Longing

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 Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She had no place in our relationship and Theresa had no right to request this of me. My temper tantrum over the suggestion won out and I had a day and a night away from our contrived little family. By the end of the visit with my father, I begged him to let me live with him, but he shook his head and said he was in no position to have me. “Next year will be better,” he promised. “There’s some deals I’m working on and if they come through I stand to make a lot of money and when that happens I’m going to send for you. One day I’m going to be wealthy, Celena, you can count on that. And when that day comes, you will be too. I’m going to buy a mansion in Beverly Hills and you’ll be sitting pretty.” I hung on his every word. Ray’s comment that my father didn’t really want me had reactivated a deep fear I’d recently developed. Why didn’t my father insist I stay with him even if he was poor? Ray and Theresa had nothing, yet they held no qualms about raising not one, but two children. I clung to my father’s claims that he was working on it, but Ray’s lash out stung as he had intended it to. Since we had left Synanon, Theresa frequently talked up Disneyland to Ray and Sara, who had never been there. She spoke glowingly about what a magical place the theme park was and its most marvelous attraction “It’s a Small World.” “There are dolls that represent people from various countries all over the world and they are singing while you float past on these little boats.” Ray’s eyes always grew shiny with emotion when Theresa spoke about this particular ride. “I would love to see that,” he’d say and Theresa would nod her head emphatically. “Oh you will. It’s going to knock your socks off.” We arrived at Disneyland in the late morning, Theresa clearly in charge of the expedition. She had meticulously mapped out our entire day the night before. While Ray counted out his money to buy our tickets, a grin spread across his face, the first time I had ever seen him smile when paying for anything. His eyes blinked rapidly and after the man behind the booth handed us our tickets, my stepfather walked as if in a daze behind Theresa, who marched forward, turning to look at us now and then, her bottom lip tucked under her front teeth. We made our way straight to the “It’s a Small World” ride, where we waited in line for half an hour before it was our turn to step into one of the little boats.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  We lived on a ranch far from town, and if I wanted to leave the property, I had to have permission or be accompanied by a senior resident. I couldn’t even make a private phone call. What I mean is that we could leave, but it was a big deal to admit that you wanted to go. Usually, when people talked about wanting to quit the commune, there was a lot of persuasion to get them to stay, and they’d be subjected to more gaming. Community members would try to convince doubters that it was in their best interest to stay. Often people caved under that pressure, but there was another way: I could run away in the night. Runaways were called “splittees,” and a plan to split between two or more people was called a “contract,” which was what I ended up making with another woman and a man. Our plan was to leave in the middle of the night and walk to the nearest town, Marshall, and from there catch a bus to San Francisco. But it never happened because the other woman started to feel guilty, and she broke our contract during a game. After that, I was subjected to a series of teardown games and was told I wasn’t good enough for boot camp. Management sent me back to Oakland. I still wanted to leave and probably would have if I hadn’t met Barbara. Barbara was an older woman with some status in the community, and she took a special interest in me. When I first met her, she said, “Honey, I’ve got my eye on you and I’m going to make it my mission to get you to stay here. You have too much potential for us to lose you.” It was the first time since I’d come to Synanon that I felt somebody cared about me. I told Barbara how much I missed you and how hard it was for me being separated from my child. Barbara told me that if I worked hard and truly embraced the Synanon way that I would be reunited with you, and she promised to help me make that happen. The more vested in the community I became, the more unattractive the outside world began to look. Sometimes when we had games or seminars in which the subject of mainstream living was brought up and we discussed how it destroys people, I’d remember how vulnerable and helpless I felt when I was on my own. Those thoughts hardened my resolve in doing the good work and to finally bring you into the community. It was in Oakland, where I met most of the people who would become my closest friends throughout my time in the community and after. What really put a fire under me, though, was when I discovered the Kidsnatchers club, a kind of support group for parents working to bring their children into Synanon.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀΐτας [1], ὁ, Dor. word for a beloved youth, answering to εἰσπνήλας or εἴσπνηλος (the lover), Ar. Fr.576, Theocr. 12.14 (where it is said to be a Thessalian word), 23.63: also generally a lover, Χρύσας (sc. ᾿Αθανᾶς) δ᾽ ἀΐτης Anth. P. 15. 26:—a fem. ditis (-(os), occurs in Alcman 125. Cf. Miiller Dor. 4. 4,6. (Either from diw, a hearer; or from dw, anu, cf. εἰσπνήλας.) aite, Dor. for εἴτε. αἰτέω, cf. αἴτημι : Ion. impf. αἴτεον, Hdt.: fut. αἰτήσω: aor. ἤτησα: pf. ἤτηκα Aristid.; pf. pass. ἤτημαι, etc. To ask, beg, absol. in Od. 18. 49, Aesch. Supp. 340. 2. mostly c. acc. rei, to ask for, crave, demand, Il. 5. 358, Od. 17. 365, Att.; ὁδὸν air. to beg one’s departure, i. e. ask leave to depart, Od. Io. 17; air. τινί τι to ask something for one, 20. 74, Hdt. 5. 17:—c. acc. pers. et rei, to ask a person for a thing, Il. 22. 295, Od. 2. 387, Hdt. 3. 1, al., and often in Att.; δίκας air. τινὰ φόνου to demand satisfaction from one for .., Hdt. 8. 114; also, air. τι πρός τινος Theogn. 556; παρά τινος Xen. An. 1. 3, 16. 3. c. acc. pers. et inf. to ask one to do, Od. 3. 173, Soph. O.C. 1334, Ant. 65, etc.; also, air. mapa τινος δοῦναι Plat. Eryx. 398 E. 4. in Logic, to postulate, assume, Arist. An. Pr. 1.24, 2, Top. 8. 13; 2) etc. II. Med. to ask for oneself, for one’s own use or purpose, to claim, Aesch. Cho. 480; often almost=the Act., and with the same construct., first in Hdt. 1. 90., 9. 34, Aesch. Pr. 822, etc.; αἰτεῖσθαί τινα ὅπως .. Antipho 112. 41; often absol. in part., αἰτουμένῳ pot δός Aesch. Cho. 480, cf. 2, Theb. 260, Soph. Ph. 63; αἰτουμένη που τεύξεται Id. Ant. 778 ; αἰτησάμενος ἐχρήσατο Lys. 154.24; οὐ πῦρ γὰρ αἰτῶν, οὐδὲ λοπάδ᾽ αἰτούμενος Menand. Ὕμν. 5; αἰτεῖσθαι ὑπέρ τινος to beg for one, Lys. 141. 35. ITI. Pass. of persons, to have a thing begged of one, αἰτηθείς τι Hdt. 8. 111, Thuc. 2.97; aitevpevos Theocr. 14. 63: also c. inf. to be asked to do a thing, Pind. I. 8 (7). το. 2. of things, to be asked, τὸ airedpevoy Hat. 8, 1123; ἵπποι ἠτημένοι bor- rowed horses, Lys. 169. 17. αἴτημα, aros, τό, a request, demand, Plat. Rep. 566 B, N. T. II. in Logic, a postulate, assumption, Arist. An. Post. 1. 10, 7. αἰτηματικός, 7, dv, disposed to ask, Artemid. 4. 2. αἰτηματώδης, es, (εἶδος) like a postulate, Plut. 2. 694 F. αἴτημι, Aeol. for airéw, Pind. Fr. 127. aityots, ews, 7, a request, demand, Hat. 7. 32, Antipho 1 29. 40. 11. in Logic, assumption, τῆς ἀποκρίσεως Arist. Interpr. 11, 3. αἰτητέον. verb. Adj. onze must ask, Xen. Eq. Mag. 5, 11.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Whenever I asked for something to drink, someone handed me 7Up, Coca-Cola or Kool-Aid. On the street where I lived with my uncle and aunt, an ice cream truck came rolling around in the late afternoon, with its colorful advertisements of chocolate-dipped ice cream cones and Hostess treats pasted on the body of the vehicle. The truck enjoyed a booming business, consistently swarmed by children and adults queuing up to buy the same items that were available in the market not far away. I usually bought either a Honeybunn, similar to a cinnamon roll without the cinnamon, or banana-flavored Now and Laters, hard, square, chewy candies that stuck to my teeth. Theresa had been fond of the pink-and-white Mother’s circus animal cookies, while my father was a fan of Winchell’s Donuts. At Grandma Regina’s there were usually homemade pies, cakes and cookies available at all times. An absolute favorite of mine was a store-bought white birthday cake with fancy, swirly, multi-colored frosting. I missed this frosted cake so much that I sometimes drooled over a picture of a mandrill baboon in a wildlife book that I had in my possession because much of the animal’s face was formed into colorful dips and ridges that reminded me of cake frosting. In Synanon, we used saccharine in place of white sugar, despite the artificial sweetener’s acrid aftertaste. When we weren’t eating eggs and toast for breakfast, we often had Grape Nuts. Some of the children sprinkled their cereal with the powder from the pink packets placed in containers on the tables, but I ate mine plain. Nor did I touch the saccharin-laced birthday cakes. Gazing upon these cakes only depressed me. Despite their delectable appearance, they tasted the way I imagined cake batter would taste if powdered cleanser were added to it. White sugar wasn’t the only condiment omitted from our diet. At one point salt, too, had been prohibited and replaced with fake salt, which attacked my taste buds like a tangy Alka-Seltzer with the fizz factor dialed down. I stayed away from the stuff, and when my desire for salt became overpowering, I broke off chunks of the large salt licks attached to the corral fences for the cattle, though we kids had been forbidden from doing this and other children who’d had the same idea had been punished for it. When I was sure I was alone, I’d break off a piece of the salt and suck on it until I puked, and then I would suck some more. With the ban on sugar lifted, adults immediately scheduled trips to the grocery store. Bags of doughnuts, Twinkies, cookies, cakes, chocolate bars and ice cream were purchased and handed freely to us children by the armload. Some of the kids who’d already made plans to leave the property for a brief trip into town collected money from the rest of us and made shopping lists of requested treats.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I carefully placed the letter with my other personal things in my end-table drawer. It was Saturday morning, and I heard the blare of television cartoons from the living room. We did not watch much TV. Weekends were the allocated time, and sometimes we watched one or two shows during the week. I closed the door to the bedroom, hoping to have a moment to myself. Sitting on my bed, I drew my knees up to my chest and thought about my mother for the first time in a while. Physically, we were very different. The first time I had taken notice, I had been three years old, the age at which young children begin to emulate their parents’ mannerisms, speech patterns and intonations. Standing in our bathroom, I had watched in the mirror while she’d brushed her hair, the bristles gliding easily through the silky brown waves, which cascaded over her shoulders. My own kinky hair popped out from my head in short little bushes of frizz that refused to obey the motions of my imitation grooming, refused to lay flat and smooth like my pretty mother’s. The harder I brushed, the puffier my hair became, until I had a halo of brown cotton candy. Angrily, I pressed down one side, crying out my frustration while my mom watched me, amused. To appease me, she braided my hair into several chunky plaits, fastening the ends with colorful plastic barrettes. Shortly after I got the letter, I received a large doll. The present astounded me, as the idea of presents was far removed from my new reality. “It’s from Theresa,” the demonstrator said. This information was as stupendous as the gift itself. I was still trying to make sense of the school at Synanon. When I’d first arrived, all my personal possessions had been confiscated, and not long after I’d been introduced to the communal playrooms. At first I did not know children could own things; however, later I learned that all children possessed personal belongings. The doll was still sealed in its tall box, its blank eyes staring at me through the clear plastic. I quickly opened it, releasing the hard plastic limbs from the twist ties that held them in place. Some of the girls who had been around me when the gift arrived stood and watched. “Ahh,” they cooed, once I had the doll out of the package. I let them pull the shiny brown springy curls and touch and stroke the bright yellow dress. The doll had brown skin like mine and curls just like I had. I loved her at once and even more so because she came from my mother, who had reached celebrity-like status in my mind compared with the utilitarian demonstrators and their evenhanded, often emotionless treatment of the other children and me. Later that morning I walked with my new doll up the road to the Commons for breakfast, which extended into brunch during the weekends.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  We’d bounce off the plastic-covered furniture and barely miss colliding with a shelf full of family photos and figurines or the big wooden TV set, which sat decoratively on the muddied green spongy carpet. With a wink or grin, they’d say, “Y’all Crips. Crip or die. Don’t be talkin’ Bloods ’roun’ here. Who y’all?” “Crips,” Danielle and I mimicked. At that, they’d hold out their hands and say, “Hey, giv’ me five, giv’ me five,” and we’d all slap each other’s palms. Satisfied that we knew our place, the brothers took us to the corner store for ice cream. They preened and strutted before older girls, who gave them sassy looks and made sucking noises through their teeth to let them know they weren’t all that. If a girl was interested, she’d swing her hips slowly from side to side when she walked away. I stayed with Alice until she and my father began to argue over my care. At first Alice merely suggested the idea of adoption, testing his response. His flat out refusal meant the subject would be dropped for a while, but she couldn’t let it go. Her constant nagging at his resolve only turned to bolder talk. “She’s my daughter now,” Alice said one day. I stood in the kitchen, sipping the nauseating obligatory glass of milk that Alice wanted me to drink every day. I heard her talking on the phone in the other room and knew better than to interrupt even though she was talking about me. Her voice took on the icy edge it had whenever something didn’t please her. “Her mother hasn’t seen her in over a year,” Alice said, “and you can’t afford to take care of her, Jim. Who takes her to school every day, feeds her and buys her clothes? I’m the mother every day, Jim.” Her voice dropped while she listened to my father, then she continued, “You can still visit her like you always do. Her mother’s not around. Who knows how long she’ll be in that place.” Alice’s voice grew softer. Whenever grownups spoke about my mother, it was always in a hushed voice. Conversation stopped altogether if they thought I was listening. I strained to hear more, but “the place” did not come up again. I tried to imagine my mom and Synanon but only drew a blank. I didn’t know what it was, and Theresa had faded in my mind. Alice’s sister Stella once forgot herself and asked Alice, “Is it true the women don’t have any hair in that place?” No hair. I could not paint a mental picture. Synanon was a blank. My mother was a blank. No hair? A few days after the overheard phone conversation, my bags were packed. Alice fussed over me while we waited for my father to pick me up and take me to his brother’s, where I’d been told I was to live. “You can come here any time, and I’ll visit with you.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But there’s something more ineffable at stake, winding like thin smoke through me, unnamed. It’s as if—through the writing—I’ve assembled some miniature replica of myself as a girl, and she’s now being lowered onto Mother’s lap to be verified somehow. For all the schisms in my upbringing, the most savage scars didn’t come from pain. Pain has belief in it. Pain is required, Patti likes to say; suffering is optional. What used to hurt was the vast and wondering doubt that could spread inside me like a desert, the niggling suspicion that none of the hard parts even happened. So the characters that so vividly inhabited me were phantasms, any residual hurt my own warped concoction. I wanted Mother to see the girl I was—the girls Lecia and I were, really—to take us into her body as we’ve taken her so indelibly into ours. Is that love or need? As Mother reads, I grind beans to brew her coffee. I cut her sandwich into quarters. I keep wiping her ashtray clean. I dissolve sugar into tea and shave ice into a frosted glass. Occasionally, she hollers out, How’d you ever remember all this crazy crap? She laughs a lot. Once she says, This is your daddy to a T. I can smell him. But her strongest emotion seems to be for an alligator belt of hers I wrote about, which she mists up over, saying, I wonder where that went to? She absorbs the material—maybe as she did being our mother—as if it were a novel she’d already seen the film of, though like any mother, she’s inclined to heap on undiluted praise. No more convincing cheerleader ever shook a pom-pom. She’s almost to the end when she claims her eyes are tired. From downstairs that night, I hear small noises from the bathroom—stifled, intermittent squeaks like a mouse might make. I tap on the door, which opens to her red-rimmed eyes. You are so busted, I say. She has on a black T-shirt and yoga pants. You caught me, she says, wiping her nose. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mother, I say. She looks surprised: I’m not the least bit hurt, she says. You’re not festive. Living through it hurt me, she says. Reading about it’s a blip on the radar. Not a lot of mothers would make this so easy. Can I smoke up in my attic, or are you gonna make me go on the porch? We creak up the stairs to where she’s spread pages across her mother’s old wedding quilt, stitched together from men’s flannel-suit samples—all manner of gray and chalk stripe with a cherry-red underside. I hold a blue teardrop flame to her cigarillo while she takes a long draw, then blows smoke up to the rafters. She raises her arms to flatten both hands on the slanted ceiling, saying, This is like an artist’s garret up here. You could come live with us, I say.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  Many of these examples have been less correctly explained as indirect questions (v. infr. B. 2). 2. sometimes the apod. is entirely suppressed for rhetorical reasons, when its absence is more emphatic than its presence, εἴ περ yap κ᾽ ἐθέλῃσιν ᾿Ολύμπιος.. στυφελίξαι if he wish to thrust him away, [he will do so], Il. 1. 580; εἰ μὲν δώσουσι yépas— εἰ δέ κε μὴ δώωσιν, ἐγὼ δέ κεν αὐτὸς ἕλωμαι if they shall give me a prize, [it will be well]; but if they give not, then I will take one for myself, 1. 135, cf. 6. 150, Ar. Pl. 469; καὶ ἣν μὲν ἐυμβῇ ἡ πεῖρα---- εἰ δὲ μὴ... ἀπᾷ if the attempt succeed,— well; otherwise .., Thuc. 3. 3, cf. Plat. Prot. 325 Ὁ. 3. by a similar ellipsis of apod., εἰ γάρ (Ep. ai yap) and εἴθε (Ep. αἴθε), with opt. or historical tenses of indic., express a wish (the opt. and indic. having the same force as in ordinary prot.), at yap ἐμοὶ τοσσήνδε θεοὶ δύναμιν παραθεῖεν O that the gods would grant me so much strength, Od. 3. 205, cf. 14. 4403; εἰ yap γενοίμην ἀντὶ σοῦ νεκρός Eur. Hipp. 1410; εἴθ᾽ εἶχες, ὦ τεκοῦσα, βελτίους φρένας would that thou hadst a better understanding, Id. El. 1061, cf. Alc. 1072; εἴθ᾽ ἔμ᾽ ἐδέξω O that thou hadst received me, Aesch. Ag. 1537; εἴθε σοι τότε συνεγενόμην Ὁ that I had met you then, Xen. Mem. 1. 2, 46. In poetry, εἰ alone is sometimes so used with opt., ἀλλ᾽ εἴ τις... καλέσειεν 1]. Το. III; εἴ μοι γένοιτο φθόγγος ἐν βραχίοσιν Eur. Hec. 836. Sometimes εἰ “γάρ or εἴθε precedes ὥφελον or ὥφελλον c. inf. in wishes, v. sub ὀφείλω. Occasionally these Particles even take the inf. alone in wishes, αἱ γὰρ τοῖος ἐὼν .. ἐμὸς γάμβρος καλέεσθαι Od. 7. 313; and more freq. in late poets, as Anth. P. 9. 284, 288. 4. sometimes the Verb of the protasis, to which εἰ belongs, is omitted, chiefly in the following expressions : a. εἰ μή. Lat. nisi, except, οὐδὲν ἄλλο σιτέονται, εἰ μὴ ἰχθῦς μοῦνον Hdt. 1. 200; εἰ μὴ κρεμάσας Ar. Nub. 229: μὰ τὼ θεώ, εἰ μὴ Κριτύλλα γ᾽ [eipi]—anay, if I’m not Critylla! i.e. 1 am, Id. Thesm. 898; εἰ μὴ ὅσον except only, ἔγὼ μέν μιν οὐκ εἶδον, εἰ μὴ ὅσον γραφῇ ΗΖδι. 2. 73, cf. I. 45., 2. 20; also, Εἰ pr εἰ, Lat. nisi st, Thuc. 1. 17, Plat. Gorg. 480 B, etc.; εἰ μή τι οὖν, ἀλλά... if nothing else, yet .., Id. Meno 86 E. b. εἰ δὲ μή but if not, i.e. otherwise, Lat. sin minus, προηγόρευε τοῖς Λαμψακηνοῖσι μετιέναι Μιλ- τιάδην, εἰ δὲ μή, σφέας πίτυος τρόπον ἀπείλεε ἐκτρίψειν Hat. 6. 37, cf. 56; so after μάλιστα μέν, Thuc. 1. 32, 35. etc.: it may refer to a pre- ceding negat., and may be used even when ἐὰν δέ would be needed if the ellipsis were supplied, μὴ τύπτ᾽ - εἰ δὲ μή.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Linda smiled. It was a secret smile, as if she knew things nobody could ever know, and she reached out and touched my wrist and said, "Timmy, stop crying. It doesn't matter." In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste. Thus, when someone got killed, as Curt Lemon did, his body was not really a body, but rather one small bit of waste in the midst of a much wider wastage. I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. "Just a crunchie munchie," Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body. We kept the dead alive with stories. When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they'd never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn't the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind. He wasn't dead, just laid-back. There were Christians among us, like Kiowa, who believed in the New Testament stories of life after death. Other stories were passed down like legends from old-timer to newcomer. Mostly, though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but 1t was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit. There was a story, for

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the "late war" or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest. —John Ransom's Andersonville Diary The Things They Carried First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 4 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin. The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 12 and 18 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The volumes that towered around Mother’s bed were partly stacked up to block him out. For his part, a book was a squatty form of two-by-four—useful, say, for propping open a window with a broken sash. Yet at college, I never stopped expecting to find Daddy reborn beside me, showing me how to tie a slipknot, or run a hunting blade under a rabbit’s hide so the blue carcass could be disassembled and peppered and dredged in flour. And crossing the campus as leaves scratched along the sidewalks, I could sense whatever thinly stretched rubber bands on my back that once tethered me to Daddy had already snapped. How he’d taught me to talk— Y’all fixing to go to class? —busted up the average midwesterner. Even his voice on the dorm phone could draw a crowd. Kids who answered tended to ape the drawl I’d started to lose, mimicking Daddy, they sounded like cornpone hillbillies from Hee Haw . But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering: Dear Daddy: Thanks for the five-spot. You didn’t have to do that, since I have actual jobs making money. The food service feeds me like the little oinker I am. You’d just put your head under the milk spout and guzzle. I know you would. Thanks to all this chow, I’m weighing over a hundred again, so I’m less of a gimlet ass. There’s a really nice art history teacher named Armajani (he’s from Iran) who takes kids fishing on weekends at his cabin. He claims the bass are big as my arm. I told him in Texas we’d throw those little fellers back. I sure wish you were here to yank a few out of the water with me. I miss you more than black eyed peas, more than oysters. Your baby, Mary Without Daddy, the wide plain of Minnesota was a vast and empty canvas, me a flealike pin dot scurrying across. So I sought the favor of my all male professors, becoming the kind of puppyish suckup I’d hated in high school. Getting to class early, I shot my hand in the air . The white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink, was a tall, barrel-chested man whose foreshortened leg, damaged from a drunk driver’s head-on, gave him a slightly heaving walk he never slowed down for. No doubt, a knack for tending the troubled—including the occasional too-many-mushrooms psychosis—kept him moving at that clip. Specializing in brain physiology, he kept labs full of pigeons and rats to teach conditioning theory in intro psych. In a sleep lab he sometimes ran, he wired kids up to a high-tech EEG. I’d signed up for his freshman seminar, Paradigms of Consciousness, under the delusion that consciousness was code for drugs —the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after class.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  And then it becomes 1990. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She's not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was. Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  They'd run into each other, he said, at a college reunion in 1979. Nothing had changed. He still loved her. For eight or nine hours, he said, they spent most of their time together. There was a banquet, and then a dance, and then afterward they took a walk across the campus and talked about their lives. Martha was a Lutheran missionary now. A trained nurse, although nursing wasn't the point, and she had done service in Ethiopia and Guatemala and Mexico. She had never married, she said, and probably never would. She didn't know why. But as she said this, her eyes seemed to slide sideways, and it occurred to him that there were things about her he would never know. Her eyes were gray and neutral. Later, when he took her hand, there was no pressure in return, and later still, when he told her he still loved her, she kept walking and didn't answer and then after several minutes looked at her wristwatch and said it was getting late. He walked her back to the dormitory. For a few moments he considered asking her to his room, but instead he laughed and told her how back in college he'd almost done something very brave. It was after seeing Bonnie and Clyde, he said, and on this same spot he'd almost picked her up and carried her to his room and tied her to the bed and put his hand on her knee and just held it there all night long. It came close, he told her—he'd almost done it. Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest, as if suddenly cold, rocking slightly, then after a time she looked at him and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things. At breakfast the next morning she told him she was sorry. She explained that there was nothing she could do about it, and he said he understood, and then she laughed and gave him the picture and told him not to burn this one up. Jimmy shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he finally said. "I love her." For the rest of his visit I steered the conversation away from Martha. At the end, though, as we were walking out to his car, I told him that I'd like to write a story about some of this. Jimmy thought it over and then gave me a little smile. "Why not?" he said. "Maybe she'll read it and come begging. There's always hope, right?" "Right," I said. He got into his car and rolled down the window. "Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever." He hesitated for a second. "And do me a favor. Don't mention anything about—"

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I set the cup down, feeling nausea rise in waves. “Plug your nose,” someone said. I looked up. It was Poop Girl. “If you plug your nose and drink it, you can’t taste it,” she said. She pinched her nostrils and downed the milk. When she finished, her upper lip was swathed in dewy white. I followed suit. Several gulps in, the cold sticky sweetness felt like a wad of mucus. I didn’t want to gag because I was afraid the milk might come back up my throat. “I’ll drink it,” Sophie offered. Her eager, round-eyed gaze darted about the room. When the demonstrator’s back was turned, she quickly finished my milk and slapped the empty cup down next to my hand. Moments later we were both served plates of soupy scrambled eggs and half pieces of toast. Worse than a cup of milk is a cup of milk and eggs. I pushed them around and took a bite of toast, willing myself not to barf it up. The meal seemed to last forever. After breakfast we took another fairly long walk up a hill to the classrooms. My grade was in a room that seemed to favor the look of wooden desks and wooden chairs on a wood floor. Large picture windows without curtains displayed a gray morning sky. For our math lesson, we counted out small wooden cubes into groups of ten. Later there was a physical education class, which consisted mostly of one exercise, step-ups, that we performed until my legs ached and became numb. Afterward, we took showers again. Then we played the game, screaming at each other until dinner, followed bedtime at 8 p.m. Several days went by and my mother didn’t return. The demonstrators constantly reminded not to call her “Mom.” “Her name is Theresa,” I was told. “And don’t ask about her anymore.” Chapter FourB efore When I stretch my mind back to the fragmented images of my early years before Synanon, I see my mom in snapshots, reading to me while I sit on her lap, her finger tracing the words, her long brown hair trailing across the pages. The paper emits a sweet, faintly musky smell, an odor that encapsulates comfort for me. She’s in the kitchen of our studio apartment, making cinnamon toast for breakfast and serving it on a napkin. My mother has something ephemeral, almost childlike, about her. A vein of vulnerability runs through her that even at age three I am able to intuit. For the most part, we were alone, the two of us adrift in the sea of humanity that makes up Los Angeles, isolated in our urban poverty. We moved often, from Hollywood to Long Beach to downtown. Once, when we’d settled into an apartment complex, a woman came to our door. “This is a family place,” she said. Her arms were folded, her hair straightened into a stiff, perfect, shiny helmet that framed her dark, self-righteous face.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἰσχἄλέος, a, ov, poét. for ἰσχνός, thin, κρομύοιο λύπος Od. 1g. 233 :— thin, paliry, περόναι Manetho 6. 434 :—later, ioyvadéos, Eust. Od. 1. c. ἰσχἄνάω, Ep. lengthd. form of ἰσχάνω (cf. sq.): Ion. impf. ἰσχανά- ασκον Il. 15. 723. To hold back, stay, stop, 5. 89 (v. sub yepupa) ; νῦν δ᾽ ἐπεὶ ἰσχανάᾳς (sc. με) Od. 15. 346 :=—Pass. to hold back, wait, νηυσὶν ἔπι... ἐελμένοι ἰσχανύωντο 1]. 12. 38; σὸν μῦθον ποτιδέγμενοι ἰσχανόωνται Odi. TOT, ch ΠΟ Το: 2524: ITI. intr., c. gen., to cling to, and so to long after, desire eagerly, μέγα δρόμου ἰσχανόωσαν Il. 23. 300; ἰσχανόων φιλότητος Od. 8. 288; also c. inf., μυῖα .. ἰσχα- νάᾳ δακέειν 1]. 17. 5723 ἰσχανόωσιν ἰδεῖν Procl. ἢ. Ven. 2. 6: cf. ἔχο- Hat, avréxopat.—Several glosses of Hesych. recognise a form ixavdw, cf. E. M. 478. 44; and Dind. prefers this form in signf. 11: it occurs in Babr. 77. 2 (rupov & ἀλώπηξ ixav@oa); and Ἴχανα, the name of a Sicil. town (in Steph. Byz.), is of the same Root ; cf. also ἔχαρ. ἰσχάνω [a], Ep. lengthd. form of ¢ toxw (wv. foreg.) :—to check, hinder, δέος ἰσχάνει ἄνδρας 1]. 14. 387; Αἴαντ᾽ ἰσχανέτην 17. 747: cf. κατι- σχάνω :---ο. gen. to keep back from, κρύος ἀνέρας ἔργων ἰσχάνει Hes. Op. 493 :—also i in Theophr. C. P. 4. 13, 6 (ubi olim ἰσχαίνει). ἰσχάς, ados, ἡ. (ἰσχνός) a dr ied fig, Ar. Eq. 155» Comici ap. Ath. 27 F, ' 75 Β, etc.; those of Attica were famous, cf. C. 1. 123. 24, and v. mapa- onpov:—also of over-ripe olives, Eust. 1963. 55. 2. a kind of spurge, Euphorbia Apios, Theophr. H. P. 9. 9, 6. II. (toxw) that which holds, an anchor, Soph. Fr. 669, cf. Luc. Lexiph. E53 ἰσχιᾶδικός, ἡ, dv, (ἰσχίον) of the hips, φθίσις Hipp. 139 F. of persons, subject to lumbago, Diosc. 1. 35, Galen. for lumbago, ἐπίπλασμα Diosc. 2. 205. ἰσχιάζω, to walk with much motion of the hips, to straddle, Byz. Pass, to be parted (like the hips), Galen. ἰσχιᾶκός. ἡ, ov, -- ἰσχιαδικός, Theophr. ap. Ath. 624 B. ἰσχιάς (sub. νόσος). ados, ἡ, pain in the hips, Hipp. Aph. 1248, Aér. 293. II. a kind of thorn, Galen.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But a woman whose third eye has begun to stare at some invisible baby is incapable of dropping the subject. So at the Labor Day clambake in the Rhode Island beach house—itself four times the size of what I grew up in—after intermittent nagging from me, Warren walks up to the white wicker chair containing his father and asks the old man about helping us when I get pregnant. Only on the drive home will Warren even say aloud that the talk took place. But any details about it stay sealed in that head of his. He’ll help us, Warren says. The car passes a long stretch of beach roses in bloom. How? I say. I don’t want to go into it. It’s private. I’m your wife, I say. At a stoplight before the freeway, he puts the car in park and stares at me, saying, You got what you wanted. Now get off my back. (Don’t think he spoke to me this way often. He didn’t, which is why—unfairly—it sticks.) At that instant, I stop drinking cold turkey. I don’t remember it being hard. In fact, it’s the last easy quit I’d have. I give up liquor and cigarettes to purify myself for the baby taking cherubic shape in my head long before my body gets to it. In some ways, I believe conception will be hard for me. One of God’s little prototypes, Hunter Thompson once said of some ne’er-do-well pal—never even considered for mass production. I pore over books about getting knocked up as if it weren’t standard order for every creature from cat to cockroach. Warren knows I’m logging my morning temperature, a sharp rise being a sign that you’ve dropped an egg into the chute. The first slightly overheated morning, it so happens that Hurricane Gloria has ripped down the phone lines on our block and shut down the library. Warren takes the bus home early like a man summoned to battle, and a month later, I miss my period. Already? he says, staring at me across the huge steaks I’ve splurged on, the half-empty bottle of nonalcoholic wine. You’re not excited, I say. He considers the burgundy fizz in the glass. Tastes like grape syrup. Not about the wine, you bonehead, I say. About the bun in the oven. Baby Otis? Warren says. It’s great. Pouring him more nonalcoholic wine, I say, You’re upset. You’re not excited. He stares across the candlelit table. No, he says. I mean, yes. It’s just… I’ve Ziploc-bagged the telltale pregnancy thermometer and stuck it in a vase between us, tying it with a ribbon like a daisy. He touches it with a finger as if it might be hot, saying, How reliable is this? I mean, should you go to the doctor or something?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  On one, I fix Cary Grant, for that’s who Warren is to me—the preoccupied professor in Bringing Up Baby, ignorant of how his patrician profile could make Katharine Hepburn trail him down the street in her convertible, holding her hat on with one kid-gloved hand. The weak spots in our union are there from the git-go—aren’t they always? But every difference lures me, for if I can yield to Warren’s way of being, his cool certainty can replace my ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around. Like any traveler from a ruined land, I try to adapt to the new customs, part of some ineffable mystery that compromises the man whose photo I carry in my wallet like an amulet against the squalor I was born to. I yearn for transformation, and Warren is its catalyst. What I don’t understand, I try to yield to, though I’m genetically disinclined to follow instruction. Like we never, ever discuss finances. Some tiny trust pays his half of our meager rent and keeps him bobbing at the poverty level. How much was it? I’d never know. We keep separate accounts and split bills. I try to absorb his reticence in this as I try to mimic his gargantuan work ethic—how early he rises to write, the number of sit-ups he grunts through at night. Without a paying post at first, he volunteers afternoons in the poetry library with its archive. For my part, I’m rebuffed from any pseudo-literary job I catch the faintest rumor of—part-time teaching or poets-in-the-schools. Hell, the dudes working the registers in the bookstores have Ph.D.’s. At a chichi restaurant, I take a job busing tables at lunch—a steep fall for the former poet laureate of Minneapolis. On day one, a particularly snide waiter scoffs at my ignorance of a fish knife, along with how sloppy I am at embossing the tiny butter terrines. He’s a waspish guy who—at regular wine tastings for the staff—makes such phony remarks that the other waiters fight back with goofy comments, such as: Fruity but not screaming; or A surly adolescent wine that loiters in your mouth. One day I take a double shift, and a famous novelist I’d been passingly introduced to in grad school—the bone-breakingly handsome John Irving— appears as if lowered by butterflies into my station. After filling his water glass once, I hide in the kitchen or bathroom for much of the remaining shift, derangedly imagining he’ll recognize me. At shift’s end, the manager threatens to fire me for malingering, so I quit, for which gift he pumps my hand like I’ve given him the winning lottery ticket. In the glass window behind him, snow starts down. Soon as he leaves the dining room, I set every single place with knives, one silver blade after another, while through the sliding glass and across the night sky, the wind sends slim white stitches. The dining room lights dim just as I clock out, and I make out strains of some symphony piped into the bar.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The volumes that towered around Mother’s bed were partly stacked up to block him out. For his part, a book was a squatty form of two-by-four—useful, say, for propping open a window with a broken sash. Yet at college, I never stopped expecting to find Daddy reborn beside me, showing me how to tie a slipknot, or run a hunting blade under a rabbit’s hide so the blue carcass could be disassembled and peppered and dredged in flour. And crossing the campus as leaves scratched along the sidewalks, I could sense whatever thinly stretched rubber bands on my back that once tethered me to Daddy had already snapped. How he’d taught me to talk—Y’all fixing to go to class?—busted up the average midwesterner. Even his voice on the dorm phone could draw a crowd. Kids who answered tended to ape the drawl I’d started to lose, mimicking Daddy, they sounded like cornpone hillbillies from Hee Haw. But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering: Dear Daddy: Thanks for the five-spot. You didn’t have to do that, since I have actual jobs making money. The food service feeds me like the little oinker I am. You’d just put your head under the milk spout and guzzle. I know you would. Thanks to all this chow, I’m weighing over a hundred again, so I’m less of a gimlet ass. There’s a really nice art history teacher named Armajani (he’s from Iran) who takes kids fishing on weekends at his cabin. He claims the bass are big as my arm. I told him in Texas we’d throw those little fellers back. I sure wish you were here to yank a few out of the water with me. I miss you more than black eyed peas, more than oysters. Your baby, Mary Without Daddy, the wide plain of Minnesota was a vast and empty canvas, me a flealike pin dot scurrying across. So I sought the favor of my all male professors, becoming the kind of puppyish suckup I’d hated in high school. Getting to class early, I shot my hand in the air. The white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink, was a tall, barrel-chested man whose foreshortened leg, damaged from a drunk driver’s head-on, gave him a slightly heaving walk he never slowed down for. No doubt, a knack for tending the troubled—including the occasional too-many-mushrooms psychosis—kept him moving at that clip. Specializing in brain physiology, he kept labs full of pigeons and rats to teach conditioning theory in intro psych. In a sleep lab he sometimes ran, he wired kids up to a high-tech EEG. I’d signed up for his freshman seminar, Paradigms of Consciousness, under the delusion that consciousness was code for drugs—the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after class.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  sleeping at night. I desperately wanted Theresa to take a stand for us, to tell Synanon goodbye. I’d imagine us moving back to Los Angeles, starting over. When I thought of my mom and me surviving as a team, I felt sure we could make it. Her marriage never crossed my mind during my fantasies. The fact that she had a husband evoked no consideration, wasn’t even an afterthought. Marriage meant little to me, just as Chuck had said years earlier in an interview in the San Raphael Journal, in which he’d suggested that divorce and remarriage was equivalent to “little more than changing one’s clothes.” My own parents had never married, and Ray was Theresa’s fourth husband. My mother’s first marriage was to a man named Rodney. Their union had been brief, and Rodney was thrown out of the commune before I arrived. I don’t think I quite grasped the fact that Theresa loved her current husband, Ray, or that he had much importance in her life as I had initially worried might be the case after the sordid demonstration with his daughter, Sara. I might have thought she would just acquire another husband once we were settled on the outside. In my mind, Ray belonged in Synanon, and leaving the community meant leaving him behind too. Other times I worried that my mother stayed because she was afraid she would not be allowed to leave. Not only did I focus on Theresa’s flaws, but I also began to observe the demonstrators in a much more cynical manner. Feeling less intimidated, I started to view their arbitrary rules and punishments with contempt. Having resettled into our normal routines after the move, games increased to a daily event. To whip us back into shape, we were required to participate in a mini stew, a game of twenty-four hours’ duration. The stew started after breakfast, and we were off to a fierce start of attacks and counterattacks, which frittered away into jealous squabbles between some of the girls about who had stolen whose friend. Next came talks between couples who wanted to break up, each person backed by his or

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  learned to tolerate the aches and pains of running, and now I forced myself to tolerate the effects of the flu through a whole day of school and physical education. I needed to somehow forget that I was sick. It will go away, I told myself. Months later a demonstrator took me to the little medical clinic on the property to cut out an earring embedded in my earlobe. I had not been able to remove the jewelry, so I’d left it in place and the skin had grown over it. Taking notice of the odd lump in my earlobe, the demonstrator called me over and probed it, her brows knitted. “What is that?” she muttered to herself. “My earring,” I said. “What?” She squeezed and pinched my lobe, her eyes squinted and lips compressed. “I couldn’t get it out,” I said. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” I shrugged, unable to articulate my lack of confidence in and distrust of the adults who cared for me. Although I missed Theresa deeply, I saw her only rarely, as was dictated. When I did see her, I lapsed into baby talk, trying to regain what I had lost. When I babbled, she would laugh, then ask me why I talked like a two-year-old. I didn’t know. I couldn’t explain, so I would bury my face in her chest, trying to breathe in her scent of fresh soap and the natural, vanilla-like fragrance of her skin. Once, when I visited her in her room, I asked, “Did you nurse me when I was a baby?” I knew the answer was yes, but I wanted to hear her affirm it. “Yes, I nursed you until you were six months old.” “Can I try it?” Theresa stood before me, her greenish eyes thoughtful. She sat on the edge of her bed and lifted her shirt to pull out her breast, still rounded and firm.