The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  I have a strong memory, I wonder if it’s true, of my father taking my brother and me to the dusty fields behind Longmeadow Apartments, where we lived for a year, to look at the moonless black night being pierced by fireflies, or lightning bugs, depending on where you live. I can feel my small hand in my dad’s big hand, mesmerized by this show, which I don’t think I knew was made by bugs. There is some profound lyric lesson in witnessing an unfathomably beautiful event in the dark night, an event illegible except for its unfathomable beauty, while leaning your head into your father’s hip, which probably smelled of Cavatini or Mexican Pizza from Pizza Hut. I don’t know what it is, but I am certain of it.

  (June 13)

  85. My Scythe Jack

  Which is all the more delightful because I am a tall lefty, a somewhat unusual designation for a scyther, evidently, though I think of the Swiss as relatively big people. I might be confusing the Swiss with the Swedes, whom I might be confusing with Paul Bunyan, whose stock, as far as I recall, was never explicitly discussed in the tall tale. My friend Jack, who is also wrapped explicitly into this delight, or is this delight, secured the blade for me when he went to a scything conference in Switzerland. I do not know what they do at a scything conference, but I like the images it conjures for me, despite the fact that I’ve never seen and likely will never see The Sound of Music.

  Jack, which I’ve just decided to cotitle this delight, also built the snath, or handle, of this scythe so that I can skim it smoothly across the grass, which is a kind of dancing after which the grass, especially if it’s tall, lays elegantly down. No one needs me to go on about the virtues of analog technologies, so I will, for my scythe outperforms my lawnmower in its sleep for tidying up around the garden beds and is absolutely silent while doing it, the clover or dandelion heads toppling, or the buckwheat that I planted with the squash, which I laid down, I scythed, before it went to seed. The scale of the scythe I think maybe is what I’m getting to, and why I exalt it above the lawnmower (also a handy tool), which cannot snug all the way up to the black walnut tree or the woodpile or the raised bed or the beehive on its cinderblocks, which probably explains why the grim reaper does not push a lawnmower.

  (June 15)

  86. Pawpaw Grove

  Yesterday I left my building on campus and was biking along the Jordan River—truly, it’s called the Jordan River, and unlike its more famous cousin, was named for David Starr Jordan, one-time president of Indiana University, eventual president of Stanford University, and pioneer in the field of eugenics—to investigate what I suspected, zooming by a few days back, might be a pawpaw grove. It is a sweet correction this computer keeps making, turning pawpaw into papaw, which means, for those of you not from this neck of the woods, papa or grandpa, which a pawpaw grove can feel like, especially standing inside of it midday, when the light limns the big leaves like stained glass and suddenly you’re inside something ancient and protective.

  It only now occurs to me that not every reader will know the pawpaw, which doubles my delight, for I am introducing you to the largest fruit native to the States. Its custardy meat surrounds a handful of large black seeds. It tastes like a blend of banana and mango, in that tropical ballpark, shocking here in the Midwest, and as a consequence of its flavor profile it has been called the Indiana or Hoosier banana, the Michigan banana, the Kentucky banana, the Ohio banana, the West Virginia banana, and probably the Pennsylvania banana. And maybe the Virginia banana. And most likely the Illinois banana. Alabama banana for sure. And the banana of Kansas. The leaves seem to be insecticidal and smell that way. The flowers are so labial they will warm your heart.

  Telling where this grove is—between Ballantine Hall and the President’s House, right along the river, which is actually a creek—is not, evidently, the kind of thing you always do, which I learned when I asked my friend Julie where the pawpaw grove was that she was raving about the previous year. “I’m not telling!” she laughed, incredulous, though she doesn’t remember this interaction, or her pawpaw grove, conveniently. I admire her pawpaw covetousness. It reminds me of the dreams I still sometimes have—sleeping dreams—of treasure of one kind or another. As a kid it used to be money, especially silver coins, often in big old chests, something I imagine was informed at least somewhat by the movie Goonies.

  But as I get older, the treasure in my dreams seems to shift. Now it’s a veggie burger and French fries up the hill and around the bend that I can’t remember how to get to. Or one final football game, granted thanks to some kind of athletic eligibility snafu, at which, when I arrive for it, usually late, my teammates either don’t recognize me or would rather I didn’t play. Or, less miserably: last night I left an event in celebration of my Uncle Roy, who was also Barack Obama, because I was underdressed [a theme]. I found some beautiful green pants that fit me well in a chest of drawers in my childhood apartment, though I lost track of the festivities, so enamored was I of these pants. My mother stepped out from the hall, shouting disapprovingly that the first speaker had already finished, turning quickly on her heel to return to her seat.

  The delight of a pawpaw grove, in addition to the groveness, which is also a kind of naveness, is in learning how to spot the fruit, which hangs in clusters, often, and somewhat high in the tree. This encourages pointing, especially if you are not alone, a human faculty that deserves at least a little celebration, something I realized when I pointed toward a grape I had tossed in the direction of a dog to no effect, and then a few days later pointing at a bird for a baby to notice, same result. The pointing skill, pointing and following the point, is acquired (I wonder if there is a pointing stage), and a miracle of cognition. A miracle to know there is an invisible line between the index finger and that barely discernible trio of fruit swaying way up in the canopy, blending into the leaves until they twist barely into the light, and out of it. There’s one, you whisper, lest they fly away.

  (June 19)

  87. Loitering

  I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

  NO SOLICITING

  NO LOITERING

  stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee, and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

  Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

  The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered critique or, nouned, epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

  For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, T
retorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying Lord.)

  It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed—in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight. The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke), but if the laugh is hard enough, if the shit talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not, and this hurts, your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go.

  There is a Carrie Mae Weems photograph of a woman in what looks to be some kind of textile factory, with an angel embroidered to the left breast of her shirt, where her heart resides. The woman, like the angel, has her arms splayed wide almost in ecstasy, as though to embrace everything, so in the midst of her glee is she. Every time I see that photo, after I smile and have a genuine bodily opening on account of witnessing this delight, which is a moment of black delight, I look behind her for the boss. Uh-oh, I think. You’re in a moment of nonproductive delight. Heads up!

  Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is. And while having interpolated the policing of delight such that I am on the lookout for the overseer even in photos I have studied hundreds of times, on the lookout always for the policer of delight, my work is studying this kind of glee, being on the lookout for it, and aspiring to it, floating away from the factory, as she seems to be.

  (June 22)

  88. Touched

  There is a designation, it might be old-timey, it might be regional, it might have its origins in any number of religious stories, prophety stories, in which the laying on of hands offers not only cure but vision, difference, which difference, among those afraid of it, can make the designation, touched, as much slur as compliment, meaning something like “not right in the head” or “off one’s rocker,” a usage that this sentence is teaching me is in fact no slur at all but rather a self-designation as nervous about the difference in oneself. Probably this is the case with all slurs.

  Today I saw a man riding a jenky bike down the sidewalk on Cass Street in Detroit. His bike had a normal-size rear tire coupled with a small, even petite, front tire (perhaps rigged from a lawnmower?), a banana seat of the Huffy-circa-1982 variety, sparkling streamers, sparkly handle grips, some bells, and several other accouterments, my favorite being the black propeller whirling about three feet above the cyclist’s head atop a pole affixed to the handle at the rear of the banana seat. If it was my bike I might have opted for a pink or purple propeller, but all the same, any propeller on an adult bike constitutes keeping it 100. This man, who I would guess was in his fifties or sixties, and wore a beanie and wraparound sunglasses, and sat on his vehicle upright as a monarch, and who smiled broadly and nodded his head to me, acknowledging me, was what one might call touched. As was the young man I saw zoom by my office a couple days ago on those shoes with the wheels built in (which I covet) and with a fur ball dangling from a length of elastic that was meant, I extrapolated, to represent the idea of a bunny’s tail. He was a roller-skating bunny. As was the kid in line a couple weeks back who, when “Billy Jean” came on the radio, started dancing unabashedly, imitating MJ in the video, to the extent that he could, which was ambitious and sweet.

  All of these examples make clear that touched often also means exuberant or enthusiastic, both of which qualities can provoke in us, when we are feeling small and hurtable, something like embarrassment, which again maybe points to the terror at our own lurking touchedness. When I watched the child doing his wonky, unselfconscious moonwalk, I had a feeling that I might have then identified as embarrassment, aware of this kid’s obliviousness, his immersion—his delight.

  But I am coming to identify that feeling of embarrassment as something akin to tenderness, because in witnessing someone’s being touched, we are also witnessing someone’s being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another, moonwalking toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

  (June 24)

  89. Scat

  Cleaning out the shed today, what remains of my shed, roofless with half of the framing rotted out, I noticed two fingers of black shit bejeweled throughout with mulberry seeds. I was so delighted at the turds, delighted at what I figured was one of the neighborhood deer hunkering down in my not-quite-shed beneath the starry night to gobble mulberries dropped from the tree above, that I snagged a thick leaf from the pokeweed plant growing in my not-quite-shed and scooped the less coiled of the nuggets for further inspection, for further delighting upon. I was going to write a delight about the turd, I’m saying. With some kind of moral, I’m sure, about finding delight even in dookie.

  The first clue that I’m a novice naturalist, some of you are already noting it, is that deer scat is not loggish or fingerish. It is pelletish. Once I remembered that, walking toward the tomato beds I was weeding, I tossed the turd to the ground nervous it might be raccoon shit. I was trying to remember if raccoons were among the more avid transporters of rabies, and if that might fester in dookie, and if so, if it might permeate my skin, and if so, if it might leave me writhing and foaming at the mouth beneath the blueberries, so different from the romantic way I sometimes imagine keeling over in my garden.

  Looking at the late-day light gleaming in the seeds in the shit, my tiny reflection winking in every one of them, I remembered Galway Kinnell’s poem “The Bear,” in which the speaker, tracking a bear he’s tricked into eating a blade whittled of a wolf’s rib, eats some of its bloody scat. He calls it a turd. It is a bafflement that people, myself included, did not immediately consider the poem goofy, or even, at very least, scatological. It somehow managed to elevate itself into the mythic, the profound. You can imagine the twentysomething boys in a poetry circle-jerk reading that poem, none of them cracking the least smile so immersed in the presence of transcendent knowledge were they. My friend Dave lifted the veil for me, showed me the poem was serious and goofy, which doesn’t in the least diminish my love for many of Kinnell’s poems, a couple of which I’ve kind of plagiarized. Anyhow, it often delights me when a grave thing is revealed to be, also, kind of silly.

  The first time I saw The Exorcist I was nine years old. My mom, flipping through the TV Guide, saw that it was coming on HBO, and she wanted to see it because my dad, a very reasonable man, asked her to hold off when it first came out. She was pregnant with my brother and people watching the movie were having miscarriages and heart attacks in the theater, both of which used to be evidence of a good movie. In twenty minutes or so, when little Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her white nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might watch Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun, she said. Just go to bed if you don’t want to watch it.

  (Dear Reader, I am here going to leap a boundary I shouldn’t, like some of your childless ex-friends before me, to tell you how to raise your children. My brother’s and my be
droom was, maybe, twenty feet from this television. It was maybe three or four seconds by foot away. But my imagination was vast. By which I mean to tell you not to watch The Exorcist with your children. Or The Shining. Or Rosemary’s Fucking Baby.)

  Damn right I was already too scared to do anything by myself, and when little Linda Blair was stabbing herself with a crucifix and vomiting in the faces of priests I was doomed. I sat on the couch pretending to read the Bucks County Courier Times as I heard the girl, about my age, panting and growling. I peeked beneath the business section to see little Linda Blair write, from inside of her Lucifer-ravaged tummy, H E L P. Of course, my dad, the one person in the world who could for sure beat up Evil, was down at Roy Rogers on Cottman, slinging burgers.

  When I did finally go to bed, I sobbed, certain I, too, would be possessed by Satan, which my brother didn’t go the extra mile to discourage me from thinking.

  Me: Matt, am I going to be possessed?

  Matt: I don’t know.

  Me: Am I possessed?

  Matt (pulling the covers over his head): I don’t know. Maybe.

  For the record, my mother now knows this was an instance of heroically poor parenting, in part because I rub her face in it often. She puts her forehead in her hand and shakes her head, while I bask in her shame.

  When I mustered up the courage to see The Exorcist again, the redux, I was about twenty-six. I went with my friend Joanna to the theater between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut in Philadelphia. When Linda Blair peed on the rug this time someone said to the screen, “Oh no she didn’t!” And when her head spun around, someone yelled, “That girl is trippin’!” At which point I realized this movie, which had occupied for years a grave space in my imagination, was actually silly. I was freed from the grave. Or rather, I was offered another version of the grave—laughter in its midst.