Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Educated (2018)

  It took some effort, but I managed to hide from Drew how poorly I was doing, or at least I thought I did. I probably didn’t. He was, after all, the one chasing me through his flat when I awoke in the middle of the night, screaming and sprinting, with no idea where I was but a desperate need to escape it. We left Amman and drove south. We were in a Bedouin camp in the Jordanian desert on the day the navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Drew spoke Arabic, and when the news broke he spent hours in conversation with our guides. “He’s no Muslim,” they told Drew as we sat on cold sand watching the dying flames of a campfire. “He does not understand Islam, or he would not do the terrible things he has done.” I watched Drew talk with the Bedouins, heard the strange, smooth sounds falling from his lips, and was struck by the implausibility of my presence there. When the twin towers had fallen ten years before, I had never heard of Islam. Now I was drinking sugary tea with Zalabia Bedouins and squatting on a sand drift in Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, less than twenty miles from the Saudi Arabian border. The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the last decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? I thought of the girl who, knowing nothing beyond her junkyard and her mountain, had stared at a screen, watching as two planes sailed into strange white pillars. Her classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap. And yet she had something precious that I—despite all my opportunities, or maybe because of them—did not. —I RETURNED TO ENGLAND, where I continued to unravel. My first week back in Cambridge, I awoke nearly every night in the street, having run there, shouting, asleep. I developed headaches that lasted for days. My dentist said I was grinding my teeth. My skin broke out so severely that twice perfect strangers stopped me in the street and asked if I was having an allergic reaction. No, I said. I always look like this. One evening, I got into an argument with a friend about something trivial, and before I knew what was happening I had pressed myself into the wall and was hugging my knees to my chest, trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my body. My friend rushed toward me to help and I screamed. It was an hour before I could let her touch me, before I could will myself away from the wall. So that’s a panic attack, I thought the next morning. Soon after, I sent a letter to my father. I’m not proud of that letter. It’s full of rage, a fractious child screaming, “I hate you” at a parent.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He wrote back immediately, asking if he could work for me full-time. “I want to be able to make it on Tiger, and the opportunity would exist for me to do other things as well—running, school, not to mention being my own boss.” I shook my head. I tell the man Blue Ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a berth in first class. Oh well, I thought, if we do go down, misery loves company. So in the late summer of 1965 I wrote and accepted Johnson’s offer to become the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon. We negotiated his salary via the mail. He’d been making $460 a month as a social worker, but he said he could live on $400. I agreed. Reluctantly. It seemed exorbitant, but Johnson was so scattered, so flighty, and Blue Ribbon was so tenuous—one way or another I figured it was temporary. As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward. AND THEN I stopped thinking about Johnson altogether. I had bigger problems at the moment. My banker was upset with me. After posting eight thousand dollars in sales in my first year, I was projecting sixteen thousand dollars in my second year, and according to my banker this was a very troubling trend. “A one hundred percent increase in sales is troubling?” I asked. “Your rate of growth is too fast for your equity,” he said. “How can such a small company grow too fast? If a small company grows fast, it builds up its equity.” “It’s all the same principle, regardless of size,” he said. “Growth off your balance sheet is dangerous.” “Life is growth,” I said. “Business is growth. You grow or you die.” “That’s not how we see it.” “You might as well tell a runner in a race that he’s running too fast.” “Apples and oranges.” Your head is full of apples and oranges, I wanted to say. It was textbook to me. Growing sales, plus profitability, plus unlimited upside, equals quality company. In those days, however, commercial banks were different from investment banks. Their myopic focus was cash balances. They wanted you to never, ever outgrow your cash balance. Again and again I’d gently try to explain the shoe business to my banker. If I don’t keep growing, I’d say, I won’t be able to persuade Onitsuka that I’m the best man to distribute their shoes in the West. If I can’t persuade Onitsuka that I’m the best, they’ll find some other Marlboro Man to take my place. And that doesn’t even take into account the battle with the biggest monster out there, Adidas. My banker was unmoved. Unlike Athena, he did not admire my eyes of persuasion. “Mr. Knight,” he’d say, again and again, “you need to slow down. You don’t have enough equity for this kind of growth.”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I’d read that “tycoon” came from taikun , Japanese for “warlord.” I didn’t know how to acknowledge their kei . To bow or not bow, that is always the question in Japan. I gave a weak smile and a half bow, and kept moving. The executives told me that they churned out fifteen thousand pairs of shoes each month. “Impressive,” I said, not knowing if that was a lot or a little. They led me into a conference room and pointed me to the chair at the head of a long round table. “Mr. Knight,” someone said, “ here .” Seat of honor. More kei . They arranged themselves around the table and straightened their ties and gazed at me. The moment of truth had arrived. I’d rehearsed this scene in my head so many times, as I’d rehearsed every race I’d ever run, long before the starting pistol. But now I realized this was no race. There is a primal urge to compare everything—life, business, adventures of all sorts—to a race. But the metaphor is often inadequate. It can take you only so far. Unable to remember what I’d wanted to say, or even why I was here, I took several quick breaths. Everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn’t, if I muffed this, I’d be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn’t really care about. I’d be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown. Myself. I looked at the faces around the table. Whenever I’d imagined this scene, I’d omitted one crucial element. I’d failed to foresee how present World War II would be in that room. The war was right there , beside us, between us, attaching a subtext to every word we spoke. Good evening, everyone—there’s good news tonight! And yet it also wasn’t there. Through their resilience, through their stoic acceptance of total defeat, and their heroic reconstruction of their nation, the Japanese had put the war cleanly behind them. Also, these executives in the conference room were young, like me, and you could see that they felt the war had nothing to do with them. On the other hand, their fathers and uncles had tried to kill mine. On the other hand, the past was past. On the other hand, that whole question of Winning and Losing, which clouds and complicates so many deals, gets even more complicated when the potential winners and losers have recently been involved, albeit via proxies and ancestors, in a global conflagration. All of this interior static, this seesawing confusion about war and peace, created a low-volume hum in my head, an awkwardness for which I was unprepared. The realist in me wanted to acknowledge it, the idealist in me pushed it aside. I coughed into my fist. “Gentlemen,” I began. Mr. Miyazaki interrupted. “Mr. Knight—what company are you with?” he asked.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  White, trying to cool things off, said a few nominal things in support of Blue Ribbon. I watched his words have no effect whatsoever on Wallace. I took a breath, started to speak, then stopped. I didn’t trust my voice. I just sat up straighter and hugged myself. This was my new nervous tic, my new habit. Rubber bands were no longer cutting it. Whenever I felt stressed, whenever I wanted to choke someone, I’d wrap my arms good and tight around my torso. That day the habit was more pronounced. I must have looked as if I was practicing some exotic yoga pose I’d learned in Thailand. At issue was more than the old philosophical disagreement about growth. Blue Ribbon was approaching six hundred thousand dollars in sales, and that day I’d gone in to ask for a loan of $1.2 million, a number that had symbolic meaning for Wallace. It was the first time I’d broken the million-dollar barrier. In his mind this was like the four-minute mile. Very few people were meant to break it. He was weary of this whole thing, he said, weary of me. For the umpteenth time he explained that he lived on cash balances, and for the umpteenth time I suggested ever so politely that if my sales and earnings were going up, up, up, Wallace should be happy to have my business.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The conversation of death. The sentence kept coming to mind. I’d think of it at odd moments – while taking a bath, scratching my nose, leaning to grab a mug of hot tea. My subconscious was trying to tell me something and though it was shouting very loudly indeed, I didn’t hear what it was saying. Things were going wrong. Very wrong. One afternoon Mabel leapt up from her perch to my fist, lashed out with one foot and buried four talons in my bare right arm. I froze. Blood was dripping on the kitchen floor. I could do nothing. Her grip was too powerful. I had to wait until she decided to let go. The pressure was immense, but the pain, though agonising, was happening to someone else. Why has she footed me? I thought wildly, after she released her grip and continued as if nothing had happened at all. She has never been aggressive before. I was sure I’d done nothing to provoke her. Is she overkeen? Is the weighing machine broken? I spent a good quarter of an hour fussing about with piles of tuppences, trying to calibrate it. There was nothing wrong with it at all. But something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just a hawk-inflicted injury. I was becoming vastly anxious. I jumped in panic when the postman knocked on the door; recoiled from the ringing phone. I stopped seeing people. Cancelled my gallery talk. Deadlocked the front door. Out on the hill I fled from walkers, dodged behind hedges when farm vehicles drove up the track. Some days I lay in bed in so much mysterious pain I began to believe the only explanation was a terminal disease. You could explain what it was like by running to books and papers. You could read Freud, you could read Klein. You could read any number of theories about attachment and loss and grief. But those kinds of explanations come from a world the hawk wasn’t in. They aren’t any help. They are like explaining how it feels to be in love by waving an MRI scan of a lovestruck brain. You have to look in different places.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1975 Pay Nissho first. This was my morning chant, my nightly prayer, my number one priority. And it was my daily instruction to the man who played the Sundance Kid to my Butch Cassidy—Hayes. Before paying back the bank, I said, before paying back anyone... pay Nissho. It wasn’t so much a strategy as a necessity. Nissho was like equity. Our line of credit at the bank was $1 million, but we had another million in credit with Nissho, which willingly took second position, which made the bank feel more secure. All of this would unspool, however, if Nissho weren’t there. Ergo, we needed to keep Nissho happy. Always, always, pay Nissho first. It wasn’t easy, however, this paying Nissho first. It wasn’t easy paying anyone. We were undergoing an explosion in assets, and inventory, which put enormous strains on our cash reserves. With any growth company, this is the typical problem. But we were growing faster than the typical growth company, faster than any growth company I knew of. Our problems were unprecedented. Or so it seemed. I was also partly to blame, of course. I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation. Why cut your order from $3 million down to $2 million if you believed in your bones that the demand out there was for $5 million? So I was forever pushing my conservative bankers to the brink, forcing them into a game of chicken. I’d order a number of shoes that seemed to them absurd, a number we’d need to stretch to pay for, and I’d always just barely pay for them, in the nick of time, and then just barely pay our other monthly bills, at the last minute, always doing just enough, and no more, to prevent the bankers from booting us. And then, at the end of the month, I’d empty our accounts to pay Nissho and start from zero again. To most observers this would’ve seemed a brazenly reckless, dangerous way of doing business, but I believed the demand for our shoes was always greater than our annual sales. Besides, eight of every ten orders were solid gold, guaranteed, thanks to our Futures program. Full speed ahead. Others might have argued that we didn’t need to fear Nissho. The company was our ally, after all. We were making them money, how mad could they get? Also, I had a strong personal relationship with Sumeragi. But suddenly in 1975 Sumeragi was no longer running things. Our account had grown too big for him; our credit was no longer his call alone. We were now overseen by the West Coast credit manager, Chio Suzuki, who was based in Los Angeles, and even more directly by the financial manager of the Portland office, Tadayuki Ito. Whereas Sumeragi was warm and approachable, Ito was congenitally aloof. Light seemed to bounce off him differently. No, rather, light didn’t bounce off him.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  By the time we get to the hill I’m practically catatonic. There, at the top of the hill, is Stuart’s Land Rover. We walk up the track. It’s getting dark. Mabel looks ragingly keen to fly for the three minutes it takes to walk up there, and I start to relax. But she takes one look at the nylon kite that Stuart has been using to help train his falcon to climb high into the sky – takes one look at this triangular splash of fluttering primary colours, looks me in the face, and then bates. Bate. Bate. Bate. Stuart persuades me not to go home. ‘We’ll find something for her to fly at,’ he says. ‘She’ll settle down.’ She does, a bit. So do I. I try to unkink my knotted shoulders and take deep gulps of cooling air. I am stressed. I don’t normally fly hawks free like this. Normally I’d call her to the fist on the creance as usual, then untie the creance and fly her once or twice without it. Only later would I try flying her at quarry. But I defer to Stuart’s knowledge: he knows about goshawks and he’s done this many times before.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler—that was a surprise—but you . Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from going.” I heard Dad’s step on the stairwell. Mother sighed and her eyes fluttered, as if she were coming out of a trance. Dad took his seat at the kitchen table and Mother stood to fix his breakfast. He began a lecture about liberal professors, and Mother mixed batter for pancakes, periodically murmuring in agreement. —WITHOUT SHAWN AS FOREMAN, Dad’s construction business dwindled. I’d quit my job at Randy’s to look after Shawn. Now I needed money, so when Dad went back to scrapping that winter, so did I. It was an icy morning, much like the first, when I returned to the junkyard. It had changed. There were still pillars of mangled cars but they no longer dominated the landscape. A few years before, Dad had been hired by Utah Power to dismantle hundreds of utility towers. He had been allowed to keep the angle iron, and it was now stacked—four hundred thousand pounds of it—in tangled mountains all over the yard. I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will. The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident. BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands. God would score the toss. I didn’t sleep the night before. My brain conjured so many scenes of disaster, it burned as if with a fever. At five I got out of bed, ate breakfast, and drove the forty miles to Utah State University. I was led into a white classroom with thirty other students, who took their seats and placed their pencils on their desks.

• From Educated (2018)

  I got behind the wheel, and Dwain climbed in on the passenger side. I checked my rearview mirror to pull onto the highway, then reached up and shoved the mirror downward so it reflected Shawn’s face, blank and bloodied. My foot hovered over the gas. Three seconds passed, maybe four. That’s all it was. Dwain was shouting, “Let’s go!” but I barely heard him. I was lost to panic. My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that, five minutes before, I had needed to believe. I had never thought about the day Shawn had fallen from the pallet. There was nothing to think about. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall; there was no deeper meaning in it than that. I had never imagined what it would have been like to be there. To see Shawn plunge, grasping at air. To watch him collide, then fold, then lie still. I had never allowed myself to imagine what happened after —Dad’s decision to leave him by the pickup, or the worried looks that must have passed between Luke and Benjamin. Now, staring at the creases in my brother’s face, each a little river of blood, I remembered. I remembered that Shawn had sat by the pickup for a quarter of an hour, his brain bleeding. Then he’d had that fit and the boys had wrestled him to the ground, so that he’d fallen, sustained a second injury, the injury the doctors said should have killed him. It was the reason Shawn would never quite be Shawn again. If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second? —I’D NEVER BEEN TO the hospital in town, but it was easy to find. Dwain had asked me what the hell I was doing when I flipped a U-turn and accelerated down the hillside. I’d listened to Shawn’s shallow breathing as I raced through the valley, along Fivemile Creek, then shot up the Bear River Hill. At the hospital, I parked in the emergency lane, and Dwain and I carried Shawn through the glass doors. I shouted for help. A nurse appeared, running, then another. Shawn was conscious by then. They took him away and someone shoved me into the waiting room. There was no avoiding what had to be done next. I called Dad. “You nearly home?” he said. “I’m at the hospital.” There was silence, then he said, “We’re coming.” Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa, Mother pacing and clicking her fingers, and Dad sitting motionless beneath a loud wall clock. The doctor gave Shawn a CAT scan.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  ITO AND SUMERAGI were right on time. Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. sharp, they pulled up to the building, each wearing a dark suit and dark tie, each carrying a black briefcase. I thought of all the samurai movies I’d seen, all the books I’d read about ninjas. This was how it always looked before the ritual killing of the bad shogun. They walked straight through our lobby and into our conference room and sat down. Without a word of small talk we stacked our books in front of them. Sumeragi lit a cigarette, Ito uncapped a fountain pen. They commenced. Pecking at calculators, scratching at legal pads, drinking bottomless cups of coffee and green tea, they slowly peeled back the layers of our operation and peered inside. I walked in and out, every fifteen minutes or so, to ask if they needed anything. They never did. The bank auditor arrived soon after to collect all our cash receipts. A fifty-thousand-dollar check from United Sporting Goods really had been in the mail. We showed him: It was right on Carole Fields’s desk. This was the late check that set all the dominoes in motion. This, plus the normal day’s receipts, covered our shortfall. The bank auditor telephoned United Sporting Goods’ bank in Los Angeles and asked that their account be charged immediately, the funds transferred to our account at Bank of California. The Los Angeles bank said no. There were insufficient funds in the United Sporting Goods account. United Sporting Goods had also been playing the float. Already feeling a splitting headache coming on, I walked back into the conference room. I could smell it in the air. We’d reached that fateful moment. Leaning over the books, Ito realized what he was looking at and did a slow double-take. Exeter. Secret factory. Then I saw the realization dawn that he was the sucker who’d paid for it. He looked up at me and pushed his head forward on his neck, as if to say: Really? I nodded. And then… he smiled. It was only a half smile, a mohair sweater smile, but it meant everything. I gave him a weak half smile in return, and in that brief wordless exchange countless fates and futures were decided. PAST MIDNIGHT, ITO and Sumeragi were still there, still busy with their calculators and legal pads. When they finally left for the day they promised to return early the next morning. I drove home and found Penny waiting up. We sat in the dining room, talking. I gave her an update. We agreed that Nissho was done with their audit; they’d known everything they needed to know before lunch. What followed, and was yet to follow, was simply punishment. “Don’t let them push you around like this!” Penny said. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Right now they can push me around all they want. They’re my only hope.” “At least there are no more surprises,” she said. “Yes,” I said.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1965I got a letter from that Jeff Johnson fellow at the start of the year. After our chance meeting at Occidental, I’d sent him a pair of Tigers, as a gift, and now he wrote to say that he’d tried them on and gone for a run. He liked them, he said. He liked them a whole lot. Others liked them, too. People kept stopping him and pointing at his feet and asking where they could buy some neat shoes like those. Johnson had gotten married since I last saw him, he said, and there was already a baby on the way, so he was looking for ways to earn extra cash, apart from his gig as a social worker, and this Tiger shoe seemed to have more upside than Adidas. I wrote him back and offered him a post as a “commissioned salesman.” Meaning I’d give him $1.75 for each pair of running shoes he sold, two bucks for each pair of spikes. I was just beginning to put together a crew of part-time sales reps, and that was the standard rate I was offering. He wrote back right away, accepting the offer. And then the letters didn’t stop. On the contrary, they increased. In length and number. At first they were two pages. Then four. Then eight. At first they came every few days. Then they came faster, and faster, tumbling almost daily through the mail slot like a waterfall, each one with that same return address, P.O. Box 492, Seal Beach, CA 90740, until I wondered what in God’s name I’d done in hiring this guy. I liked his energy, of course. And it was hard to fault his enthusiasm. But I began to worry that he might have too much of each. With the twentieth letter, or the twenty-fifth, I began to worry that the man might be unhinged. I wondered why everything was so breathless. I wondered if he was ever going to run out of things he urgently needed to tell me, or ask me. I wondered if he was ever going to run out of stamps.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Soon after that day, Bork quit. Actually, I don’t remember if he quit or Woodell fired him. Either way, not long after that, we heard Bork had a new job. Working for Kitami. I SPENT DAYS and days staring into space, gazing out windows, waiting for Kitami to play his next card. I also watched a lot of TV. The nation, the world, was agog at the sudden opening of relations between the United States and China. President Nixon was in Beijing, shaking hands with Mao Zedong, an event nearly on a par with the moon landing. I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, a U.S. president in the Forbidden City, touching the Great Wall. I thought of my time in Hong Kong. I’d been so close to China, and yet so far. I thought I’d never have another chance. But now I thought, One day? Maybe? Maybe. At last Kitami made his move. He returned to Oregon and asked for a meeting, at which he requested that Bowerman be present. To make that easier for Bowerman, I suggested Jaqua’s office down in Eugene as the site. When the day came, as we were all filing into the conference room, Jaqua grabbed my arm and whispered, “Whatever he says, you say nothing.” I nodded. On one side of the conference table were Jaqua, Bowerman, and I. On the other side were Kitami and his lawyer, a local guy, who didn’t look like he wanted to be there. Plus, Iwano was back. I thought he might have half-smiled at me, before remembering that this wasn’t a social call. Jaqua’s conference room was bigger than ours in Tigard, but that day it felt like a dollhouse. Kitami had asked for the meeting, so he kicked it off. And he didn’t beat around the bonsai tree. He handed Jaqua a letter. Effective immediately, our contract with Onitsuka was null and void. He looked at me, then back to Jaqua. “Very very regret,” he said. Furthermore, insult to injury, he was billing us $17,000, which he claimed we owed for shoes delivered. To be exact, he demanded $16,637.13. Jaqua pushed the letter aside and said that if Kitami dared to pursue this reckless course, if he insisted on cutting us off, we’d sue. “You cause this,” Kitami said. Blue Ribbon had breached its contract with Onitsuka by making Nike shoes, he said, and he was at a loss to understand why we’d ruined such a profitable relationship, why we’d launched this, this, this—Nike. That was more than I could bear. “I’ll tell you why—” I blurted. Jaqua turned on me and shouted: “Shut up, Buck!”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The average man or woman had never ventured farther than one hundred miles from his or her own front door, so the mere mention of global travel by airplane would unnerve any father, and especially mine, whose predecessor at the paper had died in an air crash. Setting aside money, setting aside safety concerns, the whole thing was just so impractical. I was aware that twenty-six of twenty-seven new companies failed, and my father was aware, too, and the idea of taking on such a colossal risk went against everything he stood for. In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity—respectability. Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream. Going around the world on a lark, therefore, would simply make no sense to him. It wasn’t done. Certainly not by the respectable sons of respectable men. It was something other people’s kids did. Something beatniks and hipsters did. Possibly, the main reason for my father’s respectability fixation was a fear of his inner chaos. I felt this, viscerally, because every now and then that chaos would burst forth. Without warning, late at night, the phone in the front hall would jingle, and when I answered there would be that same gravelly voice on the line. “Come getcher old man.” I’d pull on my raincoat—it always seemed, on those nights, that a misting rain was falling—and drive downtown to my father’s club. As clearly as I remember my own bedroom, I remember that club. A century old, with floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases and wing-backed chairs, it looked like the drawing room of an English country house. In other words, eminently respectable. I’d always find my father at the same table, in the same chair. I’d always help him gently to his feet. “You okay, Dad?” “Course I’m okay.” I’d always guide him outside to the car, and the whole way home we’d pretend nothing was wrong. He’d sit perfectly erect, almost regal, and we’d talk sports, because talking sports was how I distracted myself, soothed myself, in times of stress. My father liked sports, too. Sports were always respectable. For these and a dozen other reasons I expected my father to greet my pitch in the TV nook with a furrowed brow and a quick put-down. “Haha, Crazy Idea. Fat chance, Buck.” (My given name was Philip, but my father always called me Buck. In fact he’d been calling me Buck since before I was born. My mother told me he’d been in the habit of patting her stomach and asking, “How’s little Buck today?”) As I stopped talking, however, as I stopped pitching, my father rocked forward in his vinyl recliner and shot me a funny look.

• From Educated (2018)

  “What would you like to read?” I mumbled something about historiography. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it. I doubt I managed to communicate any of this. When I finished talking, Professor Steinberg eyed me for a moment, then said, “Tell me about your education. Where did you attend school?” The air was immediately sucked from the room. “I grew up in Idaho,” I said. “And you attended school there?” It occurs to me in retrospect that someone might have told Professor Steinberg about me, perhaps Dr. Kerry. Or perhaps he perceived that I was avoiding his question, and that made him curious. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t satisfied until I had admitted that I’d never been to school. “How marvelous,” he said, smiling. “It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s Pygmalion. ” —FOR TWO MONTHS I had weekly meetings with Professor Steinberg. I was never assigned readings. We read only what I asked to read, whether it was a book or a page. None of my professors at BYU had examined my writing the way Professor Steinberg did. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?” When I gave my explanation sometimes he would say, “Quite right,” and other times he would correct me with lengthy explanations of syntax. After I’d been meeting with Professor Steinberg for a month, he suggested I write an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had written The Federalist Papers .

• From City of Night (1963)

  I can hear the rumble of the ocean—the sound of the wind... speaking its personal language to each person who listens.... The insistent sound... that wind carrying us along.... “This must be very boring for you,” he said. “It’s fine,” I told him. “Are you tired yet?” he asked. “Yes. I like to sleep listening to the ocean.” “I know what you mean,” he said, pulling the blinds, shutting out the night. “It’s the same with the wind, isnt it?—when youre inside and just listening to it.... It used to scare me when I was a kid. You cant stop it” “It scared me too,” I told him. “I even—crazy—used to wish there was something you could draw across the sky to block it.” He laughed. “Nothing can stop it, though,” he said. I took my clothes off, not facing him, facing away. Quickly I got under the covers. He went into the bathroom, he came out wearing pajamas. He turned the light out. I close my eyes.... I felt him sit on my bed. Somewhere beyond the window, someone was laughing.... A car honked.... Over it all I can hear the private murmuring of the ocean... the lowpitched whistling of the wind. I feel his hand on my leg over the cover. Suddenly I wish I hadnt come here.... And yet will there always be the perversity?—because I keep thinking with crazy excitement: This is the first time hes done this! Hurriedly, he draws the cover from my body, bends over me— as if driving himself! I think—and the thought blots all the perverse excitement of his newness. “Dont you want me to?” he asks me. “Do you want to?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. CITY OF NIGHT YEARS, YEARS, YEARS AGO, I HAD stared at my dead dog, buried under the littered ground of our barren backyard and dug out again, and I had seen in revulsion the decaying face. Now, as if I had dug beneath the surface of the world, I saw that world’s face. And it was just as hideous. For many, San Francisco is an escape, in that coffin-shaped state, from the restless neon-forest of Los Angeles. Its whitewashed, closely pressed houses cuddle each other as if from the chilly invigorating breeze that invades its streets every day around noon, washing them with rain-specked fog almost nightly. In the crystalline mornings, the sky blazes triumphantly clear. Whitewashed, rain-cleansed, breeze-swept, the city itself ascends vigorously in steep hills before diving toward the bay.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The bureau-kraken said nothing. A faint smirk flickered across his thin lips. It struck me all at once that he was grotesquely unhappy, as all functionaries are. When I started to speak again, his unhappiness manifested itself in a restless, manic energy. He jumped up and paced. Back and forth he danced behind his desk. Then he sat down. Then he did it again. It wasn’t the pacing of a thinker, but the agitation of a caged animal. Three mincing steps left, three halting limps right. Sitting again, he cut me off midsentence. He explained that he didn’t care what I said, or what I thought, or whether any of this was “fair,” or “American.” (He made air quotes with his bony “fingers.”) He just wanted his money. His money? I wrapped my arms around myself. Ever since the onset of burnout, this old habit was becoming more pronounced. I often looked in 1979 as if I were trying to keep myself from flying apart, trying to keep my contents from spilling out. I wanted to make another point, to rebut something the bureau-kraken had just said, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I feared that my limbs might go flailing, that I might begin screaming. That I might beat the living tar out of his telephone. We made quite a pair, him with his frantic pacing, me with my frenzied self-hugging. It became clear that we were at an impasse. I had to do something. So I commenced kissing up. I told the bureau-kraken that I respected his position. He had a job to do. It was a very important job. It must not be easy, enforcing burdensome fees, dealing with complaints all the time. I looked around his office-cell, as if to sympathize. However, I said, if Nike was forced to pay this exorbitant sum of money, the straight truth was, it would put us out of business. “So?” he said. “So?” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “So… what? Mr. Knight, it’s my responsibility to collect import duties for the U.S. Treasury. For me, that’s as far as it goes. Whatever happens… happens.” I hugged myself so tight, I must have looked as if I was wearing an invisible straitjacket. Then I released myself, stood. Gingerly, I picked up my briefcase. I told the bureau-kraken that I wasn’t going to accept his decision, and I wasn’t going to give up. If necessary I would visit every congressman and senator and privately plead my case. I suddenly had the greatest sympathy for Werschkul. No wonder he’d come unhinged. Don’t you know that Hitler’s father was a customs inspector? “Do what you gotta do,” the bureau-kraken said. “Good day.” He turned back to his files. He checked his watch. Getting close to five. Not much time before the workday ended to ruin someone else’s life.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Among those most inspired by Pre was Johnson. While continuing to build up our East Coast operation, Johnson had spent much of 1972 slaving on something that he christened the Pre Montreal, a shoe that would be an homage to Pre, and to the upcoming Olympics, and to the American Bicentennial. With a blue suede toe, a red nylon back, and a white swoosh, it was our jazziest shoe yet, and also our best spike. We knew that we were going to live or die based on quality, and thus far our quality on spikes had been spotty. Johnson was going to fix that with this design. But he was going to do it in Oregon, I decided, not Boston. I’d been giving a lot of thought to Johnson, for months. He was turning into a truly fine designer, and we needed to take full advantage of his talent. The East Coast was running smoothly, but it now involved too much administration for him. The whole thing needed reorganizing, streamlining, and that wasn’t the best use of Johnson’s time or creativity. That was a job tailor-made for someone like… Woodell. Night after night, during my six-mile run, I’d wrestle with this situation. I had two guys in the wrong jobs, on the wrong coasts, and neither one was going to like the obvious solution. Each guy loved where he lived. And each irritated the other, though they both denied it. When I’d promoted Woodell to operations manager, I’d also bequeathed him Johnson. I’d put him in charge of overseeing Johnson, answering Johnson’s letters, and Woodell made the mistake of reading them thoroughly and trying to keep up. Consequently the two had developed a chippy, deeply sarcastic rapport. For instance. Woodell wheeled into my office one day and said, “This is depressing. Jeff complains constantly about inventory, expense reimbursements, lack of communications. He says he’s working his butt off while we’re lolling around. He doesn’t listen to any reason, including that our sales are doubling every year.” Woodell told me he wanted to take a different approach to Johnson. By all means, I said. Have at it. So he wrote Johnson a long letter “admitting” that we’d all been colluding against him, trying to make him unhappy. He wrote, “I’m sure you realize we don’t work quite as hard out here as you do; with only three hours in the working day it is hard to get everything done. Still, I make time to place you in all sorts of embarrassing situations with customers and the business community. Whenever you need money desperately to pay bills, I send only a tiny fraction of what you need so that you’ll have to deal with bill collectors and lawsuits. I take the destruction of your reputation as a personal compliment.” And so on. Johnson answered back: “Finally someone out there understands me.” What I was getting ready to propose wasn’t going to help.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I don’t know if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day to Strasser. He kept nodding. He never stopped eating, but he kept nodding. He agreed with me. He said he’d gone directly from our battle royal with Onitsuka to working on several humdrum insurance cases, and every morning he’d wanted to slit his wrists with a paper clip. “I miss Blue Ribbon,” he said. “I miss the clarity. I miss that feeling, every day, of getting a win. So I thank you for your offer.” Still, he wasn’t saying yes. “What’s up?” I said. “I need… to ask… my dad,” he said. I looked at Hayes. We both guffawed. “Your dad!” Hayes said. The same dad who’d told the cops to haul Strasser away? I shook my head. The one argument Hayes and I hadn’t prepared for. The eternal pull of the old man. “Okay,” I said. “Talk to your father. Get back to us.” Days later, with his old man’s blessing, Strasser agreed to become the first-ever in-house counsel for Blue Ribbon. WE HAD ABOUT two weeks to relax and enjoy our legal victory. Then we looked up and saw a new threat looming on the horizon. The yen. It was fluctuating wildly, and if it continued to do so it would spell certain doom. Before 1972 the yen-to-dollar rate had been pegged, constant, unvarying. One dollar was always worth 360 yen, and vice versa. You could count on that rate, every day, as sure as you could count on the sun rising. President Nixon, however, felt the yen was undervalued. He feared America was “sending all its gold to Japan,” so he cut the yen loose, let it float, and now the yen-to-dollar rate was like the weather. Every day different. Consequently, no one doing business in Japan could possibly plan for tomorrow. The head of Sony famously complained: “It’s like playing golf and your handicap changes on every hole.” At the same time, Japanese labor costs were on the rise. Combined with a fluctuating yen, this made life treacherous for any company doing the bulk of its production in Japan. No longer could I envision a future in which most of our shoes were made there. We needed new factories, in new countries, fast. To me, Taiwan seemed the next logical step. Taiwanese officials, sensing Japan’s collapse, were rapidly mobilizing to fill the coming void. They were building factories at warp speed. And yet the factories weren’t yet capable of handling our workload. Plus, their quality control was poor. Until Taiwan was ready, we’d need to find a bridge, something to hold us over. I considered Puerto Rico. We were already making some shoes there. Alas, they weren’t very good. Also, Johnson had been down there to scout factories, in 1973, and he’d reported that they weren’t much better than the dilapidated ones he saw all over New England.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The sun pours in through a windowed wall in a warm rush of light which accentuates the colors of the chairs, upholstered in striped gold and red, striped silver and blue.... It struck me that this room, which is all Ive seen so far of the house, is much like a conglomeration of movie furniture acquired from many period films. (This is how I happen to be here now, drinking tea, selfconsciously, with this man: Only a few nights earlier, at the Stirrup Club, I had noticed a man wearing knee-length boots, a dark leather jacket with a goldsewn insignia of a rapacious bird, a cap much like that of a policeman, and a silver chain around his left shoulder. I asked the person I was with who he was. “Neil,” he answered, “the weirdest character in San Francisco. I’d keep away from him if I were you.”... Later that night, Neil had come over—he knew the man I was with—and introduced himself. Brazenly, he asked me to have lunch with him the next day. Considering him the most ridiculous man I had ever seen—but still greatly intrigued—I said yes.) “Shall I freshen up your tea?” “No, thanks, Ive had enough.” “Tea is very invigorating in the afternoon, especially after a big lunch,” he insisted curiously—and poured out another cup. It seemed so ludicrous—this hybrid movie-set room (like a small-scale parody, at times, of a medieval chamber, with anachronistic touches of Contemporary California) and the man in the incredible costume—so ludicrously incongruous it all seemed, to sit sipping the carefully laid out tea (and cookies!) from the small tilac-decorated china cups. Glancing over the teacup, into another room (to avoid looking directly at this man and thereby to thwart his excoriating gaze by not acknowledging it—and throughout lunch he had hardly spoken, concentrating merely on studying me), I catch sight of a foot—just the tip—jutting from behind the slightly open door. I asked Neil: “Are you alone?” “Oh, yes! Just you and me—and my cat,” he answered, savoring the tea loudly as if to induce me to take mine. I dismiss the foot, which hasnt moved. It is probably a shoe—or, more likely, a boot—tossed behind the door. The telephone screams, and I almost drop the cup nervously. Excusing himself, Neil goes into the other room. He steps carefully over the jutting foot as he goes through the door. The door, slightly farther ajar now, reveals, still unmoving, what is definitely a boot. “Hello?” he answers the telephone. A pause. “Hello?” again. Silence. I hear him hang the telephone up. There is a shuffling sound of moving in that next room. The boot disappears entirely. “Ive been getting these Mysterious Calls,” Neil explained, returning. “At least once a day—sometimes more often. Someone calls up, listens to my voice, doesnt say a word.” “Someone must be trying to bug you,” I offered. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed adamantly, obviating such a simple explanation. “Nothing like that!...

• From Educated (2018)

  But when my father’s eyebrows rose, Richard’s expression changed to one of serious contemplation and accord. He seemed in a state of constant transition, phasing in and out of dimensions, unsure whether to be my father’s son or his wife’s husband. —MOTHER WAS OVERWHELMED WITH holiday orders, so I passed my days on Buck’s Peak just as I had as a child: in the kitchen, making homeopathics. I poured the distilled water and added the drops from the base formula, then passed the tiny glass bottle through the ring made by my thumb and index fingers, counting to fifty or a hundred, then moving on to the next. Dad came in for a drink of water. He smiled when he saw me. “Who knew we’d have to send you to Cambridge to get you in the kitchen where you belong?” he said. In the afternoons, Shawn and I saddled the horses and fought our way up the mountain, the horses half-jumping to clamber through snowdrifts that reached their bellies. The mountain was beautiful and crisp; the air smelled of leather and pine. Shawn talked about the horses, about their training, and about the colts he expected in the spring, and I remembered that he was always at his best when he was with his horses. I had been home about a week when the mountain was gripped by an intense cold spell. The temperature plunged, dropping to zero, then dropping further still. We put the horses away, knowing that if they worked up a sweat, it would turn to ice on their backs. The trough froze solid. We broke the ice but it refroze quickly, so we carried buckets of water to each horse. That night everyone stayed indoors. Mother was blending oils in the kitchen. Dad was in the extension, which I had begun to jokingly call the Chapel. He was lying on the crimson sofa, a Bible resting on his stomach, while Kami and Richard played hymns on the piano. I sat with my laptop on the love seat, near Dad, and listened to the music. I had just begun a message to Drew when something struck the back door. The door burst open, and Emily flew into the room. Her thin arms were wrapped around her body and she was shaking, gasping for breath. She wore no coat, no shoes, nothing but jeans, an old pair I’d left behind, and one of my worn T-shirts. Mother helped her to the sofa, wrapping her in the nearest blanket. Emily bawled, and for several minutes not even Mother could get her to say what had happened. Was everyone all right? Where was Peter? He was fragile, half the size he should have been, and he wore oxygen tubes because his lungs had never fully developed. Had his tiny lungs collapsed, his breathing stopped? The story came out haltingly, between erratic sobs and the clattering of teeth.