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 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 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. I thought of that phrase, “It’s just business.” It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad. TIME FOR BED, Penny says, packing up her needlepoint. Yes, I tell her. I’ll be along in a minute. I keep thinking of one line in The Bucket List. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I forget if it was Nicholson or Freeman. The line is so true, so very true. And it transports me to Tokyo, to the offices of Nissho. I was there not long ago for a visit. The phone rang. “For you,” the Japanese receptionist said, extending the receiver. “Me?” It was Michael Johnson, the three-time gold medalist, holder of the world record in the 200 meters and 400 meters. He did it all in our shoes. He happened to be in Tokyo, he said, and heard I was, too. “Do you want to have dinner?” he asked. I was flattered. But I told him I couldn’t. Nissho was having a banquet for me. I invited him to come. Hours later we were sitting together on the floor, before a table covered with shabu-shabu, toasting each other with cup after cup of sake. We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of connection. It’s brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it’s part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962. To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.

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

  It got me on Day One. From the moment I arrived at the University of Oregon, in August 1955, I loved Bowerman. And feared him. And neither of these initial impulses ever went away, they were always there between us. 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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  After I met Robbie, at that party, I learned he was a call boy. In other days he would have been referred to as a court favorite. But our unbudging standards of morality impose certain ugly names: The only immorality is ‘morality’—which has restricted us, shoved into the dark the most beautiful things that should glow in the light, not be stifled by darkwords, darklights, darkwhispers. Why is what I do Immoral, when it hurts no one?—no one! an expression of:... Love.... Yet this unreasoning world ignores the true obscenities of our time: poverty, repression, the blindness to beauty and sensitivity— vide , the sneaky machinations of our own storm troopers—the vice squad!” He exhaled loudly after the impassioned asseveration; went on: “Another youngman, Smitty, a charming young angel himself, had brought Robbie along to that party. That night, I went to the restroom, as one does in the course of an evening—and happily, miraculously, who followed me in? It was Robbie.... That was during another one of my periods in New York. Things were not going too well—uh—financially. (I must explain: Im much better off now—much better—and whatever funds I have will be expended to finish my research into: The Lives of The Angels!... But, then, that time in New York, it was sadly different). I was completing, on my own, a study on—of all things—the angels as they appear in literature: Blake, Milton, Dante.... And when I saw Robbie, I recognized The Archangel.... And what is there about angels that has so fascinated me? The fact, perhaps, that like birds they have wings: That, to paraphrase Pope: angels rush in where fools fear to tread.... They are the true rebels.... And am I exaggerating this world of winged fleeing creatures? Remember it was such a creature who brought about The Fall: But God, Who had given them wings, was a jealous God.... He denied them the existence He had created for them: The Flight Out of spite, He created Adam and Eve—and voyeur-like, in His aged impotence, He watched them.... And it was that rebellious angel, now Satan, who won them over to his way—a rebellious life—who made them taste of the Tree of Truth, which God, in His petty omniscience, would deprive them of.... In each of my angels I find something different—but they all have one thing in common: they all have wings. It is their nature to fly away, leaving an emptiness—but a glowing emptiness!—in my heart.... At the house of Doña Mercedes, in Mexico (she was a grand Spanish woman, with a bosom which expanded yearly, to house, I told her, her gigantic Heart)—at her house, where I stayed briefly, there was a charming houseboy. Very beautiful: and the blades of his back were like sprouting wings when he crouched. Doña Mercedes said: ‘He looks more like a featherless bird to me.’ Of course she could not see with my Clarity.

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

  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.” I winced. I knew I had two strikes against me, but I didn’t realize climbing Mount Fuji was one of them. What was so bad about climbing Mount Fuji? “How did you get away?” I asked. “My brother.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He worked in an airplane factory, he told me, and he went to school at night. He quickly explained that he merely shared that apartment with the giddy Italian; that there was nothing between them. For a long while we spoke about many things—but not about the homosexual scene. I was beginning to think he was straight, despite his roommate. Then he said: “That malenurse you were with that night, he just likes hustlers.” He was obviously trying to find out about me. I said nothing. “I cant see just going to bed with a lot of people—different ones every night,” he said. “I mean, a person, whether hes queer or not, hes got to find someone.... Nothing like a lonely fairy,” he said smiling. I liked him right away. And for that reason—resisting the temptation to say no (I had known immediately that he was not a score—and I sensed, although I dismissed it, that sexually he would be attracted only to someone who would be equally attracted to him, and I sensed, too, that he would look in that person for more than a night-long partner)—I went to his apartment with him when be asked me if I felt like talking some more. In the apartment, when he touched me, I told him quickly I had to leave. He looked at me steadily. Then he smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe youll want to go to Arrowhead with me tomorrow.” Surprisingly, he was not annoyed that I had put him off. “It’s Sunday. I’ll pick you up if you want to.” I said yes, suddenly anxious to leave. As he drove me to the hotel on Hope Street, I felt certain I wouldnt be there when he came by. But I was. And after that, I saw him more and more often. When he wasnt working or going to school, we would drive out of the city.... And I began to discover in him an honesty that constantly amazed me, an integrity and decency rare in the world of the bars and streets: It pleased me strangely that soon after I met him, he moved into another apartment, this time alone. Although he openly acknowledged his interest in other youngmen, when it was a mutual interest—and he was a very desirable member of that group—I could tell that his was not the furious hunger that it very often is with others. Since that first night, he hadnt attempted to come on with me, and we rarely ever spoke about that scene. He told me about himself: about the stone-cold woman who was his mother; the ranting father, consumed in flames one nightmare night: a cigarette dropped drunkenly on the bed.

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

  He was my dad, I was his son, and I was in the fight of my life. Looking back, I see that something else was going on. My trial was providing my father with a healthier outlet for his inner chaos. My legal troubles, my nightly phone calls, were keeping him on high alert, and at home. There were fewer late nights at the bar of the club. “I’M BRINGING SOMEONE else onto the team,” Cousin Houser told me one day. “Young lawyer. Rob Strasser. You’ll like him.” He was fresh out of UC Berkeley School of Law, Cousin Houser said, and he didn’t know a damn thing. Yet. But Cousin Houser had an instinct about the kid. Thought he showed tremendous promise. Plus, Strasser had a personality that was sure to mesh with our company. “The moment Strasser read our brief,” Cousin Houser told me, “he saw this case as a holy crusade.” Well, I liked the sound of that. So the next time I was at Cousin Houser’s firm I walked down the hall and poked my head into the office of this Strasser fellow. He wasn’t there. The office was pitch-dark. Shades drawn, lights off. I turned to leave. Then I heard... Hello? I turned back. Somewhere within the darkness, behind a big walnut desk, a shape moved. The shape grew, a mountain rising from a dark sea. 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

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

  Typically, Woodell and Johnson would fly out from the East Coast, and we’d all drive out to Sunriver late Friday. We’d reserve a bunch of cabins, seize a conference room, and spend two or three days shouting ourselves hoarse. I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at—laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact we were separated from each other by three thousand miles, at a time when communication wasn’t easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing. Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I’d assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold athletic shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was… Johnson. And yet, it was undeniable. While everyone else was laughing, rioting, he’d be the sane one, sitting quietly in the middle of the table reading a book. The loudest voice at every Buttface always seemed to be Hayes. And the craziest. Like his girth, his personality was ever expanding, adding new phobias and enthusiasms. For instance, by this time Hayes had developed a curious obsession with heavy equipment. Backhoes, bulldozers, cherry pickers, cranes, they fascinated him. They… turned him on, there’s no other way to say it. At an early Buttface we were leaving a local bar when Hayes spied a bulldozer in the field behind the lodge. He discovered, to his astonishment, the keys had been left inside, so he hopped in and moved the earth all around the field, and in the parking lot, quitting only when he narrowly missed crushing several cars. Hayes on a bulldozer, I thought: As much as the swoosh, that might be our logo. I always said that Woodell made the trains run on time, but it was Hayes who laid down the tracks. Hayes set up all the esoteric accounting systems without which the company would have ground to a halt. When we first went from manual to automated accounting, Hayes acquired the first primitive machines, and by constantly mending them, modifying them, or pounding them with his big hammy fists, he kept them uncannily accurate. When we first started doing business outside the United States, foreign currencies became a devilishly tricky problem, and Hayes set up an ingenious currency-hedging system, which made the spread more reliable, more predictable. Despite our hijinks, despite our eccentricities, despite our physical limitations, I concluded in 1976 that we were a formidable team. (Years later a famous Harvard business professor studying Nike came to the same conclusion.

• 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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Look at these people all about us: you left Whitstable to get away from people such as this!’ I gazed at her for a second in a kind of stupor; then I did as she urged me, and glanced about the tent - at Annie and Miss Raymond; at Ralph, who was still blinking and blushing into Mrs Costello’s face; at Nora and Ruth, who stood beside the platform with some other girls I recognised from the Boy in the Boat. In a chair at the far side of the tent - I had not noticed her before - sat Zena, her arm looped through that of her broad-shouldered sweetheart; close to them stood a couple of Ralph’s union friends — they nodded when they saw me looking, and raised a glass. And in the midst of them all, sat Florence. Her head was still bent to where Cyril clutched at it: he had tugged her hair down to her shoulder, and she had raised her hands to pull his fingers free. She was flushed and smiling; but even as she smiled, she lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw tears in them - perhaps, only from Cyril’s grasping - and, behind the tears, a kind of bleakness, that I did not think I’d ever seen in them before. I could not meet her smile with one of my own. But when I turned again to Kitty, my gaze was level; and my voice, when I spoke, was perfectly steady. ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I belong here, now: these are my people. And as for Florence, my sweetheart, I love her more than I can say; and I never realised it, until this moment.’ She let go of my arm and stepped away as if she had been struck. ‘You are saying these things to spite me,’ she said breathlessly, ‘because you are still hurt -’ I shook my head. ‘I’m saying these things because they’re true. Good-bye, Kitty.’ ‘Nan!’ she cried, as I made to move away from her. I turned back. ‘Don’t call me that,’ I said pettishly. ‘No one calls me that now. It ain’t my name, and never was.’ She swallowed, then stepped towards me again and said in a lower, chastened tone: ‘Nancy, then. Listen to me: I still have all your things. All the things you left at Stamford Hill.’ ‘I don’t want them,’ I said at once. ‘Keep them, or throw ’em away: I don’t care.’ ‘There are letters, from your family! Your father came to London, looking for you. Even now, they send me letters, asking if I have heard ...’ My father! I had had a vision, on seeing Diana, of myself upon a silken bed.