Contentment

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.

Page 184 of 189 · 20 per page

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When it got really cold, the water froze anyway, and we’d wake up to find a big icicle hanging from the faucet. We tried to thaw the pipe by running a burning piece of wood along it, but it would be frozen so solid there was nothing to do but wait for the next warm spell. When the pipe froze like that, we got our water by melting snow or icicles in the tin pan on the potbellied stove. A couple of times when there wasn’t enough snow on the ground, Mom sent me next door to borrow a pail of water from Mr. Freeman, a retired miner, who lived in the house with his grown son and daughter, Peanut and Prissy. He never turned me down outright, but he would look at me for a minute in silence, then shake his head and disappear into the house. When he passed out the bucket, he would give me another disgusted head-shake, even after I assured him that he could have as much water from us as he wanted come spring. “I hate winter,” I told Mom. “All seasons have something to offer,” she said. “Cold weather is good for you. It kills the germs.” That seemed to be true, because none of us kids ever got sick. But even if I’d woken up one morning with a raging fever, I never would have admitted it to Mom. Being sick might have meant staying home in our freezing house instead of spending the day in a toasty classroom. • • • Another good thing about the cold weather was that it kept odors to a minimum. By New Year’s we had washed our clothes only once since that first November snowfall. In the summer, Mom had bought a wringer washing machine like the one we’d had in Phoenix, and we kept it in the kitchen. When we had electricity, we washed the clothes and hung them on the front porch to dry. Even when the weather was warm, they’d have to stay out there for days, because it was always so damp in that hollow on the north side of the mountain. But then it got cold, and the one time we did our laundry, it froze on the porch. We brought the clothes inside—the socks had hardened into the shape of question marks, and the pants were so stiff you could lean them against the wall—and we banged them against the stove, trying to soften them up. “At least we don’t need to buy starch,” Lori said. Even with the cold, by January we were all so rank that Mom decided it was time to splurge: We would go to the Laundromat. We loaded our dirty clothes into pillowcases and lugged them down the hill and up Stewart Street. Mom put the loaded bag on her head, the way women in Africa do, and tried to get us to do the same.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  meals changed with the seasons, but they were always plentiful. The whole house snowed meat and drink. He even had a pen for his birds, and a pond for his fish. So the food was always fresh and always renewed. He would berate his cook if the sauces were not piquant and sharp and if the utensils - the flesh- hooks, the skimmers and skillets, the ladles and pestles - were not prepared. His table was always covered in the hall, ready for use. But he was not just a man of appetite. He presided at the sessions of the local court, and on many occasions represented the shire in the parliament house. He had been a sheriff, and a county auditor. Upon his girdle there hung a dagger, and a silk purse as white as morning milk. There had never been such a worthy freeholder. I told him so, and he laughed. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘I walk in the open way.’ There were some worthy citizens among our company. I saw a HABERDASHER, a CARPENTER, a WEAVER, a DYER and a MAKER OF TAPESTRIES, all in the livery of their parish fraternity. They were good guild folk, with their robes freshly turned out. Their knives were made of silver, not of brass, while their belts and purses were of the best manufacture. These were the citizens you would see in the guildhall, sitting at the high table, greeting each other with ‘God’s speed’ and ‘God give you grace’. Any one of them could have been an alderman. Any one of them had the income, and the property, to attain civic office. Their wives would have agreed on that point, too, and would have blamed them if they failed to take advantage of the situation. These worthy women liked to be called ‘ma dame’. They enjoyed leading the processions to the parish church, on festal days, bearing themselves with all the dignity of royalty. These worthy citizens had hired a COOK for the journey. I tasted one of his meals, a pudding of chicken, marrow bones, milk, hard-boiled eggs, ginger and other spices that he kept secret. It was delicious. He knew all about London beer, too, and he could roast or broil or fry or simmer with the best of them. He could prepare a stew, and bake a pie, with the same alacrity. There was just one problem. He had a large ulcer on his lower leg, which wept and was unsightly. Still, his chicken mousse was perfect. You can’t have everything. There was a SHIPMAN with us, hailing from the west country. I imagine that he came from Devon, judging by his accent, but I cannot be sure. He rode upon a carthorse as best he could, not being used to land transport. And he wore a robe of coarse woollen cloth, not being used to land fashion.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  She reached over and pressed my hand during the course of one affecting tale. She had performed in that game before. She knew, as they say, the ways of the dance. That was the Wife of Bath. There was also riding with us a good man of religion, the poor PARSON of a small town. He was poor in wealth, perhaps, but rich in thought and holy works. He was also a learned man, a clerk, who preached Christ’s gospel in the most faithful fashion and who taught his parishioners the lessons of devotion. He was gracious, and diligent; in adversity, as he proved many times, he was patient. He refused to excommunicate any of his flock for their failure to pay tithes to him; indeed he would rather give what little he possessed to the poor people of the parish. He did not earn a large income, or collect much from the offering plate, but he was content with what he had. He had a large parish, with the houses set far apart, but neither rain nor thunder would prevent him from visiting his parishioners in times of grief or dearth. He would pick up his sturdy staff, and take off to the furthest reaches of his parish where he would bless both rich and poor. He gave the best possible example to his flock. Perform before you preach. Good deeds are more fruitful than good words. He took this message from the gospel, but he added his own gloss - if gold may rust, then what will iron do? For if a priest be evil, what then might happen to the layman in his care? It would be a shame, as far as the priesthood is concerned, if the sheep were clean and the shepherd had the scab. A priest’s life must be a sign, pointing the way to heaven. Only then will his parishioners follow his virtuous example. So he did not hire out his post as a benefice. He did not leave his sheep in the mire while he ran off to London, seeking sinecures in the guild or chantry business. No. He stayed at home, and protected his flock from the wolves of sin and greed that threatened it. He was a true shepherd, not a religious mercenary. But although he was a holy and virtuous man, he did not treat sinners with contempt or disgust; in conversation he was never disdainful or haughty, but properly benevolent and courteous. He wanted to draw people to God with kind words and good deeds. Do you think, he used to say, that you can simply hop into heaven? He was not so benign with men and women who were obstinate in sin. He would rebuke them with stern words, whatever their standing in the world. ‘Barren corn,’ he said to one of them, ‘is known as deaf corn. A rotten nut is known as a deaf nut.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  And then there rode a FRIAR. He loved pleasure and any kind of merriment but, since he was obliged to beg for alms, he was still very resourceful. He was not importunate, but he was imposing. Of all the four orders, however, his was the most inclined to gossip and to flattery. He had arranged many marriages and sometimes, for reasons that I will not mention, he had to pay for them himself. Still, he was a pillar of the faith. He was well known to all the rich landowners of his neighbourhood and he was familiar, too, with the worthy women of his town. He had full power of confession, which, as he said himself, was superior to that of an ordinary curate; he could absolve the most awful sins. He heard the confessions very patiently, and pronounced the absolution very sweetly; he exacted the mildest of penances, especially if the penitent had something to give to his poor order. Bless me, father, for I have sinned and I have a large purse. That was the kind of thing he liked to hear. For, as he said, what is better proof of penitence than dispensing alms to the friars of God? There are many men who suffer from guilt and repentance, but are so hard of heart that they cannot weep for their sins. Therefore, instead of tears and prayers, these men must give silver to the friars. The tip of his hood, hanging down his back, was stuffed full of knives and pins which he gave away to pretty wives; whether he got anything in return, I could not say. I am only the narrator. I cannot be everywhere at once. I can say that the Friar had a very pleasant voice; he could sing well, and play on the gitern or lute. There was no one to beat him with a ballad. I heard him sing ‘Grimalkin, our cat’. He was excellent. And when he played the harp, and sang an accompaniment, his eyes shone like the stars on a clear crisp night of frost. He had skin as white as a lily, but he was not lily-livered; he was as strong as a champion at the Shrovetide games. He knew the taverns in every town, as well as every landlord and barmaid; certainly he spent more time with them than with lepers or beggar-women. Who could blame him? ‘My position as a confessor,’ he told me, ‘does not allow me to consort with the poorer sort. It would not be honourable. It would not be respectable. It would not be beneficial. I am more at my ease with the rich, and with the wealthier merchants. They are my congregation, sir.’ So, wherever there was profit to be gained, he was modest and courteous and virtuous to a fault. No one was better at soliciting funds. Even a widow with no shoes to her name would have given him something. When he greeted a poor householder with ‘In principio’, he would end up with a farthing at least. In the beginning was the coin. His total income was higher than his projected income. I will say no more. He could frolic like a puppy and, on love days when conflicts are resolved, he was always on hand to reconcile opposing parties. On those occasions he did not behave like a cloistered cleric, wearing a threadbare gown like some poor scholar, but rather like a master or a pope. His cloak was made of expensive cloth, and it encircled him as round as a bell just out of the mould. He affected a slight lisp, so that his enunciation seemed all the sweeter. So, as he said to me on the first evening, ‘God keep you in hith care.’ Oh, one thing I forgot - this worthy friar was called Hubert.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the “cause” of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity. In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, anthropologist Esther Newton suggests that the structure of impersonation reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social construction of gender takes place.68 I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity. Newton writes: At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says [Newton’s curious personification] “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.”69

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  After that, whenever Mom and Dad got in a fight, Mom brought up the ring, and Dad told her to quit her damn bellyaching. He’d say he was going to get her a ring even fancier than the one he pawned. That was why we had to find gold. To get Mom a new wedding ring. That and so we could build the Glass Castle. “DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?” Lori asked me. “Of course I do!” I said. “Don’t you?” “Sure,” she said. It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada desert. It was called the Bar None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven. We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would be easier, as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector if he hit the casinos for a while. We’d been driving for hours when he saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboose—the Blue Goose had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named the Green Caboose—and announced that he was going inside for a quick nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and joined him, even though she didn’t drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours. The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Nothing moved except some buzzards on the side of the road, pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a dog-eared comic book. “How many places have we lived?” I asked Lori. “That depends on what you mean by ‘lived,’” she said. “If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?” I thought. “If you unpack all your things,” I said. We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn’t remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars. “What do you think would happen if we weren’t always moving around?” I asked. “We’d get caught,” Lori said. • • • When Mom and Dad came out of the Bar None Bar, they brought us each a long piece of beef jerky and a candy bar. I ate the jerky first, and by the time I unwrapped my Mounds bar, it had melted into a brown, gooey mess, so I decided to save it until night, when the desert cold would harden it up again. By then we had passed through the small town beyond the Bar None Bar. Dad was driving and smoking with one hand and holding a brown bottle of beer with the other. Lori was in the front seat between him and Mom, and Brian, who was in back with me, was trying to trade me half of his 3 Musketeers for half of my Mounds.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Some of the original benches were still bolted to the unpainted wood walls, and you could see the dark, worn spots where prospectors and miners and their wives and children had sat waiting for the train, their behinds polishing the wood. Since we didn’t have money for furniture, we improvised. A bunch of huge wooden spools, the kind that hold industrial cable, had been dumped on the side of the tracks not far from our house, so we rolled them home and turned them into tables. “What kind of fools would go waste money on store-bought tables when they can have these for free?” Dad said as he pounded the tops of the spools to show us how sturdy they were. For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we’d moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn’t do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure. • • • Shortly after we moved into the depot, Mom decided that what we really needed was a piano. Dad found a cheap upright when a saloon in the next town over went out of business, and he borrowed a neighbor’s pickup to bring it home. We slid it off the pickup down a ramp, but it was too heavy to carry. To get it into the depot, Dad devised a system of ropes and pulleys that he attached to the piano in the front yard and ran through the house and out the back door, where they were tied to the pickup. The plan was for Mom to ease the truck forward, pulling the piano into the house while Dad and we kids guided it up a ramp of planks and through the front door. “Ready!” Dad hollered when we were all in our positions. “Okeydoke!” Mom shouted. But instead of easing forward, Mom, who had never quite gotten the hang of driving, hit the gas pedal hard, and the truck shot ahead. The piano jerked out of our hands, sending us lurching forward, and bounced into the house, splintering the door frame. Dad screamed at Mom to slow down, but she kept going and dragged the screeching, chord-banging piano across the depot floor and right through the rear door, splintering its frame, too, then out into the backyard, where it came to rest next to a thorny bush. Dad came running through the house. “What the Sam Hill were you doing?” he yelled at Mom. “I told you to go slow!” “I was only doing twenty-five!” Mom said. “You get mad at me when I go that slow on the highway.” She looked behind her and saw the piano sitting in the backyard. “Oopsie-daisy,” she said.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Phoebe SHE SINGS ALONG with Paul Simon as she packs her bags. Just slip out the back, Jack, Make a new plan, Stan ... She twirls over to the dresser, grabs an armload of lingerie—lace bras with matching bikinis, long satin nightgowns, teddies. She dumps everything onto her Habitat, a sleek, white, four-sided bed topped by a Mylar mirror. She’s always had wanderlust. Not like Caity, who never wants to go anywhere unless it’s to be with Lamb. She’s beginning to think it was a mistake to take her away from him all those years ago. Of course, if Caity wanted, she could live with Lamb. All she’d have to do is ask. She won’t be hurt. Really. She knows she’s not a bad mother, just not a very good one. But she and Caity get along. Sharkey, on the other hand, is a complete mystery. Grown men she can understand, she knows what they want, what they expect, but this is something else. Maybe they’re all odd at fourteen. She’s sure he’ll appreciate her when he’s older. He’ll be glad then to have a live wire for a mother. They both will be. Funny about this girl Caity took away for the summer. Another of her impulsive decisions? Last year’s friend lasted just ten days. Ten days and she’d flown home, and as far as she knew Caity hadn’t given her a second thought. After the summer, when she’d asked What happened? Caity told her, She just didn’t get it. Get what, Caity? Come on, Phoeb ... you know. But she didn’t. Ah well, it wasn’t her problem, was it? Let Lamb work it out. Ten months a year is enough to be a parent. Everyone needs time off to rejuvenate. Tonight she’ll be in New York, tomorrow night, Paris.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  MOM AND DAD CALLED regularly from pay phones to check up on us, and once or twice a month, we’d all get together at Lori’s. “It’s not such a bad life,” Mom told us after they’d been homeless for a couple of months. “Don’t you worry a lick about us,” Dad added. “We’ve always been able to fend for ourselves.” Mom explained that they’d been busy learning the ropes. They’d visited the various soup kitchens, sampling the cuisines, and had their favorites. They knew which churches passed out sandwiches and when. They’d found the public libraries with good bathrooms where you could wash thoroughly—“We wash as far down as possible and as far up as possible, but we don’t wash possible,” was how Mom put it —and brush your teeth and shave. They fished newspapers from the trash cans and looked up free events. They went to plays and operas and concerts in the parks, listened to string quartets and piano recitals in office-building lobbies, attended movie screenings, and visited museums. When they first became homeless, it was early summer, and they slept on park benches or in the bushes that lined park paths. Sometimes a cop would wake them up and tell them to move, but they’d just find some other place to sleep. During the day, they’d stash their bedrolls in the underbrush. “You can’t just live like this,” I said. “Why not?” Mom said. “Being homeless is an adventure.” • • • As fall came and the days shortened and the weather cooled, Mom and Dad began spending more time in the libraries, which were warm and comfortable, and some of which remained open well into the evening. Mom was working her way through Balzac. Dad had become interested in chaos theory and was reading Los Alamos Science and the Journal of Statistical Physics. He said it had already helped his pool game. “What are you going to do when winter comes?” I asked Mom.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  We'd moved to Lost Lake from Pasadena four months ago, on New Year's Day of 1970. Mom said a change of scenery would give us a fresh start for the new decade. Lost Lake was a pretty neat place, in my opinion. Most of the people who lived there were Mexicans who kept chickens and goats in their yards, which was where they practically lived themselves, cooking on grills and dancing to the Mexican music that blared from their radios. Dogs and cats roamed the dusty streets, and irrigation canals at the edge of town carried water to the crop fields. No one looked sideways at you if you wore your big sister's hand-me-downs or your mom drove an old brown Dart. Our neighbors lived in little adobe houses, but we rented a cinder-block bungalow. It was Mom's idea to paint the cinder blocks turquoise blue and the door and windowsills tangerine orange. "Let's not even pretend we want to blend in," she said. Mom was a singer, songwriter, and actress. She had never actually been in a movie or made a record, but she hated to be called "aspiring," and truth be told, she was a little older than the people described that way in the movie magazines she was always buying. Mom's thirty-sixth birthday was coming up, and she complained that the singers who were getting all the attention, like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, were at least ten years younger. Even so, Mom always said her big break was right around the corner. Sometimes she got callbacks after auditions, but she usually came home shaking her head and saying the guys at the studio were just tire-kickers who wanted a second look at her cleavage. So while Mom had her career, it wasn't one that produced much in the way of income—yet. Mostly we lived on Mom's inheritance. It hadn't been a ton of money to begin with, and by the time we moved to Lost Lake, we were on a pretty tight budget. When Mom wasn't taking trips into L. A.—which were draining because the drive was nearly four hours in each direction—she tended to sleep late and spend the day writing songs, playing them on one of her four guitars. Her favorite, a 1961 Zemaitis, cost about a year's rent. She also had a Gibson Southern Jumbo, a honey-colored Martin, and a Spanish guitar made from Brazilian rosewood. If she wasn't practicing her songs, she was working on a musical play based on her life, about breaking away from her stifling old-South family, jettisoning her jerk of a husband and string of deadbeat boyfriends—together with all the tire-kickers who didn't reach the boyfriend stage—and discovering her true voice in music. She called the play "Finding the Magic." Mom always talked about how the secret to the creative process was finding the magic.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Lamb SHE’S WONDERFUL, isn’t she? He can’t believe his luck, how she came into his life out of nowhere, when he least expected it. And this one’s a keeper. It’s not just the sex. Everything about her makes him happy. She’s so bright, so sweet. The kids are going to be crazy about her. He can’t believe he’s thinking this way. Thinking about a future with this woman. But he is. EVERY DAY LAMB SANG in the outdoor shower. “All You Need Is Love,” “Come Together,” “We Can Work It Out.” He was happy. He was in love. The happier he was over Abby, the unhappier Caitlin grew. And he didn’t seem to notice. One day Vix overheard Daniel telling Abby, “This place is a dump. They don’t even have a TV or a dishwasher.” You didn’t have to be a genius to see that Lamb had as hard a time making do as her parents. All you had to do was look around at the shabby furniture, the beat-up cars, the clothes they wore. They even ate poor. No meat, not even hamburgers. “I’d like you to remember you’re a guest in this house,” Abby told Daniel. “And I expect you to behave in a way that doesn’t embarrass any of us.” “I don’t see why you had to drag me here,” Daniel said. “This is supposed to be my vacation.” “You’ve been at camp all summer,” Abby told him. “You’ve had plenty of vacation, but I’ve got just these two weeks.” “Dad says your whole life is a vacation.”

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  paid you in kind. Heere is ended the Reves Tale The Cook’s Prologue The prologe of the Cokes Tale The Cook of London was so pleased with the Reeve’s tale that he sat on his horse with a silly smile on his face, just as if his back was being scratched. His name was Roger of Ware. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘as God is my judge, that was a very intriguing little story. The miller certainly got paid back for giving the scholars lodging. He should have known the saying of Solomon: “Don’t bring every man into your house.” That especially applies at night. You have to be careful about your invitations. The bosoms of the family, if I can put it that way, have to be protected. I swear to God, I never heard of a miller so well requited. He had a taste of malice in the dark. But God forbid that we should stop there. I am a poor man but, if you will condescend to listen to me, I will tell you a story. It is an adventure set in London.’ ‘Of course,’ our Host said. ‘Tell us the story, Roger. You had better make sure that it is a good one. I know you. I know your tricks. You take the gravy out of the meat pasties so that they will last longer. You sell your fish pies warmed over from the day before - and from the day before that. I have heard many customers complaining about your parsley sauce. You stuff it in the goose to disguise the taste. And your cookshop is full of flies. God may send a man good meat, but the devil may send an evil cook to destroy it. Is that not so, Roger? No. Seriously. Tell your story. I’m only joking, of course. But sometimes the truth just slips out.’ ‘Oh does it?’ said Roger. ‘I suppose you are right, Harry Bailey, as always. But, as the Dutch say, a true joke is a bad joke. Now that I think about it, I do know a very funny story about a Southwark innkeeper. Don’t worry. I won’t tell it now. I will save it for later. Before the end of our journey, I will give you all a good laugh.’ Then he laughed himself and, with a cheerful expression, he told the pilgrims this story.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  All we knew was that every couple of months, this check would show up and we’d have plenty of food for days at a time. When the electricity was on, we ate a lot of beans. A big bag of pinto beans cost under a dollar and would feed us for days. They tasted especially good if you added a spoonful of mayonnaise. We also ate a lot of rice mixed with jack mackerel, which Mom said was excellent brain food. Jack mackerel was not as good as tuna but was better than cat food, which we ate from time to time when things got really tight. Sometimes Mom popped up a big batch of popcorn for dinner. It had lots of fiber, she pointed out, and she had us salt it heavily because the iodine would keep us from getting goiters. “I don’t want my kids looking like pelicans,” she said. Once, when an extra-big royalty check came in, Mom bought us a whole canned ham. We ate off it for days, cutting thick slices for sandwiches. Since we had no refrigerator, we left the ham on a kitchen shelf. After it had been there for about a week, I went to saw myself a slab at dinnertime and found it crawling with little white worms. Mom was sitting on the sofa bed, eating the piece she’d cut. “Mom, that ham’s full of maggots,” I said. “Don’t be so picky,” she told me. “Just slice off the maggoty parts. The inside’s fine.” • • • Brian and I became expert foragers. We picked crab apples and wild blackberries and pawpaws during the summer and fall, and we swiped ears of corn from Old Man Wilson’s farm. The corn was tough—Old Man Wilson grew it as feed for his cattle—but if you chewed it enough, you could get it down. Once we caught a wounded blackbird by throwing a blanket over it and figured we could make a blackbird pie, like in the nursery rhyme. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill the bird, and anyway, it looked too scrawny to eat. We’d heard of a dish called poke salad, and since a big patch of pokeweed grew behind our house, Brian and I thought we’d give it a try. If it was any good, we’d have a whole new supply of food. We first tried eating the pokeweed raw, but it was awfully bitter, so we boiled it—singing “Poke Salad Annie” in anticipation—but it still tasted sour and stringy, and our tongues itched for days afterward. One day, hunting for food, we climbed through the window of an abandoned house. The rooms were tiny, and it had dirt floors, but in the kitchen we found shelves lined with rows of canned food. “Bo-nanza!” Brian cried out. “Feast time!” I said. The cans were coated with dust and starting to rust, but we figured the food was still safe to eat, since the whole point of canning was to preserve.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When we finished, our bunk beds looked sort of plain, so we spray-painted the sides with ornate red and black curlicues. Dad came home with a discarded four-drawer dresser, one drawer for each of us. He also built each of us a wooden box with sliding doors for personal stuff. We nailed them on the wall above our beds, and that was where I kept my geode. The third room at 93 Little Hobart Street, the kitchen, was in a category all its own. It had an electric stove, but the wiring was not exactly up to code, with faulty connectors, exposed lines, and buzzing switches. “Helen Keller must have wired this damn house,” Dad declared. He decided it was too convoluted to bother fixing. We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasions that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we’d get a wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room. The first time I got zapped, it knocked my breath out and left me twitching on the floor. We quickly learned that whenever we ventured into the kitchen, we needed to wrap our hands in the driest socks or rags we could find. If we got a shock, we’d announce it to everyone else, sort of like giving a weather report. “Big jolt from touching the stove today,” we’d say. “Wear extra rags.” One corner of the kitchen ceiling leaked like a sieve. Every time it rained, the plasterboard ceiling would get all swollen and heavy, with water streaming steadily from the center of the bulge. During one particularly fierce rainstorm that spring, the ceiling grew so fat it burst, and water and plasterboard came crashing down onto the floor. Dad never repaired it. We kids tried patching the roof on our own with tar paper, tinfoil, wood, and Elmer’s glue, but no matter what we did, the water found its way through. Eventually we gave up. So every time it rained outside, it rained in the kitchen, too. • • • At first Mom tried to make living at 93 Little Hobart Street seem like an adventure. The woman who had lived there before us left behind an old-fashioned sewing machine that you operated with a foot treadle. Mom said it would come in handy because we could make our own clothes even when the electricity was turned off. She also claimed you didn’t need patterns to sew, you could get creative and wing it. Shortly after we moved in, Mom, Lori, and I measured one another and tried to make our own dresses. It took forever, and they came out baggy and lopsided, with sleeves that were different lengths and armholes in the middle of our backs. I couldn’t get mine over my head until Mom snipped out a few stitches. “It’s stunning!” she said.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Mom and Dad could tell what kind of minerals and ore were in the ground from the color of the rock and soil, and they taught us what to look for. Iron was in the red rocks, copper in the green. There was so much turquoise—nuggets and even big chunks of it lying on the desert floor—that Brian and I could fill our pockets with it until the weight practically pulled our pants down. You could also find arrowheads and fossils and old bottles that had turned deep purple from lying under the broiling sun for years. You could find the sun-parched skulls of coyotes and empty tortoise shells and the rattles and shed skins of rattlesnakes. And you could find great big bullfrogs that had stayed in the sun too long and were completely dried up and as light as a piece of paper. On Sunday night, if Dad had money, we’d all go to the Owl Club for dinner. The Owl Club was “World Famous,” according to the sign, where a hoot owl wearing a chef’s hat pointed the way to the entrance. Off to one side was a room with rows of slot machines that were constantly clinking and ticking and flashing lights. Mom said the slot players were hypnotized. Dad said they were damn fools. “Never play the slots,” Dad told us. “They’re for suckers who rely on luck.” Dad knew all about statistics, and he explained how the casinos stacked the odds against the slot players. When Dad gambled, he preferred poker and pool—games of skill, not chance. “Whoever coined the phrase ‘a man’s got to play the hand that was dealt him’ was most certainly one piss-poor bluffer,” Dad said. The Owl Club had a bar where groups of men with sunburned necks huddled together over beers and cigarettes. They all knew Dad, and whenever he walked in, they insulted him in a loud funny way that was meant to be friendly. “This joint must be going to hell in a handbasket if they’re letting in sorry-ass characters like you!” they’d shout. “Hell, my presence here has a positively elevating effect compared to you mangy coyotes,” Dad would yell back. They’d all throw their heads back and laugh and slap one another between the shoulder blades. We always sat at one of the red booths. “Such good manners,” the waitress would exclaim, because Mom and Dad made us say “sir” and “ma’am” and “yes, please” and “thank you.” “They’re damned smart, too!” Dad would declare. “Finest damn kids ever walked the planet.” And we’d smile and order hamburgers or chili dogs and milk shakes and big plates of onion rings that glistened with hot grease. The waitress brought the food to the table and poured the milk shakes from a sweating metal container into our glasses. There was always some left over, so she kept the container on the table for us to finish.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I didn’t go hungry. Hot lunch at school cost a quarter, and we could usually afford that. When we couldn’t and I told Mrs. Ellis, my fourth-grade teacher, that I had forgotten my quarter, she said her records indicated that someone had already paid for me. Even though it seemed awfully coincidental, I didn’t want to push my luck by asking too many questions about who this someone was. I ate the hot lunch. Sometimes that lunch was all I had to eat all day, but I could get by just fine on one meal. One afternoon when Brian and I had come home to an empty fridge, we went out to the alley behind the house looking for bottles to redeem. Down the alley was the delivery bay of a warehouse. A big green Dumpster stood in the parking lot. When no one was looking, Brian and I pushed open the lid, climbed up, and dived inside to search for bottles. I was afraid it might be full of yucky garbage. Instead, we found an astonishing treasure: cardboard boxes filled with loose chocolates. Some of them were whitish and dried-out-looking, and some were covered with a mysterious green mold, but most of them were fine. We pigged out on chocolates, and from then on, whenever Mom was too busy to make dinner or we were out of food, we’d go back to the Dumpster to see if any new chocolate was waiting for us. From time to time, it was. • • • For some reason, there were no kids Maureen’s age on North Third Street. She was too young to run around with me and Brian, so she spent most of her time riding up and down on the red tricycle Dad had bought for her, and playing with her imaginary friends. They all had names, and she would talk to them for hours. They’d laugh together, carry on detailed conversations, even argue. One day she came home in tears, and when I asked her why she was crying, she said she’d gotten into a fight with Suzie Q., one of the imaginary friends. Maureen was five years younger than Brian, and Mom said that since she didn’t have any allies in the family around her age, she needed special treatment. Mom decided Maureen needed to enroll in preschool, but she said she didn’t want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. “Isn’t that a sin?” I asked Mom. “Not exactly,” Mom said. “God doesn’t mind you bending the rules a little if you have a good reason. It’s sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.” Mom’s plan was for her and Maureen to go into the dressing room of a store with an armful of new clothes for Maureen to try on. When they came out, Mom would tell the clerk she didn’t like any of the dresses.

• From City of Night (1963)

  From childhood, I had wanted to be a writer. My mother was Mexican, a beloved, beautiful woman with truly green eyes and flawless fair skin; my father was Scottish, a confusing, passionate, angry man with blue eyes, which, in my memories, seem always about to shed tears. I learned Spanish first and spoke only it until I entered school. At the age of eight I began writing stories, all titled “Long Ago.” At about thirteen, I started a novel called Time on Wings —about the French Revolution, which I researched diligently. The great enlightenment that comes only in midteens led me to “deeper” subjects, and I began an autobiographical novel titled—oh, yes— The Bitter Roots. It was about a half-Mexican, half-Scottish boy, doubly exiled in many ways: by his “mixed” blood (especially significant in Texas), by his present poverty contrasted to his parents’ memories of wealth and gentility; he was “popular” only during school hours, after which he rushed home to secret poverty. At sixteen, my “works” included many poems, among them two “epics” about angels at war in Heaven, more than 500 pages of Time on Wings, about 200 pages of The Bitter Roots, both started in pencil, continued on a portable typewriter my father, in one of his many moods of kindness within anger, bought me. I abandoned both books and went on to finish a short, strange novel titled Pablo!. Set in contemporary Mexico and the jungles of the Yucatán, it was framed about the Mayan legend of doomed love between the moon and the sun, who saw each other at the dawn of time. The main character in this “realistic fantasy”—in which animals talk, witches incite grave violence—is a youngman who tells the story of a “beautiful woman who died.” On scholarship given by the newspaper I worked for as copy-boy, I went to college in El Paso. After classes, I often climbed the nearby Cristo Rey Mountains, bordered by the Rio Grande, usually waterless here. I read a lot, eclectically; my favorite writers included Euripides, Faulkner, Poe, Margaret Mitchell, Lorca, Melville, Jeffers, Hawthorne, Camus, Milton, Ben Ames Williams, Dickens, Emily Brontë, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Donne, Gide, Henry Ballamann, Giraudoux, Pope, Djuna Barnes, Tennessee Williams, Proust, Joyce, Frank Yerby, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, James Jones, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Beckett, Farrell, Nabokov, Kathleen Winsor, Swift. I saw many, many movies. An English teacher offered to recommend me for a scholarship to Harvard, his school. But I went into the army. I didn’t tell anyone except my immediate family—and I burned most of what I had written, except for Pablo!. I had been gone only a few weeks when my father died and I returned to El Paso.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She erected a big white sign in the front yard on which she had carefully painted, in black letters with gold outlines, R. M. WALLS ART STUDIO . She turned the two front rooms of the house into a studio and gallery, and she used two bedrooms in the back to warehouse her collected works. An art supplies store was three blocks away, on North First Street, and thanks to Mom’s inheritance, we were able to make regular shopping expeditions to the store, bringing home rolls of canvas that Dad stretched and stapled onto wooden frames. We also brought back oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, gesso, a silk-screening frame, india ink, paintbrushes and pen nibs, charcoal pencils, pastels, fancy rag paper for pastel drawings, and even a wooden mannequin with movable joints whom we named Edward and who, Mom said, would pose for her when we kids were off at school. Mom decided that before she could get down to any serious painting, she needed to compile a thorough art reference library. She bought dozens of big loose-leaf binders and lots of packs of lined paper. Every subject was given its own binder: dogs, cats, horses, farm animals, woodland animals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, rural landscapes, urban landscapes, men’s faces, women’s faces, men’s bodies, women’s bodies, and hands-feet-bottoms-and-other-miscellaneous body parts. We spent hours and hours going through old magazines, looking for interesting pictures, and when we spotted one we thought might be a worthy subject of a painting, we held it up to Mom for approval. She studied it for a second and okayed or nixed it. If the photo made the grade, we cut it out, glued it on a piece of lined paper, and reinforced the holes in the paper with adhesive Os so the page wouldn’t tear out. Then we got out the appropriate three-ringed binder, added the new photograph, and snapped the rings shut. In exchange for our help on her reference library, Mom gave us all art lessons. Mom was also hard at work on her writing. She bought several typewriters—manuals and electrics—so she’d have backups should her favorite break down. She kept them in her studio. She never sold anything she wrote, but from time to time she received an encouraging rejection letter, and she thumbtacked those to the wall. When we kids came home from school, she’d usually be in her studio working. If it was quiet, she was painting or contemplating potential subjects. If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayings—one was “Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in”—which she’d titled “R. M. Walls’s Philosophy of Life.” • • • Dad joined the local electricians’ union. Phoenix was booming, and he landed a job pretty quickly.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  at me with a perplexed expression. Riding beside her was a nun who performed the duties of a chaplain, together with three priests about whom I could gather very little information. They were just priests. And then there was a MONK, and a handsome one at that. He was one of those monks who do much business outside the monastery, arranging sales and contracts with the lay-people, and he had acquired lay tastes. He loved hunting, for example. He prided himself on being strong and firm of purpose; he would make a very good abbot. He had a stable of good horses as brown as autumn berries and, when he rode, you could hear his bridle jingling as loudly as the bell calling his fellows to chapel. He was supposed to follow the rule of Saint Benedict, in the small monastery over which he had authority, but he found the precepts antiquated and altogether too strict; he preferred to follow the modern fashions of good living and good drinking. He loved a fat swan on his table. He paid no heed to the injunction that huntsmen can never be holy men, and scorned the old saying that a monk without rules is like a fish without water. Who needs water, in any case, when there is ale and wine? Why should he study in the book room off the cloister, and make his head spin with words and texts? Why should he labour and work with his own hands, as Saint Augustine ordained? What good is that to the world? Let Augustine do the work! No, this monk was a sportive horseman. He owned greyhounds that were as swift as any bird in flight. He loved tracking down and killing the hares on the lands of the monastery. He looked the part, too. His sleeves were lined and trimmed with soft squirrel fur, the most expensive of its kind. He had a great gold pin, to fasten his hood under his chin, which blossomed into an intricate knot at its head. That could not have been cheap. His head was bald, and shone as if it were made of glass; his face glowed, too, as if it had been anointed with oil. He was a fine plump specimen of a monk, in excellent condition. His eyes were very bright and mobile, gleaming like the sudden spark from a furnace under a cauldron. He was all fire and life, a sanguinary man. He was the best kind of prelate, to my thinking, and not a tormented ghost of a cleric. He seemed to enjoy my company or, rather, he seemed to enjoy himself in my company; he did not enquire about my life or my occupation. I liked that. And then there rode a FRIAR. He loved pleasure and any kind of merriment but, since he was obliged to beg for alms, he was still very resourceful. He was not importunate, but he was imposing.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The Parson’s Prologue Here folweth the myrie words of the Parsoun By the time that the Manciple had finished his story, the sun was low in the sky. It was by my calculation no more than twenty-nine degrees in height, and my shadow stood out before me. It was four o’clock, and a spring evening was about to descend upon us travellers. We were riding through the outskirts of a village when the Host reined in his horse and addressed us. ‘Good lords and ladies,’ he said, ‘our work is almost done. We lack only one tale, according to my reckoning. We have heard from every class, and every degree, in the course of our journey. My ordinance has almost been fulfilled. There is only one person left to entertain us. I hope he does it well.’ He turned to the Parson, who rode a little behind him. ‘Sir priest,’ he asked him, ‘are you a vicar or a parson? Do you have your own church or do you serve another? Speak the truth, please. It doesn’t matter what rank you hold, as long as you can tell a good story. You are the last. Open up. Sing for your supper. Let us see what you are made of. I can tell by your appearance, and your expression, that you are good at this kind of thing. Tell us a good old-fashioned fable, will you?’ ‘You will get no fable from me, Mr Bailey,’ the Parson replied. ‘Do you not recall the words of Paul to Timothy? He condemns those who stray from the path of truth and who invent lies or fantasies. Why should I give you chaff when I can offer you good wheat? So if you wish to hear morality and virtuous matter, I am your man. If you are willing to give me an audience I will do my best to mix instruction with delight. But I am a man of the south. I cannot call a lady “a bonny wee thing” or tell you something “canny”. I cannot lay claim to being much of a poet, either, so I will tell you something pleasing and suitable in prose. Now, at the end of our journey, I will bring matters to a conclusion. May the Saviour guide me and inspire me to lead you to Jerusalem. Our pilgrimage on earth is an image of the glorious pilgrimage to the celestial city. With your permission I will now begin my story. What is your opinion? ‘There is one other thing. I am no scholar. I am sure that there are some among you who are more learned and able than I am. I can offer you only the substance, the essential meaning, and I am perfectly willing to be corrected.’ We all agreed to this. It seemed good to us that we should end our journey with some virtuous text. We were happy to hear the Parson’s soft voice at the end of the day. So we asked our Host to entreat him to continue. ‘Sir priest,’ he said, ‘God be with you. Give us the fruit of your contemplations. But you must hurry. The sun is sinking in the sky. Give us much matter in a short space. May God help you in your task, good man. Now please begin.’ So the Parson rode before us, and began his story. We had entered a forest. ‘Our sweet Lord God of heaven, who wills that all men have full knowledge of His godhead and live in the sweet bliss of eternity, admonishes us with the wise words of the prophet Jeremiah. Stand upon the old paths and find from old scriptures the right way which is the good way, on this pilgrimage upon the earth . . .’ I held my horse back as the pilgrims made their way among the trees. The evening fell and the birds of the forest were silent. I could still hear him speaking of ‘the right way to Jerusalem the Celestial’ when I dismounted and walked into a small grove. There I went down on my knees and prayed.