The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  (June 25)

  90. Get Thee to the Nutrient Cycle!

  This morning I was peeing into an empty rice wine vinegar bottle, which makes, with some olive oil, the vinegar, my very favorite salad dressing. I was peeing into the bottle so that I could discreetly pour it into my watering can to give my garden plants a shot of nitrogen, which the pee has in abundance. It’s a fun exercise, the version that involves a penis anyway, which I’m most familiar with, because depending on the receptacle, which I so badly want to call a vessel, it can be a bit of an ordeal. For instance, without telling you too much about my anatomy, I can tell you that the vinegar bottle requires something like putting one’s eye to a keyhole, except if you do it wrong you will pee on your hands and the floor.

  I go in and out of collecting my urine for my garden, and was reminded of the bounty our bodies produce, aka our forgotten station in the nutrient cycle—I wonder if this simple forgetting, this collective amnesia, that we are, in fact, part of the nutrient cycle is the source of our gravest problem, namely, that we are in the long process of making our planet uninhabitable to many species, including ourselves—upon running into my friend Jack on Fourth Street. Jack, along with a bevy of other skills, is a superb Dumpster diver. Talking about the waste stream segued seamlessly into a conversation about the garden, and peeing in it. Jack mentioned that his droopy plants perked right up with a shot of his pee tea, though Jack feeds with a stronger solution (3–5 parts pee to 10 parts water) than I prefer (1 or 2 parts pee to 10 parts water). Oh yeah, I thought. I gotta get back on that.

  Now that I think of it, I stopped harvesting pee tea a few years back when I was living for the year with Stephanie and her family in New Jersey. We were sharing a community garden plot for which I had been collecting my pee, a fact I bet the other gardeners would not have loved. All the same, I was diligent, and one day after a solo basketball workout on the crummy courts behind the Milford public library I harvested into an empty Gatorade bottle, filling it up all the way with the warm, golden elixir, capping it tight, and putting it in the cupholder before going to pick up Stephanie’s daughter, Georgia, from softball practice or camp or something. We were chatting and driving down Rt. 29 when I watched her spot the bottle, grab it, twist it open, and, moving it toward her mouth, ask if she could have a sip.

  Friends, you may know that fully one third of being an adult man in a girl’s life is not to be perceived as, not to be, a pervert, both of which boundaries I was very close to unintentionally crossing simply by virtue of this child’s cavalier disregard for my boundaries, which is my way of saying I am the one who needs your sympathy right now.

  In the single most athletic gesture of my adult life I removed the full and sort of warm vessel from Georgia’s hand without spilling even a drop, recapped it, and placed it back in the cupholder without driving off the road, saying, “You better not.” Had I been more prepared I would have said something about a cold or mouth herpes, but instead we just drove the few miles home in weird, perverse silence.

  (June 26)

  91. Pulling Carrots

  Today we pulled the carrots from the garden that Stephanie sowed back in March. She planted two kinds: a red kind shaped like a standard kind, and a squat orange kind with a French name, a kind I recall the packet calling a “market variety,” probably because, like the red kind, it’s an eye-catcher. And sweet, which I learned nibbling a couple of both kinds like Bugs Bunny as I pulled them.

  The word kind meaning type or variety, which you have noticed I have used with some flourish, is among the delights, for it puts the kindness of carrots front and center in this discussion (good for your eyes, yummy, etc.), in addition to reminding us that kindness and kin have the same mother. Maybe making those to whom we are kind our kin. To whom, even, those we might be. And that circle is big.

  These are kinds, I am thinking, as I snip the feathery green tops, making my way through the pile, holding the root in one hand, feeling the knobs and grains, the divots where they’ve grown against a rock or some critter nibbled. Or the four or five of the red kind that have almost become two carrots, carrot legs in need of some petite pantaloons.

  The utterly forgettable magic of the carrot, which applies as well to the turnip and radish and potato and garlic and onion and ginger and turmeric and yam and sunchoke and shallot and salsify and maca and sweet potato, is that because much of the food resides under the ground it probably had to be discovered. Uncovered. And after the discovering, and the uncovering, choosing which ones to replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, until there was the long red kind I’m brushing the soil from. Until the squat kind piling up at the bottom of the basket. It was kindness. They are our family.

  (July 4)

  92. Filling the Frame

  I finally watched Moonlight, and perhaps the most moving parts of the movie to me were the scenes of kids, mostly black kids, at play. I’m thinking of course of the dance classroom where the uniformed children all practice their own moves, studying their beautiful bodies in the mirror. Little Chiron going hard, twirling and getting his shoulders into it. And when playing Kill the Man, which they did with a torn-up soccer ball. They sprinted through the dusty field chasing each other or being chased, trying to put their hands on each other, to embrace each other and roll with each other and smell each other in that sanctioned way, laughing and shouting through the field, laying on each other, holding each other, beneath the sun, filling the frame.

  (July 5)

  93. Reckless Air Quotes

  I have a new friend who uses, or misuses, air quotes with such abundance and aplomb that it’s actually a demolishment of the gesture. A blessed desecration. You can’t help but notice that his air quotes are not even in the same gestural family as those you might see at lectures or public readings: half-embarrassed one-digit swipes at the air; or the distracted waves; or halfhearted peace signs; or very, very halfhearted (quarter-hearted) victory signs. My friend’s air quotes are unabashed, two-handed, two-fingered punctuative dances during which, often, he will lean back or put a hip out like he’s setting a Hula-Hoop into motion. Sometimes he flares his elbows like he’s boxing out. Although the entirety of his air quote rumba delights me, I am most delighted by the fact that he does the dance infrequently to indicate attribution, that “someone” or “a someone” “might say” or “have said” “a” “thing.” Indeed, the only physiolinguistic significance of the gesture seems to be, maybe, emphasis, a kind of italics, though it’s hard to say.

  (July 10)

  94. Judith Irene Gay, Aged Seventy-six Today!

  On this, my mother’s seventy-sixth birthday, I am picturing her telling the story about how, pretty numbed up after having a cap on a molar replaced, she went to her neighborhood supermarket, where she is a regular, for some chicken noodle soup. When she got back into her car and was looking into her mirror to back out of her parking space, she saw snot was running down her face, into her mouth, which she couldn’t feel thanks to the lidocaine. My mother is among the most self-berating people I know, and has been known to wake up from dreams chastising herself for what innocuous thing she did there. (God forbid she dreamed she’d been fucking her mother for two years.)

  This snot-mouthed situation is ripe for such self-beration, which might in the past have included a self-imposed exile from her supermarket, and recurrent, crippling bouts of disgust and shame. But these days my mother tells this story of buying chicken noodle soup with a river of snot running into her mouth and laughs so hard that she has to hold her head up. She laughs and holds the kitchen table lest she fall from her chair telling the story. She gasps and cries a little bit. She is accepting, it seems, what she is: one of the varieties of light.

  (July 13)

  95. Rothko Backboard

  Today I am delighted by the backboard, built of a raggedy piece of wood—not quite ply, not quite particle, more like an ancient and shabby backboard-shaped slab of barnwood with a rim set
cockeyed into it—that I can see from the living room window. This backboard is more vertically oriented than it ought to be, but delight doesn’t truck with ought. Or should, for that matter. The wood is weathered, probably from the weather and some lovingly heaved bricks (or astutely measured bank shots), which reminds us that basketball is meteorological. These weathers have produced a few distinctly colored hues on the backboard—gray, mauve, maroon, and a rectangle of taupe right above the rim.

  It looks like the best of Rothko’s paintings, which, as I recall, he thought a viewer should weep upon seeing for the tragedy contained therein, something like that. Oh, I did my best when my friends Nut and Cootie and I pilgrimaged to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, driving a few days to get there. Once we got inside that mournful ecumenical cave, I sat alone on one of the benches trying unsuccessfully to hyperventilate myself into some tears the way a toddler was doing in line at the store last night, begging for marshmallows. Worked for the kid, not me. The backboard, every time I see it, makes me happy, which makes it, I suppose, a failed Rothko, his very best.

  (July 14)

  96. The Marfa Lights

  My buddy Pat and I went to shoot around at the courts here in Marfa today. We were warming up, shooting twelve-footers or doing slow spin moves and crossovers, when a young guy from the other side of the court (where the rim had a net) swaggered toward us, holding a ball on his hip, the light gleaming in his earrings, and challenged us to a two-on-two, pointing his thumb to himself and back to his buddy draining threes from the corner. We agreed, and went on to kick the shit out of them, 21 to 0. That is a horrible figure of speech, and I leave it in only to expose the violence we easily speak. We got more baskets than they did. That they were only twelve years old is irrelevant, given as this was their home court, and they even had a crowd watching, another little girl who, when one of the kids shouted to the gods, “They’re kicking our butts!” said, “I hope so. They’re grown men.”

  (July 16)

  97. The Carport

  One, this one I mean, is often surprised by what stirs in him delight, as I was this evening walking beneath the huge and strange evening sky toward the house I’m staying in here in Marfa and noticed a genuine warming in my center, which is a metaphor for pleasure, for delight even, at the fairly sophisticated carport I passed. By sophisticated I mean that it wasn’t just flat with a slight pitch but was flat with a slight pitch with also a down-tilting thing at the sides, probably a minor rain-deterring advancement. I’m not sure why I love the carport—I have decided now I love the carport—interruptive delight: an acquaintance, an academic, shockingly, who told his daughter, when she was a tadpole, the more stuff you love the happier you will be—though I do love open windows, I love letting the air through, and it’s probably no joke having a place to practice your kick flips and shuvits and juggling during inclement weather. (This is speculative, for I have never lived with a carport.) And because of the publicness of the structure, its openness, there tends not to be an accumulation or storage of stuff, as might occur in a garage, and that makes me wonder about carports and garages as markers of class.

  (Another small delightful aside—when my friend Brooke, her blind cat, and I were driving across the country and stopped to stay the night at my grandfather’s house in Verndale, Minnesota, population 559, Brooke asked where she might leave the cat while he took us out to the River Inn for supper, where my grampa always ate frogs’ legs. My grampa, who was not, shall we say, sentimental about nonhuman animals, and might have considered sentimentality about nonhuman animals simple, looked at the garage, which was full of sharp rusty things, many of them gopher traps, half of them the variety called the death trap, and said, “We could tie her up in there?” I suggested the basement, and he said that’d be just fine.)

  The carport is a somewhat vulnerable structure, a structure whose form asserts vulnerability: it is a vulnerable thing under which to put your vulnerable thing, both of which a kid with a sledgehammer could destroy in five minutes flat. I like that about it, and I also wonder, because I have a slight nostalgic feeling upon encountering carports, something lonely and yearning, if the carport was a feature of Verndale, where we spent some summers, but that seems unlikely because it would collapse beneath the snow. Maybe Youngstown, another family place where we spent time, but it snowed a lot there, too.

  I have taken note of how delight and nostalgia, delight and loneliness, which I will further clarify as existential loneliness, irremediable loneliness, are, in this one, connected. They are kin. Seems a good thing to know.

  As for other architectural features that delight me: the breezeway, the breakfast nook, and the window seat, all for obvious reasons.

  (July 23)

  98. My Garden (Book):

  That good and delightful have no requisite correlation ought to be evident, but if it isn’t, here’s an example. To my mind one of our finest writers, whose work is among the most important to me, that I love the most, is the most good to me, is Jamaica Kincaid. I do not have to go into why right now, for this delight has other objectives. The first, as I’ve already hinted, is to clarify the difference between the good and the delightful, which I am doing now by telling you that delight is not one of the things I most often feel reading her work. And when the feeling of delight is aroused while reading it, or what I would have previously categorized as delight, it has been of the ironic variety.

  For instance, when, in A Small Place, the narrator tells the tourists—she’s talking to white North Americans who find swimming in the silvery blue water of Antigua a kind of temporary heaven—that, given the sewage situation, they might be swimming with their own shit, I enjoy this. Kincaid is genius at eviscerating observations of the powerful. Her work lays bare, among other things, the fact that one’s comfort is often dependent, the way we’ve set it up anyway, on someone else’s agony. This does not delight me. It causes me pain, which is significantly less pain than I am causing someone else simply by turning on the lights. Than I cause, literally, in my sleep. This is the point. And I think it probably points us toward a greater, or potentially greater, humanity. It is good. The good.

  (I wonder, though, if the beauty of her sentences themselves, the beauty of her thinking as communicated by her sentences, which illuminate the possibility of our humanity, of our beauty [which is also the sorrow of our depravity, it’s true], despite the way those sentences often necessarily rub the reader’s [obliviously violent] face in its own feces [oblivious violence], might say something about this tugging of delight I’m feeling, even in considering books like A Small Place and Autobiography of My Mother. I guess I don’t yet know quite how I feel.)

  Which might amplify my delight when today I was reading her garden book, My Garden (Book):, and came across a passage where she discovers something had been eating her recently planted squash seeds.

  “I plotted the demise of the offending beings, and finally did catch one of them, a raccoon, in that ridiculous pantywaist contraption, the Havahart trap.” Although Kincaid wants to drown the critter, “the three whining pacifists” she lives with, her family, convince her to take it to the woods, which she does grudgingly, sure it will make its way back to her garden, as almost every gardener will tell you is true. Though shortly after I had a real talk with Greg the groundhog, who had taken up residence in my garden—talk is not a euphemism; I wasn’t holding a shotgun or blowtorch; we just had a heart-to-heart—my neighbor Estella told me a groundhog had moved into her garden. “Must be Greg,” I said, which did not please her.

  I have the feeling, after reading My Garden (Book):, that if I were to tell Kincaid that story, which is one of quite a few I could tell her, she might want to slice my head from my body, which, in this book, she admits wanting to do to people a couple times, which, both times she did so, made me gasp with delight. And recognition.

  Although the Havahart scene is more or less already glowing with delight—the garden, the raccoon set free, the cursing of the fam
ily, the mopey fatalism of the gardener—Kincaid called the no-kill trap, in case you missed it, which happens to be the very trap I paid a guy handsome money to pacifistically remove the skunk that had taken up rank residence in the crawlspace beneath my house with, a pantywaist contraption. Now I don’t exactly know what that means, but it made me laugh out loud when I read it. By which I mean, like gardens tend to do, it nourished my delight.

  (July 24)

  99. Black Bumblebees!

  There is a kind of flowering bush, new to me, that I’ve been studying on my walks in Marfa. On that bush, whose blooms exude a curtain of syrupy fragrance, a beckoning of it, there are always a few thumb-size all-black bumblebees. Their wings appear, when the light hits them right, metallic blue-green. I have never seen anything so beautiful. Everything about them—their purr, their wobbly veering from bloom to bloom—is the same as their cousins, the tiger-striped variety that show up in droves when the cup plants in my garden are in bloom, making the back corner of my yard sound like a Harley convention. I wonder how I could encourage these beauties?

  These bees (though perhaps this observation is more about these flowers) mostly forego the sheer summer dresses, the pouty orifices of the blooms—though occasionally they dip in just enough to shiver the camisole—and instead land briefly on the outside of the flower, lumbering toward the juncture of or seam between the bloom and stem, where I imagine the nectar or pollen has dribbled or drifted. They then spin their legs into the base of the flower, shimmy some, swirl their abdomens for good measure, and, exhaling, haul their furry bodies, gold-flecked, to the next bloom for more.