Grief

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 228 of 263 · 20 per page

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

  To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking. I THINK OF others who didn’t make it this far. Bowerman died on Christmas Eve, 1999, in Fossil. He’d gone back to his hometown, as we always suspected he would. He still owned his house on the mountaintop above campus, but he chose to quit it, to move with Mrs. Bowerman to a Fossil retirement home. He needed to be where he started—did he tell someone that? Or am I imagining him muttering it to himself? I remember when I was a sophomore, we had a dual meet with Washington State, in Pullman, and Bowerman made the bus driver go through Fossil so he could show us. I immediately thought of that sentimental detour when I heard that he’d lain down on the bed and never got up. It was Jaqua who phoned. I was reading the paper, the Christmas tree blinking blinking blinking. You always remember the strangest details from such moments. I choked into the phone, “I’ll have to call you back,” then walked upstairs to my den. I turned out all the lights. Eyes shut, I replayed a million different moments, including that long-ago lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Deal? Deal. An hour passed before I could go back downstairs. At some point that night I gave up the Kleenex and just draped a towel over my shoulder. A move I learned from another beloved coach—John Thompson. Strasser passed suddenly, too. Heart attack, 1993. He was so young, it was a tragedy, all the more so because it came after we’d had a falling out. Strasser had been

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

  He snuck me out of the house early this morning and drove me to the airport.” I wondered if she really loved me, or just saw me as a chance to rebel. DURING THE DAY, while I was busy working on Blue Ribbon stuff, Sarah would hang out with my mother. At night she and I would go downtown for dinner and drinks. On the weekend we skied Mount Hood. When it was time for her to return home, I was bereft again. Dear Sarah, I miss you. I love you. She wrote back right away. She missed me, too. She loved me, too. Then, with the winter rains, there was a slight cooling in her letters. They were less effusive. Or so I thought. Maybe it’s just my imagination, I told myself. But I had to know. I phoned her. It wasn’t my imagination. She said she’d given it a lot of thought and she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She wasn’t sure I was sophisticated enough for her. “Sophisticated,” that was the word she used. Before I could protest, before I could negotiate, she hung up. I took out a piece of paper and typed her a long letter, begging her to reconsider. She wrote back right away. No sale. THE NEW SHIPMENT of shoes arrived from Onitsuka. I could hardly bring myself to care. I spent weeks in a fog. I hid in the basement. I hid in the servants’ quarters. I lay on my bed and stared at my blue ribbons. Though I didn’t tell them, my family knew. They didn’t ask for details. They didn’t need them, or want them. Except my sister Jeanne. While I was out one day she went into the servants’ quarters and into my desk and found Sarah’s letters. Later, when I came home and went down to the basement, Jeanne came and found me. She sat on the floor beside me and said she’d read the letters, all of them, carefully, concluding with the final rejection. I looked away. “You’re better off without her,” Jeanne said. My eyes filled with tears. I nodded thanks. Not knowing what to say, I asked Jeanne if she’d like to do some part-time work for Blue Ribbon. I was pretty far behind, and I could sure use some help. “Since you’re so interested in mail,” I said hoarsely, “maybe you’d enjoy doing some secretarial work. Dollar and a half an hour?” She chuckled. And thus my sister became the first-ever employee of Blue Ribbon.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She sleeps all the way to Suffolk in my car. Tony’s house is tucked behind trees on a road between two fields and lines of hedgerow elms. I pull into the drive, take Mabel onto my glove and walk across the lawn. He comes out to greet me. We walk together to the high, white-walled aviary behind his mews. He unlocks the door and I step through. Her new home is huge. There are bark-covered branches, and perches upholstered in astroturf to massage her feet. There is a bath, a chute through which Tony will drop her food; weedy undergrowth, gravel, a nest-ledge to lie on, a patch of warming sun. Above the wire-mesh roof the Suffolk sky. ‘Well, Mabes,’ I say, unhooding her, ‘This is your home for the next few months.’ She looks down at my hand as it pulls each jess free from her anklets: now she stands on my fist wearing none at all. She cocks an eye up to the moving clouds, then examines her surroundings. She follows the line of the roof to the corners, peers at the cinderblock foundation walls. For a moment we are back in the darkened room on that first day of our meeting. I remember that moment when the hawk first forgot me and flinch inwardly at the knowledge that now she will forget me again. ‘I’ll see you after the summer’s over,’ I say. Forgetting. Remembering. I put my hand out, drag the tips of my fingers down her teardrop-splashed front. The new feathers she will grow will be barred stone-grey and white. The tones of earth and ochre will disappear. Her eyes, when I see her next, will be the deep orange of glowing coals. Everything changes. Everything moves. I lift my hand, cast her towards the nearest perch. She flies, lands, shakes her tail, sees a branch above her and leaps upon it. She’s facing away from me. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. No answer can come, and there is nothing to explain. I turn and walk out of the door, leaving the hawk behind. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Come inside the house,’ he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm. Postscript

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The Victorian terrace loomed and swayed in the summer dusk. I walked to my door, box in my arms. I don’t remember opening the box that night. What I remember is my bare feet treading on carpet and the weight of the hawk on my fist. Her shape, long and haunted, and the hitch of her nervous shoulders as she stepped backwards onto the shadow of the bowperch on my living-room floor. I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, ‘reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost’. Yes, holding the hawk for the first time felt like that. Exactly like that. Mutely I crawled up the stairs and fell into bed. The hawk was here, the journey was over. That night I dreamed of my father. It wasn’t the usual dream of a family reunited. In the dream I’m searching for something in a house, an empty house with pale squares on the walls where pictures should be. I can’t find what I am looking for. I open an upstairs door onto a room that is not like the others. Three white walls run with water and the far wall is gone. No wall at all: just air, falling into the pale violet of a city evening. Below me is a bombsite. Tons of bricks and rubble, rosebay willowherb blooming in drifts between broken rafters and spars that are ruined chairs and the shadows between all these things are thickening to night. But they are not what I am looking at. Because standing on top of the tallest pile of bricks is a small boy with sandy hair. His face is turned away, but I recognise him immediately, and not just because he’s wearing the same short trousers and lumpy grey jacket in a photograph in our family album. It is my father. As soon as I see him I know where I am. This is Shepherd’s Bush, where he’d run wild as a boy, clambering over bombsites with his friends, collecting things, salvaging them, hiding, watching. ‘We used to bomb bricks with bombs made of bricks,’ he’d told me once. ‘There wasn’t much else to play with.’ And then the boy turns, looks up at me standing in the ruined house, and I know he is going to say something. But there are no words. Instead, he points with one arm. Points up. I look. There’s an aeroplane up there, thousands of feet above us, so high its fuselage and wings are still lit by the setting sun. There’s no engine noise, no sound, nothing moving anywhere else. Just this small point of light crossing the sky until it passes over and is lost in the shadow of the world. And I look down again, and the boy that was my father is gone. 7 Invisibility

• From Educated (2018)

  “The hospital called,” she said. “Grandma’s gone.” —MY FATHER LOST HIS appetite for the business. He started getting out of bed later and later, and when he did, it seemed it was only to insult or accuse. He shouted at Shawn about the junkyard and lectured Mother about her management of the employees. He snapped at Audrey when she tried to make him lunch, and barked at me for typing too loudly. It was as if he wanted to fight, to punish himself for the old woman’s death. Or perhaps the punishment was for her life, for the conflict that had been between them, which had only ended now she was dead. The house slowly filled again. The phones were reconnected, and women materialized to answer them. Dad’s desk remained empty. He spent his days in bed, gazing up at the stucco ceiling. I brought him supper, as I had as a child, and wondered now, as I’d wondered then, whether he knew I was there. Mother moved about the house with the vitality of ten people, mixing tinctures and essential oils, directing her employees between making funeral arrangements and cooking for every cousin and aunt who dropped in unannounced to reminisce about Grandma. As often as not I’d find her in an apron, hovering over a roast with a phone in each hand, one a client, the other an uncle or friend calling to offer condolences. Through all this my father remained in bed. Dad spoke at the funeral. His speech was a twenty-minute sermon on God’s promises to Abraham. He mentioned my grandmother twice. To strangers it must have seemed he was hardly affected by the loss of his mother, but we knew better, we who could see the devastation. When we arrived home from the service, Dad was incensed that lunch wasn’t ready. Mother scrambled to serve the stew she’d left to slow-cook, but after the meal Dad seemed equally frustrated by the dishes, which Mother hurriedly cleaned, and then by his grandchildren, who played noisily while Mother dashed about trying to hush them. That evening, when the house was empty and quiet, I listened from the living room as my parents argued in the kitchen. “The least you could do,” Mother said, “is fill out these thank-you cards. It was your mother, after all.” “That’s wifely work,” Dad said. “I’ve never heard of a man writing cards.” He had said the exact wrong thing. For ten years, Mother had been the primary breadwinner, while continuing to cook meals, clean the house, do the laundry, and I had never once heard her express anything like resentment. Until now. “Then you should do the husband’s work, ” she said, her voice raised. Soon they were both shouting. Dad tried to corral her, to subdue her with a show of anger, the way he always had, but this only made her more stubborn. Eventually she tossed the cards on the table and said, “Fill them out or don’t.

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

  I knew then that the only answer to such poverty is entry-level jobs. Lots of them. I didn’t form this theory on my own. I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always, always benefits both trading nations. Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon. By 1997 we had four. I was very proud. And when I learned that we were to be honored and celebrated by the Vietnamese government as one of the nation’s top five generators of foreign currency, I felt that I simply had to visit. What a wrenching trip. I don’t know if I’d appreciated the full depth of my hatred for the war in Vietnam until I returned twenty-five years after the peace, until I joined hands with our former antagonists. At one point my hosts graciously asked what they could do for me, what would make my trip special or memorable. I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t want them to go to any trouble, I said. But they insisted. Okay, I said, okay, I’d like to meet eighty-six-year-old General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Vietnamese MacArthur, the man who single-handedly defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese. My hosts stared in amazed silence. Slowly they rose and excused themselves and stood off in a corner, conversing in frantic Vietnamese. After five minutes they came back. Tomorrow, they said. One hour. I bowed deeply. Then counted the minutes until the big meeting. The first thing I noticed as General Giáp entered the room was his size. This brilliant fighter, this genius tactician who’d organized the Tet Offensive, who’d planned those miles and miles of underground tunnels, this giant of history, came up to my shoulders. He was, maybe , five foot four. And humble. No corncob pipe for Giáp. I remember that he wore a dark business suit, like mine. I remember that he smiled as I did—shyly, uncertainly. But there was an intensity about him. I’d seen that kind of glittery confidence in great coaches, and great business leaders, the elite of the elite. I never saw it in a mirror. He knew I had questions. He waited for me to ask them. I said simply: “How did you do it?” I thought I saw the corners of his mouth flicker. A smile? Maybe? He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.” THOUGHTS OF ASIA always lead back to Nissho. Where on earth would we have been without Nissho?

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

  For this “overreaction,” Bowerman was severely reprimanded by Olympic officials. He’d exceeded his authority, they said. In the heat of the crisis they made time to summon Bowerman to their headquarters. Thank goodness Jesse Owens, the hero of the last German Olympics, the man who “beat” Hitler, went with Bowerman and voiced his support for Bowerman’s actions. That forced the bureaucrats to back off. Bowerman and I sat and stared at the river for a long while, saying little. Then, his voice scratchy, Bowerman told me that those 1972 Olympics marked the low point of his life. I’d never heard him say a thing like that, and I’d never seen him look like that. Defeated. I couldn’t believe it. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us. Soon after that day Bowerman announced that he was retiring from coaching. A GRIM TIME. Skies were grayer than usual, and low. There was no fall. We just woke up and winter was upon us. The trees went overnight from full to bare. Rain fell without stop. At last, a needed boon. We got word that a few hours north, in Seattle, at the Rainier International Classic, a fiery Romanian tennis player was destroying every opponent in his path, and doing it in a brand-new pair of Nike Match Points. The Romanian was Ilie Nastase, aka “Nasty,” and every time he hit his patented overhead smash, every time he went up on his toes and stroked another unreturnable serve, the world was seeing our swoosh. We’d known for some time that athlete endorsements were important. If we were going to compete with Adidas—not to mention Puma and Gola, and Diadora and Head, and Wilson and Spalding, and Karhu and Etonic and New Balance and all the other brands popping up in the 1970s—we’d need top athletes wearing and talking up our brand. But we still didn’t have money to pay top athletes. (We had less money than ever before.) Nor did we know the first thing about getting to them, persuading them that our shoe was good, that it would soon be better, that they should endorse us at a discounted price. Now here was a top athlete already wearing Nike, and winning in it. How hard could it be to sign him? I found the number for Nastase’s agent. I phoned and offered him a deal. I said I’d give him $5,000—I gagged as I said it—if his boy would wear our stuff. He countered with $15,000. How I hated negotiating. We settled on $10,000. I felt that I was being robbed. Nastase was playing a tourney that weekend in Omaha, the agent said. He suggested I fly out with the papers.

• From Educated (2018)

  But if you don’t, no one will.” Then she marched downstairs. Dad followed, and for an hour their shouts rose up through the floor. I’d never heard my parents shout like that—at least, not my mother. I’d never seen her refuse to give way. The next morning I found Dad in the kitchen, dumping flour into a glue-like substance I assumed was supposed to be pancake batter. When he saw me, he dropped the flour and sat at the table. “You’re a woman, ain’tcha?” he said. “Well, this here’s a kitchen.” We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance that had sprung up between us—how natural those words sounded to his ears, how grating to mine. It wasn’t like Mother to leave Dad to make his own breakfast. I thought she might be ill and went downstairs to check on her. I’d barely made it to the landing when I heard it: deep sobs coming from the bathroom, muffled by the steady drone of a blow-dryer. I stood outside the door and listened for more than a minute, paralyzed. Would she want me to leave, to pretend I hadn’t heard? I waited for her to catch her breath, but her sobs only grew more desperate. I knocked. “It’s me,” I said. The door opened, a sliver at first, then wider, and there was my mother, her skin glistening from the shower, wrapped in a towel that was too small to cover her. I had never seen my mother this way, and instinctively I closed my eyes. The world went black. I heard a thud, the cracking of plastic, and opened my eyes. Mother had dropped the blow-dryer and it had struck the floor, its roar now doubled as it rebounded off the exposed concrete. I looked at her, and as I did she pulled me to her and held me. The wet from her body seeped into my clothes, and I felt droplets slide from her hair and onto my shoulder. [image "Chapter 33 Sorcery of Physics" file=Image00035.jpg] I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. I remember the river, which was calm; I remember the slow drift of autumn leaves resting on the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I wrote in order to forget. Audrey asked me to stay. Shawn was too strong, she said, too persuasive, for her to confront him alone. I told her she wasn’t alone, she had Mother. Audrey said I didn’t understand.

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

  BY THE NEXT morning the news was everywhere. Internet, radio, newspapers, TV, all blaring the bare facts. Penny and I pulled the blinds, locked the doors, cut ourselves off. But not before our niece Brittany moved in with us. To this day I believe that she saved our lives. Every Nike athlete wrote, emailed, phoned. Every single one. But the first was Tiger. His call came in at 7:30 a.m. I will never, ever forget. And I will not stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence. Another early caller was Alberto Salazar, the ferociously competitive distance runner who won three straight New York City Marathons in Nikes. I will always love him for many things, but above all for that show of concern. He’s a coach now, and recently he brought a few of his runners to Beaverton. They were having a light workout, in the middle of Ro-naldo Field, when someone turned and saw Alberto on the ground, gasping for air. A heart attack. He was legally dead for fourteen minutes, until paramedics revived him and rushed him to St. Vincent’s. I know that hospital well. My son Travis was born there, my mother died there, twenty-seven years after my father. In his final six months I was able to take my father on a long trip, to put to rest the eternal question of whether he was proud, to show him that I was proud of him. We went around the world, saw Nikes in every country we visited, and with every appearance of a swoosh his eyes shone. The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory. Fathers and sons, it’s always been the same, since the dawn of time. “My dad,” Arnold Palmer once confided to me at the Masters, “did all he could to discourage me from being a professional golfer.” I smiled. “You don’t say.” Visiting Alberto, walking into the lobby of St. Vincent’s, I was overcome with visions of both my parents. I felt them at my elbow, at my ear. Theirs was a strained relationship, I believe. But, as with an iceberg, everything was below the surface. In their house on Claybourne Street, the tension was concealed, and calm and reason almost always prevailed, because of their love for us. Love wasn’t spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That’s their legacy. That’s their lasting victory.

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

  Many were wearing Pre Montreals. (Many more were wearing Exeter-made products like the Triumph and the Vainqueur. Hayward that day looked like a Nike showroom.) It was well known that these trials would have been the start of Pre’s epic comeback. After being knocked down in Munich, he’d have risen again, no doubt, and the rising would have begun right here, right now. Each race prompted the same thoughts, the same image: Pre bursting ahead of the pack. Pre diving through the tape. We could see it. We could see him flush with victory. If only, we kept saying, our voices choking, if only. At sunset the sky turned red, white, and a deep blackish blue. But it was still bright enough to read by as the runners in the 10,000 meters gathered at the starting line. Penny and I tried to clear our minds as we stood, hands clasped as if in prayer. We were counting on Shorter, of course. He was extremely talented, and he’d been the last person to see Pre alive—it made sense that he’d be the one to carry Pre’s torch. But we also had Nikes on Craig Virgin, a brilliant young runner from the University of Illinois, and on Garry Bjorklund, a lovable veteran from Minnesota, who was trying to come back from surgery to remove a loose bone in his foot. The gun went off, the runners shot forward, all bunched tight, and Penny and I were bunched tight, too, oohing and aahing with every stride. There wasn’t an inch of separation in the pack until the halfway mark, when Shorter and Virgin violently pushed ahead. In the jostling, Virgin accidentally stepped on Bjorklund and sent his Nike flying. Now Bjorklund’s tender, surgically repaired foot was bare, exposed, smacking the hard track with every stride. And yet Bjorklund didn’t stop. He didn’t falter. He didn’t even slow down. He just kept running, faster and faster, and that blazing show of courage won over the crowd. I think we cheered for him as loudly as we’d cheered for Pre the year before. Entering the final lap, Shorter and Virgin were in front. Penny and I were jumping up and down. “We’re going to get two,” we said, “we’re going to get two!” And then we got three. Shorter and Virgin took first and second, and Bjorklund plunged ahead of Bill Rodgers at the tape to take third. I was covered with sweat. Three Olympians… in Nikes! The next morning, rather than take a victory lap at Hayward, we set up camp at the Nike store. While Johnson and I mingled with customers, Penny manned the silk-screen machine and churned out Nike T-shirts. Her craftsmanship was exquisite; all day long people came in to say they’d seen someone wearing a Nike T-shirt on the street and they just had to have one for themselves.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Miss Destiny says to me. “She offered him a Cadillac! Pauline! Who hasnt even got enough to keep her dragclothes in proper shape!... But nevuhmind, let him be gullible (thats someone who believes untrue stories). And, besides,” she says with a toss of her head, “I flipped over Sandy, a bad new stud.... But Chuck’s still jealous of me—he knows Im looking for a new husband—now that poor Sandy (my most recent ex, dear) got busted, and I know he didnt have any hard narcotics on him like they say he did—they planted them in his car—... Shake that moneymakuh, honey!—” (this to a spadequeen swishing by) “—and I still love my Sandy—did the best I could, tried to bail him out, hire a good attuhnee, but it was no good—they laughed when I said he was my husband. The quality of muhcee is mighty strained indeed—as the dear Portia said (from Shakespeare, my dears—a very Great writer who wrote ladies’ roles for dragqueens in his time). And it breaks my heart to think of my poor Sandy in the joint away from women all that time, him so redhot he might turn queer, but oh no not my Sandy, hes all stud. If I know him, he’ll come out of the joint rich, hustling the guards.... And I tried to be faithful—but the years will be so long—and what can a girl do, and restless the way I am?—restless and crying muhself to sleep night aftuh night, missing him—missing him. But my dears, I realize I Will Have To Go On—he would want it that way. Well, queens have died eaten by the ah worm of ah love, as the Lovely Cleopatra said—she was The Queen of Ancient Egypt—” (quoting, misquoting Shakespeare—saying it was a lovely he-roine who said it in the play—taking it for granted—a safe assumption in her world—that no one will understand her anyway). “Then Miss Thing said to me (Miss Thing is a fairy perched on my back like some people have a monkey or a conscience),” she explained, “well, Miss Thing said to me, ‘Miss Destiny dear, dont be a fool, fix your lovey rair and find you a new husband—make it permanent this time by really getting Married—and even if you have to stretch your unemployment, dont allow him to push or hustle’ (which breaks up a marriage)—and Miss Thing said, ‘Miss Destiny dear, have a real wedding this time.’... A real wedding,” Miss Destiny sighed wistfully. “Like every young girl should have at least once.... And when it happens oh it will be the most simpuhlee Fabulous wedding the Westcoast has evuh seen! with oh the most beautiful queens as bridesmaids! and the handsomest studs as ushers! (and you will absolutely have to remove chose boots, Chuck)—and Me! ...

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I went with him, sometimes, on Saturday mornings, driving up into the Cotswolds. My dad had been my dad, but also my friend, and a partner in crime when it came to quests like this. From the grassy source near Cirencester we walked and explored, followed a wormy, muddy stream, trespassed to take photos of planks over it, got shouted at by farmers, menaced by cattle, pored over maps in fierce concentration. It took a year. He did it, in the end. Every single bridge. Somewhere in the files of slides back at my mum’s house is a complete photographic record of ways to cross the Thames from source to sea. On another day, the panic was that we might not find his car. He’d parked it somewhere near Battersea Bridge and, of course, had never returned. We looked for it for hours, increasingly desperate, searching back streets and side streets and cul-de-sacs to no avail, widening our search to streets miles from anywhere we knew the car could possibly be. As the day drew on, we understood that even if we found it, Dad’s blue Peugeot with his press pass tucked in the sun-visor and his cameras in the boot, our search would still have been hopeless . Of course it had been towed away. I found the number , called the compound and said to the man on the phone that the owner of the vehicle couldn’t collect it because he was dead. He was my father . That he didn’t mean to leave the car there but he died. That he really didn’t mean to leave it. Lunatic sentences, deadpan, cut from rock. I didn’t understand his embarrassed silence. He said, ‘Sorry, oh God. I’m so sorry’, but he could have said anything at all and it would have signified nothing. We had to take Dad’s death certificate to the compound to avoid the towing fee. This also signified nothing. After the funeral I went back to Cambridge. I didn’t sleep. I drove around a lot. I stared at the sun going down and the sun coming up, and the sun in between. I watched the pigeons spreading their tails and courting each other in stately pavanes on the lawn outside my house. Planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped and talked and worked. None of these things made any sense at all. For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal. That’s what it was like; so much so that I was convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that if you’d put me on a bed or a chair I would have burned right through. It was about this time a kind of madness drifted in.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Looking back, and all for love. There was a telescope on my bookshelf at the far end of the room. A spotting scope in a green Cordura cover. I’d borrowed it from my father to go birdwatching and it had not been returned. I’d forgotten to bring it with me on that last visit. ‘Next time,’ he said, shaking his head with good-natured exasperation. There was no next time. I could not give it back. I could not apologise to him either. There was a time, perhaps the day after his death, or perhaps the day after that, when I sat on a train with my mother and brother. We were on our way to look for his car. It was a desperate journey. My hands clutched the coarse upholstery of the seat until my knuckles turned white. I remember buddleia, and trackside clinker, and a green gasometer, and Battersea Power Station as the train slowed. And it wasn’t until we were standing on Queenstown Road station, on an unfamiliar platform under a white wooden canopy, wasn’t until we were walking towards the exit, that I realised, for the first time, that I would never see my father again. Ever. I stopped dead. And I shouted. I called out loud for him. Dad. And then the word No came out in one long, collapsing howl. My brother and mother put their arms around me, and I them. Brute fact. I would never speak to him again. I would never see him again. We clung to each other, crying for Dad, the man we loved, the quiet man in a suit with a camera on his shoulder, who had set out each day in search of things that were new, who had captured the courses of stars and storms and streets and politicians, who had stopped time by making pictures of the movings of the world. My father, who had gone out to photograph storm-damaged buildings in Battersea, on that night when the world had visited him with damage and his heart had given way. The photographs he’d taken were still on the camera they handed to my mother at the hospital. The last photograph I saw only once. I never want to see it again. But I can never stop seeing it. Blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street. Sodium lights, dusk, a wall tipped sideways from the vertical and running into the distance; a vanishing point of sallow, stormy sky. 12 Outlaws

• From Educated (2018)

  When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us. But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her. If there was a single moment when the breach between us, which had been cracking and splintering for two decades, was at last too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without my knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands and dialed my brother. Diego, the knife. What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom. It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place. Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education. [image "Author’s Note" file=Image00043.jpg] This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two. The following names, listed in alphabetical order, are pseudonyms: Aaron, Audrey, Benjamin, Emily, Erin, Faye, Gene, Judy, Peter, Robert, Robin, Sadie, Shannon, Shawn, Susan, Vanessa. [image "Acknowledgments" file=Image00044.jpg] To my brothers Tyler, Richard and Tony I owe the greatest debt for making this book possible, first in the living of it, then in the writing of it. From them and their wives, Stefanie, Kami and Michele, I learned much of what I know about family.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was about this time a kind of madness drifted in. Looking back, I think I was never truly mad. More mad north-north-west. I could tell a hawk from a handsaw always, but sometimes it was striking to me how similar they were. I knew I wasn’t mad mad because I’d seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong. I began to notice curious connections between things. Things of no import burst into extraordinary significance. I read my horoscope and believed it. Auguries. Huge bouts of déjà vu. Coincidences. Memories of things that hadn’t happened yet. Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past. Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was. Because these were the normal madnesses of grief. I learned this from books. I bought books on grieving, on loss and bereavement. They spilled over my desk in tottering piles. Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers. Was it reassuring to be told that everyone sees ghosts? That everyone stops eating? Or can’t stop eating? Or that grief comes in stages that can be numbered and pinned like beetles in boxes? I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt. I remember worrying about which stage I was at. I wanted to taxonomise the process, order it, make it sensible. But there was no sense, and I didn’t recognise any of these emotions at all.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But my Robbie’s wings began to feel for the breeze, wings are meant for flying, and before I knew it he was Gone. He wrote me, he was in Europe—stranded briefly. I sent him funds. Then it was South America. By then things were much better for me, and I sent him money—a long-distance bond between us—but what I sent was but a meager expression of my Love—but what else could I do? And always he would write back, endearingly, endearingly!—the dear child—that he should send it right back to me, but he needed it badly—he would pay it back—because what he had from me was Greater. But he knew it pleased me to give him things.... And then, suddenly, no more letters—” He broke off abruptly, reached for a Kleenex, touched his cheeks. “Can I accuse him for the emptiness he left in my heart? No! It was his nature—the very nature which made me love him—his nature, to occupy my heart forever and my life only fleetingly: He had wings; he had to fly away.... Or perhaps,” he said cautiously, almost in a whisper, “could it be that Love had indeed touched him powerfully—Love for me—and that that Love, at war with his angel’s love of flight—had—lost out?... I dont know.” He went on dully now. “I have heard hes now in Los Angeles—Im not sure—Ive heard he works in a bar—... Its been so many years.... Maybe he has soared to Heaven to bring Beauty to that drab place....” He paused—a rare, long pause. Then, with a flourish of his cigarette, he continued more enthusiastically: “The Countess Sabrisky once asked me if I believed in Heaven, and I answered; ‘Of course I believe—I have had it on earth!’... I was referring to the angels—my angels—why, even Milton, the poet, in his epic poem, was on the side of the rebellious angels. He makes us sympathize with them against God: They are as heroic as American colonists rebelling against extra taxation!... But listen to me, I have gone on and on, and I must interview you, my new angel.... And, child, there is a favor I have to ask you: I must have a photograph of you, to put in my Album.... I have pictures of most of my Angels.... Please—over there—oh that shelf—that album—please bring it to me....” I rose from the chair, mesmerized by the words which came almost like an endless song. I saw an album. On top of the album was a book: a thick, important-looking volume—much like the one the malenurse had thrust at me that day, but a different color. I glanced at the author’s name. It was the Professor’s.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He never finished a show without calling into a public-house on his way home; and on the night of our party he had been drinking at Fulham. Here, all hidden in a corner stall, he had overheard a fellow at the bar say that Gully Sutherland was past his best, and should make way for funnier artistes; that he had sat through Gully’s latest routine, and all the gags were flat ones. The bar-man said that when Gully heard this he went to the man and shook him by the hand, and bought him a beer, then he bought beer for everyone. Then he went home and took a gun, and fired it at his own heart ... We didn’t know all of this that night at Marylebone, we knew only that Gully had had a kind of fit, and taken his life; but the news put an end to our party and left us all, like Esther, nervous and grave. Kitty and I, on hearing the news, went up to the stage - she seizing my hand as we stumbled up the steps, but in grief now, I thought, rather than anything warmer. The manager had had all the house-lights lit, and the band had lain their instruments aside; some people were weeping, the cornet-player who had tickled me had his arm about a trembling girl. Esther cried, ‘Oh isn’t it awful, isn’t it horrible?’ - I suppose the wine made everybody feel the shock of it the more. I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn’t think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap between us. She hadn’t looked at me since then, and now she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the news of Gully’s suicide. After a moment, however, I saw her shake her head and step away, and seem to search for me; and when she saw me - waiting for her, in the shadows of the wing - she came and sighed. ‘Poor Gully. They say his heart was shot right through...’ ‘And to think,’ I said, ‘it was for Gully’s sake that I first went to Canterbury and saw you ...’ She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure. When I said that we should go - since other people were now leaving - she nodded.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The theatre, of course, was still shut up: there were sounds of hammering from the hall as the carpenters finished their work, but apart from that the corridors, the green-room - all were quiet. I was glad: I didn’t want to be seen by anyone. I walked very fast but very quietly to the dressing-rooms, until I reached the door that said Miss Butler and Miss King. Then very stealthily - for I half-feared, in my fevered state, that Kitty might be on the other side, awaiting me - I unlocked the door and pushed it open. The room beyond it was dark: I stepped across it in the light from the corridor, struck a match and lit a gas-jet, then closed the door as softly as I could. I knew just what I wanted. In a cupboard beneath Kitty’s table there was a little tin box with a pile of coins and notes in it - a portion of our wages went there every week, for us to draw on as we chose. The key to it lay mixed up with her sticks of grease-paint, in the old cigar-box in which she kept her make-up. I took this box, and tipped it up; the sticks fell out, and so did the key — and so, I saw, did something else. There had always been a sheet of coloured paper at the bottom of the box, and I had never thought to lift it. Now it had come loose and behind it was a card. I picked it up with trembling fingers, and studied it. It was creased, and stained with make-up, but I knew it at once. On the front was a picture of an oyster-smack; two girls smiled from its deck through a patina of powder and grease, and on the sail someone had inked, ‘To London’. There was more writing on the back - Kitty’s address at the Canterbury Palace, and a message: ‘I can come!!! You must do without your dresser for a few nights, though, while I make all ready ...’ It was signed: ‘Fondly, Your Nan’. It was the card that I had sent her, so long ago, before we had even moved to Brixton; and she had kept it, secretly, as if she treasured it. I held the card between my fingers for a moment; then I returned it to its box and placed the paper sheet above it, as before. Then I laid my head upon the table, and wept, again, until I could weep no more.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then I started crashing my father’s car. I didn’t mean to: it just happened. I backed up against bollards, scraped wings against walls, heard the sound of metal squealing in agony over and over again, and I’d get out of the car and rub the new gouges dumbly with my fingers, as if somehow that might fix them, though they ran through the paint to the metal below. ‘Are you punishing your father’s car because he left you?’ asked a psychoanalytically-minded and fairly tactless friend. I thought about that. ‘No,’ I said, embarrassed because my answer was so much less interesting. ‘It’s that I don’t know what shape my car is any more.’ It was true. I couldn’t keep the dimensions of the car in my head. Or my own, for I kept having accidents. I cracked cups. I dropped plates. Fell over. Broke a toe on a door-jamb. I was as clumsy as I had been as a child. But when I was busy with Mabel I was never clumsy. The world with the hawk in it was insulated from harm, and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin. Every night I slept and dreamed of creances, of lines and knots, of skeins of wool, skeins of geese flying south. And every afternoon I walked out onto the pitch with relief, because when the hawk was on my fist I knew who I was, and I was never angry with her, even if I wanted to sink to my knees and weep every time she tried to fly away. 15 For whom the bell ‘Bloody hell, she’s calm, Helen,’ Stuart says. ‘I can feel her heartbeat. She’s not bothered at all.’ His head is bowed low over the table, fingers spread wide over the closed wings of my hooded hawk. He holds her upon a kitchen cushion as firmly and as gently as if she were made of glass. ‘Good,’ I say, shifting her covert feathers carefully aside to reveal the base of her tail. Here, just before the long feathers join her body, the quills are hollow and translucent, and I’m about to glue and tie a bell the size and shape of an acorn onto the topmost pair. It doesn’t take long. I tug on it gently to check it is secured, then take the hawk back onto my fist. She rouses and the bell sounds loud in the bright room. It does not seem to concern her at all.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But while the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk. I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart in The Sword in the Stone , who was transformed by Merlyn into a merlin as part of his magical education. I had loved that scene as a child. I had read it over and over again, thrilling at the Wart’s toes turning to talons and scratching on the floor , his primary feathers bursting in soft blue quills from the end of his fingers. But I was turning into a hawk all the same. The change came about through my grief, my watching, my not being myself. The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate, reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come close, you must read your hawk’s state of mind. You do this by watching her posture and her feathers, the workings of which turn the bird’s shape into an exquisitely controlled barometer of mood. A hawk’s simpler emotions are easily perceived. Feathers held tight to the body mean I am afraid. Held loosely they mean I am at ease. But the longer you watch a hawk the more subtleties you see; and soon, in my hypervigilant state, I was responding to the tiniest of cues. A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes meant something like happy ; a particular , fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant sleepy. To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer . Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘ tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear , and then in the birds she watched , took flight. It was happening now.