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 Going Clear (2013)

  Ron and Mary Sue had four children in six years. Diana, born in 1952, was the eldest and clearly the dominant one. She had her father’s red hair and a generous splattering of freckles. Quentin, born two years later, was the only one who was not a radiant redhead; he was small with ash-blond hair, like Mary Sue, and would always be his mother’s favorite. Suzette was a year younger; she was a cheerful child, but somewhat overshadowed by her big sister. The baby, Arthur, was born in 1958. Seen together, the Hubbard family made a vivid impression, with their ruddy complexions and their striking hair color. Although the children had a nanny, they spent much of their time unsupervised. School was an afterthought; it wasn’t until Diana demanded to learn how to write her name that the children began their education. Mary Sue was a chilly presence as a mother; she rarely cuddled or even touched her children, but in the early years she would read to them—Mary Poppins, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Kipling’s stories—in her slight Texas twang. As she took on additional responsibility in Scientology, she became even more removed; but Ron would hug the kids and toss them in the air. The house echoed with his booming laugh. He taught the children how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano and showed them card tricks with his quick hands and perfectly manicured fingernails. He would play records and dance with the children to Beethoven or Ravel or Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite—bold, soaring music. He liked to sing, and he would burst into “Farewell and Adieu to You Fair Spanish Ladies,” and “Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends,” a children’s song that is sung to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He was fanatical about taking vitamins, and he made sure the children took theirs, as well. Afterward, they would all roar to see who was the strongest. Hubbard was restless in Washington, and in 1959 he moved his family back to England, to a luxurious estate in Sussex called Saint Hill Manor, which he purchased from the Maharajah of Jaipur. Hubbard employed an extensive household staff, including two butlers, a housekeeper, a nanny, a tutor for the children, a chauffeur, and maintenance workers for the estate. “Dr.” Hubbard presented himself to the curious British press as an experimental horticultural scientist; to prove it, he allowed a photograph to be published of himself staring intently at a tomato that was attached to an E-Meter. The headline in Garden News was “Plants Do Worry and Feel Pain.” The grand mansion was a terrific playground for the children. It was actually a castle with crenelated rooflines, ivy-covered walls, and rumors of ghosts. There were fifty-two rolling acres to play in, with rose gardens, goldfish ponds, and a lake.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I went to her, and put my hands on her, and kissed her hard upon the mouth, until she laughed. I had woken tired and sore; I had had a dismal time at Green Street; but I did not feel dismal now - I felt limber and hot. If I had had a cock, it would have been twitching.We embraced for a minute or two; then she moved away and took my hand. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a room made ready for you.’I was at first a little dismayed to learn that I would not be sharing Diana’s chamber; but I could not stay dismayed for long. The room to which she led me - it was a little way along the corridor - was hardly less imposing than her own, and quite as grand. Its walls were bare and creamy-white, its carpets gold, its screen and bedstead of bamboo; its dressing-table, moreover, was crowded with goods - a cigarette-case of tortoise-shell, a pair of brushes and a comb, a button-hook of ivory, and various jars and bottles of oils and perfumes. A door beside the bed led to a long, low-ceilinged closet: here, draped on a pair of wooden shoulders, was a dressing-gown of crimson silk, to match Diana’s green one; and here, too, was the suit I had been promised: a handsome costume of grey worsted, terribly heavy and terribly smart. Besides this there was a set of drawers, marked links and neckties, collars and studs. These were all full; and on a further rack of shelves, marked linen, there was fold after fold of white lawn shirts.I gazed at all this, then kissed Diana very hard indeed - partly, I must confess, in the hope that she would close her eyes, and thus not see how much I was in awe of her. But when she had gone, I fairly danced about the golden floor in pleasure. I took the suit, and a shirt, and a collar, and a necktie, and laid them all, in proper order, upon the bed. Then I danced again. The bags I had brought with me from Mrs Milne’s I carried to the closet and cast, unopened, into the farthest corner.I wore my suit to supper; it looked, I knew, very well on me. Diana, however, said the cut was not quite right, and that tomorrow she would have Mrs Hooper measure me properly, and send my details to a tailor. I thought her faith in her housekeeper’s discretion quite extraordinary; and when that lady had left us - for, as she had at lunch, she filled our plates and glasses, then stood in grave and (I thought) unnerving attendance until dismissed - I said so. Diana laughed.‘There’s a secret to that,’ she said; ‘can’t you guess it?’‘You pay her a fortune in wages, I suppose.’‘Well, perhaps. But didn’t you catch Mrs Hooper, gazing through her lashes at you as she served you your soup?

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

  He also asked them to notice that feeling good can sometimes escape awareness altogether, but that these good feelings could do quite a lot for them. Celebrating the good feelings that they were learning to create in the classroom—by listening to and supporting their classmates—could renew their energy, give them confidence, and build the resources they needed to face tough math problems. Together as a class, they drew on this discussion of emotions to create extended analogies to tough situations in sports. They talked, for instance, about how a baseball player, up at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run on second base, needs to have confidence and to be able to visualize his own success and give it his all. He told them that math class was just like that, that they’d need to marshal up their own resources and confidence to persevere and give each step of a math problem their all. One by one, Jeremy helped his students tie this particular math course to what they wanted to do in life. He helped Tisha see how, as a nurse, she’d need math to measure blood pressure or dispense a particular dosage of medicine. “She was like, ‘You need math for that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah! You think you are just going to stick someone with a needle?’” With Ty, Jeremy talked about engineering, tire pressure, and rotations per minute and speed, and emphasized all the math that these ideas involved. “He was like ‘Really? I need math? I didn’t know any of this….’ ” Jeremy went on to tell me, “I think that was the big key . . . that we tied the course to something positive and we even talked about how they felt. Like, does it make you happy when you think about your career or what you want to do? And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ Well, then math should make you happy too because it is going to get you there!” After days and weeks of “conversating,” as they called it, these twelve lowest-achieving students bonded in Jeremy’s math class. Along the way, he encouraged them to celebrate one another by sharing what they found interesting in one another’s stories. He also encouraged them to help each other through difficult steps on math problems and cheer on one another’s successes, however small.

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

  I put on my suit and took a taxi to Onitsuka headquarters. In the conference room, the familiar conference room, Morimoto pointed me to a chair in the middle of the table. The middle this time, not the head. No more kei. He sat across from me and stared at me as the room slowly filled with executives. When everyone was there, Morimoto nodded to me. “Hai,” he said. I plunged in, essentially repeating what I’d said to him the previous morning. As I built to my crescendo, as I prepared to close, all heads swiveled toward the door, and I stopped midsentence. The temperature of the room dropped ten degrees. The founder of the company, Mr. Onitsuka, had arrived. Dressed in a dark blue Italian suit, with a head of black hair as thick as shag carpet, he filled every man in the conference room with fear. He seemed oblivious, however. For all his power, for all his wealth, his movements were deferential. He came forward haltingly, with a shuffling gait, giving no sign that he was the boss of all bosses, the shogun of shoes. Slowly he made his way around the table, making brief eye contact with each executive. Eventually he came to me. We bowed to each other, shook hands. Now he took the seat at the head of the table and Morimoto tried to summarize my reason for being there. Mr. Onitsuka raised a hand, cut him off. Without preamble he launched into a long, passionate monologue. Some time ago, he said, he’d had a vision. A wondrous glimpse of the future. “Everyone in the world wear athletic shoes all the time,” he said. “I know this day come.” He paused, looking around the table at each person, to see if they also knew. His gaze rested on me. He smiled. I smiled. He blinked twice. “You remind me of myself when I am young,” he said softly. He stared into my eyes. One second. Two. Now he turned his gaze to Morimoto. “This about those thirteen western states?” he said. “Yes,” Morimoto said. “Hm,” Onitsuka said. “Hmmmm.” He narrowed his eyes, looked down. He seemed to be meditating. Again he looked up at me. “Yes,” he said, “all right. You have western states.” The Marlboro Man, he said, could continue selling his wrestling shoes nationwide, but would limit his track shoe sales to the East Coast. Mr. 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.

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

  Penny wasn’t legally old enough to drink alcohol, but we’d often borrow one of my sisters’ driver’s licenses and go for cocktails at Trader Vic’s downtown. Alcohol and time worked their magic. By February, around my thirtieth birthday, she was spending every minute of her free time at Blue Ribbon, and evenings at my apartment. At some point she stopped calling me Mr. Knight. INEVITABLY, I BROUGHT her home to meet my family. We all sat around the dining room table, eating Mom’s pot roast, washing it down with cold milk, pretending it wasn’t awkward. Penny was the second girl I’d ever brought home, and though she didn’t have the wild charisma of Sarah, what she had was better. Her charm was real, unrehearsed, and though the Knights seemed to like it, they were still the Knights. My mother said nothing; my sisters tried in vain to be a bridge to my mother and father; my father asked a series of probing, thoughtful questions about Penny’s background and upbringing, which made him sound like a cross between a loan officer and a homicide detective. Penny told me later that the atmosphere was the exact opposite of her house, where dinner was a free-for-all, everyone laughing and talking over one another, dogs barking and TVs blaring in the background. I assured her that no one would have suspected she felt out of her element. Next she brought me home, and I saw the truth of everything she’d told me. Her house was the opposite. Though much grander than Chateau Knight, it was a mess. The carpets were stained from all the animals—a German shepherd, a monkey, a cat, several white rats, an ill-tempered goose. And chaos was the rule. Besides the Parks clan, and their arkful of pets, it was a hangout for all the stray kids in the neighborhood. I tried my best to be charming, but I couldn’t seem to connect with anyone, human or otherwise. Slowly, painstakingly, I made inroads with Penny’s mother, Dot. She reminded me of Auntie Mame—zany, madcap, eternally young. In many ways she was a permanent teenager, resisting her role as matriarch. It struck me that she was more like a sister to Penny than a mother, and indeed, soon after dinner, when Penny and I invited her to come get a drink with us, Dot jumped at the chance. We hit several hot spots and wound up at an after-hours joint on the east side. Penny, after two cocktails, switched to water—but not Dot. Dot kept right on going, and going, and soon she was jumping up to dance with all sorts of strange men. Sailors, and worse. At one point she jabbed a thumb in Penny’s direction and said to me, “Let’s ditch this wet blanket! She’s dead weight!” Penny put both hands over her eyes. I laughed and kicked back. I’d passed the Dot Test.

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

  Wanting to settle the matter once and for all, I put the subject at the top of the agenda for our biannual gathering, a retreat we’d taken to calling the Buttface. JOHNSON COINED THE phrase, we think. At one of our earliest retreats he muttered: “How many multimillion-dollar companies can you yell out, ‘Hey, Buttface,’ and the entire management team turns around?” It got a laugh. And then it stuck. And then it became a key part of our vernacular. Buttface referred to both the retreat and the retreaters, and it not only captured the informal mood of those retreats, where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos. The first few Buttfaces took place at various Oregon resorts. Otter Crest. Salishan. Ultimately we came to prefer Sunriver, an idyllic spot in sunny central Oregon. Typically, Woodell and Johnson would fly out from the East Coast, and we’d all drive out to Sunriver late Friday. We’d reserve a bunch of cabins, seize a conference room, and spend two or three days shouting ourselves hoarse. I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at—laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact we were separated from each other by three thousand miles, at a time when communication wasn’t easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing. Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I’d assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold athletic shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was… Johnson. And yet, it was undeniable. While everyone else was laughing, rioting, he’d be the sane one, sitting quietly in the middle of the table reading a book. The loudest voice at every Buttface always seemed to be Hayes. And the craziest. Like his girth, his personality was ever expanding, adding new phobias and enthusiasms. For instance, by this time Hayes had developed a curious obsession with heavy equipment. Backhoes, bulldozers, cherry pickers, cranes, they fascinated him. They… turned him on, there’s no other way to say it. At an early Buttface we were leaving a local bar when Hayes spied a bulldozer in the field behind the lodge. He discovered, to his astonishment, the keys had been left inside, so he hopped in and moved the earth all around the field, and in the parking lot, quitting only when he narrowly missed crushing several cars. Hayes on a bulldozer, I thought: As much as the swoosh, that might be our logo.

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

  1975 T here was no victory party. There was no victory dance. There wasn’t even a quick victory jig in the halls. There wasn’t time. We still didn’t have a bank, and every company needs a bank. Hayes made a list of banks with the most deposits in Oregon. They were all much smaller than First National or Bank of California, but oh well. Beggars, choosers, etc. The first six hung up on us. Number seven, First State Bank of Oregon, didn’t. The bank was in Milwaukie, a little town half an hour up the road from Beaverton. “Come on over,” said the bank president when I finally got him on the phone. He promised me one million dollars in credit, which was about his bank’s limit. We moved our account that day. That night, for the first time in about two weeks, I put my head on a pillow and slept. THE NEXT MORNING I lingered with Penny over breakfast and we talked about the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. I told her I didn’t know when I’d craved a holiday so much. I needed rest, and sleep, and good food—and I needed to watch Pre run. She gave me a wry smile. Always mixing business with pleasure. Guilty. Pre was hosting a meet that weekend in Eugene, and he’d invited the top runners in the world, including his Finnish archnemesis, Viren. Though Viren had pulled out at the last minute, there was still a gang of amazing runners competing, including one brash marathoner named Frank Shorter, who’d taken gold at the 1972 Games, in Munich, the city of his birth. Tough, smart, a lawyer now living in Colorado, Shorter was starting to become as well known as Pre, and the two were good friends. Secretly I had designs on signing Shorter to an endorsement deal. Friday night Penny and I drove down to Eugene and took our place with seven thousand screaming, roistering Pre fans. The 5,000-meter race was vicious, furious, and Pre wasn’t at his best, everyone could see that. Shorter led going into the last lap. But at the last possible moment, in the last two hundred yards, Pre did what Pre always did. He dug down deep. With Hayward vibrating and swaying, he pulled away and won in 13:23.8, which was 1.6 seconds off his best time. Pre was most famous for saying, “Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.” Watching him run that final weekend of May 1975, I’d never felt more admiration for him, or identified with him more closely. Somebody may beat me, I told myself, some banker or creditor or competitor may stop me, but by God they’re going to have to bleed to do it. There was a postrace party at Hollister’s house. Penny and I wanted to go, but we had a two-hour drive back to Portland. The kids, the kids, we said as we waved good-bye to Pre and Shorter and Hollister.

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

  My best man was Cousin Houser. My lawyer, my wingman. The other groomsmen were Penny’s two brothers, plus a friend from business school, and Cale, who told me moments before the ceremony, “Second time I’ve seen you this nervous.” We laughed, and reminisced, for the millionth time, about that day at Stanford when I’d given my presentation to my entrepreneurship class. Today, I thought, is similar. Once again I’m telling a roomful of people that something is possible, that something can be successful, when in fact I don’t really know. I’m speaking from theory, faith, and bluster, like every groom. And every bride. It would be up to me and Penny to prove the truth of what we said that day. The reception was at the Garden Club of Portland, where society ladies gathered on summer nights to drink daiquiris and trade gossip. The night was warm. The skies threatened rain, but never opened. I danced with Penny. I danced with Dot. I danced with my mother. Before midnight Penny and I said good-bye to all and jumped into my brand-new car, a racy black Cougar. I sped us to the coast, two hours away, where we planned to spend the weekend at her parents’ beach house. Dot called every half hour. 1969Suddenly, a whole new cast of characters was wandering in and out of the office. Rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners, and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling they were all business. Because they were inspired by what we were trying to do, and because they worked solely on commission (two dollars a pair), they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school and college track meet within a thousand-mile radius, and their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more. We’d posted $150,000 in sales in 1968, and in 1969 we were on our way to just under $300,000. Though Wallace was still breathing down my neck, hassling me to slow down and moaning about my lack of equity, I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my thirty-first birthday I made the bold move. I quit Portland State and went full-time at my company, paying myself a fairly generous eighteen thousand dollars a year. Above all, I told myself, the best reason for leaving Portland State was that I’d already gotten more out of the school—Penny—than I’d ever hoped. I got something else, too; I just didn’t know it at the time. Nor did I dream how valuable it would prove to be.

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

  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. Did the Japanese count differently? Alarmed, I wondered if thirteen western states might actually mean three?

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

  “We have here two conflicting stories,” he said, “and it’s the opinion of this court that Blue Ribbon’s is the more convincing.” Blue Ribbon has been more truthful, he said, not only throughout the dispute, as evidenced by documents, but in this courtroom. “Truthfulness,” he said, “is ultimately all I have to go on, to gauge this case.” He noted Iwano’s testimony. Compelling, the judge said. It would seem Kitami had lied. He then noted Kitami’s use of a translator: During the course of Mr. Kitami’s testimony, on more than one occasion, he interrupted the translator to correct him. Each time Mr. Kitami corrected him in perfect English. Pause. James the Just looked through his papers. So, he declared, it’s therefore my ruling that Blue Ribbon will retain all rights to the names Boston and Cortez. Further, he said, there are clearly damages here. Loss of business. Misappropriation of trademark. The question is, how to assign a dollar figure for those damages. The normal course is to name a special master to determine what the damages are. This I will do in the coming days. He slammed down his gavel. I turned to Cousin Houser and Strasser. We won? Oh my… we won . I shook hands with Cousin Houser and Strasser, then clapped their shoulders, then hugged them both. I allowed myself one delicious sidelong look at Hilliard. But to my disappointment he had no reaction. He was staring straight ahead, perfectly still. It had never really been his fight. He was just a mercenary. Coolly, he shut his briefcase, clicked the locks, and without a glance in our direction he stood and strolled out of the courtroom. WE WENT STRAIGHT to the London Grill at the Benson Hotel, not far from the courthouse. We each ordered a double and toasted James the Just. And Iwano. And ourselves. Then I phoned Penny from the pay phone. “We won!” I cried, not caring that they could hear me in all the rooms of the hotel. “Can you believe it—we won!” I called my father and yelled the same thing. Both Penny and my father asked what we’d won. I couldn’t tell them. We still didn’t know, I said. One dollar? One million? That was tomorrow’s problem. Today was about relishing victory. Back in the bar Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had one more stiff one. Then I phoned the office to find out the daily pair count. A WEEK LATER we got a settlement offer: four hundred thousand dollars. Onitsuka knew full well that a special master might come up with any kind of number, so they were seeking to move preemptively, contain their losses. But four hundred thousand dollars seemed low to me. We haggled for several days. Hilliard wouldn’t budge. We all wanted to be done with this, forever. Especially Cousin Houser’s overlords, who now authorized him to take the money, of which he’d get half, the largest payment in the history of his firm. Sweet vindication.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Me... in virgin-white... coming down a winding staircase... carrying a white bouquet!... and my family will be crying for joy.... And there will be champagne! cake! a real priest to puhfawm the Ceremony!—” She broke off abruptly, shutting her eyes deliriously as if to visualize the scene better. Then she opened them again, onto the frantic teeming world of Pershing Square.... “They will bust you again for sure if you have that wedding, Miss Destinée,” said Chuck gravely. “It would be worth it,” sighed Miss Destiny. “Oh, it would be worth it.” Then we noticed a welldressed man standing a few feet from us in the shadows, staring at us intently until he saw us looking back and he shifted his gaze, began to smoke, looked up furtively again. Miss Destiny smiled brightly at him, but he didnt smile back at her, and Miss Destiny said obviously he is a queer and so he must want a man. “So darlings, I will leave you to him and him to whomevuh eenie-meenie-miney he wants. But let me tell you, my dear—” me—confidentially “—that when they dress that elegantly around here, why, they will make all kinds of promises and give you oh two bucks,” and Chuck said oh no the score was worth at least twenty, and Miss Destiny laughs like Tallulah Bankhead, who is the Idol of all queens, and says in a husky voice, “Dalling, this is not your young inexperienced sistuh you are talkin to, this is your mothuh, who has been a-round.... Why, Miss Thing told me about this sweet stud kid going for a dollar!—... Ah, well, as my beloved sweet Juliet said, Parting is: such—sweet—sorrow—...” And she sighed now, being Juliet, then whispered to me loud enough for Chuck to hear, “There will be other times, my dear—when you are not Working.” And she moved away with peals of queenly laughter, flirting again, fluttering again, flamboyantly swishing, just as she had come on, saying hello to everyone: “Good evening, Miss Saint Moses, dear—...” spreading love, throwing kisses, bringing her delicate hands to her face, sighing, “Too Much!” after some goodlooking youngman she digs, glancing back at Chuck and me as the man moved out of the shadows, closer to us, jingling money. So there goes Miss Destiny leaving Pershing Square, all gayety, all happiness, all laughter. “I love you too, dear, ummmm, so much....” 3 I left the 1-2-3 and went to Ji-Ji’s bar—another malehustling and queen bar: but tougher.

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

  As my feet hit the sand I whooped and laughed and kicked off my sneakers, then sprinted directly into the waves. I didn’t stop until I was up to my neck in the foam. I dove to the bottom, all the way to the bottom, and then came up gasping, laughing, and rolled onto my back. At last I stumbled onto the shore and plopped onto the sand, smiling at the birds and the clouds. I must have looked like an escaped mental patient. Carter, sitting beside me now, wore the same daffy expression. “We should stay here,” I said. “Why be in a hurry to leave?” “What about The Plan?” Carter said. “Going around the world?” “Plans change.” Carter grinned. “Swell idea, Buck.” So we got jobs. Selling encyclopedias door to door. Not glamorous, to be sure, but heck. We didn’t start work until 7:00 p.m., which gave us plenty of time for surfing. Suddenly nothing was more important than learning to surf. After only a few tries I was able to stay upright on a board, and after a few weeks I was good. Really good. Gainfully employed, we ditched our motel room and signed a lease on an apartment, a furnished studio with two beds, one real, one fake—a sort of ironing board that folded out from the wall. Carter, being longer and heavier, got the real bed, and I got the ironing board. I didn’t care. After a day of surfing and selling encyclopedias, followed by a late night at the local bars, I could have slept in a luau fire pit. The rent was one hundred bucks a month, which we split down the middle. Life was sweet. Life was heaven. Except for one small thing. I couldn’t sell encyclopedias. I couldn’t sell encyclopedias to save my life. The older I got, it seemed, the shier I got, and the sight of my extreme discomfort often made strangers uncomfortable. Thus, selling anything would have been challenging, but selling encyclopedias, which were about as popular in Hawaii as mosquitoes and mainlanders, was an ordeal. No matter how deftly or forcefully I managed to deliver the key phrases drilled into us during our brief training session (“Boys, tell the folks you ain’t selling encyclopedias—you’re selling a Vast Compendium of Human Knowledge… the Answers to Life’s Questions!”), I always got the same response. Beat it, kid. If my shyness made me bad at selling encyclopedias, my nature made me despise it. I wasn’t built for heavy doses of rejection. I’d known this about myself since high school, freshman year, when I got cut from the baseball team. A small setback, in the grand scheme, but it knocked me sideways. It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.

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

  My brow beginning to bead with sweat, I turned down a street and saw the hospital up ahead. Thank goodness. Once again they wheeled Penny away, and once again I waited, and wilted, in the bullpen. This time I tried to do some paperwork, and when the doctor came and found me, and told me I had another son, I thought: Two sons. A pair of sons. The ultimate pair count. I went to Penny’s room and met my new boy, whom we named Travis. Then I did a bad thing. Smiling, Penny said the doctors told her she could go home after two days, instead of the three they’d required after Matthew. Whoa, I said, hold on there, the insurance is willing to pay for another day in the hospital—what’s your hurry? Might as well kick back, relax. Take advantage. She lowered her head, cocked an eyebrow. “Who’s playing and where is it?” she said. “Oregon,” I whispered. “Arizona State.” She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Phil. Go.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I opened the curtains the next morning. The brightness of the room made me clearer, which concerned her for a while. But when a broad stripe of sunlight fell across her back she raised her feathers to greet it. Now, standing in a shallow bath next to her perch, she nibbles her toes, takes precise and tiny bites of water. She jumps back onto her perch and begins to preen herself, contorting her body into the stylised shapes of Japanese paintings of courtly goshawks. She runs her beak through one feather after another in quick succession: the sound is of paper being scored, or a pack of cards being shuffled Then she stretches one broad wing behind her, drags it slowly back over her sunlit tail, and rouses, squeaking happily through her nose. I watch all this with a ravenous, gulping-down-champagne sense of joy. Look how happy she is, I think. This room is not a dungeon and I am not a torturer. I am a beneficent figure, one who crouches and stoops in anxious genuflection, bearing delicious treats of steak in my hand. It is hubris. Less than an hour later I am certain that my hawk hates me and I am the worst falconer in the history of the world. No matter that Mabel is far tamer than any of the boys or books had told me she would be. I’ve comprehensively failed her. The hawk is ruined. I know this is true because she doesn’t want to be hooded. Until now she has accepted the hood with equanimity. Earlier today I sensed a little thrum of disquiet in her heart and now it has exploded into outright rebellion. I bring the hood up to her head and she dodges it. Snakes her head. Contracts it into her neck. Ducks and runs. I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now, unhappy, unsettled, lifting one foot then the other, the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear. I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too. I remember hauling this hood out of my bag while looking for a pen before a university seminar a few months ago. ‘What’s that?’ asked a colleague. ‘A falcon hood,’ I said, not looking up. ‘Have you brought it in to show it to people?’ ‘No. It was just in my bag.’ ‘But can I look at it?’ ‘Absolutely, go ahead.’

• From Educated (2018)

  Charles called a few days later. I was standing in my room after a day of roofing. I smelled of paint thinner and was covered in dust the color of ash, but he didn’t know that. We talked for two hours. He called the next night, and the one after. He said we should get a burger on Friday. —ON THURSDAY, AFTER I’D finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts, both blue. When I put them on, I barely recognized my own body, the way it narrowed and curved. I took them off immediately, feeling that somehow they were immodest. They weren’t, not technically, but I knew why I wanted them—for my body, so it would be noticed—and that seemed immodest even if the clothes were not. The next afternoon, when the crew had finished for the day, I ran to the house. I showered, blasting away the dirt, then I laid the new clothes on my bed and stared at them. After several minutes, I put them on and was again shocked by the sight of myself. There wasn’t time to change so I wore a jacket even though it was a warm evening, and at some point, though I can’t say when or why, I decided that I didn’t need the jacket after all. For the rest of the night, I didn’t have to remember to be Shannon; I talked and laughed without pretending at all. Charles and I spent every evening together that week. We haunted public parks and ice cream shops, burger joints and gas stations. I took him to Stokes, because I loved it there, and because the assistant manager would always give me the unsold doughnuts from the bakery. We talked about music—about bands I’d never heard of and about how he wanted to be a musician and travel the world. We never talked about us—about whether we were friends or something else. I wished he would bring it up but he didn’t. I wished he would let me know some other way—by gently taking my hand or putting an arm around me—but he didn’t do that, either. On Friday we stayed out late, and when I came home the house was dark. Mother’s computer was on, the screen saver casting a green light over the living room. I sat down and mechanically checked BYU’s website. Grades had been posted. I’d passed. More than passed. I’d earned A’s in every subject except Western Civ. I would get a scholarship for half of my tuition. I could go back. Charles and I spent the next afternoon in the park, rocking lazily in tire swings. I told him about the scholarship. I’d meant it as a brag, but for some reason my fears came out with it. I said I shouldn’t even be in college, that I should be made to finish high school first. Or to at least start it.

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

  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. Despite our continual melancholy about Pre, we allowed ourselves to feel joy, because it was becoming clear that Nike was doing more than making a good show. Nike was dominating those trials. Virgin took the 5,000 meters in Nikes. Shorter won the marathon in Nikes. Slowly, in the shop, in the town, we heard people whispering, Nike Nike Nike. We heard our name more than the name of any athlete. Besides Pre. Saturday afternoon, walking into Hayward to visit Bowerman, I heard someone behind me say, “Jeez, Nike is really kicking Adidas’s ass.” It might have been the highlight of the weekend, of the year, followed closely by the Puma sales rep I spotted moments later, leaning against a tree and looking suicidal. Bowerman was there strictly as a spectator, which was strange for him, and us. And yet he was wearing his standard uniform: the ratty sweater, the low ball cap. At one point he formally requested a meeting in a small office under the east grandstand. The office wasn’t really an office, more like a closet, where the groundskeepers stored their rakes and brooms and a few canvas chairs. There was barely room for the coach and Johnson and me, never mind the others invited by the coach: Hollister, and Dennis Vixie, a local podiatrist who worked with Bowerman as a shoe consultant. As we shut the door I noticed Bowerman didn’t look like himself. At Pre’s funeral he’d seemed old. Now he seemed lost. After a minute of small talk he started bellowing. He complained that he wasn’t getting any “respect” anymore from Nike. We’d built him a home lab, and supplied him with a lasting machine, but he said that he was constantly asking in vain for raw materials from Exeter. Johnson looked horrified. “What materials?” he asked. “I ask for shoe uppers and my requests are ignored!” Bowerman said. Johnson turned to Vixie. “I sent you the uppers!” he said. “Vixie—didn’t you get them?” Vixie looked perplexed. “Yes, I got them.” Bowerman took off his ball cap, put it back on, took it off. “Yeah, well,” he grumbled, “but you didn’t send the outer soles.” Johnson’s face reddened. “I sent those, too! Vixie?”

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

  1964 T he notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don’t recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors. I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing. I raced home, scurried down to the basement, ripped open the box. Twelve pairs of shoes, creamy white, with blue stripes down the sides. God, they were beautiful. They were more than beautiful. I’d seen nothing in Florence or Paris that surpassed them. I wanted to put them on marble pedestals, or in gilt-edged frames. I held them up to the light, caressed them as sacred objects, the way a writer might treat a new set of notebooks, or a baseball player a rack of bats. Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman. I did so without a second thought, since it was Bowerman who’d first made me think, really think , about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. In the four years I’d run for him at Oregon, Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He’d spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter. Especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn’t kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man’s stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile (5,280 feet), you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step—that’s 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn’t like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal. Goal is putting it kindly. In quest of lightness he was willing to try anything. Animal, vegetable, mineral, any material was eligible if it might improve on the standard shoe leather of the day. That sometimes meant kangaroo skin. Other times, cod. You haven’t lived until you’ve competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod. There were four or five of us on the track team who were Bowerman’s podiatry guinea pigs, but I was his pet project.

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

  The setting was their place, down in Corvallis. Scattered rain had been falling all morning, and it was coming down in sheets by game time. Penny and I stood in the stands, shivering inside our sopping ponchos, peering into the raindrops as the opening kickoff spun into the air. On the first play from scrimmage, Oregon’s burly quarterback, a sharpshooter named Dan Fouts, handed the ball to Donny Reynolds, who made one cut on his Nike waffles and… took it to the house . Ducks 7, Nike 7, Beavers 0. Fouts, closing out a brilliant college career, was out of his mind that night. He passed for three hundred yards, including a sixty-yard touchdown bomb that landed like a feather in his receiver’s hands. The rout was soon on. At the final gun my Ducks were on top of the Bucktooths, 30–3. I always called them my Ducks, but now they really were. They were in my shoes. Every step they took, every cut they made, was partly mine. It’s one thing to watch a sporting event and put yourself in the players’ shoes. Every fan does that. It’s another thing when the athletes are actually in your shoes. I laughed as we walked to the car. I laughed like a maniac. I laughed all the way back to Portland. This, I kept telling Penny, this is how 1972 needed to end. With a victory. Any victory would have been healing, but this, oh boy—this.

• From Educated (2018)

  The music stopped my breath. I’d heard the piano played countless times before, to accompany hymns, but when Mary played it, the sound was nothing like that formless clunking. It was liquid, it was air. It was rock one moment and wind the next. The next day, when Mary returned from the school, I asked her if instead of money she would give me lessons. We perched on the piano bench and she showed me a few finger exercises. Then she asked what else I was learning besides the piano. Dad had told me what to say when people asked about my schooling. “I do school every day,” I said. “Do you meet other kids?” she asked. “Do you have friends?” “Sure,” I said. Mary returned to the lesson. When we’d finished and I was ready to go, she said, “My sister Caroline teaches dance every Wednesday in the back of Papa Jay’s. There are lots of girls your age. You could join.” That Wednesday, I left Randy’s early and pedaled to the gas station. I wore jeans, a large gray T-shirt, and steel-toed boots; the other girls wore black leotards and sheer, shimmering skirts, white tights and tiny ballet shoes the color of taffy. Caroline was younger than Mary. Her makeup was flawless and gold hoops flashed through chestnut curls. She arranged us in rows, then showed us a short routine. A song played from a boom box in the corner. I’d never heard it before but the other girls knew it. I looked in the mirror at our reflection, at the twelve girls, sleek and shiny, pirouetting blurs of black, white and pink. Then at myself, large and gray. When the lesson finished, Caroline told me to buy a leotard and dance shoes. “I can’t,” I said. “Oh.” She looked uncomfortable. “Maybe one of the girls can lend you one.” She’d misunderstood. She thought I didn’t have money. “It isn’t modest,” I said. Her lips parted in surprise. These Californian Moyles, I thought. “Well, you can’t dance in boots,” she said. “I’ll talk to your mother.” A few days later, Mother drove me forty miles to a small shop whose shelves were lined with exotic shoes and strange acrylic costumes. Not one was modest. Mother went straight to the counter and told the attendant we needed a black leotard, white tights and jazz shoes. “Keep those in your room,” Mother said as we left the store. She didn’t need to say anything else. I already understood that I should not show the leotard to Dad. That Wednesday, I wore the leotard and tights with my gray T-shirt over the top. The T-shirt reached almost to my knees, but even so I was ashamed to see so much of my legs. Dad said a righteous woman never shows anything above her ankle. The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity.

• 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.