jenky? Because no word I know sounds more like my crooked shed door. Sounds more like duct tape being ripped from the roll.)
To be clear, my efforts at the jenky are modest compared to my folks’, from whom I learned it in part, probably to their upwardly mobile chagrin. Which is a good place to say the plain, which is that jenky is a classed designation. It often implies a degree of judgment, often by people still haunted by and sprinting from the tendrils of poverty, about broke people. About broke people things. I am no longer a broke person, and so you would be right to read my affinity for the jenk complicatedly, with a nod to privilege and inheritance both.
My folks were, mostly, mostly broke people who had neither the time nor the resources to always fix things the boring way, which is called replacement. And so the hatchback cracked up by a trash truck, the insurance money from which they needed to pay some bills, got fixed (affixed) with a bungee cord. Me and my brother’s wristbands were made of the tops of striped tube socks. The hammer we kept under the seat to tap the stuck starter until it went completely kaput. A rectangle of sheet metal screwed into the rusted-out floorboard of the Corolla. A sheet of plywood tossed over the dinner table for holiday dinners. Taped glasses. Shoe goo. Duct taped car hood. Oh, I could go on.
I think I am advocating for a kind of innovation, or an innovative spirit, which seems often to be occasioned by deprivation, or being broke. Or broke-ass. Which condition I am adamantly not advocating. But I am advocating for the delight one feels making a fire pit with the inside of a dryer, or keeping the dryer door shut with an exercise band, which is probably caused by endorphins released from a bout of cognitive athleticism. Which is also called figuring something out. Which is something we all go to school, some of us for years and years, to forget how to do.
(Apr. 27)
70. The Crow’s Ablutions
It is a good day when the delightful thing you witness sounds like a spiritual tract, or at least like the title of a good novel, or a bad one, who knows. What I know for sure, though, is that it is nearing graduation time, so on the campus where I work there are lots of young people trotting about in their caps and gowns, posing for photographs near the fountains and clock, in the woods on campus. Near the drift of tulips grown in the school colors, no kidding.
Given as we are in the era of hyper-photography, I wonder if there is a stat on how many photographs people take of themselves daily. Factoring in people who do no such thing, I would guess it still exceeds a photo a day. The average, I mean. But witnessing the automatic photo-ready poses the youth and the youth-emulating nonyouth assume—not just the smile, but the three-quarter profile, the set of the mouth, a few other somewhat embarrassing affects—it occurs to me as a new and abiding and normative expertise. (I might be able to definitively attribute the articulation of this observation to Sarah Manguso, but I can’t find my copy of 300 Arguments.) I suppose a rebellion will ensue in which people, the youth and the youth-emulating nonyouth, will cease posing as though for Interview Magazine, will start posing like something else, which Pepsi or Nike will catch wind of quicker than those in the rebellion, selling it to the masses.
As I’m thinking this, standing on the wooden pedestrian bridge over the creek moseying through campus, ignoring the general happiness of those having their pictures taken, being as they are celebrating, they are laughing and pointing and holding each other, a wind gusting the gowns of two standing arm in arm and laughing loud before running after their hats, I heard something that sounded like two erasers being smacked together, then like hard applause. I turned to see a crow standing in a low point in the creek, dipping its head in and whacking the surface hard with its wings, again and again, whap whap, whap whap whap, which I took to mean, of course, take your head out of your ass and be glad.
(May 1)
71. Flowers in the Hands of Statues
As I have noted in a previous delight, undelightfully, it is common to see public statues in our country carrying guns. Statues of men adorned with guns. Statues of white men adorned with guns. You will probably notice this in public squares, often, and near city halls and courthouses, which is an unambiguous assertion of cultural values, lest that slip by. All of which amplifies, or magnifies, my delight today when passing the Hoagy Carmichael statue on campus, where he’s leaning over his piano, almost embracing it, maybe working out the chords of “Stardust” or “Heart and Soul,” his hat tilted back on his head. His outstretched hand atop the piano is open just enough for a flower, or some flowers, to fit into it, which someone, or some ones, have decided they should.
These some ones have slid a big explosive allium, probably pilfered from a nearby drift, into his soft fist. The allium is such a fortuitous flower for many reasons, but in this case because it looks like a wand or some other magical and pointedly nonmartial baton. There was also another flower I don’t know the name of, though it is made of a torrent of petite violet bells. And the third flower, also unknown to me, was yellow, which made me realize that this collaborative effort was endowing Hoagy not only with a wand-centric bouquet but with a beautifully composed one, with complimentary shapes and colors.
Seeing this I was reminded of how often, in fact, we have the impulse to adorn our statues, our public figures, with flowers or, sometimes, coins or fruit. (I have never seen a public statue adorned with a gun not by the sculptor, which is probably to say not at the behest of the commissioner, who is wealthy, who benefits in some very shortsighted way by the union of public figures and weapons, no doubt.) I suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is, is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet.
Or a vase.
(May 2)
72. An Abundance of Public Toilets
I don’t mean this delight to diminish the dignity- violating absence of public toilets, public bathrooms, in New York City, which is a failure and a carelessness. A ruthlessness, in fact, that reminds me somehow that ours is a country where property is more valued than people are. Nor do I want this delight, which was occasioned by the lavatorial deprivation New York City is, which every one of you has a friend with a bad story about, to be a delight about deprivation. Though it might be that deprivation, and the alleviation or deprivation of that deprivation, is one of the sources of delight. Source is the wrong word. One of the flashlights upon delight. The unveilers. The ticklers. Some word that explains how delight originates in the delighted is what I mean, and is simply stimulated or awakened.
Not too long ago I was buying some lumber at the local hardware store to build a raised bed. It was summer, melon season, a time of year I tend to be abundantly hydrated. As I was sliding my two-by-twelves into the car, I realized I really needed to pee, like really really, but for some reason felt shy asking to use the loo. I wanted an espresso anyway, and figured I’d just pull into the bakery around the corner, except when I got there all the parking was taken. And now it was bad. Real bad. And so I started looking around for abandoned buildings or little clutches of trees where I could piss, but had no luck, being more or less downtown. Not to mention the muscles of my mid and lower back were now starting to seize up thanks to whatever taxing physiological business clamps the urethra shut. (I had a friend once who had to pee bad, but being a new guy at a law firm in a meeting that wouldn’t stop, he held it for a very long time until the meeting finally stopped and, while removing his member from his slacks at the urinal, fainted. I will never forget this story.) And given as mine is a small town, and mine is a public occupation, I thought better of pulling into the parking lot next to the Family Video and letting loose against the wall in full view of everyone on Grimes, one of them of course an old student who got a C– capturing my indecent drainage with his phone for later upload. I chose instead to pee my pants in my car. I peed and peed in my pants, my shorts, in my car. And peed some more.
The word chose there made the not-exactly-accident seem more volitional than it actually was, though driving while in a bathroom panic is unsafe, and so I approve of my choice for that reason, too. Regardless, the delight of the car-peeing was in the alleviation of the mental and physical anguish of holding the pee in. It was a deprivation of a deprivation, and the delight, for it was a delight as the vinyl seats of my Subaru became a pool of well-hydrated urine, would not have occurred had the original deprivation—having to pee and nowhere to do it—not occurred. Yeah, yeah, some shame and such; this essayette’s helping me work it out. I fully understand that this delight, and what is coming to look like an appeal to you to view it as such, might not be a delight for you. Delight is like that. All the same, it seems illuminating.
And so it was that when I was in Greenwich Village, again well hydrated, but this time from coffee, without a bathroom, and asked the barista where he might urinate if he couldn’t pee in the place where he just spent four and a half bucks for a short fucking Americano, he pointed to the park across the street, which had a porta-potty. When I entered, I found that it was a very clean porta-potty, and urinating I noticed for the first time, standing up and kind of tall like I am, that the tops of porta-potties have screens that you can look out of, which I did, like I was in a confessional, like I was a priest, watching the parishioners walk by as the noon bells to the nearby church started to ring.
(May 8)
73. The Wave of Unfamiliars
Today I was waved at twice, and so delighted, by people I didn’t know. It was the sort of placid, warm wave of unfamiliars that I learned from my grampa, riding the country roads outside of Verndale, Minnesota, population 559, where to the driver of every passing truck or car he raised his first two fingers to the stiff brim of his John Deere ball cap and cut them through the air like the gentlest initiation of a curve ball ever. It was an elegant wave, understated, that intimated an older time of hat-tipping and such. Of hats and such. An older time of neighborliness, which is actually the present time, too, evidenced by my two unfamiliar wavers.
When I was a kid I figured my grampa knew everyone here in the Verndale region, which was not unthinkable to me, given as the apartment complex where my brother and I grew up probably housed about three or four times the number of people who lived in Verndale, where he’d lived his whole life. And though I didn’t, I could imagine waving to most of the people in our apartments, given as I delivered the Piggy Back Shopper to every one of them, not to mention the knock-knock zoom-zoom. But my grampa’s waving got more impressive as he kept it up out on the country roads past Wadena and Staples and New York Mills and Alexandria. My grampa was like an ambassador. He waved all the way down to Saint Cloud and over to Duluth. He waved down to the cities when we went to see Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek do their thing. But nothing confirmed my grampa’s fame more than when he waved us down to Brainerd to see Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. The huge statues, toward whom he touched the brim of his cap, bellowed, “Welcome Mathew and Ross Gay from Langhorne, Pennsylvania”: my grampa, Virgil Seaton, was the mayor of Minnesota!
(May 11)
74. Not for Nothing
If there ever was a phrase that demanded the phonetic spelling, it’s not for nothing, or not fuh nuttin’, one of the regionalisms I adore from my home area, imprecisely the larger Delaware Valley, which is maybe the upper mid-Atlantic region, but is what I more or less mean when I say the Northeast. I’m from the Northeast, I hear myself say. Or, I’m a Northeasterner. Meaning, linguistically, that the appropriate plural of “you” in certain contexts is “yous.” Meaning the beach is called the shore, and you go down to it. To swim in the wooder. Meaning having used the phrase “a real Philly guy,” the history of which I speculate has to do with Rocky, but might also reference the infamous pelting of Santa with snowballs at Veterans Stadium, and means something like don’t fight him because even if you win you will have bite marks and a limp for the rest of your life. Meaning the emphatic prefix, not fuh nuttin’, which my friend Sarah tossed around like she was getting paid to do it in her beautiful Baltimore brogue, not fuh nuttin’ this, not fuh nuttin’ that, overseeing the zucchini and tofu and eggplant and jalapeños sizzling on the grill. If you are unfamiliar with the phrase, which, by the way, means, literally, for something, or nota bene, then you don’t know that the vegetarian, let alone vegan, deployment of not fuh nuttin’ is like spotting a unicorn. Which is only to say consider my luck. Which is only to say my heart cooing like a pigeon nestled on a windowsill where the spikes rusted off.
(May 12)
75. Bindweed . . . Delight?
There are gardeners reading this who are likely thinking that if I try to turn bindweed, that most destructive, noxious, invasive, life-destroying plant, into a delight, they will bind me and pour glyphosate down my throat. That might be overstatement. All the same, it is a cloying glass-half-fullness to wrangle bindweed into a delight, though I am going for it, shortly after having spent about twenty minutes pulling it from my newly planted mound of five sweet meat squash—yes, sweet meat; try to say that without smiling—out near the woodpile. Already coming up in that mound is all the buckwheat and clover I planted, which, along with the hopefully soon-to-be-thorough coverage of the sweet meat foliage, might crowd out the bindweed. You are right to observe in me the desire not to live with bindweed, which does not in the least negate or supersede my desire to make living with bindweed, which I do, okay.
I carefully pull the arrowheaded and somewhat reptilian plants from the soil, which if left to grow will quickly find something to ascend by wrapping, or binding, it. There is a lovely feeling to gently pulling the sprouts so that the roots slide unbroken and blanched from the soil, putting them in my pockets (I always have bindweed in my pockets),
very careful not to drop any part, which, lore has it, will reroot and strangle your children as they sleep. I do this work, often, on my hands and knees, scanning my garden beds for bindweed, pulling the straw back over here, lifting the leaves of the collards over there. I notice the lettuces are untouched by critters, but the cabbages are getting nibbled. The parsley is starting to get thick. The potatoes need mounding, I notice, sliding a long strand of bindweed from the patch. The beans maybe got washed out from all the rain. And when I pull this sprout, breaking it at the stem, and dig some to get it all out, I notice the worms tunneling through the soil.
And if I think I’m in a hurry, or think I ought to be, and quickly walk by to peek at the beds, the teeny bindweed sprouts will sing out to me. “Stay in the garden! Stay in the garden!” And I often oblige, despite my obligations, getting back on my hands and knees, my thumb and forefinger caressing the emergent things free, all of us rooting around for the light.
(May 13)
76. Dickhead
When my brother and I were little kids, maybe nine and seven, one of the big kids (this description has almost none of the gravity it once did, when kids actually went outside unsupervised and uncoached and so the small ones would on occasion be thrown by the big ones into the sticker bush or dropped into a sewer for sport) caught us in the woods and pinched us on the backs of our arms until we cursed, which we adamantly and unusually for our neighborhood did not do. (I wonder, in retrospect, if we acted a bit superior due to our linguistic chastity.)
