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

  Every time a thought crossed Johnson’s mind, seemingly, he wrote it down and stuck it into an envelope. He wrote to tell me how many Tigers he’d sold that week. He wrote to tell me how many Tigers he’d sold that day. He wrote to tell me who’d worn Tigers at which high school meet and in what place they’d finished. He wrote to say that he wanted to expand his sales territory beyond California, to include Arizona, and possibly New Mexico. He wrote to suggest that we open a retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads in running magazines and what did I think? He wrote to inform me that he’d placed those ads in running magazines and the response was good. He wrote to ask why I hadn’t answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn’t responded to his previous plea for encouragement. I’d always considered myself a conscientious correspondent. (I’d sent countless letters and postcards home during my trip around the world. I’d written faithfully to Sarah.) And I always meant to answer Johnson’s letters. But before I got around to it there was always another one, waiting. Something about the sheer volume of his correspondence stopped me. Something about his neediness made me not want to encourage him. Many nights I’d sit down at the black Royal typewriter in my basement workshop, curl a piece of paper into the roller, and type, “Dear Jeff.” Then I’d draw a blank. I wouldn’t know where to begin, which of his fifty questions to start with, so I’d get up, attend to other things, and the next day there’d be yet another letter from Johnson. Or two. Soon I’d be three letters behind, suffering from crippling writer’s block. I asked Jeanne to deal with the Johnson File. Fine, she said. Within a month she thrust the file at me, exasperated. “You’re not paying me enough,” she said. AT SOME POINT I stopped reading Johnson’s letters all the way to the bottom. But from skimming them I learned that he was selling Tigers part-time and on weekends, that he’d decided to keep his day job as a social worker for Los Angeles County. I still couldn’t fathom it. Johnson just didn’t strike me as a people person. In fact he’d always seemed somewhat misanthropic. It was one of the things I’d liked about him.

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

  Our sales for 1973 rose 50 percent, to $4.8 million, a number that staggered me the first time I saw it on a piece of paper. Wasn’t it only yesterday that we’d done $8,000? And yet there was no celebration. Between our legal troubles and our supply woes, we might be out of business any minute. Late at night I’d sit with Penny and she’d ask, for the umpteenth time, what we were going to do if Blue Ribbon went under. What was the plan? And for the umpteenth time I’d reassure her with optimistic words that I didn’t wholly believe. Then, that fall, I had an idea. Why not go to all of our biggest retailers and tell them that if they’d sign ironclad commitments, if they’d give us large and nonrefundable orders, six months in advance, we’d give them hefty discounts, up to 7 percent? This way we’d have longer lead times, and fewer shipments, and more certainty, and therefore a better chance of keeping cash balances in the bank. Also, we could use these long-term commitments from heavyweights like Nordstrom, Kinney, Athlete’s Foot, United Sporting Goods, and others, to squeeze more credit out of Nissho and the Bank of California. Especially Nissho. The retailers were skeptical, of course. But I begged. And when that didn’t work I made bold predictions. I told them that this program, which we were calling “Futures,” was the future, for us and everyone else, so they’d better get on board. Sooner rather than later. I was persuasive because I was desperate. If we could just take the lid off our annual growth limits. But retailers continued to resist. Over and over we heard: “You newbies at Nike don’t understand the shoe industry. This new idea will never fly.” My bargaining position was suddenly improved when we rolled out several eye-popping new shoes, which customers were sure to demand. The Bruin was already popular, with its outsoles and uppers cooked together to give a more stable ride. Now we debuted an enhanced version, with bright green suede uppers. (Paul Silas of the Boston Celtics had agreed to wear a pair.) Plus, two new Cortezes, a Leather and a Nylon, both of which figured to be our bestselling shoes yet. At last, a few retailers signed on. The program started to gain traction. Before long, the stragglers and holdouts were desperate to be included. SEPTEMBER 13, 1973. My fifth wedding anniversary. Once again Penny woke me in the middle of the night to say she wasn’t feeling well. But this time, on the drive to the hospital, I had more on my mind than just the baby. Futures program. Pair count. Pending trial. So of course I got lost. I circled back, retraced my steps. My brow beginning to bead with sweat, I turned down a street and saw the hospital up ahead. Thank goodness.

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

  The answer disarmed him. As it should have. I’d rehearsed it for weeks. It was so reasonable and logical that Kitami didn’t know how to respond. He’d come spoiling for a fight, and I’d countered his bull rush with a rope-a-dope. He demanded to know who made the new shoes. I told him they were made by different factories in Japan. He demanded to know how many Nikes we’d ordered. A few thousand, I said. He gave an “Ooh.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. I didn’t mention that two members of my scrappy hometown Portland Trail Blazers had just worn Nikes during a rout of the New York Knicks, 133–86. The Oregonian had recently run a photo of Geoff Petrie driving past a Knick (Phil Jackson, by name), and visible on Petrie’s shoes was a swoosh. (We’d just made a deal with a couple of other Blazers to supply them with shoes, too.) Good thing the Oregonian didn’t have a wide circulation in Kobe. Kitami asked if the new Nike was in stores. Of course not, I lied. Or fibbed. He asked when I was going to sign his papers and sell him my company. I told him my partner still hadn’t decided. End of meeting. He buttoned and unbuttoned the coat of his suit and said he had other business in California. But he’d be back. He marched out of my office and I immediately reached for the phone. I dialed our retail store in Los Angeles. Bork answered. “John, our old friend Kitami is coming to town! I’m sure he’ll come by your store! Hide the Nikes!” “Huh?” “He knows about Nike, but I told him it isn’t in stores!” “What you’re asking of me,” Bork said, “I don’t know.” He sounded frightened. And irritated. He didn’t want to do anything dishonest, he said. “I’m asking you to stash a few pairs of shoes,” I cried, then slammed down the phone. Sure enough, Kitami showed up that afternoon. He confronted Bork, badgered him with questions, shook him down like a cop with a shaky witness. Bork played dumb—or so he told me later. Kitami asked to use the bathroom. A ploy, of course. He knew the bathroom was somewhere in the back, and he needed an excuse to snoop back there. Bork didn’t see the ploy, or didn’t care to. Moments later Kitami was standing in the stockroom, under a bare lightbulb, glowering at hundreds of orange shoe boxes. Nike, Nike, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Bork phoned me after Kitami left. “Jig’s up,” he said. “What happened?” I asked. “Kitami forced his way into the stockroom—it’s over, Phil.” I hung up, slumped in my chair. “Well,” I said, out loud, to no one, “I guess we’re going to find out if we can exist without Tiger.” We found out something else, too.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was fifteen and I felt it, felt the race I was running with time. My body was changing, bloating, swelling, stretching, bulging. I wished it would stop, but it seemed my body was no longer mine. It belonged to itself now, and cared not at all how I felt about these strange alterations, about whether I wanted to stop being a child, and become something else. That something else thrilled and frightened me. I’d always known that I would grow differently than my brothers, but I’d never thought about what that might mean. Now it was all I thought about. I began to look for cues to understand this difference, and once I started looking, I found them everywhere. One Sunday afternoon, I helped Mother prepare a roast for dinner. Dad was kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie. He’d been talking since we left the church. “That hemline was three inches above Lori’s knee,” Dad said. “What’s a woman thinking when she puts on a dress like that?” Mother nodded absently while chopping a carrot. She was used to this particular lecture. “And Jeanette Barney,” Dad said. “If a woman wears a blouse that low-cut, she ought not bend over.” Mother agreed. I pictured the turquoise blouse Jeanette had worn that day. The neckline was only an inch below her collarbone, but it was loose-fitting, and I imagined that if she bent it would give a full view. As I thought this I felt anxious, because although a tighter blouse would have made Jeanette’s bending more modest, the tightness itself would have been less modest. Righteous women do not wear tight clothing. Other women do that. I was trying to figure out exactly how much tightness would be the right amount when Dad said, “Jeanette waited to bend for that hymnal until I was looking. She wanted me to see.” Mother made a disapproving tsk sound with her teeth, then quartered a potato. This speech would stay with me in a way that a hundred of its precursors had not. I would remember the words very often in the years that followed, and the more I considered them, the more I worried that I might be growing into the wrong sort of woman. Sometimes I could scarcely move through a room, I was so preoccupied with not walking or bending or crouching like them . But no one had ever taught me the modest way to bend over, so I knew I was probably doing it the bad way. —SHAWN AND I AUDITIONED for a melodrama at Worm Creek. I saw Charles at the first rehearsal and spent half the evening working up the courage to talk to him. When I did, finally, he confided in me that he was in love with Sadie. This wasn’t ideal, but it did give us something to talk about. Shawn and I drove home together. He sat behind the wheel, glaring at the road as if it had wronged him.

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

  Chicago was important every year. The sporting goods show was where sales reps from across the nation got their first look at all the new athletic products, from all the different companies, and voted up or down, via the sizes of their orders. But this 1972 show was going to be more than important. It was going to be our Super Bowl and our Olympics and our Bar Mitzvah, because it was where we’d decided to introduce the world to Nike. If sales reps liked our new shoe, we’d live to see another year. If not, we wouldn’t be back for the 1973 show. Onitsuka, meanwhile, was eyeing Chicago, too. Days before the start of the show, without a word to me, Onitsuka gave the Japanese press an announcement trumpeting their “acquisition” of Blue Ribbon. The announcement set off shock waves everywhere, but especially at Nissho. Sumeragi wrote me, asking, in essence, “What the—?” In my impassioned two-page reply I told him that I had nothing to do with Onitsuka’s announcement. I assured him that Onitsuka was trying to bully us into selling, but they were our past, and Nissho, like Nike, was our future. In closing I confessed to Sumeragi that I hadn’t yet mentioned any of this to Onitsuka, so mum’s the word. “I ask that you keep the above information in strict confidence for obvious reasons. In order to maintain our present distribution system for future Nike sales, it’s important that we have about one or two more months of shipments from Onitsuka, and if these shipments were cut off it would be very harmful.” I felt like a married man caught in a tawdry love triangle. I was assuring my lover, Nissho, that it was only a matter of time before I divorced my spouse, Onitsuka. Meanwhile, I was encouraging Onitsuka to think of me as a loving and devoted husband. “I do not like this way of doing business,” I wrote Sumeragi, “but I feel it was thrust upon us by a company with the worst possible intentions.” We’ll be together soon, darling. Just have patience. Right before we all left for Chicago, a wire came from Kitami. He’d thought up a name for “our” new company. The Tiger Shoe Company. He wanted me to unveil it in Chicago. I wired back that the name was beautiful, lyrical, sheer poetry—but alas it was too late to unveil anything at the show. All the signs and promotional literature had been printed already.

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

  I filed away all this information. For a few days. And the next time I went down to First National, the next time Wallace made me feel like a bum, I walked out and saw the sign for Bank of Tokyo. I’d seen that sign a hundred times before, of course, but now it meant something different. Huge pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Dizzy, I walked directly across the street, straight into the Bank of Tokyo, and presented myself to the woman at the front desk. I said I owned a shoe company, which was importing shoes from Japan, and I wanted to speak with someone about doing a deal. Like the madam of a brothel, the woman instantly and discreetly led me to a back room. And left me. After two minutes a man walked in and sat down very quietly at the table. He waited. I waited. He continued waiting. Finally I spoke. “I have a company,” I said. “Yes?” he said. “A shoe company,” I said. “Yes?” he said. I opened my briefcase. “These are my financial statements. I’m in a terrible bind. I need credit. I just read an article in Fortune about Japanese trading companies, and the article said these companies are looser with credit—and, well, do you know of any such companies that you might introduce me to?” The man smiled. He’d read the same article. He said it just so happened that Japan’s sixth-largest trading company had an office right above our heads, on the top floor of that building. All the major Japanese trading companies had offices in Portland, he said, but this particular one, Nissho Iwai, was the only one in Portland with its own commodities department. “It’s a $100 billion company,” the banker said, eyes widening. “Oh, boy,” I said. “Please wait,” he said. He left the room. Minutes later he returned with an executive from Nissho Iwai. His name was Cam Murakami. We shook hands and chatted, strictly hypothetically, about the possibility of Nissho financing my future imports. I was intrigued. He was quite intrigued. He offered me a deal on the spot, and extended his hand, but I couldn’t shake it. Not yet. First I had to clear it with Onitsuka. I sent a wire that day to Kitami, asking if he’d have any objections to my doing side business with Nissho. Days passed. Weeks. With Onitsuka, silence meant something. No news was bad news, no news was good news—but no news was always some sort of news. WHILE WAITING TO hear back, I got a troubling call. A shoe distributor on the East Coast said he’d been approached by Onitsuka about becoming its new U.S. distributor. I made him say it again, slower. He did. He said he wasn’t trying to make me angry. Nor was he trying to help me out or give me a heads-up. He just wanted to know the status of my deal.

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

  I said I wasn’t sure “fucking him” was the best strategy. Maybe there was some middle way of mollifying Johnson, of giving him a stake in the company. But as we talked about it in greater detail, the math just didn’t pencil out. Neither Bowerman nor I wanted to surrender any portion of our stake, so Johnson’s ultimatum, even if I’d wanted to accept it, was a nonstarter. I flew to Palo Alto, where Johnson was visiting his parents, and asked for a sit-down. Johnson said he wanted his father, Owen, to join us. The meeting took place at Owen’s office, and I was immediately stunned by the similarities between father and son. They looked alike, sounded alike, even had many of the same mannerisms. The similarities ended there, however. From the start Owen was loud, aggressive, and I could see that he’d been the instigator behind this mutiny. By trade Owen was a salesman. He sold voice recording equipment, like Dictaphones, and he was darned good at it. For him, as with most salesmen, life was one long negotiation, which he relished. In other words, he was my complete opposite. Here we go, I thought. Yet another shootout with a consummate negotiator. When will it end? Before getting down to brass tacks, Owen first wanted to tell me a story. Salesmen always do. Since I was an accountant, he said, he was reminded of an accountant he’d met recently who had a topless dancer for a client. The story, I believe, revolved around whether the dancer’s silicone implants were deductible. At the punch line I laughed, to be polite, then gripped the arms of my chair and waited for Owen to stop laughing and make his opening move. He began by citing all the things his son had done for Blue Ribbon. He insisted that his son was the main reason Blue Ribbon still existed. I nodded, let him talk himself out, and resisted the urge to make eye contact with Johnson, who sat off to the side. I wondered if they’d rehearsed all this, the way Johnson and I rehearsed my pitch before my last trip to Japan. When Owen finished, when he said that, given the facts, his son obviously should be a full partner in Blue Ribbon, I cleared my throat and conceded that Johnson was a dynamo, that his work had been vital and invaluable. But then I dropped the hammer. “The truth of the matter is, we have forty thousand dollars in sales, and more than that in debt, so there’s simply nothing to divvy up here, fellas. We’re fighting over slices of a pie that doesn’t exist.” Moreover, I told Owen that Bowerman was unwilling to sell any of his stake in Blue Ribbon, and therefore I couldn’t sell any of mine. If I did I’d be surrendering majority control of the thing I’d created. That wasn’t feasible. I made my counteroffer. I would give Johnson a fifty-dollar raise. Owen stared.

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

  I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg. Penny jumped at the chance. She’d never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting. The flight was long, though, and Penny didn’t like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I’d be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn’t move, couldn’t find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped. The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I’d never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she’d gotten out to change it. Joke? Kitami? Remember? She didn’t laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster. She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A half hour later, when we pulled up to the hotel, she said she was going to use the ladies’ room while I checked us in. I hurried to the front desk, got our room keys, and sat on one of the lobby sofas to wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. I went to the door of the ladies’ room and cracked it open. “Penny?” “I’m frozen,” she said. “What?” “I’m on the floor of the ladies’ room... and I am frozen.” I went in and found her on the cold tiles, lying on her side, ladies stepping over and around her. She was having a panic attack. And severe leg cramps. The long flight, the chaos at the airport, the months of stress about Kitami—it was too much for her. I spoke calmly, told her everything would be fine, and gradually she unclenched. I helped her to her feet, guided her upstairs, and asked the hotel to send up a masseuse. As she lay on the bed, a cold washcloth on her forehead, I was worried, but a little bit grateful. I’d been on the edge of panic for weeks. Months. The sight of Penny in this state gave me a shot of adrenaline. One of us had to keep it together, for the sake of Matthew. This time it would have to be me.

• From Educated (2018)

  “I’m sure everyone here washes their hands.” That night, after I left the bathroom, I stopped at the sink in the hall and washed my hands. With soap. The next day was the first day of class. Charles had designed my course schedule. He’d signed me up for two music classes and a course on religion, all of which he said would be easy for me. Then he’d enrolled me in two more challenging courses—college algebra, which terrified me, and biology, which didn’t but only because I didn’t know what it was. Algebra threatened to put an end to my scholarship. The professor spent every lecture muttering inaudibly as he paced in front of the chalkboard. I wasn’t the only one who was lost, but I was more lost than anyone else. Charles tried to help, but he was starting his senior year of high school and had his own schoolwork. In October I took the midterm and failed it. I stopped sleeping. I stayed up late, twisting my hair into knots as I tried to wrest meaning from the textbook, then lying in bed and brooding over my notes. I developed stomach ulcers. Once, Jenni found me curled up on a stranger’s lawn, halfway between campus and our apartment. My stomach was on fire; I was shaking with the pain, but I wouldn’t let her take me to a hospital. She sat with me for half an hour, then walked me home. The pain in my stomach intensified, burning through the night, making it impossible to sleep. I needed money for rent, so I got a job as a janitor for the engineering building. My shift began every morning at four. Between the ulcers and the janitorial work, I barely slept. Jenni and Robin kept saying I should see a doctor but I didn’t. I told them I was going home for Thanksgiving and that my mother would cure me. They exchanged nervous glances but didn’t say anything. Charles said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost pathological inability to ask for help. He told me this on the phone, and he said it so quietly it was almost a whisper. I told him he was crazy. “Then go talk to your algebra professor,” he said. “You’re failing. Ask for help.” It had never occurred to me to talk to a professor—I didn’t realize we were allowed to talk to them—so I decided to try, if only to prove to Charles I could do it. I knocked on his office door a few days before Thanksgiving. He looked smaller in his office than he did in the lecture hall, and more shiny: the light above his desk reflected off his head and glasses. He was shuffling through the papers on his desk, and he didn’t look up when I sat down. “If I fail this class,” I said, “I’ll lose my scholarship.” I didn’t explain that without a scholarship, I couldn’t come back.

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

  As best I could determine, the federal government was saying that Nike owed customs duties dating back three years, by virtue of something called the “American Selling Price,” an old duty-assessing method. American Selling—what? I called Strasser into my office and thrust the letter at him. He read it, laughed. “This can’t be real,” he said, tugging his beard. “My reaction exactly,” I said. We passed it back and forth and agreed it had to be a mistake. Because if it was real, if we actually did owe $25 million to the government, we were out of business. Just like that. All this talk of going public had been a colossal waste of time. Everything since 1962 had been a waste of time. There is no finish line? This right here, this is the finish line. Strasser made a few phone calls and came back to me the next day. This time he wasn’t laughing. “It might be real,” he said. And its origin was sinister. Our American competitors, Converse and Keds, plus a few small factories—in other words, what was left of the American shoe industry—were all behind it. They’d lobbied Washington, in an effort to slow our momentum, and their lobbying had paid off, better than they’d ever dared hope. They’d managed to convince customs officials to effectively hobble us by enforcing this American Selling Price, an archaic law that dated back to the protectionist days, which preceded—some say prompted—the Great Depression. Essentially the American Selling Price law, or ASP, said that import duties on nylon shoes must be 20 percent of the manufacturing cost of the shoe—unless there’s a “similar shoe” manufactured by a competitor in the United States. In which case, the duty must be 20 percent of the competitor’s selling price . So all our competitors needed to do was make a few shoes in the United States, get them declared “similar,” then price them sky high—and boom. They could send our import duties sky high, too. And that’s just what they did. One dirty little trick, and they’d managed to spike our import duties by 40 percent—retroactively. Customs was saying we owed them import duties dating back years, to the tune of $25 million. Dirty trick or not, Strasser told me customs wasn’t joking around. We owed them $25 million, and they wanted it. Now. I put my head on my desk. A few years earlier, when my fight had been with Onitsuka, I told myself the problem was rooted in cultural differences. Some part of me, shaped by World War II, wasn’t all that surprised to be at odds with a former foe. Now I was in the position of the Japanese, at war with the United States of America. With my own government. This was one conflict I never imagined, and desperately didn’t want, and yet I couldn’t duck it. Losing meant annihilation. What the government was demanding, $25 million, was very nearly our sales number for all of 1977.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Not if you know the secret,’ he countered, leaning closer. There was a slight Jack Nicholson vibe to all this. I drew back, faintly alarmed. ‘It’s simple. If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible. Murder sorts them out.’ And he grinned. ‘Right,’ I said. There was a pause, as if it wasn’t quite the right response. I tried again. ‘Thanks.’ And I was all, Bloody hell! I’m sticking with falcons, thank you very much. I’d never thought I’d train a goshawk. Ever. I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes. Not for me, I’d thought, many times. Nothing like me. But the world had changed, and so had I. It was the end of July and I’d convinced myself that I was pretty much back to normal. But the world around me was growing very strange indeed. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea. There were imperceptible pressures. Tapping water-pipes. I’d hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects in my house. I ignored it. I’m fine, I told myself. Fine. And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote. But at night, as rain pricked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it. I sat at my computer in my rain-lit study. I telephoned friends. I wrote emails. I found a hawk-breeder in Northern Ireland with one young goshawk left from that year’s brood. She was ten weeks old, half Czech, one-quarter Finnish, one-quarter German, and she was, for a goshawk, small. We arranged that I should drive to Scotland to pick her up. I thought that I would like to have a small goshawk. ‘Small’ was the only decision I made. I didn’t think for a second there was any choice in the matter of the hawk itself. The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.

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

  By the end of his questioning, I had made a slight recovery. The adrenaline was gone and I was starting to make sense. But now it was the other side’s turn to have a go at me. Hilliard drilled down, down. He was relentless and I was soon reeling. I hemmed, hawed, couched every other word in strange qualifiers. I sounded shady, shifty, even to myself. When I talked about going through Kitami’s briefcase, when I tried to explain that Mr. Fujimoto wasn’t really a corporate spy, I saw the courtroom spectators, and the judge, look skeptical. Even I was skeptical. Several times I looked into the distance and squinted and thought, Did I really do that? I scanned the courtroom, looking for help, and saw nothing but hostile faces. The most hostile was Bork’s. He was sitting right behind the Onitsuka table, glaring. Now and then he’d lean into the Onitsuka lawyers, whispering, handing them notes. Traitor, I thought. Benedict Arnold. Prompted by Bork, presumably, Hilliard came at me from new angles, with new questions, and I lost track of the plot. I often had no idea what I was saying. The judge, at one point, scolded me for not making sense, for being overly complicated. “Just answer the questions concisely,” he said. “How concisely?” I said. “Twenty words or less,” he said. Hilliard asked his next question. I ran a hand over my face. “There’s no way I can answer that question in twenty words or less,” I said. The judge required lawyers on both sides to stay behind their tables while questioning witnesses, and to this day I think that ten yards of buffer might have saved me. I think if Hilliard had been able to get closer, he might have cracked me, might have reduced me to tears. Toward the end of his two-day cross I was numb. I’d hit bottom. The only place to go was up. I could see Hilliard decide that he’d better let me go before I started to rise and make a comeback. As I slid off the stand I gave myself a grade of D minus. Cousin Houser and Strasser didn’t disagree. THE JUDGE IN our case was the Honorable James Burns, a notorious figure in Oregon jurisprudence. He had a long, dour face, and pale gray eyes that looked out from beneath two protruding black eyebrows. Each eye had its own little thatch roof. Maybe it was because factories were so much on my mind in those days, but I often thought Judge Burns looked as if he’d been built in some far-off factory that manufactured hanging judges. And I thought he knew it, too. And took pride in it. He called himself, in all seriousness, James the Just. In his operatic basso he’d announce, “You are now in the courtroom of James the Just!” Heaven have mercy on anyone who, thinking James the Just was being a bit dramatic, dared to laugh.

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

  I was on the verge of losing it, right on the verge. Then I saw that Johnson and Woodell were already losing it, and I realized that I couldn’t afford to. Like Penny, they beat me to the panic attack punch. “Look,” I said, “fellas, this is the worst the shoes will ever be. They’ll get better. So if we can just sell these… we’ll be on our way.” Each gave a resigned shake of the head. What choice do we have? We looked out, and here they came, a mob of salesmen, walking like zombies toward our booth. They picked up the Nikes, held them to the light. They touched the swoosh. One said to another, “The hell is this?” “Hell if I know,” said the other. They started to barrage us with questions. Hey—what IS this? That’s a Nike. The hell’s a Nike? It’s the Greek goddess of victory. Greek what now? Goddess of vic— And what’s THIS? That’s a swoosh. The hell’s a swoosh? The answer flew out of me: It’s the sound of someone going past you. They liked that. Oh, they liked it a whole lot. They gave us business. They actually placed orders with us. By the end of the day we’d exceeded our grandest expectations. We were one of the smash hits of the show. At least, that’s how I saw it. Johnson, as usual, wasn’t happy. Ever the perfectionist. “The irregularities of this whole situation,” he said, left him dumbfounded. That was his phrase, the irregularities of this whole situation. I begged him to take his dumbfoundedness and irregularity elsewhere, leave well enough alone. But he just couldn’t. He walked over and button-holed one of his biggest accounts and demanded to know what was going on. “Whaddya mean?” the man said. “I mean,” Johnson said, “we show up with this new Nike, and it’s totally untested, and frankly it’s not even all that good—and you guys are buying it. What gives?” The man laughed. “We’ve been doing business with you Blue Ribbon guys for years,” he said, “and we know that you guys tell the truth. Everyone else bullshits, you guys always shoot straight. So if you say this new shoe, this Nike, is worth a shot, we believe.” Johnson came back to the booth, scratching his head. “Telling the truth,” he said. “Who knew?” Woodell laughed. Johnson laughed. I laughed and tried not to think about my many half truths and untruths with Onitsuka. GOOD NEWS TRAVELS fast. Bad news travels faster than Grelle and Prefontaine. On a rocket. Two weeks after Chicago, Kitami walked into my office. No advance notice. No heads-up. And he cut right to the car chase. “What is this, this… thing,” he demanded, “this… NEE-kay?” I made my face blank. “Nike? Oh. It’s nothing. It’s a sideline we’ve developed, to hedge our bets, in case Onitsuka does as threatened and yanks the rug out from under us.”

• From Educated (2018)

  “You need to deliver a baby on your own.” Mother shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “Besides, who would hire me when they could hire Judy?” She’d jinxed herself, thrown her gauntlet before God. Soon after, Maria told me her father had a new job in Wyoming. “Mom says your mother should take over,” Maria said. A thrilling image took shape in my imagination, of me in Maria’s role, the midwife’s daughter, confident, knowledgeable. But when I turned to look at my mother standing next to me, the image turned to vapor. Midwifery was not illegal in the state of Idaho, but it had not yet been sanctioned. If a delivery went wrong, a midwife might face charges for practicing medicine without a license; if things went very wrong, she could face criminal charges for manslaughter, even prison time. Few women would take such a risk, so midwives were scarce: on the day Judy left for Wyoming, Mother became the only midwife for a hundred miles. Women with swollen bellies began coming to the house and begging Mother to deliver their babies. Mother crumpled at the thought. One woman sat on the edge of our faded yellow sofa, her eyes cast downward, as she explained that her husband was out of work and they didn’t have money for a hospital. Mother sat quietly, eyes focused, lips tight, her whole expression momentarily solid. Then the expression dissolved and she said, in her small voice, “I’m not a midwife, just an assistant.” The woman returned several times, perching on our sofa again and again, describing the uncomplicated births of her other children. Whenever Dad saw the woman’s car from the junkyard, he’d often come into the house, quietly, through the back door, on the pretense of getting water; then he’d stand in the kitchen taking slow, silent sips, his ear bent toward the living room. Each time the woman left Dad could hardly contain his excitement, so that finally, succumbing to either the woman’s desperation or to Dad’s elation, or to both, Mother gave way. The birth went smoothly. Then the woman had a friend who was also pregnant, and Mother delivered her baby as well. Then that woman had a friend. Mother took on an assistant. Before long she was delivering so many babies that Audrey and I spent our days driving around the valley with her, watching her conduct prenatal exams and prescribe herbs. She became our teacher in a way that, because we rarely held school at home, she’d never been before. She explained every remedy and palliative. If So-and-so’s blood pressure was high, she should be given hawthorn to stabilize the collagen and dilate the coronary blood vessels. If Mrs. Someone-or-other was having premature contractions, she needed a bath in ginger to increase the supply of oxygen to the uterus. Midwifing changed my mother.

• From Educated (2018)

  I held that unnatural pose for perhaps twenty seconds, until he understood, hearing the words I couldn’t say, and moved to the floor. [image "Chapter 20 Recitals of the Fathers" file=Image00022.jpg] Charles was my first friend from that other world, the one my father had tried to protect me from. He was conventional in all the ways and for all the reasons my father despised conventionality: he talked about football and popular bands more than the End of Days; he loved everything about high school; he went to church, but like most Mormons, if he was ill, he was as likely to call a doctor as a Mormon priest. I couldn’t reconcile his world with mine so I separated them. Every evening I watched for his red jeep from my window, and when it appeared on the highway I ran for the door. By the time he’d bumped up the hill I’d be waiting on the lawn, and before he could get out I’d be in the jeep, arguing with him about my seatbelt. (He refused to drive unless I wore one.) Once, he arrived early and made it to the front door. I stammered nervously as I introduced him to Mother, who was blending bergamot and ylang-ylang, clicking her fingers to test the proportions. She said hello but her fingers kept pulsing. When Charles looked at me as if to ask why, Mother explained that God was speaking through her fingers. “Yesterday I tested that I’d get a migraine today if I didn’t have a bath in lavender,” she said. “I took the bath and guess what? No headache!” “Doctors can’t cure a migraine before it happens,” Dad chimed in, “but the Lord can!” As we walked to his jeep, Charles said, “Does your house always smell like that?” “Like what?” “Like rotted plants.” I shrugged. “You must have smelled it,” he said. “It was strong . I’ve smelled it before. On you. You always smell of it. Hell, I probably do, too, now.” He sniffed his shirt. I was quiet. I hadn’t smelled anything. —DAD SAID I WAS BECOMING “uppity.” He didn’t like that I rushed home from the junkyard the moment the work was finished, or that I removed every trace of grease before going out with Charles. He knew I’d rather be bagging groceries at Stokes than driving the loader in Blackfoot, the dusty town an hour north where Dad was building a milking barn. It bothered him, knowing I wanted to be in another place, dressed like someone else. On the site in Blackfoot, he dreamed up strange tasks for me to do, as if he thought my doing them would remind me who I was. Once, when we were thirty feet in the air, scrambling on the purlins of the unfinished roof, not wearing harnesses because we never wore them, Dad realized that he’d left his chalk line on the other side of the building. “Fetch me that chalk line, Tara,” he said.

• From Educated (2018)

  Instead I pictured Sunday school, which I attended each week and which I hated. A boy named Aaron had told all the girls that I couldn’t read because I didn’t go to school, and now none of them would talk to me. “Dad said I can go?” I said. “No,” Grandma said. “But we’ll be long gone by the time he realizes you’re missing.” She set my bowl in the sink and gazed out the window. Grandma was a force of nature—impatient, aggressive, self-possessed. To look at her was to take a step back. She dyed her hair black and this intensified her already severe features, especially her eyebrows, which she smeared on each morning in thick, inky arches. She drew them too large and this made her face seem stretched. They were also drawn too high and draped the rest of her features into an expression of boredom, almost sarcasm. “You should be in school,” she said. “Won’t Dad just make you bring me back?” I said. “Your dad can’t make me do a damned thing.” Grandma stood, squaring herself. “If he wants you, he’ll have to come get you.” She hesitated, and for a moment looked ashamed. “I talked to him yesterday. He won’t be able to fetch you back for a long while. He’s behind on that shed he’s building in town. He can’t pack up and drive to Arizona, not while the weather holds and he and the boys can work long days.” Grandma’s scheme was well plotted. Dad always worked from sunup until sundown in the weeks before the first snow, trying to stockpile enough money from hauling scrap and building barns to outlast the winter, when jobs were scarce. Even if his mother ran off with his youngest child, he wouldn’t be able to stop working, not until the forklift was encased in ice. “I’ll need to feed the animals before we go,” I said. “He’ll notice I’m gone for sure if the cows break through the fence looking for water.” —I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. I sat on the kitchen floor and watched the hours tick by. One A.M . Two. Three. At four I stood and put my boots by the back door. They were caked in manure, and I was sure Grandma wouldn’t let them into her car. I pictured them on her porch, abandoned, while I ran off shoeless to Arizona. I imagined what would happen when my family discovered I was missing. My brother Richard and I often spent whole days on the mountain, so it was likely no one would notice until sundown, when Richard came home for dinner and I didn’t. I pictured my brothers pushing out the door to search for me. They’d try the junkyard first, hefting iron slabs in case some stray sheet of metal had shifted and pinned me. Then they’d move outward, sweeping the farm, crawling up trees and into the barn attic. Finally, they’d turn to the mountain.

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

  And best friend–lawyers…? Bowerman, meanwhile, was doing nothing to put my mind at ease. He sat ramrod straight and watched the scenery. Amid the booming silence I kept my eyes on the road and mulled over Bowerman’s eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain. Always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work. But when he worked you, brother, he worked you. Bowerman’s strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a Zen-like quality to this strategy, because it was impossible. And yet it worked. Bowerman coached more sub-four-minute milers than anybody, ever. I wasn’t one of them, however, and this day I wondered if I was going to fall short once again in that crucial final lap. We found Jaqua standing out on his porch. I’d met him before, at a track meet or two, but I’d never gotten a really good look at him. Though bespectacled, and sneaking up on middle age, he didn’t square with my idea of a lawyer. He was too sturdy, too well made. I learned later that he’d been a star tailback in high school, and one of the best hundred-meter men ever at Pomona College. He still had that telltale athletic power. It came right through his handshake. “Buckaroo,” he said, grabbing me by the arm and guiding me into his living room, “I was going to wear your shoes today but I got cow shit all over ’em!” The day was typical for Oregon in January. Along with the spitting rain, a deep, wet cold permeated everything. We arranged ourselves on chairs around Jaqua’s fireplace, the biggest fireplace I ever saw, big enough to roast an elk. Roaring flames were spinning around several logs the size of hydrants. From a side door came Jaqua’s wife carrying a tray. Mugs of hot chocolate. She asked if I’d like whipped cream or marshmallows. Neither, thank you, ma’am. My voice was two octaves higher than normal. She tilted her head and gave me a pitying look. Boy, they’re going to skin you alive. Jaqua took a sip, wiped the cream from his lips, and began. He talked a bit about Oregon track, and about Bowerman. He was wearing dirty blue jeans and a wrinkled flannel shirt, and I couldn’t stop thinking how unlawyerly he looked. Now Jaqua said he’d never seen Bowerman this pumped up about an idea. I liked the sound of that. “But,” he added, “fifty-fifty is not so hot for the Coach. He doesn’t want to be in charge, and he doesn’t want to be at loggerheads with you, ever. How about we make it fifty-one–forty-nine?

• 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.