Joy

Passages

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

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

  Onitsuka would personally write to the Marlboro Man and inform him of this decision. He rose. I rose. Everyone rose. We all bowed. He left the conference room. Everyone remaining in the conference room exhaled. “So… it is decided,” Morimoto said. For one year, he added. Then the subject would be revisited. I thanked Morimoto, assured him that Onitsuka wouldn’t regret its faith in me. I went around the table shaking everyone’s hand, bowing, and when I came back to Morimoto I gave his hand an extra-vigorous shake. I then followed a secretary into a side room, where I signed several contracts, and placed an order for a whopping thirty-five hundred dollars’ worth of shoes. I RAN ALL the way back to my hotel. Halfway there I started skipping, then leaping through the air like a dancer. I stopped at a railing and looked out at the bay. None of its beauty was lost on me now. I watched the boats gliding before a brisk wind and decided that I would hire one. I would take a ride on the Inland Sea. An hour later I was standing in the prow of a boat, wind in my hair, sailing into the sunset and feeling pretty good about myself. The next day I boarded a train to Tokyo. It was time, at last, to ascend into the clouds. ALL THE GUIDEBOOKS said to climb Mount Fuji at night. A proper climb, they said, must culminate with a view of sunrise from the summit. So I arrived at the base of the mountain promptly at dusk. The day had been muggy, but the air was growing cooler, and right away I rethought my decision to wear Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt, and Tigers. I saw a man coming down the mountain in a rubberized coat. I stopped him and offered him three dollars for his coat. He looked at me, looked at the coat, nodded. I was negotiating successful deals all over Japan! As night fell hundreds of natives and tourists appeared and began streaming up the mountain. All, I noticed, were carrying long wooden sticks with tinkling bells attached. I spotted an older British couple and asked them about these sticks. “They ward off evil spirits,” the woman said. “There are evil spirits on this mountain?” I asked. “Presumably.” I bought a stick. I then noticed people gathering at a roadside stand and buying straw shoes. The British woman explained that Fuji was an active volcano, and its ash and soot were guaranteed to ruin shoes. Climbers therefore wore disposable straw sandals. I bought sandals. Poorer, but properly outfitted at last, I set off. There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs along the upward path, written in many languages, said there would be nine stations before the summit, each offering food and a place to rest. Within two hours, however, I’d passed Station 3 several times.

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

  Above all, she was learning that marrying a man with a start-up shoe company meant living on a shoestring budget. And yet she thrived. I could give her only twenty-five dollars a week for groceries, and still she managed to whip up delicious meals. I gave her a credit card with a two-thousand-dollar limit to furnish our entire apartment, and she managed to buy a dinette table, two chairs, a Zenith TV, and a big couch with soft arms, perfect for napping. She also bought me a brown recliner, which she stuck in a corner of the living room. Now, each night, I could lean back at a forty-five-degree angle and spin inside my own head all I wanted. It was more comfortable, and safer, than the Cougar. I got into the habit every night of phoning my father from my recliner. He’d always be in his recliner, too, and together, recliner to recliner, we’d hash out the latest threat confronting Blue Ribbon. He no longer saw my business as a waste of my time, apparently. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, he did seem to find the problems I faced “interesting,” and “challenging,” which amounted to the same thing. IN THE SPRING of 1969 Penny began to complain of feeling poorly in the mornings. Food didn’t sit well. By midday she was often a little wobbly around the office. She went to the doctor—the same doctor who’d delivered her—and discovered she was pregnant. We were both overjoyed. But we also faced a whole new learning curve. Our cozy apartment was now completely inappropriate. We’d have to buy a house, of course. But could we afford a house? I’d just started to pay myself a salary. And in which part of town should we buy? Where were the best schools? And how was I supposed to research real estate prices and schools, plus all the other things that go into buying a house, while running a start-up company? Was it even feasible to run a start-up company while starting a family? Should I go back to accounting, or teaching, or something more stable? Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die. WE FOUND A house in Beaverton. Small, only sixteen hundred square feet, but it had an acre of land around it, and a little horse corral, and a pool. There was also a huge pine tree in the front and a Japanese bamboo out back. I loved it. More, I recognized it. When I was growing up my sisters asked me several times what my dream house would look like, and one day they handed me a charcoal pencil and a pad and made me draw it. After Penny and I moved in, my sisters dug out the old charcoal sketch. It was an exact picture of the Beaverton house.

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

  Acceptable.” She marched down to the drugstore and bought a vial of wart remover, which she applied each day to my foot. Then, every two weeks, she took a carving knife and pared away a sliver of the wart, until it was all gone. That spring I posted the best times of my life. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised by my mother’s next move when my father accused me of jackassing around. Casually she opened her purse and took out seven dollars. “I’d like to purchase one pair of Limber Ups, please,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. Was it my mother’s way of digging at my father? A show of loyalty to her only son? An affirmation of her love of track? I don’t know. But no matter. It never failed to move me, the sight of her standing at the stove or the kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size 6. PROBABLY BECAUSE HE didn’t want any trouble with my mother, my father loaned me the thousand bucks. This time the shoes came right away. April 1964. I rented a truck, drove down to the warehouse district, and the customs clerk handed over ten enormous cartons. Again I hurried home, carried the cartons down to the basement, ripped them open. Each carton held thirty pairs of Tigers, and each pair was wrapped in cellophane. (Shoe boxes would have been too costly.) Within minutes the basement was filled with shoes. I admired them, studied them, played with them, rolled around on top of them. Then I stacked them out of the way, arranging them neatly around the furnace and under the Ping-Pong table, as far as possible from the washer and dryer, so my mother could still do laundry. Lastly I tried on a pair. I ran circles around the basement. I jumped for joy. Days later came a letter from Mr. Miyazaki. Yes, he said, you can be the distributor for Onitsuka in the West. That was all I needed. To my father’s horror, and my mother’s subversive delight, I quit my job at the accounting firm, and all that spring I did nothing but sell shoes out of the trunk of my Valiant. MY SALES STRATEGY was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!”), I drove all over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races I’d chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling.

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

  Also, Woodell and I were tired of shouting to be heard above that jukebox. So each night after work we’d go out for cheeseburgers, then drive around looking at office space. Logistically, it was a nightmare. Woodell had to drive, because his wheelchair wouldn’t fit in my Cougar, and I always felt guilty and uncomfortable, being chauffeured by a man with so many limitations. I also felt crazed with nerves, because many of the offices we looked at were up a flight of stairs. Or several flights. This meant I’d have to wheel Woodell up and down. At such moments I was reminded, painfully, of his reality. During a typical workday, Woodell was so positive, so energetic, it was easy to forget. But wheeling him, maneuvering him, upstairs, downstairs, I was repeatedly struck by how delicate, how helpless he could be. I’d pray under my breath. Please don’t let me drop him. Please don’t let me drop him. Woodell, hearing me, would tense up, and his tension would make me more nervous. “Relax,” I’d say, “I haven’t lost a patient yet —haha!” No matter what happened, he’d never lose his composure. Even at his most vulnerable, with me balancing him precariously at the top of some dark flight of stairs, he’d never lose touch with his essential philosophy: Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I’m here to kill you. (The first time I ever sent him to a trade show, the airline lost his wheelchair. And when they found it, the frame was bent like a pretzel. No problem. In his mutilated chair, Woodell attended the show, ticked off every item on his to-do list, and came home with an ear-to-ear mission-accomplished smile on his face.) At the end of each night’s search for new office space, Woodell and I would always have a big belly laugh about the whole debacle. Most nights we’d wind up at some dive bar, giddy, almost delirious. Before parting we’d often play a game. I’d bring out a stopwatch and we’d see how fast Woodell could fold up his wheelchair and get it and himself into his car. As a former track star, he loved the challenge of a stopwatch, of trying to beat his personal best. (His record was forty-four seconds.) We both cherished those nights, the silliness, the sense of shared mission, and we mutually ranked them among the solid gold memories of our young lives. Woodell and I were very different, and yet our friendship was based on a selfsame approach to work. Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And each of us recognized that this small task of finding a bigger office meant we were succeeding. We were making a go of this thing called Blue Ribbon, which spoke to a deep desire, in each of us, to win. Or at least not lose.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.” He said, “I know it sounds cliché, but you could say ‘the sun rose on a dark day,’ [and] they would just shout out answers and it got to the point where they were almost too willing and it was incredible.” The atmosphere Jeremy and his students created was “almost celebratory” and truly interactive, like a church in which shouts of “Hallelujah!” come from any pew. Or, as Jeremy summed it up: “It was like a party, except with math.” This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ” Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.” As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.” The experience taught him both how and why to be optimistic. He drew on what he learned in TFA and in my course to “overcome probably the most difficult challenge” of his life in ways that have “applicability throughout life.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Of course, not every infant-parent interaction is so rosy. Some pairs show little mutual engagement. Some moms and dads rarely make eye contact with their infants and emit precious little positivity, either verbally or nonverbally. These pairs are simply less attuned to each other, less connected. And in those rare moments when they are engaged, the vibe that joins them is distinctly more negative. They connect over mutual distress or indifference, rather than over mutual affection. It turns out that positive behavioral synchrony—the degree to which an infant and a parent (through eye contact and affectionate touch) laugh, smile, and coo together—goes hand in hand with oxytocin synchrony. Researchers have measured oxytocin levels in the saliva of dads, moms, and infants both before and after a videotaped, face-to-face parent-infant interaction. For infant-parent pairs who show mutual positive engagement, oxytocin levels also come into sync. Without such engagement, however, no oxytocin synchrony emerges. Positivity resonance, then, can be viewed as the doorway through which the exquisitely attuned biochemical tendencies of one generation influence those of the next generation to form lasting, often lifelong bonds. Knowing, too, that oxytocin can ebb and flow in unison among non-kin—even among brand-new acquaintances just learning to trust each other—micro-moments of love, of positivity resonance, can also be viewed as the doorways through which caring and compassionate communities are forged. Love, we know, builds lasting resources. Oxytocin, studies show, swings the hammer. This core tenet of my broaden-and-build theory—that love builds lasting resources—finds support in a fascinating program of research on . . . rodents. It turns out that rat moms and their newborn pups show a form of positive engagement and synchrony analogous to that of human parents with their infants. Sensitive parenting in a rat mom, however, is conveyed by her attentively licking and grooming her newborn pups. When a rat mom licks and grooms her pup, it increases the pup’s sensitivity to oxytocin, as indicated, for instance, by the number of oxytocin receptors deep within the pup’s amygdala, as well as within other subcortical brain regions. Sure enough, these well-groomed—or I dare say well-loved—rat pups grow up to have calmer demeanors; they’re less skittish, more curious. The researchers can be certain that it’s the experiences of loving connection that determine the brain and behavioral profiles of the next generation (that is, their oxytocin receptors and calm demeanors)—and not simply shared genes—because cross-fostering studies show the same patterns of results. That is, even when a rat mom raises a newborn pup that is not her own, her maternal attention still forecasts that pup’s brain sensitivity to oxytocin and whether it grows up to be anxious or calm. Touring Vagus

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And even in the orthodox church these measures did not secure entire uniformity. For the council of Nicaea, probably from prudence, passed by the question of the Roman and Alexandrian computation of Easter. At least the Acts contain no reference to it.751 At all events this difference remained: that Rome, afterward as before, fixed the vernal equinox, the terminus a quo of the Easter full moon, on the 18th of March, while Alexandria placed it correctly on the 21st. It thus occurred, that the Latins, the very year after the Nicene council, and again in the years 330, 333, 340, 341, 343, varied from the Alexandrians in the time of keeping Easter. On this account the council of Sardica, as we learn from the recently discovered Paschal Epistles of Athanasius, took the Easter question again in hand, and brought about, by mutual concessions, a compromise for the ensuing fifty years, but without permanent result. In 387 the difference of the Egyptian and the Roman Easter amounted to fully five weeks. Later attempts also to adjust the matter were in vain, until the monk Dionysius Exiguus, the author of our Christian calendar, succeeded in harmonizing the computation of Easter on the basis of the true Alexandrian reckoning; except that the Gallican and British Christians adhered still longer to the old custom, and thus fell into conflict with the Anglo-Saxon. The introduction of the improved Gregorian calendar in the Western church in 1582 again produced discrepancy; the Eastern and Russian church adhered to the Julian calendar, and is consequently now about twelve days behind us. According to the Gregorian calendar, which does not divide the months with astronomical exactness, it sometimes happens that the Paschal full moon is put a couple of hours too early, and the Christian Easter, as was the case in 1825, coincides with the Jewish Passover, against the express order of the council of Nicaea. § 80. The Cycle of Pentecost. The whole period of seven weeks from Easter to Pentecost bore a joyous, festal character. It was called Quinquagesima, or Pentecost in the wider sense,752 and was the memorial of the exaltation of Christ at the right hand of the Father, His repeated appearances during the mysterious forty days, and His heavenly headship and eternal presence in the church. It was regarded as a continuous Sunday, and distinguished by the absence of all fasting and by standing in prayer. Quinquagesima formed a marked contrast with the Quadragesima which preceded. The deeper the sorrow of repentance had been in view of the suffering and dying Saviour, the higher now rose the joy of faith in the risen and eternally living Redeemer. This joy, of course, must keep itself clear of worldly amusements, and be sanctified by devotion, prayer, singing, and thanksgiving; and the theatres, therefore, remained closed through the fifty days. But the multitude of nominal Christians soon forgot their religious impressions, and sought to compensate their previous fasting with wanton merry-making.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When the rain stopped the heat began. Dogs panted flat in the black shade under the limes, and the lawns in front of the house paled and burned to hay. A damp, hot wind pushed leaves about but failed to cool anything; it was a wind that made things worse, like stirring a hot bath with your hand. Walking in it was like wading neck-deep through thick liquid. I struggled into the furnace of my car and drove to a friend’s house in a village just outside the city. I wanted to talk goshawks, and there was no one better than Stuart to do it with. He is my goshawk guru. Years ago I’d hawked with him on late winter afternoons, crunched across long shadow and sugarbeet in search of wild fenland pheasants, his big old female gos sitting on his fist like a figurehead leaning into the gilded wind. He is a splendid chap; a carpenter and ex-biker, solid and serene as a mid-ocean wave, and his partner Mandy is brilliantly generous and funny, and seeing them both was such a shot in the arm. I’d halfway forgotten how kind and warm the world could be. Stuart fired up the barbecue, and the garden filled with kids and teenagers and cigarette smoke and pointers nosing around, and ferrets rattling in their hutches, and the sky grew whiter as the afternoon went on, and the sun turned gauzy behind a spreading mat of fibrous cloud. A Spitfire banked overhead. We mopped our brows. The dogs panted, the ferrets drank from their water bottles, and Stuart slaved over his barbecue, coming back around the side of the house wiping his forehead on his arm. ‘It’s getting cooler!’ he said, surprised. ‘No, you’ve walked away from the barbecue!’ we chorused. I plonked myself down with a burger on a white plastic chair. And there, on a perch on the lawn, shaded by the hedge and ignoring the melee, was a perfect little peregrine, carefully preening the long, flippy barred feathers of his undercarriage. ‘Half-Czech?’ Stuart was saying. ‘The most bloody-minded gos I ever trained was Czech. It was a nightmare. Are you sure you want to do this?’ He tipped his head towards the bird on the lawn. ‘You can fly that if you like,’ he said. ‘Want a peregrine?’ My heart skipped a beat. The falcon. There he was, an impossibly beautiful creature the colour of split flint and chalk, wings crossed sharp over his back, his dark, hooded face turned up to the sky. He was watching the Spitfire overhead with professional curiosity. I looked up at the plane. Its engine note had changed; it was throttling back, slowly descending through white air to the aviation museum where it lived. The peregrine bobbed his head, watching it too. Our gazes were exactly aligned. For a long, sinking moment, I wondered if I was making a terrible mistake.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Come on, Mabel!’ I’m kneeling on the carpet and holding out a dead day-old cockerel chick. My freezer is packed with their sad, fluffy corpses, by-products of industrial egg production. Mabel loves them. She stares longingly at the one in my glove. I hold it just out of reach and whistle. ‘You can do it!’ I say. ‘Jump!’ But she is doing everything she can to avoid jumping. It is comical. She leans. She leans further. She stretches her neck as far as it will go and opens her beak hopefully. The food is just there. She can’t reach it. She over-balances, scrambles upright. A change in tactics is required. She makes a cobra-strike grab for the meat with one great, grasping foot. Her reach is astonishing; her legs are almost as long as she is. One feathered shin flashes out, tawny as a lion’s, and her talons very nearly catch on the glove. But not quite. Now she is cross. She paces up and down. She stamps and grips her perch. Her black-feathered moustaches harden into frown-lines down her jaw, and I can feel her bristling. She snakes her head from side to side, reckoning distances. Something is changing in her. I sense it with a shiver. It is as if the room is darkening, contracting to a point. Then something happens. My hand is hit, hard, with a blow so unexpectedly powerful the shock is carried down my spine to the tips of my toes. Hitting someone’s hand with a baseball bat would have a similar effect. She is on the glove, mantling her great, barred wings over it, gripping it fiercely and tearing at the meat. Disarticulated pieces of chicken disappear fast down her throat. I am delighted. She has crossed a great psychological gulf, one far wider than the ten inches of air between her perch and the glove she’s landed upon. Not that she’s landed on it: she’s killed it. There is no mercy in that ratcheting, numbing grip. Mabel can keep up this pressure with no effort whatsoever. It is an effort for her to let go. I choose my moment. When her head is up swallowing a mouthful of chick, I tug its remains through my palm and spirit it away. She looks down, then behind her, then at the floor. Where did it go? I persuade her to step back onto her perch. Then I hold the chick out once more, and further away. Instantly I feel that terrible blow. It is a killing blow, but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’m just about to start running, but she’s already on her way back to me, coming in at treetop height over the wood like a Mustang in a war movie. One vast, stylish arc, carving right through the barricade of oncoming air, like, Here I come!, and she’s back on the fist, grinning like an idiot, and her whole attitude is, like, Well! What did you think of that? As the days drive deeper into winter, a small and fugitive gleam begins to touch the edges of things. It happens without much fuss. I catch myself watching the sky in the morning and liking simply how it looks. Gone is the austringer’s calculating eye, concerned only with wind-speed, bearing, likely precipitation. I call on old friends, make plans for the future. I look for a house to rent. My mother comes to visit. I go back to the doctor to discuss my progress. He tells me the deep blurry tiredness is a side-effect of the drugs, and that it will soon pass. The American writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold once wrote that falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame – not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer. That is why he considered it the perfect hobby. I am starting to see the balance is righting, now, and the distance between Mabel and me increasing. I see, too, that her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were. Then I find myself doing something surprising. I raise Mabel’s weight even more and let her range more widely when she flies. This is terrible falconry. ‘Never let a goshawk self-hunt,’ say the books. ‘Such independence is the fastest way to lose your hawk.’ I know I shouldn’t slip her unless there’s quarry, right there, in front of her. But how can I resist this method of hawking? Today I walked up to the crest of a hill on a freezing, smoky afternoon, the whole Cambridgeshire countryside laid out in front in woods and fields and copses beneath us, all bosky and bright with golden sunshine, and I can see that what Mabel wants to do is launch a prospecting attack on the hedgerow over the rise. I let her go. Her tactical sense is magnificent.

• From Educated (2018)

  The night before my flight, there was a feast in my college. One of my friends had formed a chamber choir that was to sing carols during dinner. The choir had been rehearsing for weeks, but on the day of the feast the soprano fell ill with bronchitis. My phone rang late that afternoon. It was my friend. “Please tell me you know someone who can sing,” he said. I had not sung for years, and never without my father to hear me, but a few hours later I joined the chamber choir on a platform near the rafters, above the massive Christmas tree that dominated the hall. I treasured the moment, taking pleasure in the lightness I felt to have music once again floating up from my chest, and wondering whether Dad, if he were here, would have braved the university and all its socialism to hear me sing. I believed he would. —BUCK’S PEAK WAS UNCHANGED. The Princess was buried in snow but I could see the deep contours of her legs. Mother was in the kitchen when I arrived, stirring a stew with one hand and with the other holding the phone and explaining the properties of motherwort. Dad’s desk was still empty. He was in the basement, Mother said, in bed. Something had hold of his lungs. A burly stranger shuffled through the back door. Several seconds passed before I recognized my brother. Luke’s beard was so thick, he looked like one of his goats. His left eye was white and dead: he’d been shot in the face with a paintball gun a few months before. He crossed the room and clapped me on the back, and I stared into his remaining eye, looking for something familiar. But it wasn’t until I saw the raised scar on his forearm, a curved check mark two inches wide from where the Shear had bitten his flesh, that I was sure this man was my brother.* He told me he was living with his wife and a pack of kids in a mobile home behind the barn, making his money working oil rigs in North Dakota. Two days passed. Dad came upstairs every evening and settled himself into a sofa in the Chapel, where he would cough and watch TV or read the Old Testament. I spent my days studying or helping Mother. On the third evening I was at the kitchen table, reading, when Shawn and Benjamin shuffled through the back door. Benjamin was telling Shawn about a punch he’d thrown after a fender bender in town. He said that before climbing out of his truck to confront the other driver, he’d slipped his handgun into the waistband of his jeans. “The guy didn’t know what he was getting into,” Benjamin said, grinning. “Only an idiot brings a gun into a mess like that,” Shawn said. “I wasn’t gonna use it,” Benjamin muttered. “Then don’t bring it,” Shawn said. “Then you know you won’t use it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  His name is Kanat. He asks where I will hunt with the hawk. ‘On farmland a few miles from here,’ I reply. He nods, looks searchingly at Mabel, and is silent for a long time. Then he spreads his fingers wide on the wooden rail and stares at the backs of his hands and at the cuffs of his brown leather jacket. ‘I miss my country,’ he says. Soon after he leaves a cyclist skids to a halt and asks politely if he can look at the bird. He is absurdly handsome. He stands there with his Antonio Banderas hair , and his expensive technical jacket and titanium bike beaded with rain, and admires the hell out of her. ‘She is beautiful , ’ he says. He is trying to find another word but it evades him. Beautiful will have to do. He says it again. Then he thanks me over and over again for the hawk. ‘So close!’ he says. ‘I have never seen a hawk so close.’ In Mexico he has only seen wild ones, and only far away. ‘I like to watch them because they are . . . ’ And he makes a movement with one hand as if it were something lifting into the air. ‘Free,’ I say. He nods, and I do too , and in some wonder , because I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar , unusual , in anything that isn’t entirely normal. I’m in an expansive, celebratory mood. Today Mabel flew four feet to my fist from the back of a chair in my front room. ‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ I tell her. ‘Time for a walk. Let’s go and meet my friend’s kids. They’ll love you.’ A few minutes later I knock on a door and my friend’s husband opens it. My hawk flinches. So do I: this man was exceptionally rude to me once. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Maybe he was having a bad day. Forgive, forget. My friend isn’t in.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She had none at all, she said, since her grandmother died. Mother tut-tutted over that, and said it was a shame; Davy said she could help herself to some of our relations, if she liked, for we had more than we knew what to do with. ‘Oh yes?’ said Kitty. ‘Yes,’ said Davy. ‘You must have heard the song: ‘There’s her uncle, and her brother, and her sister, and her mother, And her auntie, and another, who is cousin to her mother...’ No sooner had he finished the verse, indeed, than there was the sound of our street-door opening, and a shout up the stairs; and three of our cousins themselves appeared, followed by Uncle Joe and Aunt Rosina - all got up in their Sunday best, and all just popped in, they said, for a ‘peek’ at Miss Butler, if Miss Butler had no objection. More chairs were brought up, and more cups; a fresh round of introductions was made, and the little room grew stuffy with heat and smoke and laughter. Somebody said what a shame it was we had no piano for Miss Butler to give us a song; then George - my eldest cousin - said, ‘Would a harmonica serve the purpose?’ and produced one from his jacket pocket. Kitty blushed, and said she couldn’t; and everyone cried, ‘Oh please, Miss Butler, do!’ ‘What do you think, Nan,’ she said to me, ‘should I shame myself?’ ‘You know you won’t,’ I said, pleased that she had turned to me at the last, and used my special name before them all. ‘Very well, then,’ she said. A little space was cleared for her, and Rhoda ran down to her house, to fetch her sisters to come and watch. She sang ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’, and ‘The Coffee Shop Girl’ - then ‘The Boy’ again for Rhoda’s sisters, who had just arrived. Then she whispered to George and to me, and I fetched her a hat of Father’s and a walking-cane, and she sang us a couple of masher songs, and ended with the ballad with which she finished her set at the Palace, about the sweetheart and the rose. We cheered her then, and she had her hand shaken, and her back slapped, ten times over. She looked very flushed and hot at the end of it all, and rather tired. Davy said, ‘How about a song from you now, Nance?’ I gave him a look. ‘No,’ I said. I wouldn’t sing for them with Kitty there, for anything. Kitty looked at me curiously. ‘Do you sing, then?’ she said. ‘Nancy’s got the prettiest voice, Miss Butler,’ said one of the cousins, ‘you ever heard.’ ‘Yes, go on, Nance, be a sport!’ said another. ‘No, no, no!’ I cried again - so firmly that Mother frowned, and the others laughed.

• From City of Night (1963)

  An I climbed that fence, an there he is, that horse, jes starin me in the eye, an me starin back at him. An, man, I tell you; that horse, he smiled at me—crooked, you know—but smiling. An I figure he jes started roaming, like me—an somehow I knowed he was lookin for me. See, we’re in the same spot—both beginning. An I smiled back.... An, man, that horse understood! He nods his head, saying yes. Yes! So I jumped on him, an I rode away.... Along them beautiful plains, those crazy clouds— ooo-ee! —man, I couldda been going to Heaven an I wouldnuh been any Happier.... But then these three mean studs ride up to me on horses—an they say Im stealing this here guy’s horse. Stealing it, man! If anything, we stole each other.... So I figure, hell, they are gonna lynch me, like I seen in the flix.... But I was jes a kid an that man they took me to, the owner, he was kinda nice. He understands, an he offers me a gig.... But it was not like I figgered. I jes worked aroun the place, doing, you know, odd things. It was not that I minded it or nothin. It was jes this: I never got to be near that horse no more—except when I got drunk,” he smiled. “Then I would go an find him—an he would be waiting there for me, his neck up straight, waiting. An we’d take off again. It happen over an over. I jes couldnt keep away from that Horse.... Then, one time, the owner, he says he hates to do it but hes gonna get me busted to teach me a lesson if I do it again. Well, it happen again. I got high, an I rode that horse into them hills—and this time I got busted, jes like the man said. The cop said I was a menace.... So I left that place.... An what bugs me: I never said goodbye to my Horse.... And when I left, I think: Well, hell, it ain like in the movies”.... It was the only note—perhaps not even there—of bitterness I remember ever having detected in his voice. But now he laughed: “I figure then my saddle days is over—thumbing days beginning. Yahoo!... An this guy gives me a ride—an that was the first guy ever put the make on me. See—you wone believe it, but it is the truth—when we got to this motel, he says we will stay there overnight. An I was deadass tired, so I say sure....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But I do miss her; and she was a lovely looker - though not quite as lovely, if you don’t mind my saying so, as her sister has gone and turned out ...’ I didn’t mind, for I knew that he was only flirting - indeed, it was rather pleasant to be flirted with by an old beau of Alice’s. Instead I asked him about the hall - about how it did, who he had had there, what they had sung. At the end of it he picked up a pen that lay on his desk, and began to fiddle with it. ‘And when are we to have Miss Butler back again?’ he asked. ‘I gather you and she’ve teamed up properly now.’ I stared, then felt my cheeks grow red; but he only meant, of course, the act: ‘I hear you’re working the halls together; and are quite a pair, by all accounts.’ Now I smiled. ‘How did you find that out? I am very quiet about it with my family.’ ‘I read the Era, don’t I? “Kitty Butler and Nan King”. I know a stage-name when I see one ...’ I laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny, Tony? Isn’t it just the most marvellous thing? We are in Cinderella at the minute, at the Brit. Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’ He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’ I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said. ‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’ He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze. He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked. I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home.

• From Educated (2018)

  our noses and onto the painted iron. Luke slipped out of his shirt, grabbed hold of the sleeves and tore them, leaving huge gashes a breeze could pass through. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything so radical, but after the twentieth purlin my back was sticky with sweat, and I flapped my T-shirt to make a fan, then rolled up my sleeves until an inch of my shoulders was visible. When Dad saw me a few minutes later, he strode over and yanked the sleeves down. “This ain’t a whorehouse,” he said. I watched him walk away and, mechanically, as if I weren’t making the decision, rerolled them. He returned an hour later, and when he caught sight of me he paused mid-step, confused. He’d told me what to do, and I hadn’t done it. He stood uncertainly for a moment, then crossed over to me, took hold of both sleeves and jerked them down. He didn’t make it ten steps before I’d rolled them up again. I wanted to obey. I meant to. But the afternoon was so hot, the breeze on my arms so welcome. It was just a few inches. I was covered from my temples to my toes in grime. It would take me half an hour that night to dig the black dirt out of my nostrils and ears. I didn’t feel much like an object of desire or temptation. I felt like a human forklift. How could an inch of skin matter? — I WAS HOARDING MY PAYCHECKS, in case I needed the money for tuition. Dad noticed and started charging me for small things. Mother had gone back to buying insurance after the second car accident, and Dad said I should pay my share. So I did. Then he wanted more, for registration. “These Government fees will break you,” he said as I handed him the cash. That satisfied Dad until my test results arrived. I returned from the junkyard to find a white envelope. I tore it open, staining the page with grease, and looked past the individual scores to the composite. Twenty- two. My heart was beating loud, happy beats. It wasn’t a twenty-seven, but it opened up possibilities. Maybe Idaho State. I showed Mother the score and she told Dad. He became agitated, then he shouted that it was time I moved out. “If she’s old enough to pull a paycheck, she’s old enough to pay rent,”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I moved to London to try and make it, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And I met your dad out on a job once and he talked to me. He gave me lots of advice. He helped me. He didn’t have to, but he did. He saved my life. He was amazing . . . ’ And he tailed off, and looked embarrassed, and I stepped forward and gave him a hug, because I didn’t know what to say. And more and more people came up and talked about Dad; and all the old guard were there, snappers from back in the 1960s, and I finally got to put names to the bylines I’d seen so many times. They told me they liked the story. They said it was nice to know that my father was a born journalist. That the boy in short trousers was already the man they’d known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat. Down in the Press Club after the service the drinks were poured. And poured. And poured some more. Everyone became increasingly expansive, rushed up to tell me stories about my father . The stories got more slurred as the drinking went on, and the hugs and cheek-kisses increasingly off-target. ‘Another drink?’ said one pressman. ‘Just a soft drink,’ I said, and back he came with a vast glass of wine. ‘Um, is there any soft drink?’ I said, embarrassed. He frowned. ‘That’s what I brought you. This is a soft drink.’ I left with a song in my heart. I felt my family had expanded by about two hundred people, and everything was going to be fine. Bless you, Dad , I thought. I always thought you were a legend, and it turns out you really, really were . All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘ Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘ Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold.

• From Educated (2018)

  small circle of friends. Then I set out to obliterate the barriers that separated me from them. I tasted red wine for the first time, and my new friends laughed at my pinched face. I discarded my high-necked blouses and began to wear more fashionable cuts—fitted, often sleeveless, with less restrictive necklines. In photos from this period I’m struck by the symmetry: I look like everyone else. In April I began to do well. I wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s concept of self-sovereignty, and my supervisor, Dr. David Runciman, said that if my dissertation was of the same quality, I might be accepted to Cambridge for a PhD. I was stunned: I, who had sneaked into this grand place as an impostor, might now enter through the front door. I set to work on my dissertation, again choosing Mill as the topic. One afternoon near the end of term, when I was eating lunch in the library cafeteria, I recognized a group of students from my program. They were seated together at a small table. I asked if I could join them, and a tall Italian named Nic nodded. From the conversation I gathered that Nic had invited the others to visit him in Rome during the spring holiday. “You can come, too,” he said. We handed in our final essays for the term, then boarded a plane. On our first evening in Rome, we climbed one of the seven hills and looked out over the metropolis. Byzantine domes hovered over the city like rising balloons. It was nearly dusk; the streets were bathed in amber. It wasn’t the color of a modern city, of steel, glass and concrete. It was the color of sunset. It didn’t look real. Nic asked me what I thought of his home, and that was all I could say: it didn’t look real. At breakfast the next morning, the others talked about their families. Someone’s father was a diplomat; another’s was an Oxford don. I was asked about my parents. I said my father owned a junkyard. Nic took us to the conservatory where he’d studied violin. It was in the heart of Rome and was richly furnished, with a grand staircase and resonant halls. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study in such a place, to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to associate learning with beauty. But my imagination failed me. I could only imagine the school as I was experiencing it now, as a kind of museum, a relic from someone else’s life. For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Fractious gusts of wind rattle the hedgerows, blowing voluminous shoals of leaves over us as we walk up the track. There’s sticky mud, and pheasant prints in it. Flocks of fieldfares chak chak and dodge in the hawthorns by the cow field, breaking low when we get too near, bouncing over the hedge and away in thrushy strobes of black and white. It’s nice to see them. Proper winter is here. And Mabel is fizzing with happiness, wagging her tail in barely suppressed excitement, tummy feathers fluffed over her grippy toes, eyes gleaming silver in the sun. If this hawk could speak, she’d be singing under her breath. Something has changed inside me. Today it’s hard to slip into the exquisite, wordless sharpness of being a hawk. Or rather, the hawk seems more human today. A rabbit lopes across the path twenty yards away and she chases it; swings up into a poplar, clutching onto a thin, near-vertical branch and leaning into the wind, narrow as a stoat. She looks about. Sees something. Goes to the next tree, looks down. Then flies back to the first one. I proffer my fist. She comes down immediately, and off we go again. Raah, she says. More. By the hayrolls we sneak through the side of the wood, and then make our way to the corner of the top field. I’m a little blurry. I’ve combated the drug- induced tiredness with two double espressos at breakfast and a caffeinated soda after lunch. I’m hoping that the drugs will prevent the rampant paranoia that this excess of caffeine will inevitably provoke. Mabel clocks a pile of woodpigeons on plough a quarter of a mile away and makes as if to bate at them. ‘Don’t be daft, Mabes,’ I say, but she bates anyway. Pah. She looks me directly in the face. Give me something to chase! I do. We walk through chest-high thistles at the corner of the next field, hawk held high as I negotiate the thorns. She’s gripping hard with all eight talons, bracing herself against the oncoming gusts of wind. And then out of nowhere, coming out of the ground right from where the tip of my shadow ends, a cock pheasant in bronze and bottle green, all rackety tail and sharp primaries, clatters up from the dry grass, gos already close behind. He turns downwind. She’s gaining on him. No more than six inches behind the tip of his tail. But she hasn’t flown much in winds like this, and mistimes her attack; is pushed by the wind a little askew, and the pheasant pulls away, climbs up over the wood. She follows, and both are lost to view.

• From Educated (2018)

  and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing. On the third night there was a rainstorm. I stood on Nic’s balcony and watched streaks of lightning race across the sky, claps of thunder chasing them. It was like being on Buck’s Peak, to feel such power in the earth and sky. The next morning was cloudless. We took a picnic of wine and pastries to the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The sun was hot, the pastries ambrosial. I could not remember ever feeling more present. Someone said something about Hobbes, and without thinking I recited a line from Mill. It seemed the natural thing, to bring this voice from the past into a moment so saturated with the past already, even if the voice was mixed with my own. There was a pause while everyone checked to see who had spoken, then someone asked which text the line was from, and the conversation moved forward. For the rest of the week, I experienced Rome as they did: as a place of history, but also as a place of life, of food and traffic and conflict and thunder. The city was no longer a museum; it was as vivid to me as Buck’s Peak. The Piazza del Popolo. The Baths of Caracalla. Castel Sant’Angelo. These became as real to my mind as the Princess, the red railway car, the Shear. The world they represented, of philosophy, science, literature—an entire civilization—took on a life that was distinct from the life I had known. At the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, I stood before Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and did not once think about chickens.