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)

  As Mother recounted these details, the blood drained from her face until she sat, pale as an egg, her arms wrapped around herself. Audrey made chamomile tea and we put our mother to bed. When Dad came home that night, Mother told him the same story. “I can’t do it,” she said. “Judy can, but I can’t.” Dad put an arm on her shoulder. “This is a calling from the Lord,” he said. “And sometimes the Lord asks for hard things.” Mother didn’t want to be a midwife. Midwifery had been Dad’s idea, one of his schemes for self-reliance. There was nothing he hated more than our being dependent on the Government. Dad said one day we would be completely off the grid. As soon as he could get the money together, he planned to build a pipeline to bring water down from the mountain, and after that he’d install solar panels all over the farm. That way we’d have water and electricity in the End of Days, when everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness. Mother was an herbalist so she could tend our health, and if she learned to midwife she would be able to deliver the grandchildren when they came along. The midwife came to visit Mother a few days after the first birth. She brought Maria, who again followed me to my room. “It’s too bad your mother got a bad one her first time,” she said, smiling. “The next one will be easier.” A few weeks later, this prediction was tested. It was midnight. Because we didn’t have a phone, the midwife called Grandma-down-the-hill, who walked up the hill, tired and ornery, and barked that it was time for Mother to go “play doctor.” She stayed only minutes but woke the whole house. “Why you people can’t just go to a hospital like everyone else is beyond me,” she shouted, slamming the door on her way out. Mother retrieved her overnight bag and the tackle box she’d filled with dark bottles of tincture, then she walked slowly out the door. I was anxious and slept badly, but when Mother came home the next morning, hair deranged and dark circles under her eyes, her lips were parted in a wide smile. “It was a girl,” she said. Then she went to bed and slept all day. Months passed in this way, Mother leaving the house at all hours and coming home, trembling, relieved to her core that it was over. By the time the leaves started to fall she’d helped with a dozen births. By the end of winter, several dozen. In the spring she told my father she’d had enough, that she could deliver a baby if she had to, if it was the End of the World. Now she could stop. Dad’s face sank when she said this. He reminded her that this was God’s will, that it would bless our family. “You need to be a midwife,” he said.

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

  Around nine o’clock he said he needed to be getting home. Fujimoto said he’d stay and have a nightcap with us. The moment Kitami was gone, Fujimoto told us everything he knew of the plan to cut off Blue Ribbon. It wasn’t much more than I’d gleaned from the folder in Kitami’s briefcase. Still, it was nice to sit with an ally, so we had several nightcaps, and a few laughs, until Fujimoto looked at his watch and let out a scream. “Oh no! It is after eleven. The train stop running!” “Ah, no problem,” I said. “Come stay with us.” “We have a big tatami in our room,” Penny said. “You can sleep on that.” Fujimoto accepted, with many bows. He thanked me yet again for the bicycle. An hour later, there we were, in one small room, pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary about the three of us bedding down together. At sunrise I heard Fujimoto get up, cough, and stretch. He went to the bathroom, ran the water, brushed his teeth. Then he put on his clothes from the night before and slipped out. I fell back asleep but a short while later Penny went to the bathroom and when she came back to bed she was—laughing? I rolled over. Nope, she was crying. She looked as if she was on the verge of another panic attack. “He used…,” she rasped. “What?” I said. She buried her head in the pillows. “He used… my toothbrush.” AS SOON AS I got back to Oregon I invited Bowerman up to Portland to meet with me and Woodell, talk about the state of the business. It seemed like any old meeting. At some point, in the course of conversation, Woodell and I pointed out that the outer sole of the training shoe hadn’t changed in fifty years. The tread was still just waves or grooves across the bottom of the foot. The Cortez and Boston were breakthroughs in cushioning and nylon, revolutionary in upper construction, but there hadn’t been a single innovation in outer soles since before the Great Depression. Bowerman nodded. He made a note. He didn’t seem all that interested. As I recall, once we’d covered all the new business on the agenda, Bowerman told us that a wealthy alum had just donated a million dollars to Oregon, earmarked for a new track—the world’s finest. His voice rising, Bowerman described the surface he’d created with that windfall. It was polyurethane, the same spongy surface that was to be used in Munich in the 1972 Olympics, where Bowerman was on tap to be head coach of the track team. He was pleased. And yet, he said, he was far from satisfied. His runners still weren’t getting the full benefit of this new surface. Their shoes still weren’t gripping it right.

• 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. Wallace rapped his pen on the table. My credit was maxed out, he said. Officially, irrevocably, immediately. He wasn’t authorizing one more cent until I put some cash in my account and left it there. Meanwhile, henceforth, he’d be imposing strict sales quotas for me to meet. Miss one quota, he said, by even one day, and, well… He didn’t finish the sentence. His voice trailed off, and I was left to fill the silence with worst-case scenarios. I turned to White, who gave me a look. What can I do, pal? DAYS LATER WOODELL showed me a telex from Onitsuka. The big spring shipment was ready to hit the water and they wanted twenty thousand dollars. Great, we said. For once they’re shipping the shoes on time. Just one hitch. We didn’t have twenty thousand dollars. And it was clear I couldn’t go to Wallace. I couldn’t ask Wallace for change of a five. So I telexed Onitsuka and asked them to hold the shoes, please, until we brought in some more revenue from our sales force. “Please don’t think we are in financial difficulty,” I wrote. It wasn’t a lie, per se. As I told Bowerman, we weren’t broke, we just had no money. Lots of assets, no cash. We simply needed more time. Now it was my turn to say: Little more days.

• 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)

  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)

  Check marks, squiggles, lightning bolts. In the eerie glow of the moon they all looked like angry, defiant swooshes. Don’t go to sleep one night. What you most want will come to you then. I MANAGED TO fall asleep for an hour or two, and I spent most of that bleary Saturday morning on the phone, reaching out to people for advice. Everyone said Monday would be the critical day. Perhaps the most critical of my life. I would need to act swiftly and boldly. So, to prepare, I organized a summit for Sunday afternoon. We all gathered in the conference room at Blue Ribbon. There was Woodell, who must have caught the first flight out of Boston, and Hayes, and Strasser, and Cale flew up from Los Angeles. Someone brought doughnuts. Someone sent out for pizzas. Someone dialed Johnson and put him on the speakerphone. The mood in the room, at first, was somber, because that was my mood. But having my friends around, my team, made me feel better, and as I lightened up, they did, too. We talked long into the evening, and if we agreed on anything, we agreed there wasn’t an easy solution. There usually isn’t when the FBI has been notified. Or when you’ve been ousted by your bank for the second time in five years. As the summit drew to a close the mood shifted again. The air in the room grew stale, heavy. The pizza looked like poison. A consensus formed. The resolution of this crisis, whatever it might be, is in the hands of others. And of all those others, Nissho was our best hope. We discussed tactics for Monday morning. That’s when the men from Nissho were due to arrive. Ito and Sumeragi were going to pore through our books, and while there was no telling what they might think of our finances, one thing was pretty much preordained. They were going to see right away that we’d used a big chunk of their financing not to purchase shoes from overseas but to run a secret factory in Exeter. Best case, this would make them mad. Worst case, it would make them lose their minds. If they considered our accounting sleight of hand a full-fledged betrayal, they would abandon us, faster than the bank had, in which case we’d be out of business. Simple as that. We talked about hiding the factory from them. But everyone around the table agreed that we needed to play this one straight. As in the Onitsuka trial, full disclosure, total transparency, was the only course. It made sense, strategically and morally. Throughout this summit the phones rang constantly. Creditors from coast to coast were trying to find out what was going on, why our checks were bouncing like Super Balls. Two creditors in particular were livid. One was Bill Shesky, head of Bostonian Shoes.

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

  1971 “G uess who’s coming to dinner,” Woodell said. He wheeled into my office and handed me the telex. Ki-tami had accepted my invitation. He was coming to Portland to spend a few days. Then he was going to make a wider tour of the United States, for reasons he declined to share. “Visiting other potential distributors,” I said to Woodell. He nodded. It was March 1971. We vowed that Kitami was going to have the time of his life, that he would return home feeling love in his heart for America, Oregon, Blue Ribbon—and me. When we were done with him he’d be incapable of doing business with anyone else. And so, we agreed, the visit should close on a high note, with a gala dinner at the home of our prize asset—Bowerman. IN MOUNTING THIS charm offensive, naturally I enlisted Penny. Together we met Kitami’s flight, and together we whisked him straight to the Oregon coast, to her parents’ oceanfront cottage, where we’d spent our wedding night. Kitami had a companion with him, a sort of bag carrier, personal assistant, amanuensis, named Hiraku Iwano. He was just a kid, naïve, innocent, in his early twenties, and Penny had him eating out of her hand before we hit Sunset Highway. We both slaved to give the two men an idyllic Pacific Northwest weekend. We sat on the porch with them and breathed in the sea air. We took them for long walks on the beach. We fed them world-class salmon and poured them glass after glass of good French wine. We tried to focus most of our attention on Kitami, but both Penny and I found it easier to talk to Iwano, who read books and seemed guileless. Kitami seemed like a man who was importing guile by the boatload. Monday, bright and early, I drove Kitami back to Portland, to First National Bank. Just as I was determined to charm him on this trip, I thought that he could be helpful in charming Wallace, that he could vouch for Blue Ribbon and make credit easier to get. White met us in the lobby and walked us into a conference room. I looked around. “Where’s Wallace?” I asked. “Ah,” White said, “he won’t be able to join us today.” What? That was the whole point of visiting the bank. I wanted Wallace to hear Kitami’s ringing endorsement. Oh well, I thought—good cop will just have to relay the endorsement to bad cop. I said a few preliminary words, expressed confidence that Kitami could bolster First National’s faith in Blue Ribbon, then turned the floor over to Kitami, who scowled and did the one thing guaranteed to make my life harder. “Why do you not give my friends more money ?” he said to White. “W-w-what?” White said. “Why do you refuse to extend credit to Blue Ribbon?” Kitami said, pounding his fist on the table. “Well now—” White said. Kitami cut him off. “What kind of bank is this?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Of course, I wish I could take you out to my new apartment—in Hollywood (though actually it’s closer to Beverly Hills) —but as a matter of fact, I havent really occupied it, yet . You see, theyre remodeling it and the interior decorators want it to be just so —you know how those girls are—and so, in the meantime, Im still living on Spring Street ....” We walked out together, Pauline shrieking to attract attention as she makes her exit. At the landing leading up the steps to the street, I glanced back at the man. He was still looking at me. This time, for once, it turned out Pauline is telling the truth. She was indeed loaded. We took a cab to a place on upper Broadway. The bar turns out to be mostly a spadebar. On the dance floor, spade chicks with classic butts squeezed into gold and orange and red hugging dresses dance with gleamingfaced Negro men. This is not a queer bar—it is an outcast bar—Negroes and vagrant whites, heads and hypes, dikes and queens. On the dancefloor, too, lesbians—the masculine ones, the bull-dikes—dance with hugely effeminate queens, the roles of course reversed but technically legal—broadshouldered women and waspwaist-squeezed youngmen. The dikes are leading the queens. “Isnt this positively mad, honey?” says Pauline, playing for tonight—or until her money lasts—the wealthy woman out on the town with her “escort.” “I have a fine connection here, baby, and we’ll get tanked on bees and pod and then I’ll really show you a sex-scene . Ive been waiting since the first time I saw you.... Huccome youve never made it with me, baby?—youre the only one Ive ever loved!... My God! Those queens dancing with lesbians —ugh! They must be perverts!” I went to the head, and there, sweat-bright spade and fay faces focus intensely on dice, cramped bodies in the tiny room exploding with the odor of maryjane smoke. A droopy-eyed Negro hands me a tiny joint, offers what is hardly a roach now: “Turn on?” “You took so long,” said Pauline when I returned to the table where we were now sitting. “I hope nobody was being naughty with you. I’ll scratch their eyes out!” She goes on like this—but I wasnt really listening. I was still thinking about that man at the Hodge Podge. Somehow, whatever had happened with him, whenever and wherever it had happened, or not happened, was important. I knew that much with certainty. “Why are you so nervous, baby?” Pauline asks me. And then I remembered, suddenly and distinctly. Abruptly, I got up from the table. “Where are you going?”

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Description: First Edition. | Colorado Springs : WaterBrook, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025074 | ISBN 9781601429643 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781601429667 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Christian women—Religious life. | Thought and thinking—Religious aspects—Christianity. Classification: LCC BV4527 .A448 2020 | DDC 248.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025074 a_prh_5.4_141612160_c0_r4 Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. —ROMANS 12:2 This means it’s possible. Contents Cover Title Page Copyright [image file=Image00022.jpg] ALL THE THOUGHTS 1. Thinking About Thinking 2. What We Believe 3. Spiraling Out 4. Breaking Free 5. Where Thoughts Are Captured 6. Make the Shift [image file=Image00023.jpg] TAKING DOWN THE ENEMIES OF OUR MINDS 7. Drawing Battle Lines 8. Holding Space for Silence I Choose to Be Still with God 9. Lifelines I Choose to Be Known 10. Unafraid I Choose to Surrender My Fears to God 11. A Beautiful Interruption I Choose to Delight in God 12. Less Important I Choose to Serve God and Others 13. Not Overcome I Choose to Be Grateful 14. Run Your Race I Choose to Seek the Good of Others [image file=Image00024.jpg] THINKING AS JESUS THINKS 15. Who Do You Think You Are? 16. Dangerous Thinking Dedication Acknowledgments Notes [image "Part One: All the Thoughts" file=Image00025.jpg] 1 Thinking About Thinking “Take every thought captive.” They say authors write books for two reasons: either the author is an expert on the subject, or the subject makes the author desperate enough to spend years finding the answers. The latter most definitely describes me. This morning I woke up intending to write to you. But first, I thought, I need to spend time with God. So what did I do? I picked up my phone. I noticed an email about something I was working on, in which the sender was “constructively” critical of my work. Just as I decided to set my phone down, something else stole my attention…and the next thing I knew, I was on Instagram, noticing others’ wins and glories contrasted with my work in process that seemed to not be measuring up. In minutes with my phone, I decided that I was an inadequate writer, I was spending my life chasing things that mean nothing because I am nothing, I have nothing to say. I was spiraling fast into discouragement. Then my husband, Zac, came in happy, having just met with God, and I snapped at him. My spiral began to spin faster and more chaotically. In less than an hour, I had diminished myself, criticized all my work, decided to quit ministry, ignored God, and pushed away my greatest advocate and friend. Wow. Brilliant, Jennie. And that was only this morning?

• From Educated (2018)

  They’ll shut down.” “Can’t they fix it?” “Nope, can’t be done,” Dad said. “Man trusted his own strength, and his strength was weak.” At church, Dad warned everyone about Y2K. He advised Papa Jay to get strong locks for his gas station, and maybe some defensive weaponry. “That store will be the first thing looted in the famine,” Dad said. He told Brother Mumford that every righteous man should have, at minimum, a ten-year supply of food, fuel, guns and gold. Brother Mumford just whistled. “We can’t all be as righteous as you, Gene,” he said. “Some of us are sinners!” No one listened. They went about their lives in the summer sun. Meanwhile, my family boiled and skinned peaches, pitted apricots and churned apples into sauce. Everything was pressure-cooked, sealed, labeled, and stored away in a root cellar Dad had dug out in the field. The entrance was concealed by a hillock; Dad said I should never tell anybody where it was. One afternoon, Dad climbed into the excavator and dug a pit next to the old barn. Then, using the loader, he lowered a thousand-gallon tank into the pit and buried it with a shovel, carefully planting nettles and sow thistle in the freshly tossed dirt so they would grow and conceal the tank. He whistled “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story while he shoveled. His hat was tipped back on his head, and he wore a brilliant smile. “We’ll be the only ones with fuel when The End comes,” he said. “We’ll be driving when everyone else is hotfooting it. We’ll even make a run down to Utah, to fetch Tyler.” —I HAD REHEARSALS MOST NIGHTS at the Worm Creek Opera House, a dilapidated theater near the only stoplight in town. The play was another world. Nobody talked about Y2K. The interactions between people at Worm Creek were not at all what I was used to in my family. Of course I’d spent time with people outside my family, but they were like us: women who’d hired Mother to midwife their babies, or who came to her for herbs because they didn’t believe in the Medical Establishment. I had a single friend, named Jessica. A few years before, Dad had convinced her parents, Rob and Diane, that public schools were little more than Government propaganda programs, and since then they had kept her at home. Before her parents had pulled Jessica from school, she was one of them, and I never tried to talk to her; but after, she was one of us. The normal kids stopped including her, and she was left with me. I’d never learned how to talk to people who weren’t like us—people who went to school and visited the doctor. Who weren’t preparing, every day, for the End of the World. Worm Creek was full of these people, people whose words seemed ripped from another reality.

• From Educated (2018)

  I sat slowly, tensely, as if the seat were made of needles. “I’m Charles,” he said. There was a pause while he waited for me to give my name, but I didn’t. “I saw you in the last play,” he said after a moment. “I wanted to tell you something.” I braced myself, for what I wasn’t sure, then he said, “I wanted to tell you that your singing is about the best I ever heard.” —I CAME HOME ONE AFTERNOON from packing macadamias to find Dad and Richard gathered around a large metal box, which they’d hefted onto the kitchen table. While Mother and I cooked meatloaf, they assembled the contents. It took more than an hour, and when they’d finished they stood back, revealing what looked like an enormous military-green telescope, with its long barrel set firmly atop a short, broad tripod. Richard was so excited he was hopping from one foot to the other, reciting what it could do. “Got a range more than a mile! Can bring down a helicopter!” Dad stood quietly, his eyes shining. “What is it?” I asked. “It’s a fifty-caliber rifle,” he said. “Wanna try it?” I peered through the scope, searching the mountainside, fixing distant stalks of wheat between its crosshairs. The meatloaf was forgotten. We charged outside. It was past sunset; the horizon was dark. I watched as Dad lowered himself to the frozen ground, positioned his eye at the scope and, after what felt like an hour, pulled the trigger. The blast was thunderous. I had both palms pressed to my ears, but after the initial boom I dropped them, listening as the shot echoed through the ravines. He fired again and again, so that by the time we went inside my ears were ringing. I could barely hear Dad’s reply when I asked what the gun was for. “Defense,” he said. The next night I had a rehearsal at Worm Creek. I was perched on my crate, listening to the monologue being performed onstage, when Charles appeared and sat next to me. “You don’t go to school,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You should come to choir. You’d like choir.” “Maybe,” I said, and he smiled. A few of his friends stepped into the wing and called to him. He stood and said goodbye, and I watched him join them, taking in the easy way they joked together and imagining an alternate reality in which I was one of them. I imagined Charles inviting me to his house, to play a game or watch a movie, and felt a rush of pleasure. But when I pictured Charles visiting Buck’s Peak, I felt something else, something like panic. What if he found the root cellar? What if he discovered the fuel tank? Then I understood, finally, what the rifle was for.

• 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.