by Ross Gay
I remembered, watching these bees, that among the delights of childhood was finding a patch of honeysuckle, sometimes with our noses, and feasting on the nectar by plucking the flower from the vine, sliding the stamen free of the bloom, careful not to break it, and sucking the faint sweetness dry. We would stay like that, licking flowers, sometimes for a half hour.
I’m pretty sure it was Joey Burns, at the time my best friend in the world, evidenced by the number of times we punched each other in the face, who introduced me when I was about six to the joys of honeysuckle plunder, for which I’d like to thank him. Though I do not thank him for the time he peed on me.
And I do not want to praise myself too much, but I do consider it an innovation in honeysuckling when one time inspecting the flower I realized I might, without risking snapping the stamen, pluck the tiny bulbous stopper on the bloom’s bottom to tap the honey, as it were, in a kind of florid anilingus. Looking to all like you’re blowing the world’s teeniest cornet. If only they knew.
(July 26)
100. Grown
I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it—if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible alignment, but simply observe the signs—light and song—for what they are—light and song. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.
(July 27)
101. Coco-baby
I caught sight of myself this morning in the mirror applying coconut oil to my body. I was bent over with one foot on the edge of the tub, rubbing the oil into my calves, which have become a particularly ashen part of my body, particularly visibly ashen as it’s summer, which I’m trying to address with a loofah and the oil, abundantly applied. (If you want to get way further into this, and I think you do, I recommend Simone White’s essay “Lotion” in her book Of Being Dispersed.)
This time of year I am mostly brown, except for the stretch from my waist to my mid-thighs, which is a lighter shade, neither of them to be compared to a food or coffee drink. With my leg up like this, bent over, my testicles swaying just beneath my pale thigh, I wondered if, whenever I am in this position, which is often (oiling, cutting toenails), I will always think of Toi Derricotte’s poem in The Undertaker’s Daughter where as a child she walks in on her abusive father standing more or less just like this, though he’s shaving. Seeing his testicles dangling like that, she thinks they are his udders, the “female part he hid, something soft and unprotected I shouldn’t see.”
I watched myself rub the oil liberally on my body while I was still wet, which my dear friend recently taught me keeps some of the moisture in. I got my calves, then my feet, lacing my fingers into my toes—when doing this I often recall another friend who, watching me put lotion on my feet one day smiled and said, “Good job!” Up to my thighs, inner and outer, around to my ass, which seems to want to break out some when I’m sitting too much. Then I get both arms and shoulders, my chest and stomach, and what I can reach of my back. Usually I oil my face with the residual oil on my hands, and finish by oiling my penis, not always last, but often, which I wouldn’t read too much into, one way or the other.
Today when I watched myself, particularly when I was oiling my chest and stomach, which I do kind of by self-hugging, I was thinking how many bodies of mine are in this body, this nearly forty-three-year-old body stationed on this plane for the briefest. I could see, as I always can, probably kind of dysmorphically, my biggest body, when it was 260 pounds and a battering ram and felt sort of impervious. I could also see my twelve-year-old self, chubby and gangly and ashamed. And of course the baby me, who I don’t remember being, though I have seen pictures.
When you watch yourself in the mirror oiling yourself like this, wrapping your arms around yourself, jostling yourself a little, it is easy, or easier, to see yourself as a child, and maybe even a child you really love. It is easy, if you decide it, which might be hard, to let the oiling be of the baby you. Or at least I thought so today, looking at myself, whom I am so often not nice to. But the baby you, you oil until he shines.
(July 31)
102. My Birthday
It’s my forty-third birthday, and today I am, without hesitation, delighting in that. I began the day by sitting in my bed, drinking coffee, eating oatmeal, and reading Eduardo Galeano’s Book of Embraces. Sweet notes abound, one of them with the promise of birthday lentils, which might not sound celebratory to you, but this is my delight. Among the delights—noticing on a patch of at-first-look barren ground no fewer than four colorful tiny flowers in bloom, one of them pink as the sky over the cemetery in Bloomington on lucky nights, one yellow as the sun. A black cat on the way to the kombucha store (they sell other things—I was getting booch) whom I startled awake by yelling Gato! A young man at the Laundromat who asked if he could tell me a joke, which makes me nervous because you know, but feeling emboldened and lucky and generous, I said go for it. “What does your hippie buddy tell you when you try to kick him off your couch? Namaste.” And kids playing a board game in the café, I think it was Life. And phone conversations with beloveds.
A tiny bee alighting in the gully between my knuckles. A hummingbird hovering close enough to fill my left ear with wind. A very sweet hello from the woman stocking shelves, rubbing her eye with her fist and smiling. A hard-but-loving workout. A nap as a light rain came down, swaying the blinds. An early evening cup of good coffee. The hiding moon lighting up a cataract of clouds. And two cards: one with a glittering butterfly and one with a woodchuck eating pizza in tighty-whities. And a handwritten letter in which my friend explained that delight means “out from light” and is etymologically connected to delicious, to delectable, which I did not know despite this past year turning and turning delight over, which connects delight also to cultivation. Makes it a garden.
I am inclined to sum something up, as this has been a “yearlong project,” and so today is kind of like a graduation, or a funeral, where someone, in this case me, offers a commencement address or eulogy. Why delight now? the inclination wonders. Or, What I have learned from delight. Or, god forbid, My year of delight. Though those might be catchy titles of books I won’t be writing, I have nothing to sum up. Because today is the day of my birth.
My friend Pat told me about the village next to his mother’s in the Philippines where, a few years back, a typhoon had leveled most of everything. Salvaged from the wreckage, stacked in the gazebo that had survived, were all the doors.
(Aug. 1) Preface
Acknowledgments
Let me first say thank you to everyone at Algonquin who has in some way cared for this book. That includes Elisabeth Scharlatt, Michael McKenzie, Craig Popelars, Lauren Moseley, Brunson Hoole, Carla Bruce-Eddings, and so many others. But I am especially indebted to Amy Gash, my editor, for the thoughtful and rigorous conversations we’ve had about this book. You have helped me see things I never would have, and you have made The Book of Delights significantly more delightful. Gratitude!
To Liza Dawson, my agent, who has been more supportive and instructive and patient and curious and encouraging than I could have ever imagined. Thank you.
And to Vaughan(y) Fielder, of The Field Office, goddamn, I would miss so many readings without your help and care. Seriously. Thank you.
Thank you to the editors of Washington Square for first publishing “Hummingbird” and “But, Maybe.”
Thank you, too, to the institutions that helped support this project: the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the ICCI.
Too, I am grateful to the good eyes a
nd ears and hearts and questions and enthusiasms and qualms and love of so many friends, so many beloveds, who helped to grow these delights (hello hello hey hello hello), including, in no good order: Poppa T, Young David, Kayte, Chrism, Lala, Gito (Boogs), Alex, Yalie, JJ, Mykey, Rhett, Tushers, Scotty with the Body, Michelle, Ms. Comer, Lady C, Big Noey, Wendy Lee, Skeeter, Leenski, Buffalita (Polla), Bgbg!, Coco, Treecio, Axolatl (Latl), Sneezers, J Miller, Brookey, Big Momma, Biggie Sis, Ol’ Girl, Meemee (Big Brother), Nut, Cootie, J. Bell, Walton, Simone, Ama, Abdel, Stern, Annie Marie, my entire fall 2017 poetry workshop, the MFA garden crew, the Monster Housers, the Orchardistas, and people, of course, I am forgetting, forgive me, thank you! Also, especially, always, my dear Steffieboo, who encouraged me to read these delights to her and anyone within earshot again and again and again. Who asks such beautiful and necessary questions. Who provides, who is, one of the delights. All my babies. All my mothers.
And, of course, I am grateful to every person who offered or became or enlightened any of these delights. Driving by with your windows down and the music loud. Wearing bright colors. Dancing in a big reflective window. Smiling at me. Laughing recklessly. Sharing your tool in the garden. And the person at a reading who told me I was writing essayettes: thank you!
To everyone whose books I was reading this year, whose sentences were helping me to make sentences, to think, to articulate: gratitude.
And to anyone who listened to these delights being read at gardens or farms or colleges or food pantries or bookstores or music venues or high schools (and whoever invited me!): thank you. Your listening made me better understand these wonderings. It helped me to clarify my delight.
And finally, Dear Reader, as always, as always, I am grateful to you.
ALSO BY ROSS GAY
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Bringing the Shovel Down
Against Which
Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and it was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2019 by Ross Gay. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012383
eISBN: 978-1-61620-890-5
