Love

Passages

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

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

  I vaguely remember throwing up all over Hayes’s car. I vaguely remember him very sweetly and patiently telling me to clean it up. What I remember vividly is that Hayes grew red in the face, righteously indignant on my behalf, even though I was clearly in the wrong, and resigned his membership in the City Club. Such loyalty, such unreasonable and unwarranted fealty—that might have been the moment I fell in love with Hayes. I looked up to the man when he saw something deeper in numbers, but I loved him when he saw something special in me. On one of those road trips, in one of our boozy late-night conversations, I told Hayes about Blue Ribbon. He saw promise in it. He also saw doom. The numbers, he said, didn’t lie. “Starting a new company,” he said, “in this economy? And a shoe company? With zero cash balance?” He slouched and shook his big fuzzy head. On the other hand, he said, I had one thing in my favor. Bowerman. A legend for a partner—that was one asset for which it was impossible to assign a number. PLUS, MY ASSET was rising in value. Bowerman had gone to Japan for the 1964 Olympics, to support the members of the U.S. track-and-field team he’d coached. (Two of his runners, Bill Dellinger and Harry Jerome, medaled.) And after the Games, Bowerman had switched hats and become an ambassador for Blue Ribbon. He and Mrs. Bowerman—whose Christmas Club account had provided the initial five hundred dollars Bowerman gave me to form our partnership—visited Onitsuka and charmed everyone in the building. They were given a royal welcome, a VIP tour of the factory, and Morimoto even introduced them to Mr. Onitsuka. The two old lions, of course, bonded. Both, after all, were built from the same last, shaped by the same war. Both still approached everyday life as a battle. Mr. Onitsuka, however, had the particular tenacity of the defeated, which impressed Bowerman. Mr. Onitsuka told Bowerman about founding his shoe company in the ruins of Japan, when all the big cities were still smoldering from American bombs. He’d built his first lasts, for a line of basketball shoes, by pouring hot wax from Buddhist candles over his own feet. Though the basketball shoes didn’t sell, Mr. Onitsuka didn’t give up. He simply switched to running shoes, and the rest was shoe history. Every Japanese runner in the 1964 Games, Bowerman told me, was wearing Tigers. Mr. Onitsuka also told Bowerman that the inspiration for the unique soles on Tigers had come to him while eating sushi. Looking down at his wooden platter, at the underside of an octopus’s leg, he thought a similar suction cup might work on the sole of a runner’s flat. Bowerman filed that away. Inspiration, he learned, can come from quotidian things. Things you might eat. Or find lying around the house. Now back in Oregon, Bowerman was happily corresponding with his new friend, Mr.

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

  In many ways they were the classic case of opposites attracting. My mother, tall, stunning, a lover of the outdoors, was always seeking places to regain some lost inner peace. My father, small, average with thick rimless glasses to correct his 20-450 vision, was engaged in a daily, noisome battle to overcome his past, to become respectable, mainly through academics and hard work. Second in his law school class, he never tired of complaining about the one C on his transcript. (He felt the professor penalized him for his political beliefs.) When their diametrically opposed personalities caused problems, my parents would fall back on the thing they had most deeply in common, their belief that family comes first. When that consensus didn’t work, there were difficult days. And nights. My father turned to drink. My mother turned to stone. Her façade could be deceiving, however. Dangerously so. People assumed from her silence that she was meek, and she’d often remind them, in startling ways, that she was not. For instance, there was the time my father refused to cut back on his salt, despite a doctor’s warnings that his blood pressure was up. My mother simply filled all the saltshakers in the house with powdered milk. And there was the day my sisters and I were bickering and clamoring for lunch, despite her pleas for quiet. My mother suddenly let out a savage scream and hurled an egg salad sandwich against the wall. She then walked out of the house, across the lawn, and disappeared. I’ll never forget the sight of that egg salad slowly dripping down the wall while my mother’s sundress dissolved in the distant trees. Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother’s true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she’d witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared. And this: My mother loves me. When I was twelve, Les Steers and his family moved in across the street, next to my best friend Jackie Emory. One day Mr. Steers set up a high-jump course in Jackie’s backyard, and Jackie and I did battle. Each of us maxed out at four feet six inches. “Maybe one of you will break the world record one day,” Mr. Steers said. (I learned later that the world record at that time, six feet eleven inches, belonged to Mr. Steers.) Out of nowhere my mother appeared. (She was wearing gardening slacks and a summery blouse.) Uh-oh, I thought, we’re in trouble. She looked over the scene, looked at me and Jackie. Looked at Mr. Steers. “Move the bar up,” she said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And then we gazed and gazed at one another; and for all that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now that I was looking at her as if for the first time. We had lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised. But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, ‘When I first knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would see...’ She smiled. I gave the match a shake. ‘Didn’t you know,’ I said then, ‘didn’t you know, that I loved you?’ ‘I’m not sure,’ she answered; then she sighed. ‘I didn’t like to think of it.’ ‘Why not?’ She shrugged. ‘It seemed easier to be your friend ...’ ‘But Kitty, that’s just what I thought! And oh! wasn’t it terribly hard! But I thought, that if you knew I liked you as a, as a sweetheart - well, I never heard of such a thing before, did you?’ She moved to the glass to work again at the pins in her plait, and now, without turning, she said, ‘It’s true I never cared for any other girl, like I care for you ...’ As she said it I saw her neck and ears grow pink, and felt myself grow weak and warm and silly in response; but I caught a glimpse of something, too, behind her words. ‘It has happened before, then,’ I said flatly, ‘with you...’ She grew redder than ever, but would make me no reply; and I fell silent. But the fact was, I loved her too much to want to fret for very long about the other girls she might have kissed before me. ‘When was it,’ I asked next, ‘that you began to think of me like ...

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

  I kept saying to myself, over and over, I’m engaged, I’m engaged. But it didn’t sink in, maybe because we were in a hotel in the middle of a heat wave in exurban Sacramento. Later, when we got home and went to a Zell’s and picked out an engagement ring with an emerald stone, it started to feel real. The stone and setting cost five hundred dollars—that was very real. But I never once felt nervous, never asked myself with that typical male remorse, Oh, God, what have I done? The months of dating and getting to know Penny had been the happiest of my life, and now I would have the chance to perpetuate that happiness. That’s how I saw it. Basic as Accounting 101. Assets equal liabilities plus equity. Not until I left for Japan, not until I kissed my fiancée good-bye and promised to write as soon as I got there, did the full reality, with all its dimensions and contours, hit me. I had more than a fiancée, a lover, a friend. I had a partner. In the past I’d told myself Bowerman was my partner, and to some extent Johnson. But this thing with Penny was unique, unprecedented. This alliance was life-altering. It still didn’t make me nervous, it just made me more mindful. I’d never before said good-bye to a true partner, and it felt massively different. Imagine that, I thought. The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye. FOR ONCE, MY former contact at Onitsuka was still my contact. Kitami was still there. He hadn’t been replaced. He hadn’t been reassigned. On the contrary, his role with the company was more secure, judging by his demeanor. He seemed easier, more self-assured. He welcomed me like one of the family, said he was delighted with Blue Ribbon’s performance, and with our East Coast office, which was thriving under Johnson. “Now let us work on how we can capture the U.S. market,” he said. “I like the sound of that,” I said. In my briefcase I was carrying new shoe designs from both Bowerman and Johnson, including one they’d teamed up on, a shoe we were calling the Boston. It had an innovative full-length midsole cushion. Kitami put the designs on the wall and studied them closely. He held his chin in one hand. He liked them, he said. “Like very very much,” he said, slapping me on the back. We met many times over the course of the next several weeks, and each time I sensed from Kitami an almost brotherly vibe. One afternoon he mentioned that his Export Department was having its annual picnic in a few days. “You come!” he said. “Me?” I said. “Yes, yes,” he said, “you are honorary member of Export Department.”

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

  Moreover, I told Owen that Bowerman was unwilling to sell any of his stake in Blue Ribbon, and therefore I couldn’t sell any of mine. If I did I’d be surrendering majority control of the thing I’d created. That wasn’t feasible. I made my counteroffer. I would give Johnson a fifty-dollar raise. Owen stared. It was a fierce, tough stare, honed during many intense negotiations. A lot of Dictaphones had moved out the door after that stare. He was waiting for me to bend, to up my offer, but for once in my life I had leverage, because I had nothing left to give. “Take it or leave it” is like four of a kind. Hard to beat. Finally Owen turned to his son. I think we both knew from the start that Johnson would be the one to settle this, and I saw in Johnson’s face that two contrary desires were fighting for his heart. He didn’t want to accept my offer. But he didn’t want to quit. He loved Blue Ribbon. He needed Blue Ribbon. He saw Blue Ribbon as the one place in the world where he fit, an alternative to the corporate quicksand that had swallowed most of our schoolmates and friends, most of our generation. He’d complained a million times about my lack of communication, but in fact my laissez-faire management style had fostered him, unleashed him. He wasn’t likely to find that kind of autonomy anywhere else. After several seconds he reached out his hand. “Deal,” he said. “Deal,” I said, shaking it. We sealed our new agreement with a six-mile run. As I remember, I won. WITH JOHNSON ON the East Coast, and Bork taking over his store, I was awash in employees. And then I got a call from Bowerman asking me to add yet another. One of his former track guys—Geoff Hollister. I took Hollister out for a hamburger, and we got along fine, but he cinched the deal by not even flinching when I reached into my pocket and found I didn’t have any money to pay for lunch. So I hired him to go around the state selling Tigers, thereby making him Full-time Employee Number Three. Soon Bowerman phoned again. He wanted me to hire another person. Quadrupling my staff in the span of a few months? Did my old coach think I was General Motors? I might have balked, but then Bowerman said the job candidate’s name. Bob Woodell. I knew the name, of course. Everyone in Oregon knew the name. Woodell had been a standout on Bowerman’s 1965 team. Not quite a star, but a gritty and inspiring competitor. With Oregon defending its second national championship in three years, Woodell had come out of nowhere and won the long jump against vaunted UCLA. I’d been there, I’d watched him do it, and I’d gone away mighty impressed.

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

  It slid toward me. Now I saw the rough contours of a man. Six-three, 280 pounds, with an extra helping of shoulders. And fire-log arms. This was one part Sasquatch, one part Snuffleupagus, though somehow light on his feet. He minced toward me and thrust one of his fire logs in my direction. I reached, we shook. Now I could make out the face—brick red, covered by a full strawberry-blond beard—and glazed with sweat. (Hence the darkness. He required dimly lit, cool spaces. He also couldn’t bear wearing a suit.) Everything about this man was different from me, from everyone I knew, and yet I felt a strange, instant kinship. He said that he was thrilled to be working on my case. Honored. He believed that Blue Ribbon had been the victim of a terrible injustice. Kinship became love. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we have.” DAYS LATER STRASSER came out to Tigard for a meeting. Penny was in the office at the time and when Strasser glimpsed her walking down a hall his eyes bulged. He tugged on his beard. “My God!” he said. “Was that Penny Parks?!” “She’s Penny Knight now,” I said. “She dated my best friend!” “Small world.” “Smaller when you’re my size.” Over the coming days and weeks Strasser and I discovered more and more ways our lives and psyches intersected. He was a native Oregonian, and proud of it, in that typical, truculent way. He’d grown up with a bug about Seattle, and San Francisco, and all the nearby places that outsiders saw as our betters. His geographical inferiority complex was exacerbated by his ungainly size, and homeliness. He’d always feared that he wouldn’t find his place in the world, that he was doomed to be an outcast. I got that. He compensated, at times, by being loud, and profane, but mostly he kept his mouth shut and downplayed his intelligence, rather than risk alienating people. I got that, too. Intelligence like Strasser’s, however, couldn’t be hidden for long. He was one of the greatest thinkers I ever met. Debater, negotiator, talker, seeker—his mind was always whirring, trying to understand. And to conquer. He saw life as a battle and found confirmation for this view in books. Like me, he read compulsively about war. Also, like me, he lived and died with the local teams. Especially the Ducks. We had a huge laugh over the fact that Oregon’s basketball coach that year was Dick Harter, while the football coach was still Dick Enright. The popular cheer at Oregon State games was: “If you can’t get your Dick Enright, get your Dick Harter!” After we stopped laughing, Strasser started up again. I was amazed by the pitch of his laughter. High, giggly, twee, it was startling from a man his size.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  10 Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate, while a good piece of exegesis sowed affection and dispelled discord. Anybody who studied scripture properly was full of love, explained Rabbi Meir; he “loves the Divine Presence (Shekhinah ) and all creatures, makes the Divine Presence glad and makes glad all creatures.” 11 The rabbis continued to use terms such as the Glory (kavod) , Shekhinah, and Spirit (ruach ) to distinguish their inherently limited, earthly experience of God from the ineffable reality itself. Their new spiritual exercises made the divine a vibrant and immanent presence. Exegesis would do for them what yoga did for Buddhists and Hindus. The truth they sought was not abstract or theoretical but derived from the practice of spiritual exercises. To put themselves into a different state of consciousness, they would fast before they approached the sacred text, lay their heads between their knees, and whisper God’s praises like a mantra. They found that when two or three of them studied the Torah together, they became aware of the Shekhinah in their midst. 12 One day, when Rabbi Yohanan was studying the Torah with his pupils, the Holy Spirit seemed to descend upon them in the form of fire and a rushing wind. 13 On another occasion, Rabbi Akiva heard that his student Ben Azzai was expounding the Torah surrounded by a nimbus of flashing fire. He hurried off to investigate. Was Ben Azzai attempting a dangerous mystical flight to the throne of God? “No,” Ben Azzai replied. “I was only linking up the words of the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets and the prophets with the Writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet as at their original utterance.” 14 As Ezra had indicated so long ago, scripture was not a closed book and revelation was not a distant historical event. It was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. The rabbis called scripture miqra: it was a “summons to action.” No exegesis was complete until the interpreter had found a practical new ruling that would answer the immediate needs of his community. This dynamic vision could set the world aflame. Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to “investigate” and “go in search” of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world.

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

  I never stopped loving the man, and I never found a way to shed the old fear. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more, sometimes it went right down to my shoes, which he’d probably cobbled with his bare hands. Love and fear—the same binary emotions governed the dynamic between me and my father. I wondered sometimes if it was mere coincidence that Bowerman and my father—both cryptic, both alpha, both inscrutable—were both named Bill. And yet the two men were driven by different demons. My father, the son of a butcher, was always chasing respectability, whereas Bowerman, whose father had been governor of Oregon, didn’t give a darn for respectability. He was also the grandson of legendary pioneers, men and women who’d walked the full length of the Oregon Trail. When they stopped walking they founded a tiny town in eastern Oregon, which they called Fossil. Bowerman spent his early days there, and compulsively returned. Part of his mind was always back in Fossil, which was funny, because there was something distinctly fossilized about him. Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America. Today it’s all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was. As a major in the Tenth Mountain Division, stationed high in the Italian Alps, Bowerman had shot at men, and plenty had shot back. (His aura was so intimidating, I don’t recall anyone ever asking if he’d actually killed a man.) In case you were tempted to overlook the war and the Tenth Mountain Division and their central role in his psyche, Bowerman always carried a battered leather briefcase with a Roman numeral X engraved in gold on the side. The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called Coach. Given his background, his makeup, he naturally thought of track as a means to an end. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead, far beyond Oregon. Despite this lofty mission, or perhaps because of it, the facilities at Oregon were Spartan. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn’t been painted in decades. The lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guy’s. We hung our clothes on nails. Rusty nails. We sometimes ran without socks. Complaining never crossed our minds. We saw our coach as a general, to be obeyed quickly and blindly. In my mind he was Patton with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn’t a god. Like all the ancient gods, Bowerman lived on a mountaintop. His majestic ranch sat on a peak high above the campus. And when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the gods.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In a letter to White, Gilbert Blaine explained that he didn’t like goshawks because their ‘crazy and suspicious temperament had alienated him from them, as it had most falconers’. ‘Perhaps for this reason,’ White wrote, years later, ‘I had loved Gos. I always loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog.’ Gos was a queer thing, the opposite of civilised English hearts, and through him White could play many selves: the benevolent parent, the innocent child, the kindly teacher, the patient pupil. And other, stranger selves: through the hawk White could become a mother, a ‘man who for two months had made that bird, almost like a mother nourishing her child inside her, for the subconsciousness of the bird and the man became really linked by a mind’s cord: to the man who had created out of a part of his life’. And in White’s notebooks, the ones written in green ink, he begins writing things late at night in a drunken, expansive hand that never make their way into his book because they are too revealing. The thing he most hates is to have his head stroked, the thing he most likes is to have his tail feathers pulled, stroked, pruned & sorted out. In fact, Gos shows much interest in his backward parts. He is a coprophilite, if not a pansy. He can slice his mutes 3 yards and always turns proudly round to look at them. I, however, who can pee continually for several minutes (and this he supposes to be some form of slicing) excite his interest and envy. There are many ways to read The Goshawk, and one of them is as a work of suppressed homosexual desire – not for flesh, but for blood, for kinship. You can sense it is the book of a lonely man who felt he was different, who was searching for others like him. Falconry wasn’t a particularly queer sport, though some of the falconers White corresponded with, like Jack Mavrogordato and Ronald Stevens, were gay. Perhaps Blaine, too: he never married. But falconers were a fellowship of men, a ‘monkish elite’, a ‘small, tenacious sect’, as Lord Tweedsmuir described them, who felt a love that other people did not understand. It was a love that was not considered normal, and it was not something they could help. Gilbert Blaine explained that ‘deeply rooted in the nature of certain individuals [exists] some quality which inspires a natural liking for hawks’. The ‘true falconer’, he wrote, ‘is born, not made’. And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men:

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

  Dot’s seal of approval promised to be an asset some months later, when I wanted to take Penny away for a long weekend. Though Penny had been spending evenings at my apartment, we were still in some ways constrained by propriety. As long as she lived under their roof, Penny felt bound to obey her parents, to abide by their rules and rituals. So I was bound to get her mother’s consent before such a big trip. Wearing a suit and tie, I presented myself at the house. I made nice with the animals, petted the goose, and asked Dot for a word. The two of us sat at the kitchen table, over cups of coffee, and I said that I cared very much for Penny. Dot smiled. I said that I believed Penny cared very much for me. Dot smiled, but less certainly. I said that I wanted to take Penny to Sacramento for the weekend. To the national track-and-field championships. Dot took a sip of her coffee and puckered her lips. “Hmm… no,” she said. “No, no, Buck, I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re going to do that.” “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” I went and found Penny in one of the back rooms of the house and told her that her mother said no. Penny put her palms against her cheeks. I told her not to worry, I’d go home, collect my thoughts, and try to think of something. The next day I returned to the house and again asked Dot for a moment of her time. Again we sat in the kitchen over cups of coffee. “Dot,” I said, “I probably didn’t do a very good job yesterday of explaining how serious I am about your daughter. You see, Dot, I love Penny. And Penny loves me. And if things continue in this vein, I see us building a life together. So I really hope that you’ll reconsider your answer of yesterday.” Dot stirred sugar into her coffee, drummed her fingers on the table. She had an odd look on her face, a look of fear, and frustration. She hadn’t found herself involved in many negotiations, and she didn’t know that the basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole. So she got flummoxed and instantly folded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” PENNY AND I flew to Sacramento. We were both excited to be on the road, far from parents and curfews, though I suspected Penny might be more excited about getting to use her high school graduation gift—a matching set of pink luggage.

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

  She slipped off her shoes, toed her mark, and burst forward, clearing five feet easily. I don’t know if I ever loved her more. In the moment I thought she was cool. Soon after, I realized she was also a closet track-ophile. It happened my sophomore year. I developed a painful wart on the bottom of my foot. The podiatrist recommended surgery, which would mean a lost season of track. My mother had two words for that podiatrist. “Un. Acceptable.” She marched down to the drugstore and bought a vial of wart remover, which she applied each day to my foot. Then, every two weeks, she took a carving knife and pared away a sliver of the wart, until it was all gone. That spring I posted the best times of my life. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised by my mother’s next move when my father accused me of jackassing around. Casually she opened her purse and took out seven dollars. “I’d like to purchase one pair of Limber Ups, please,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. Was it my mother’s way of digging at my father? A show of loyalty to her only son? An affirmation of her love of track? I don’t know. But no matter. It never failed to move me, the sight of her standing at the stove or the kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size 6. PROBABLY BECAUSE HE didn’t want any trouble with my mother, my father loaned me the thousand bucks. This time the shoes came right away. April 1964. I rented a truck, drove down to the warehouse district, and the customs clerk handed over ten enormous cartons. Again I hurried home, carried the cartons down to the basement, ripped them open. Each carton held thirty pairs of Tigers, and each pair was wrapped in cellophane. (Shoe boxes would have been too costly.) Within minutes the basement was filled with shoes. I admired them, studied them, played with them, rolled around on top of them. Then I stacked them out of the way, arranging them neatly around the furnace and under the Ping-Pong table, as far as possible from the washer and dryer, so my mother could still do laundry. Lastly I tried on a pair. I ran circles around the basement. I jumped for joy. Days later came a letter from Mr. Miyazaki. Yes, he said, you can be the distributor for Onitsuka in the West. That was all I needed. To my father’s horror, and my mother’s subversive delight, I quit my job at the accounting firm, and all that spring I did nothing but sell shoes out of the trunk of my Valiant.

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

  WEEKS LATER I came home from running errands and there she was, in my living room, sitting with my mother and sisters. “Surprise,” she said. She’d gotten my note and decided to take me up on my offer. She’d phoned from the airport and my sister Joanne had answered and shown what sisters are for. She promptly drove out to the airport and fetched Sarah. I laughed. We hugged, awkwardly, my mother and sisters watching. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. I got her a jacket from the servants’ quarters and we walked in a light rain to a wooded park nearby. She saw Mount Hood in the distance and agreed that it looked astonishingly like Fuji, which made us both reminisce. I asked where she was staying. “Silly boy,” she said. The second time she’d invited herself into my space. For two weeks she lived in my parents’ guestroom, just like one of the family, which I began to think she might one day be. I watched in disbelief as she charmed the uncharmable Knights. My protective sisters, my shy mother, my autocratic father, they were no match for her. Especially my father. When she shook his hand, she melted something hard at his core. Maybe it was growing up among the Candy Bar People, and all their mogul friends—she had the kind of self-confidence you run across once or twice in a lifetime. She was certainly the only person I’d ever known who could casually drop Babe Paley and Hermann Hesse into the same conversation. She admired them both. But especially Hesse. She was going to write a book about him one day. “It’s like Hesse says,” she purred over dinner one night, “happiness is a how, not a what.” The Knights chewed their pot roast, sipped their milk. “Very interesting,” my father said. I brought Sarah down to the worldwide headquarters of Blue Ribbon, in the basement, and showed her the operation. I gave her a pair of Limber Ups. She wore them when we drove out to the coast. We went hiking up Humbug Mountain, and crabbing along the scalloped coastline, and huckleberry picking in the woods. Standing under an eighty-foot spruce we shared a huckleberry kiss. When it was time for her to fly back to Maryland, I was bereft. I wrote her every other day. My first-ever love letters. Dear Sarah, I think about sitting beside that torii gate with you… She always wrote back right away. She always expressed her undying love. THAT CHRISTMAS, 1964, she returned. This time I picked her up at the airport. On the way to my house she told me that there had been a terrible row before she got on the plane. Her parents forbade her to come. They didn’t approve of me. “My father screamed,” she said. “What did he scream?” I asked. She imitated his voice. “You can’t meet a guy on Mount Fuji who’s going to amount to anything.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  He draped the tape-measure loosely about his chest, released it momentarily, and let it lie limp along his body. I noticed a little red wire clamp marking a certain spot on the measure. “My dear boy,” he explained, “Robbie is my Guardian Angel—about whom you must hear—but later—perhaps in another interview, a precious interview—because I am also a philosopher. The poet stands in awe of life, and the philosopher penetrates it—and I do both. And life, my dear, dear young angel, is a long series of Interviews. And so: On With The Terms, to plunge, as in epic poetry, in medias res .... Lets dispense with the—uh—matter of—funds. Larry, I can suppose—uh—met you on one of our numerous streets, and so I take it you are—uh—seeking—(how did one street angel put it to me not too long ago? Oh, yes:)—bread: a fitting designation for funds, reduced, in the manner of the streets, to The Essential:... bread. I will give you (this is always a rather touchy subject, and so I have established a fixed fee)—$7.50 an hour, and if a fraction of an hour, the full amount All right?... Very good, thats Marvelous! And you will come to see me as often as—” His voice broke, he stares at the red mark on the tape-measure. “—as often,” he finished sighingly, “as the interviews shall last...” He reaches for a Kleenex, also pastel-colored, and touches his nose delicately. “Very well, then.... Im looking forward to knowing All About You my novice angel. Angel!” He puckered his lips and threw me a kiss. “I am all love, my dear boy—every inch (and there are, oh, so many!), every thought, every sigh—all Love: Love, dear child, which is, indeed, God!... Now do move closer. Yes. Now on with our First Interview!—the most important, really—in which we will get to know each other—in which we will turn a searchlight on the wonder of our mutual lives—ignoring momentarily the ugliness, of which—” he said sadly “—of which—there is—so much.... Ah, life—that vast plain of—what?... Like a cold card dealer, God deals out our destinies: It was mine to be born ugly.... But let me, now—by way of establishing an Important Contact with you—let me tell you, now, about The Angels....” He leaned back on the bed like a puffed-up balloon. I imagined him in a Macy Thanksgiving parade, wobbling from side to side with enormous eyes.... He reaches now for another cigarette—retrieves a lavender one, studies it, sets it back in the box. “That—the Lavender,” he says, smiling slyly, “is for later: at the last of our interview.

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

  And I will not stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence. Another early caller was Alberto Salazar, the ferociously competitive distance runner who won three straight New York City Marathons in Nikes. I will always love him for many things, but above all for that show of concern. He’s a coach now, and recently he brought a few of his runners to Beaverton. They were having a light workout, in the middle of Ro-naldo Field, when someone turned and saw Alberto on the ground, gasping for air. A heart attack. He was legally dead for fourteen minutes, until paramedics revived him and rushed him to St. Vincent’s. I know that hospital well. My son Travis was born there, my mother died there, twenty-seven years after my father. In his final six months I was able to take my father on a long trip, to put to rest the eternal question of whether he was proud, to show him that I was proud of him . We went around the world, saw Nikes in every country we visited, and with every appearance of a swoosh his eyes shone. The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory. Fathers and sons, it’s always been the same, since the dawn of time. “My dad,” Arnold Palmer once confided to me at the Masters, “did all he could to discourage me from being a professional golfer.” I smiled. “You don’t say.” Visiting Alberto, walking into the lobby of St. Vincent’s, I was overcome with visions of both my parents. I felt them at my elbow, at my ear. Theirs was a strained relationship, I believe. But, as with an iceberg, everything was below the surface. In their house on Claybourne Street, the tension was concealed, and calm and reason almost always prevailed, because of their love for us. Love wasn’t spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That’s their legacy. That’s their lasting victory. I walked to the cardiac unit, saw the familiar sign on the door: No Admittance . I sailed past the sign, through the door, down the hall, and found Alberto’s room. He lifted his head off the pillow, managed a pained smile. I patted his arm and we had a good talk. Then I saw that he was fading. “See you soon,” I said. His hand shot out and grabbed mine. “If something happens to me,” he said, “promise me you’ll take care of Galen.” His athlete. The one he’d been training. Who was just like a son to him. I got it. Oh, how I got it. “Of course,” I said. “Of course. Galen. Consider it done.” I walked out of the room, barely hearing the beeping machines, the laughing nurses, the patient groaning down the hall.

• From Educated (2018)

  In the space of a moment, he had accepted our claim to ride him, to his being ridden. He had accepted the world as it was, in which he was an owned thing. He had never been feral, so he could not hear the maddening call of that other world, on the mountain, in which he could not be owned, could not be ridden. I named him Bud. Every night for a week I watched Shawn and Bud gallop through the corral in the gray haze of dusk. Then, on a soft summer evening, I stood next to Bud, grasping the reins while Shawn held the halter steady, and stepped into the saddle. —SHAWN SAID HE WANTED out of his old life, and that the first step was to stay away from his friends. Suddenly he was home every evening, looking for something to do. He began to drive me to my rehearsals at Worm Creek. When it was just the two of us floating down the highway, he was mellow, lighthearted. He joked and teased, and he sometimes gave me advice, which was mostly “Don’t do what I did.” But when we arrived at the theater, he would change. At first he watched the younger boys with wary concentration, then he began to bait them. It wasn’t obvious aggression, just small provocations. He might flick off a boy’s hat or knock a soda can from his hand and laugh as the stain spread over the boy’s jeans. If he was challenged—and he usually wasn’t—he would play the part of the ruffian, a hardened “Whatcha gonna do about it?” expression disguising his face. But after, when it was just the two of us, the mask lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my brother. It was his smile I loved best. His upper canines had never grown in, and the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a child had failed to notice until it was too late. By the time he was twenty-three, and he got himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated sideways inside his gums and were ejecting themselves through the tissue under his nose. The surgeon who removed them told Shawn to preserve his baby teeth for as long as possible, then when they rotted out, he’d be given posts. But they never rotted out. They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy.* —IT WAS A HAZY summer evening, a month before I turned fifteen. The sun had dipped below Buck’s Peak but the sky still held a few hours of light. Shawn and I were in the corral. After breaking Bud that spring, Shawn had taken up horses in a serious way. All summer he’d been buying horses, Thoroughbreds and Paso Finos, most of them unbroken because he could pick them up cheap. We were still working with Bud.

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

  No need to worry. That happens to people. It’s completely normal. In her first book, simply entitled Lovingkindness , Sharon Salzberg speaks of “relearning loveliness,” drawing her phrasing from the beloved poem “Saint Francis and the Sow,” in which American poet Galway Kinnell describes how Saint Francis gently put his hand on the forehead of a sow to remind her “in words and in touch” of her value. Sometimes, you can forget your own loveliness. You forget the many, many reasons for which you wholly deserve love. Your loveliness isn’t about outward beauty. As Kinnell’s poem reminds, a pig is hardly what you’d imagine first when considering what’s lovely. And yet, through the sow’s actions—through the generosity she offers in the simple gesture of feeding her offspring—the sow is lovely, fully lovely, from snout to tail. When you recognize how your own actions have contributed to the greater good, you, too, can relearn your own loveliness. As you recognize your own value and value-added, as Kinnell puts it, you open as a flower, “from within, from self-blessing.” If you have difficulty summoning your good qualities, try sidestepping this obstacle by imagining how those who care for you might see you. Be like Saint Francis to the sow. Imagine for a moment stopping the busy pace of your daily life. See yourself stopped, freeze-frame, in the midst of your daily activities. Now imagine: Approaching you in this freeze-framed moment is someone who cares for you, someone who, at one time or another, has appreciated you and shown you warmth. This could be a mentor or a dear friend, your partner, parent, or another loving relative, either alive now, or long gone. Imagine that this person’s intention is to remind you of your long-forgotten loveliness. Perhaps like Saint Francis, he or she rests a hand on your brow and reminds you, in words and in touch, of your good qualities. What would he or she say? What would you remember? What image of yourself would emerge? Try This Meditation Practice: See Yourself as the Target of Others’ Love You can circumnavigate your own particular obstacles to self-love by visualizing the cherished people in your life themselves engaged in the well-wishing that typifies LKM, whether or not they have actually practiced this technique formally. Imagine all your beloved mentors and friends, all your treasured family members, standing in a circle around you. You are now the center of each one’s attention and loving regard, the hub of this imagined social gathering. Just as, in LKM, you extend your own wishes for each of them to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease, the feeling is often mutual. These other people wish for you to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease. Visualize how it is that you might be represented in each of their minds and hearts.

• From City of Night (1963)

  It was blasphemy.... An outrage against Beauty is the only blasphemy.... But to pick up the thread of my story: I asked a friend of mine, ‘Who is that magnificent youngman in the white tights?’ And he answered the magic name—Robbie! My Angel!—my love—the first, really, of the Angels: The Angel. Robbie.... And that child with the face of purity—that child, I was to learn, was a call boy.... But I anticipate my story. There is still another category of angels: The Ethereal Angels—these are the artists, the poets, the dancers.... Which will you be? Ah, but we’ll find out later.... I knew an ice-skater, who glided across my heart as if it were ice—at first—at first, burying the blades of his ice-skates into my already-wounded heart—... I have a weak heart, child—at times I stop and listen to it, listen to its beating, I cling to that sound—can it be, I wonder at times, that it has stopped, and am I now suspended between life and death?—but that would be impossible because no such stage exists: Death is merely the absence of life, and all philosophy that goes further goes on superfluously. It must stop There.... So this ice-skater warmed later, but then, as is the way of angels, he flew away—skated away to someone he had met—through me—an investor in a bigger show.... So you see, Life—my life—is the delving into the mysteries of the heart: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things.... Who can know it? ’ We can try! Try, by sharing our mutual space of time together, to fuse the secrets—to find an answer: Love.... And I must go on to explain why I think we should believe in an evil God. Why, the belief in a good God, child, is belied all around us, we dont understand, we turn from Him—and so turn toward the opposite: Evil. How much more logical if we were taught that God is evil? Life would not belie that We would believe in Him, implicitly—and again, we would turn from Him—rebelling—but this time we would be turning toward Good, the opposite of the evil God, whose existence we couldnt possibly doubt... Which leads me somehow to the conclusion,” he chuckled, “that God, like Hamlet, is a woman: She changes Her makeup constantly, She primps, She flirts with us. In other words: She cant make up Her holy mind.... (A severely inelegant form, I must add, of unGodly High camp!).... And, good, my dear child, takes many forms: Take my earthangel—the All-American. For him, good was the football—and the wedding ring I bought for his sweetheart—Later!... For my Robbie—it was—but you shall learn about that in a subsequent Interview....

• From Educated (2018)

  I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time. I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop. —MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.” I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away. My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn. I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all. I fashioned a new history for myself. I became a popular dinner guest, with my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires. Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot. I thought I was finally being honest about the life I’d had before.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It wasn’t mine, I didn’t mean the words - at least, not then, when I said them.’ I came to a halt, then put a hand to my head. ‘Oh! I feel like I’ve been repeating other people’s speeches all my life. Now, when I want to make a speech of my own, I find I hardly know how.’ ‘If you are fretting over how to tell me you are leaving -’ ‘I am fretting,’ I said, ‘over how to tell you that I love you; over how to say that you are all the world to me; that you and Ralph and Cyril are my family, that I could never leave - even though I was so careless with my own kin.’ My voice grew thick; she gazed at me but didn’t answer, so I stumbled on. ‘Kitty broke my heart - I used to think she’d killed it! I used to think that only she could mend it; and so, for five years I’ve been wishing she’d come back. For five years I have scarcely let myself think of her, for fear that the thought would drive me mad with grief. Now she has turned up, saying all the things I dreamed she’d say; and I find my heart is mended already, by you. She made me know it. That was the look you saw on my face.’ I raised a hand to stop a tickling at my cheek, and found tears there. ‘Oh, Flo!’ I said then. ‘Only say - only say you’ll let me love you, and be with you; that you’ll let me be your sweetheart, and your comrade. I know I’m not Lily -’ ‘No, you’re not Lily,’ she said. ‘I thought I knew what that meant - but I never did, till I saw you gazing at Kitty and thought I should lose you. I’ve been missing Lily for so long, it’s come to seem that wanting anything must be only another way of wanting her; but oh! how different wanting seemed, when I knew it was you I wanted, only you, only you ...’ I shifted closer towards her: the paper in my pocket gave a rustle, and I remembered romantic Miss Skinner, and all the friendless girls who Zena had said were mad in love with Flo, at Freemantle House. I opened my mouth to tell her; then thought I wouldn’t, just yet - in case she hadn’t noticed.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now I can see why’ - which made Alice blush, and look to the floor in confusion. With my father she was kind. ‘Well, well, Miss Butler,’ he said when he took her hand, nodding at her skirts, ‘this is rather a change, ain’t it, from your usual gear?’ She smiled and said it was; and when he added, with a wink, ‘And something of an improvement, too - if you don’t mind a gentleman saying so’, she laughed and said that, since gentlemen were usually of that opinion, she was quite used to it, and did not mind a bit. All in all she made herself so pleasant, and answered their questions about herself, and the music hall, so sweetly and cleverly, that no one - not even Alice, or spiteful Rhoda - could dislike her; and I - watching her gaze from the windows at Whitstable Bay, or incline her head to catch a story of my father’s, or compliment my mother on some ornament or picture (she admired the shawl, above the fireplace!) - I fell in love with her, all over again. And my love was all the warmer, of course, since I had that special, secret knowledge about Tricky, and the contract, and the extra four months. She had come for tea, and presently we all sat down to it - Kitty marvelling, as we did so, at the table. It was set for a real oyster-supper, with a linen cloth, and a little spirit-lamp with a plate of butter on it, waiting to be melted. On either side of this there were platters of bread, and quartered lemons, and vinegar and pepper castors - two or three of each. Beside every plate there was a fork, a spoon, a napkin, and the all-important oyster-knife; and in the middle of the table there was the oyster-barrel itself, a white cloth bound about its top-most hoop, and its lid loosened by a finger’s width - ‘Just enough,’ as my father would say, ‘to let the oysters stretch a little’; but not enough to let them open their shells and sicken. We were rather cramped around the table, for there were eight of us in all, and we had had to bring up extra chairs from the restaurant below. Kitty and I sat close, our elbows almost touching, our shoes side by side beneath the table. When Mother cried, ‘Do move along a bit, Nancy, and give Miss Butler some room!’, Kitty said that she was quite all right, Mrs Astley, really; and I shifted a quarter of an inch to my right, but kept my foot pressed against hers, and felt her leg, all hot, against my own.