Nostalgia

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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  147. Notes from a Trip to Russia * SINCE I’VE RETURNED from Russia a few weeks ago, I’ve been dreaming a lot. At first I dreamt about Moscow every night. Sometimes my lover and I had returned there; sometimes I would be in warmer, familiar places I had visited; sometimes in different, unfamiliar cities, cold, white, strange. In one dream, I was making love to a woman behind a stack of clothing in Gumm’s Department Store in Moscow. She was ill, and we went upstairs, where I said to a matron, “We have to get her to the hospital.” The matron said, “All right, you take her over there and tell them that she needs a kidney scan and a brain scan ...” And I said, “No, they’re not going to do that for me.” And she looked at me very strangely and she said, “Of course they will.” And I realized I was in Russia, and medicine and doctor bills and all the rest of that are free. My dreams don’t come every night anymore, but it seems as if they’ve gotten deeper and deeper so that I awake not really knowing any of the content of them but only knowing that I’ve just dreamt about Russia again. For a while, in my dreams, Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been. The possibilities of living in Russia seem very different in some respects, yet the people feel so Western European (so American, really) outside of Tashkent. And the afternoons in Moscow are so dark and gloomy. I The flight to Moscow was nine hours long, and from my observations on the plane, Russians are generally as unfriendly to each other as Americans are and just about as unhelpful. There was a marvelously craggy-faced old blue-eyed woman in her seventies wearing a babushka, with a huge coat roll. On the plane everyone had one kind of huge coat roll or another except me. When I stepped out into the Moscow weather I realized why. But this woman was sitting in the seat right in front of me. She was traveling alone and was too short to wield her roll easily. She tried once, and she tried twice, and finally I got up and helped her. The plane was packed: I’d never seen a plane quite so crowded before. The old woman turned around and looked at me. It was obvious she did not speak English because I had muttered something to her with no reply.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  2 There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve, and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity. 3 In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the “fall” of Adam as a catastrophe, because the “evil inclination” ( yeytzer ha’ra ) was an essential part of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements. 4 In the Enuma Elish , the cosmogony was linked with the gods’ construction of the Esagila ziggurat. In the ancient Middle East, creation was regularly associated with temple building, and this Genesis myth was closely related to the temple built by King Solomon (c. 970-930 BCE) in Jerusalem: 5 one of the four sacred rivers that flow from Eden is the Gihon, the spring at the foot of the Temple Mount. The theme of Yahweh’s creation was important in the temple cult, not because it provided worshippers with information about the origin of the universe but because the building of a temple was a symbolic repetition of the cosmogony. 6 It enabled mortals to participate in the creative powers of the gods and ensured that Yahweh would fight Israel’s enemies just as “in the beginning” he had slain the sea monsters.

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

  A lone cricket chirped. Then died. Somewhere, far off, one person laughed like a loon. To this day I think it was Johnson. Money was no laughing matter to these people, and a public offering of this size was not the occasion for jokes. I sighed, looked down at my note card. If Hayes had driven a bulldozer through the room, it could hardly have been worse. Later that night I took him aside and told him I thought it was best if he didn’t speak anymore. Johnson and I would handle the formal presentations. But we’d still need him for the Q and A sessions. Hayes looked at me, blinked once. He understood. “I thought you were going to send me home,” he said. “No,” I said, “you need to be part of this.” We continued to Chicago, then Dallas, then Houston, then San Francisco. We went on to Los Angeles, then Seattle. At each stop we grew more tired, almost weepy with fatigue. Johnson and I especially. A strange sentimentality was stealing over us. On the airplanes, in the hotel bars, we talked about our salad days. His endless letters. Please send encouraging words. My silence. We talked about the name Nike coming to him in a dream. We talked about Stretch, and Giampietro, and the Marlboro Man, and all the different times I’d jerked him back and forth across the country. We talked about the day he was almost strung up by his Exeter employees, when their paychecks had bounced. “After all that,” Johnson said one day in the back of a town car, headed to the next meeting, “and now we’re the toasts of Wall Street.” I looked at him. Things do change. But he hadn’t. He now reached into his bag, took out a book, and began to read. The road show ended the day before Thanksgiving. I vaguely remember a turkey, some cranberries, my family around me. I vaguely remember being aware that it was an anniversary of sorts. I’d first flown to Japan on Thanksgiving Day, 1962. Over dinner my father had a thousand questions about the public offering. My mother had none. She said she’d always known it would happen, ever since the day she bought a pair of seven-dollar Limber Ups. They were understandably feeling reflective, congratulatory, but I quickly hushed them, begged them not to be premature. The game was still on. The race was afoot. WE CHOSE A date for the offering. December 2, 1980. The last remaining hurdle was settling on a price. The night before the offering Hayes came into my office. “The guys at Kuhn, Loeb are recommending twenty dollars per share,” he said. “Too low,” I said. “It’s insulting.” Well, it can’t be too high, he cautioned. We want the damn thing to sell. The whole process was crazy-making, because it was imprecise. There was no right number. It was all a matter of opinion, feeling, selling.

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

  We accompany him in a three days’ journey from Bethlehem to Nazareth, his proper home, where he spent thirty silent years of his life in quiet preparation for his public work, unknown in his divine character to his neighbors and even the members of his own household (John 7:5), except his saintly parents. Nazareth is still there, a secluded, but charmingly located mountain village, with narrow, crooked and dirty streets, with primitive stone houses where men, donkeys and camels are huddled together, surrounded by cactus hedges and fruitful gardens of vines, olive, fig, and pomegranates, and favorably distinguished from the wretched villages of modern Palestine by comparative industry, thrift, and female beauty; the never failing "Virgin’s Fountain," whither Jesus must often have accompanied his mother for the daily supply of water, is still there near the Greek Church of the Annunciation, and is the evening rendezvous of the women and maidens, with their water-jars gracefully poised on the head or shoulder, and a row of silver coins adorning their forehead; and behind the village still rises the hill, fragrant with heather and thyme, from which he may often have cast his eye eastward to Gilboa, where Jonathan fell, and to the graceful, cone-like Tabor—the Righi of Palestine—northward to the lofty Mount Hermon—the Mont Blanc of Palestine—southward to the fertile plain of Esdraëlon—the classic battle-ground of Israel—and westward to the ridge of Carmel, the coast of Tyre and Sidon and the blue waters of the Mediterranean sea—the future highway of his gospel of peace to mankind. There he could feast upon the rich memories of David and Jonathan, Elijah and Elisha, and gather images of beauty for his lessons of wisdom. We can afford to smile at the silly superstition which points out the kitchen of the Virgin Mary beneath the Latin Church of the Annunciation, the suspended column where she received the angel’s message, the carpenter shop of Joseph and Jesus, the synagogue in which he preached on the acceptable year of the Lord, the stone table at which he ate with his disciples, the Mount of Precipitation two miles off, and the stupendous monstrosity of the removal of the dwelling-house of Mary by angels in the air across the sea to Loretto in Italy! These are childish fables, in striking contrast with the modest silence of the Gospels, and neutralized by the rival traditions of Greek and Latin monks; but nature in its beauty is still the same as Jesus saw and interpreted it in his incomparable parables, which point from nature to nature’s God and from visible symbols to eternal truths.165

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

  Yes, they both say, looking down at their shoes, though it was a bit depressing. What’s on your bucket lists? I nearly ask, but I don’t. Gates and Buffett seem to have done everything they’ve ever wanted in this life. They have no bucket lists, surely. Which makes me ask myself: Have I? AT HOME PENNY picks up her needlepoint and I pour myself a glass of wine. I pull out a yellow legal pad to look at my notes and lists for tomorrow. For the first time in a while... it’s blank. We sit in front of the eleven o’clock news, but my mind is far, far away. Drifting, floating, time-traveling. A familiar feeling of late. I’m apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn’t bother to get his driver’s license, he just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scolded it. “Whoa, WHOA, you son of a bitch!” I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was. Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he’d always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed doughnuts—each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm doughnut. Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor’s edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don’t think so. After forty years I’ve stepped down as Nike CEO, leaving the company in good hands, I think, and good shape, I trust. Sales last year, 2006, were $16 billion. (Adidas was $10 billion, but who’s counting?) Our shoes and clothes are in five thousand stores worldwide, and we have ten thousand employees. Our Chinese operation in Shanghai alone has seven hundred. (And China, our second-largest market, is now our largest producer of shoes. I guess that 1980 trip paid off.) The five thousand employees at the world headquarters in Beaverton are housed on an Edenic collegiate campus, with two hundred acres of wooded wilderness, laced by rolling streams, dotted by pristine ball fields. The buildings are named after the men and women who have given us more than their names and endorsements.

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

  Penny asks if they enjoyed the movie. Yes, they both say, looking down at their shoes, though it was a bit depressing. What’s on your bucket lists? I nearly ask, but I don’t. Gates and Buffett seem to have done everything they’ve ever wanted in this life. They have no bucket lists, surely. Which makes me ask myself: Have I? AT HOME PENNY picks up her needlepoint and I pour myself a glass of wine. I pull out a yellow legal pad to look at my notes and lists for tomorrow. For the first time in a while… it’s blank. We sit in front of the eleven o’clock news, but my mind is far, far away. Drifting, floating, time-traveling. A familiar feeling of late. I’m apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn’t bother to get his driver’s license, he just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scolded it. “Whoa, WHOA, you son of a bitch!” I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was. Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he’d always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed doughnuts—each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm doughnut. Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor’s edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don’t think so. After forty years I’ve stepped down as Nike CEO, leaving the company in good hands, I think, and good shape, I trust. Sales last year, 2006, were $16 billion. (Adidas was $10 billion, but who’s counting?) Our shoes and clothes are in five thousand stores worldwide, and we have ten thousand employees. Our Chinese operation in Shanghai alone has seven hundred. (And China, our second-largest market, is now our largest producer of shoes. I guess that 1980 trip paid off.)

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

  NIGHTWe love going to the movies. We always have. But tonight we have a dilemma. We’ve seen all the violent movies, which Penny likes best, so we’re going to have to venture outside our comfort zone, try something different. A comedy, maybe. I leaf through the paper. “How about The Bucket List—at the Century? Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman?” She frowns: I guess. It’s Christmastime, 2007. THE BUCKET LIST turns out to be anything but a comedy. It’s a movie about mortality. Two men, Nicholson and Freeman, both terminally ill with cancer, decide to spend their remaining days doing all the fun things, the crazy things, they’ve always wanted to do, to make the most of their time before they kick the bucket. An hour into the movie, there’s not a chuckle to be had. There are also many strange, unsettling parallels between the movie and my life. First, Nicholson always makes me think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which makes me think of Kesey, which takes me back to my days at the University of Oregon. Second, high on the bucket list of Nicholson’s character is seeing the Himalayas, which transports me to Nepal. Above all, Nicholson’s character employs a personal assistant—a sort of surrogate son—named Matthew. He even looks a bit like my son. Same scruffy goatee. When the movie ends, when the lights come up, Penny and I are both relieved to stand and return to the bright glare of real life. The theater is a new sixteen-screen colossus in the heart of Cathedral City, just outside Palm Springs. These days we spend much of the winter there, hiding from the chilly Oregon rains. Walking through the lobby, waiting for our eyes to adjust, we spot two familiar faces. At first we can’t place them. We’re still seeing Nicholson and Freeman in our minds. But these faces are equally familiar—equally famous. Now we realize. It’s Bill and Warren. Gates and Buffett. We stroll over. Neither man is what you’d call a close friend, but we’ve met them several times, at social events and conferences. And we have common causes, common interests, a few mutual acquaintances. “Fancy meeting you here!” I say. Then I cringe. Did I really just say that? Is it possible that I’m still shy and awkward in the presence of celebrities? “I was just thinking about you,” one of them says. We shake hands, all around, and talk mostly about Palm Springs. Isn’t this place lovely? Isn’t it wonderful to get out of the cold? We talk about families, business, sports. I hear someone behind us whisper, “Hey, look, Buffett and Gates—who’s that other guy?” I smile. As it should be. In my head I can’t help doing some quick math. At the moment I’m worth $10 billion, and each of these men is worth five or six times more. Lead me from the unreal to the real.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Or was it you with me? We bought him a hamburger, then he left. Why, his name is Dean—Dean something.... No, you werent with me. I was with Rick that night, I remember. Rick liked him, I didnt.... Anyway,” he repeated, “this Dean is a tramp.” Dean? Dean.... I remember that name. “I dont believe it about Lance,” says Chick, with touching loyalty. “Youre just being bitchy, Jamey. Lance may not be as Young as he was, but hes still too special.” “All I can say,” said Jamey, “is that he certainly had his day.” “Babe,” Chick said to me now, “Lance was the handsomest boy in Hollywood.” “ I never thought he was that good,” said Jamey. “He was,” says Chick staunchly, explaining to me: “He had them all scratching at his door. He was in the movies—we all were, then—he wasnt a Star, but everyone knew him. Why, he had an affair with Pierce Flint—the big moviestar. And Pierce loved Lance so much that when Lance left him, Pierce got married— to a woman! ... Thats when Lance met Esmeralda Drake the Third.” Jamey interrupted Chick: “Were you on the set the day Esmeralda first saw Lance?” “You know damn well I was, bitch, you tried to push me out of the camera each time you came on—like every other nelly upstart chorus boy. It was that Betty Grable musical we did—” “Rita Hayworth,” says Jamey. “Well, one of those, who cares? It couldve been Shirley Temple!” Jamey began to hum a tune from a musical, to sway his body to the rhythm. “I was just a Kid, then, but I remember it like it was this morning.” “You werent that Young,” Chick said; then to me: “Lance was doing this number with Betty Grable—or Rita Hayworth—one of those—that was right after he broke up with Pierce. Well, babe, I mean to tell you, dont let anyone tell you a moviestar isnt Powerful in this damn town. Why, when Lance left Pierce, Pierce fixed it so Lance couldnt get any work, hardly. Lance might have been a Big Star today if it hadnt been for that. Anyway, they had to finish this movie—and Lance knew he had to do Something, but quick—Lance always looks out for himself—” “Except maybe that time in Laguna,” Jamey said. “Well, you dont know what really happened, and dont pretend you do. You want to believe the worst about Lance....

• From Educated (2018)

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

• From Educated (2018)

  Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain. There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step. My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home. All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home. * Except for my sister Audrey, who broke both an arm and a leg when she was young. She was taken to get a cast. PART ONE [image "Chapter 1 Choose the Good" file=Image00003.jpg] My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sisters each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That’s the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds who’ve surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory it’s always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms. The baby doesn’t make sense—I’m the youngest of my mother’s seven children—but like I said, none of this happened. —A YEAR AFTER MY FATHER told us that story, we gathered one evening to hear him read aloud from Isaiah, a prophecy about Immanuel. He sat on our mustard-colored sofa, a large Bible open in his lap.

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

  Whenever I go back to Eugene, and walk the campus, I think of her. Whenever I stand outside Hayward Field, I think of the silent race she ran. I think of all the many races that each of us have run. I lean against the fence and look at the track and listen to the wind, thinking of Bowerman with his string tie blowing behind him. I think of Pre, God love him. Turning, looking over my shoulder, my heart leaps. Across the street stands the William Knight Law School. A very serious-looking edifice. No one ever jackasses around in there. I CAN’T SLEEP. I can’t stop thinking about that blasted movie, The Bucket List. Lying in the dark, I ask myself again and again, What’s on yours? Pyramids? Check. Himalayas? Check. Ganges? Check. So… nothing? I think about the few things I want to do. Help a couple of universities change the world. Help find a cure for cancer. Besides that, it’s not so much things I want to do as things I’d like to say. And maybe unsay. It might be nice to tell the story of Nike. Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. Or vice versa. I might start the story, or end it, with regrets. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of bad decisions. I’m the guy who said Magic Johnson was “a player without a position, who’ll never make it in the NBA.” I’m the guy who tabbed Ryan Leaf as a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning. It’s easy to laugh those off. Other regrets go deeper. Not phoning Hiraku Iwano after he quit. Not getting Bo Jackson renewed in 1996. Joe Paterno. Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It’s all the same drive. The same dream.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was trying to take it all in, this last, luxurious moment—of sharp yellow light, of warm air flowing from the heater. I was experiencing nostalgia for the life I’d had before, which I would lose at any second, when the world turned and began to devour itself. The longer I sat motionless, breathing deeply, trying to inhale the last scent of the fallen world, the more I resented its continuing solidity. Nostalgia turned to fatigue. Sometime after 1:30 I went to bed. I glimpsed Dad as I left, his face frozen in the dark, the light from the TV leaping across his square glasses. He sat as if posed, with no agitation, no embarrassment, as if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for why he was sitting up, alone, at near two in the morning, watching Ralph and Alice Kramden prepare for a Christmas party. He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood. [image "Chapter 10 Shield of Feathers" file=Image00012.jpg] When January 1 dawned like any other morning, it broke Dad’s spirit. He never again mentioned Y2K. He slipped into despondency, dragging himself in from the junkyard each night, silent and heavy. He’d sit in front of the TV for hours, a black cloud hovering. Mother said it was time for another trip to Arizona. Luke was serving a mission for the church, so it was just me, Richard and Audrey who piled into the old Chevy Astro van Dad had fixed up. Dad removed the seats, except the two in front, and in their place he put a queen mattress; then he heaved himself onto it and didn’t move for the rest of the drive. As it had years before, the Arizona sun revived Dad. He lay out on the porch on the hard cement, soaking it up, while the rest of us read or watched TV. After a few days he began to improve, and we braced ourselves for the nightly arguments between him and Grandma. Grandma was seeing a lot of doctors these days, because she had cancer in her bone marrow. “Those doctors will just kill you quicker,” Dad said one evening when Grandma returned from a consultation. Grandma refused to quit chemotherapy, but she did ask Mother about herbal treatments. Mother had brought some with her, hoping Grandma would ask, and Grandma tried them—foot soaks in red clay, cups of bitter parsley tea, tinctures of horsetail and hydrangea. “Those herbs won’t do a damned thing,” Dad said. “Herbals operate by faith. You can’t put your trust in a doctor, then ask the Lord to heal you.” Grandma didn’t say a word. She just drank her parsley tea. I remember watching Grandma, searching for signs that her body was giving way.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s a child’s world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed about when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ants’ nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I’d run to check the place where once I’d caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now I’m giving Mabel her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works. She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. Mabel is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours. 26 The flight of time It’s turned cold: cold so that saucers of ice lie in the mud, blank and crazed as antique porcelain. Cold so the hedges are alive with Baltic blackbirds; so cold that each breath hangs like parcelled seafog in the air. The blue sky rings with it, and the bell on Mabel’s tail is dimmed with condensation. Cold, cold, cold. My feet crack the ice in the mud as I trudge uphill. And because the squeaks and grinding harmonics of fracturing ice sound to Mabel like a wounded animal, every step I take is met with a convulsive clench of her toes. Where the world isn’t white with frost, it’s striped green and brown in strong sunlight, so the land is particoloured and snapping backwards to dawn and forwards to dusk. The days, now, are a bare six hours long.

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

  Yes, they both say, looking down at their shoes, though it was a bit depressing. What’s on your bucket lists? I nearly ask, but I don’t. Gates and Buffett seem to have done everything they’ve ever wanted in this life. They have no bucket lists, surely. Which makes me ask myself: Have I? AT HOME PENNY picks up her needlepoint and I pour myself a glass of wine. I pull out a yellow legal pad to look at my notes and lists for tomorrow. For the first time in a while… it’s blank. We sit in front of the eleven o’clock news, but my mind is far, far away. Drifting, floating, time-traveling. A familiar feeling of late. I’m apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn’t bother to get his driver’s license, he just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scolded it. “Whoa, WHOA, you son of a bitch!” I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was. Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he’d always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed doughnuts—each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm doughnut. Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor’s edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don’t think so. After forty years I’ve stepped down as Nike CEO, leaving the company in good hands, I think, and good shape, I trust. Sales last year, 2006, were $16 billion. (Adidas was $10 billion, but who’s counting?) Our shoes and clothes are in five thousand stores worldwide, and we have ten thousand employees. Our Chinese operation in Shanghai alone has seven hundred. (And China, our second-largest market, is now our largest producer of shoes. I guess that 1980 trip paid off.) The five thousand employees at the world headquarters in Beaverton are housed on an Edenic collegiate campus, with two hundred acres of wooded wilderness, laced by rolling streams, dotted by pristine ball fields. The buildings are named after the men and women who have given us more than their names and endorsements.

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

  It was actually the green of newly minted money. My other consolation was lunch. Each day at noon I’d walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. Switzerland. Tahiti. Moscow. Bali. I’d grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I’d ask the pigeons: Can you believe it was only a year ago that I was surfing Waikiki? Eating water buffalo stew after an early morning hike in the Himalayas? Are the best moments of my life behind me? Was my trip around the world… my peak? The pigeons were less responsive than the statue at Wat Phra Kaew. This is how I spent 1963. Quizzing pigeons. Polishing my Valiant. Writing letters. Dear Carter, Did you ever leave Shangri-La? I’m an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out. PART TWO “No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

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

  About which they still had a maddeningly blasé attitude. Little more days. With Wallace continually acting more like a loan shark than a banker, a little more days could mean disaster. And when the shipments from Onitsuka did finally arrive? They often contained the wrong number of shoes. Often the wrong sizes. Sometimes the wrong models. This kind of disarray clogged our warehouse and rankled our sales reps. Before I left Japan Mr. Onitsuka and Kitami assured me that they were building new state-of-the-art factories. Delivery problems would soon be a thing of the past, they said. I was skeptical, but there was nothing I could do. I was at their mercy. Johnson, meanwhile, was losing his mind. His letters, once mumbly with angst, were becoming shrill with hysteria. The main problem was Bowerman’s Cortez, he said. It was simply too popular. We’d gotten people hooked on the thing, turned them into full-blown Cortez addicts, and now we couldn’t meet the demand, which created anger and resentment up and down the supply chain. “God, we are really screwing our customers,” Johnson wrote. “Happiness is a boatload of Cortez; reality is a boatload of Bostons with steel wool uppers, tongues made out of old razor blades, sizes 6 to 6 ½.” He was exaggerating, but not much. It happened all the time. I’d secure a loan from Wallace, then hang fire waiting for Onitsuka to send the shoes, and when the boat finally docked it wouldn’t contain any Cortezes. Six weeks later, we’d get too many Cortezes, and by then it was too late. Why? It couldn’t just be Onitsuka’s decrepit factories, we all agreed, and sure enough Woodell eventually figured out that Onitsuka was satisfying its local customers in Japan first , then worrying about foreign exports. Terribly unfair, but again what could I do? I had no leverage. Even if Onitsuka’s new factories ended all delivery problems, even if every shipment of shoes hit the water right on time, with all the correct quantities of size 10s, and no size 5s, I’d still face problems with Wallace. Bigger orders would require bigger loans, and bigger loans would be harder to pay off, and in 1970 Wallace was telling me that he wasn’t interested in playing that game anymore. I recall one day, sitting in Wallace’s office. Both he and White were working me over pretty good. Wallace seemed to be enjoying himself, though White kept giving me looks that said, “Sorry, pal, this is my job.” As always I politely took the abuse they dished out, playing the role of meek small business owner. Long on contrition, short on credit. I knew the role backward and forward, but I remember feeling that at any moment I might cut loose a bloodcurdling scream. Here I’d built this dynamic company, from nothing, and by all measures it was a beast—sales doubling every year, like clockwork—and this was the thanks I got? Two bankers treating me like a deadbeat?

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And so plane- spotting became Dad’s childhood obsession. Numbering, identifying, classifying, recording, learning the details with a fierce child’s need to know and command. When he was older he cycled to distant airfields with a bottle of Tizer, a Box Brownie camera, a notebook and pencil. Farnborough, Northolt, Blackbushe. Hours of waiting at the perimeter fence, a small boy looking through the wire. I must have inherited being a watcher from Dad, I thought idly. Perhaps it was inevitable that with Dad’s propensity to stare up at the slightest engine note, raise a pair of binoculars to distant contrails, my tiny self would emulate him, learn that looking at flying things was the way to see the world. Only for me, it wasn’t aeroplanes. It was birds. Now I’ve come to realise that we were watching the same things: or at least, things that history conspired to make the same. Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh: beings of aerodynamic, predatory perfection. Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same. These similarities were seized upon by military propagandists, for they made air warfare, like hawks, part of the natural order of things. Falconry’s medieval glamour played its part, too, and soon hawks and aeroplanes were deeply entangled in visions of war and national defence. There’s an extraordinary example of this in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale. In the opening scenes a party of Chaucerian pilgrims crosses the downs on the way to Canterbury. A knight unhoods a falcon and casts it into the air. The camera lingers on its flickering wings – a quick cut – and the falcon’s silhouette becomes a diving Spitfire. We see the knight’s face again. It is the same face, but now it wears the helmet of a modern soldier as it watches the Spitfire above. The sequence is powered by the myth of an essential Britishness unchanged through the ages, and it shows how powerfully hawks could marry romantic medievalism with the hard-edged technology of modern war. Sitting there in the grass, listening to distant engines under a misty October sky, I thought of my father standing on the bombsite in my dream. He had stood and waited, as a boy. Had been patient and the planes had come. And I remembered, then, a story he’d told us one Saturday morning over breakfast. It was a good story. In a small way, it made my dad a hero. I felt a flood of gratitude.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Prrt. Prrt. Prrt. One interrogatory note over and over again, like a telephone call from a bird deep in leaves. That’s what pulled me from sleep. The noise came from a chaffinch in the lime tree outside my window, and I lay watching the day grow bright listening to the sound move about in the tree behind the glass. It was a rain call, a beautiful name for a noise like an unanswered question. No one knows why chaffinches make it, but the name comes from an old tradition that it portends bad weather. In the 1950s, in a small research station in Madingley a few miles north of where I lay, a scientist called Thorpe experimented on chaffinches to try to understand how they learned to sing. He reared young finches in total isolation in soundproofed cages, and listened, fascinated, to the rudimentary songs his broken birds produced. There was a short window of time, he found, in which the isolated chicks needed to hear the elaborate trills of adult song, and if that window was missed, they could never quite manage to produce it themselves. He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from? Thorpe discovered that wild chaffinches from different places had different dialects. I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child. It was thinner, less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Prrt. Prrt. Prrt. One interrogatory note over and over again, like a telephone call from a bird deep in leaves. That’s what pulled me from sleep. The noise came from a chaffinch in the lime tree outside my window, and I lay watching the day grow bright listening to the sound move about in the tree behind the glass. It was a rain call, a beautiful name for a noise like an unanswered question. No one knows why chaffinches make it, but the name comes from an old tradition that it portends bad weather. In the 1950s, in a small research station in Madingley a few miles north of where I lay, a scientist called Thorpe experimented on chaffinches to try to understand how they learned to sing. He reared young finches in total isolation in soundproofed cages, and listened, fascinated, to the rudimentary songs his broken birds produced. There was a short window of time, he found, in which the isolated chicks needed to hear the elaborate trills of adult song, and if that window was missed, they could never quite manage to produce it themselves. He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from? Thorpe discovered that wild chaffinches from different places had different dialects. I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child. It was thinner, less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I sat down, tired and content. The goshawks were gone, the sky blank. Time passed. The wavelength of the light around me shortened. The day built itself. A sparrowhawk, light as a toy of balsa-wood and doped tissue-paper, zipped past at knee-level, kiting up over a bank of brambles and away into the trees. I watched it go, lost in recollection. This memory was candescent, irresistible. The air reeked of pine resin and the pitchy vinegar of wood ants. I felt my small-girl fingers hooked through plastic chain-link and the weight of a pair of East German binoculars around my neck. I was bored. I was nine. Dad was standing next to me. We were looking for sparrowhawks. They nested nearby, and that July afternoon we were hoping for the kind of sighting they’d sometimes give us: a submarine ripple through the tops of the pines as one swept in and away; a glimpse of a yellow eye; a barred chest against moving needles, or a quick silhouette stamped black against the Surrey sky. For a while it had been exciting to stare into the darkness between the trees and the bloodorange and black where the sun slapped crazy-paving shadows across pines. But when you are nine, waiting is hard. I kicked at the base of the fence with my wellingtoned feet. Squirmed and fidgeted. Let out a sigh. Hung off the fence with my fingers. And then my dad looked at me, half exasperated, half amused, and explained something. He explained patience. He said it was the most important thing of all to remember, this: that when you wanted to see something very badly, sometimes you had to stay still, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and be patient. ‘When I’m at work, taking photographs for the paper,’ he said, ‘sometimes I’ve got to sit in the car for hours to get the picture I want. I can’t get up to get a cup of tea or even go to the loo. I just have to be patient. If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.’ He was grave and serious, not annoyed; what he was doing was communicating a grown-up Truth, but I nodded sulkily and stared at the ground. It sounded like a lecture, not advice, and I didn’t understand the point of what he was trying to say.