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

  One afternoon I followed the narrow, paved road that wound through the property and saw a rare sight: a moving car. I found a yard full of every imaginable kind of tile—some stacked neatly, others tossed in messy, mountainous heaps on wooden pallets as far as I could see. I explored the tile yard for an hour or so, winding my way through the maze of multi-colored ceramic and porcelain materials and never saw another person. Nor did I ever see anyone there in subsequent visits. I found other places like the tile yard, buildings two or three stories high, barn-like structures with tin roofs. Layers of dust and dirt covered every surface inside them. Cobwebs hung in dusty tatters or curtained the corners, shimmering expansively at times. These buildings were bursting with various items: clothes, shoes, blankets, record players, records, cabinets, dining tables and chairs, all stacked haphazardly or packed in boxes. I spent hours sorting through things, playing records and trying on musty-smelling clothes before some of the hazy mirrors. Light poured through the windows, making visible the dust particles that swirled through the air, giving the spaces a ghostly feel. On another walk, I discovered an old speedboat in the middle of a meadow and, not far from the boat, a decaying cow and calf. The calf was just bones with bits of skin and fur, but the cow was mostly intact. Its stomach had expelled a pool of white, foul-smelling goop teeming with maggots. I went back to look at the bovine corpses every weekend until the cow was nothing but scattered bones. Some of the other girls introduced me to the children’s zoo, which consisted mostly of rabbits kept in individual hutches that sat high above the ground on stilted wooden legs. I had to stand on a two-step ladder to open the hatch door. I was allowed to pet the velvety fur of the skittish creatures, but warned to never touch the tiny pink newborns because the mother might kill them if she smelled an unfamiliar scent on their smooth, bubblegum flesh. Weekends were about autonomy. I might wander alone, set off on an adventure with another child or join a group of kids in a game of tag or Monopoly. Mostly I played on my own. Other than a brief friendship with a girl named Anna, who replaced my “buddy” Sophie, I did not yet have connections with any of the other children. Anna, an older girl who was well liked by the demonstrators and other kids, treated me like a favored pet. During free times, I went everywhere with her. As her favorite, I found myself regularly fussed over, my cheeks pinched by other, older girls, who exclaimed, “Ahh, she’s so cute!” When Anna left the commune, I once again became solitary.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Perhaps the ferry boat was just coming into the dock and I would stop a moment to watch the men in uniform as they pulled away at the big wooden wheels to which the chains were attached. As the gates were thrown open and the planks laid down a mob would rush through the shed and make for the saloons which adorned the nearest corners. Those were the days when the old man knew the meaning of “moderation,” when he drank because he was truly thirsty, and to down a schooner of beer by the ferry house was a man’s prerogative. Then it was as Melville has so well said: “Feed all things with food convenient for them—that is, if the food be procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of the body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be.” Yes, then it seems to me that the old man’s soul had not yet shrivelled up, that it was endlessly bounded by light and space and that his body, heedless of the resurrection, was feeding on all that was convenient and procurable—if not champagne and oysters, at least good lager beer and pretzels. Then his body had not been condemned, nor his way of living, nor his absence of faith. Nor was he yet surrounded by vultures, but only by good comrades, ordinary mortals like himself who looked neither high nor low but straight ahead, the eye always fixed on the horizon and content with the sight thereof. And now, as a battered wreck, he has made himself into an elder of the church and he stands before the altar, gray and bent and withered, while the minister gives his blessing to the measly collection which will go to make a new bowling alley. Perhaps it was necessary for him to experience the birth of the soul, to feed this spongelike growth with that light and space which the Congregational church offered. But what a poor substitute for a man who had known the joys of that food which the body craved and which, without the pangs of conscience, had flooded even his spongelike soul with a light and space that was ungodly but radiant and terrestrial. I think again of his seemly little “corporation” over which the thick gold chain was strung and I think that with that death of his paunch there was left to survive only the sponge of a soul, a sort of appendix to his own bodily death. I think of the minister who had swallowed him up as a sort of inhuman sponge eater, the keeper of a wigwam hung with spiritual scalps.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The furniture was in the room my brother and I shared. I still have some of the pieces. 86 This photograph is heavily retouched. A wood-body station wagon is posed in front of one of the model houses in the picture. Otherwise, the scene is deserted. It is unclear if the photograph will help sell the houses or if it commemorates the street light in the foreground. The concrete pole, light globe, and the clouds overhead have been inserted into the picture. Street lights were a selling point, since the county did not require street lighting when the houses were built. The parks, the shopping center, and the nine-foot-wide panels of grass and trees dividing residential streets from cross-town traffic weren’t required either. 87 Drive from the ocean to Los Angeles, and you’ll stay on the same grid of streets. The drive passes through suburb after suburb without interruption. It is a distance of fifteen miles, over land so worthless a hundred years ago that house lots on it could not be given away. What later redeemed the land—and determined its limits—are the subdivision maps filed in the county recorder’s office. 88 Every map is a fiction. Every map offers choices. It’s even possible to choose something beautiful. 89 For this photograph my father sat on the lawn of his house playing with my brother. Behind him, the wood railing of the porch was unobscured by the pyracantha bushes. Over the years, the pyracanthas swelled out of the limits of the garden. Both my parents are dead; my older brother moved away to repair cars. I live in the house that belonged to the three of them, the house my parents bought for $6,700, and into which my brother was born as their first gift. I have taken their places, displacing everything of theirs except the way in which they succeeded in fitting into this small house before I was born. My brother and I, who shared a room for almost twenty years, slept in identical beds. Our bedspreads were always the same. We slept east to west in our room and less than fourteen feet from our parents, in their bedroom at the front of the house. Only once did I hear their lovemaking, although I was a fitful sleeper and lay awake hours every night looking up at the ceiling, imagining other houses in which to live. Now I sleep better in this house, and I am grateful. 90 After work at city hall, I walk home on straight, flat sidewalks. Their lines converge ahead of me into a confusion of trees and lawns. The sidewalk is four feet wide. The street is forty feet wide. The strip of lawn between the street and the sidewalk is seven feet. The setback from curb to house is twenty feet. This pattern—of asphalt, grass, concrete, grass—is as regular as any thought of God’s.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  These trees now shade the water department office and the city’s print shop. Eucalyptus trees are native to Australia. By ordinance, every house must have a city tree planted in front of it. The tree is planted in the rectangle of land, seven feet wide and thirty feet long, which is the city’s right of way in front of each house. None of the city’s street trees is native to California. 104 A Mexican family sits in the dense shade of a parkway tree—a Ficus benjamina —on the front lawn of the corner house. The corner is on Hedda Street, named for Hedda Hopper. Several streets in the part of town where I live are named for radio and Hollywood personalities of the 1940s. Two streets nearby intersect as Amos and Andy. The family is waiting for a Long Beach bus that will stop a hundred feet farther on, in the sun. While they wait, two school-age girls play quietly. Their father lies on his side in the shade and leans on his arm. He wears a traditional straw hat from his state in Mexico. The hat has a narrow brim and a bright, yarn band. The woman sits bolt upright on the grass, in a loose dress, staring in the direction the bus will come, her legs wide in an open V. No one in my neighborhood ever sits on the front lawn. 105 The National Arbor Day Foundation has named us a Tree City for the past six years. The award commends the city for maintaining its street trees and replacing those that die. This is called urban forestry. Some residents, however, make other arrangements. They dislike trees, or what they drop, or the shade on their lawn. They girdle their tree to kill it, or pound a ring of copper nails into the trunk to poison it, or cut it down themselves. When the city replaces the tree, some of these residents kill it again. The tree belongs to the city, and each new, fifteen-gallon replacement costs about $70 to plant. The city will replant a tree twice more. After three replants, the city’s right of way is left empty. 106 I work in my front yard on Saturday mornings. My front yard is fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet deep. It includes the seven-foot-wide parkway strip that is the city’s right of way. The parkway is planted with a small crape myrtle tree that flowers red in spring. There is a maple tree in the front lawn. Two birch trees flank the front porch. When I look up from my garden, two rows of mature Brazilian peppertrees converge in the distance. The trees have dark trunks and small, dark-green leaves. In season, they litter the sidewalk with pink peppercorns. The city no longer plants this variety of tree. In 1979, a few days after my mother’s funeral, the Brazilian peppertree in front of my house split from age and drought.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The city replaced the tree a few years later with a red crape myrtle. The rest of the street will be replanted with new trees when the city can afford them. 107 The forty-year-old Brazilian peppertrees aren’t tall, but they have spreading crowns that extend over the sidewalk and the street. The city trims the trees every few years to keep facing pairs from arching over the narrow street. Trimming the trees isn’t for aesthetic reasons. Trimming clears access for the city’s trash trucks. Some houses on my street have a tree planted in the front lawn. Most houses have at least one tree in the backyard. Most of the trees are thirty or forty years old. Some of the trees tower over the houses. Aerial photographs of this suburb from 1950 and 1951 are reprinted in textbooks on urban design and landscaping. The photographs show rows of light-colored houses in a treeless waste. 108 I have a yard service mow my lawn twice a month. I replant my front garden twice a year, with spring and winter annuals. Most of my neighbors do the same, though not all. No one spends much time in their front yard, except the young husbands and wives of new families. They mow and edge their own lawns. The city does not compel owners to mow their lawns regularly. But if they don’t, their neighbors complain to city hall. Beginning in the 1850s in America, city planners and architects sought to domesticate the condition of working people by setting their houses in a landscape. The houses of working people would have a lawn and garden, to soften the view. The houses would be small, because extended families would no longer live in them. The small houses would be affordable, so that even a machinist could buy one. Living in them would, however, require orderly lives. When I walk to work, I walk through a vista that is almost one continuous garden and lawn, broken every fifty feet by a concrete driveway. 109 The afternoon of the day my father died, the shadows of eucalyptus trees planted by the city lay across the boulevards that border my neighborhood. That August day was part of a very long youth. It was not a better time. I would not live it again. 110 The bank auctioned off Mr. H’s house, after disclosing that it needed repairs. The bank thought the property would sell for little more than the value of its loan. The bids went well above the $119,000 minimum. The successful bidder thought Mr. H’s house was worth the much higher price. A few days after the auction, the new owner and a city building inspector met at the house. They found, among other things, that Mr. H had excavated a room beneath his garage. The room is nearly three hundred square feet and deep enough for a man to stand in comfortably. Mr. H had dug a fallout shelter.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  What happened? Times Square was, particularly for a young man with a criminal bent and a few bucks in his pocket, a wonderland of urban exotica. Not too long ago, you could buy a couple of loose joints on the street, then watch a triple bill of Lightning Swords of Death, Three the Hard Way, and Get Carter from the balcony/smoking section of one of a half dozen cavernous, moldering grind house movie theaters, the film's soundtrack accompanied by the hoots and shouts of the other patrons, for whom the theater was not a diversion but a place of business. All those theaters are gone, replaced by the Disney-owned New Victory and, across the street, the Lion King in apparent permanent residence. Where feral young men with butterfly knives tucked in their waistbands used to play video games and pinball among the chicken hawks, selling beat drugs and planning felonies, it's now stores selling Warner Brothers action figures and stuffed animals. Where Matty "The Horse" Ianello once ran an empire of clip joints and peep shows and hustler bars, it's Mickey and Bugs who are the baddest dudes on the block. Up the street on Broadway, where a midget doorman used to escort you up the dusty plaster waterfall into the gargantuan and half-empty Hawaii Kai for flaming drinks to chill you out from all the bad cocaine, and movie marquees once sported titles like Anal Rampage III and The Sperminator, there's the All-Star Cafe, a hellacious Terrordome of banality: Tourists and their spotty children chaw haplessly at frozen hamburgers, waiting listlessly for a glimpse of Michael Jordan on one of the gigantic video screens. World Wrestling Entertainment has a store. There's a Gap—unthinkable a few years back, when the shelves would have been quickly emptied by enterprising sneak-thieves and shoplifters. The MTV studios look down on the Square, attracting doughy teenage girls hoping for a glimpse of one of their nonthreatening hosts. Wasn't rock and roll dangerous once? The hideous Mars 2112 restaurant offers "Martian cuisine" and a virtual reality trip through a "wormhole in space" to thousands of children and their bored-looking parents where junkies and Johns once frolicked unfettered.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  On Eighth Avenue, once called "The Minnesota Strip" as it was prime recruiting for pimps who'd catch impressionable young victims fresh off the bus at Port Authority, the blight continues: The Haymarket Bar, a vicious hustler hotspot where young male entrepreneurs would pick up older Johns—so they could rob them at knifepoint—is gone. Lady Anne's Full Moon Saloon, called by Paper magazine's well-traveled bar reporter "The Worst Bar in the World," where the smell of Lysol and vomit distracted one from the recently released convict population playing pool on a warped table in the rear, is now the Collins Bar, with a smart Art Deco facade. You can walk from Fiftieth Street to Forty-second without once hearing the comforting refrain of "Smoke, smoke" or "Crack it up, got it good . . ." The legendary Terminal Cafe, across from the bus station, where at eight a.m. you could enjoy a shot of rye and a draft beer, pulling it to your mouth with a dirty bar towel, is now a parking lot. The Hollywood Twin Cinema, immortalized in Taxi Driver, is now the home to Big Apple Tours, and the terrifying peep show/bookstore downstairs is now a Burger King. In the convenience stores and shops where once were rows of dildos, crack pipes, bongs, and nunchuks, there are only rows of Pringles. The Lower East Side is worse. At one time a superstore of heroin and cocaine, where customers would line up in the streets for admission to a vast underground empire of abandoned, burned-out tenements converted into fortified rabbit warrens of booby-trapped passageways (the dark, candlelit peepholes manned by gun-toting guards)—it's now a neighborhood for the Starbucks generation. And an expensive one. Once the air smelled of burning candles, piss, and desperation. Now it smells of CKl. The old name brands (of heroin) proudly shouted out over the ever-present salsa music—Toilet, Laredo, Try-It-Again, Check-Mate, 357—have been replaced by Prada, Comme des Gar^ons, and Tommy Hilfiger. The meat district? Crisco Disco, the Anvil, the Mineshaft—a former world of unsafe sex, amyl nitrite, Quaaludes, and leather, sandwiched between meat wholesalers—is now the hottest restaurant district in town. Tribeca? A former no-man's-land of warehouses where mob-run after-hours clubs thrived, and you could pass out on a stack of empty beer crates in a rear "VIP" room and wake up near a nodding Johnny Thunders or a gibbering Belushi, greet the cold gray dawn with a shot of Wolfschmidts vodka poured from a Stoli bottle. Robert DeNiro seems to own it all now. You'd think that that might make it interesting. It doesn't. One swank restaurant after another, offices for the cell-phone set. Conversation at bars tends to lean toward back-end points and development deals rather than hijacked loads and who's got the bag.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Upper Amsterdam Avenue? You'd think the former Crack Boulevard would retain a vestige of its glories. Now it's a cluster-fuck of frat-boy bars, serving girl drinks and Jello shots to a bunch of towheaded projectile-vomiting college boys for whom Ecstasy is a dangerous drug. New York used to be a tough town. It demanded of its visitors a certain vigilance, a certain attitude. If you didn't walk the walk and talk the talk you could end up naked and walletless in a hot-sheet motel, wondering how the hell you got there. The wrong look at the wrong person and you could be looking at the business end of a Saturday Night Special (a cheap .38). Buying drugs without getting beat or cut up was an accomplishment, visiting some neighborhoods an adventure. Everyone was always admitted—but not everyone could stay. Survival required speed, flexibility, volume, aggression. If you stopped to look up at the skyscrapers or decided to linger over a friendly game of three-card-monte the locals would be all over you like carnivorous beetles. I saw a New York comedian a while back, talking about the Boston subway system—how they had, to his amazement, cash machines right there on the train platforms. "Of course, we have cash machines on our subway platforms too," he said knowingly, "only we call them 'tourists.'" Now the tourists are scarier than the locals. They don't even look worried, consulting their maps and adjusting their lederhosen without fear of discovery. Who's gonna stop them? You can't even spray-paint your name on the subways anymore. Subway cars used to be an exciting showcase for dedicated artists, a place where they could create masterworks two and three hundred feet long that would rocket across the boroughs, write their names in the sky, every wild style "piece" more outlandish and distinctive than the one that came before. Now, every subway car, like every American city, looks the same—another soulless space, filled with slack-jawed, sleepwalking bodies, unconnected to anything, running from nothing, to nowhere. Giuliani's right, of course. That increased "quality of life" enforcement leads to a lower violent crime rate. Let's face it—you get rousted every time you crack a can of beer on a particular corner, you're less likely to shank a visiting tourist there. But with the diminishing threat of violence comes a deadening torpor, an end to life. Movement and thought become optional.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  He’s already had some of his throat removed because of cancer and his voice bubbles with phlegm. He began slap-fighting with Otto, boxing him around the room. Finally, Otto yelled, “Goddamnit, Dad!” and shoved him across the room, past the door, and into a wooden table, which shattered with a crash. Mr. Lafte got up swearing and swinging. Through the open door I saw him rush across the room. Then I ran away. Otto is as gentle a guy as could be to his friends and to everybody who doesn’t give him shit. But he’s vicious with people he thinks do him or his friends wrong. Then he fights crazy, like a dog. Dad sold Otto his ’58 Chevy at cost. That and his letter sweater are the only nice things Otto has. If Otto didn’t have sports to make a career and maybe to channel his meanness, I’d be worried about his future. I’d love to munch some candy with Dad. I could probably handle a piece or two. I’m holding 147 pretty well now. It’s just that eating trash food after all this time would spoil the pattern. It would upset the rhythm I’ve got going with my body and break the deal I made with my spirit. I mean, I’m so close now I can see the end. I really feel like I understand that Franz Kafka story A Hunger Artist now. It’s about this guy who’s into fasting as a profession. He’s making a good living at it until somebody invents the radio or something and everybody turns elsewhere for entertainment. He should hang it up and move into some other line, but he doesn’t. He’s become an artist of hunger. What was once a painful discipline has become fulfilling and beautiful just for its own sake. His manager tries to get him to quit, but it’s too late. The Hunger Artist just fasts himself into a pile of dusty satisfaction at the bottom of his cage. I can’t say there’s a real strict correlation between the two of us. I mean, I’m not quite ready for cosmic union. But I think I finally do understand what Kafka was getting at. Dad popped a couple gumdrop orange slices into his mouth and Carla grabbed a miniature candy cane to suck. “Good candy,” Dad said. He put a little bit of gumdrop on Katzen’s nose. She slept away, not even flinching. “See,” Dad said, smiling, “even my cat likes it.” * * * Carla’s asleep after a load of love that should hold us over the two days I’ll be in Montana. I should be asleep, too, but I’m just too excited, so I’m sitting here in the basement living room in front of a little fire I just made in the fireplace. In five days I’ll wrestle Shute and end four months of working toward it. Then we’ve got test week at school, I turn in my senior thesis, and it’s all over.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  She’d already known from the muscles of his bare legs, the meat of his arms, that he was too young for her. Early thirties. He pulled his backpack from under his feet and went through the contents. He had the window seat, Fiona the aisle. He felt his pockets, felt the seat around him. He went through the backpack again, removing things: rolled-up socks, plastic bag with toothpaste and Scope, a small journal. He turned to Fiona and said, “Hey, I buy a drink?” She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. He might have been offering to buy her a cocktail, but this was an urgent question, not a flirtatious one. She said, “I’m sorry?” “Did I buy any drinks? On this flight?” His speech was slightly slurred. “Oh. You’ve been asleep.” “Fuck,” he said, and leaned his head back so far his Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling. “Something wrong?” “I left my wallet at the bar.” He whispered it, as if saying it aloud would make it true. “At O’Hare.” “Your whole wallet?” “Big, leather thing. You haven’t seen it, have you?” He peered, suddenly inspired, into his magazine pouch, and then into Fiona’s. “Fuck. I got my passport at least, but fuck.” She was horrified for him. This was the kind of thing she would have done herself in her wild days. Left her purse at some club, found herself on the wrong side of the city with no way home. “Should we call the flight attendant?” “Nothing she can do.” He shook his head, bewildered, his curls hitting his beard. He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Fucking alcoholism, man. Fuck me. Fuck.” She couldn’t tell if he was joking. What alcoholic spoke about it so openly? But at the same time, would you say it if it weren’t true? She said, “Do you have friends in Paris who can help?” “There’s someone I’m supposed to stay with for the weekend. I don’t think she’s gonna put me up longer than that.” And suddenly it hit Fiona: This was a scam. This was his sob story. She was supposed to look at him with maternal concern, to hand him a hundred bucks and say, “Perhaps this will help.” If she were his age, he’d have tried to seduce her on top of it. She said, “What a nightmare.” She made her face empathic, and then she turned her magazine page. She could’ve said, I’ve got bigger problems than you, buddy . She could’ve said, There are worse things to lose. When the cabin lights turned off, Fiona curled her body toward the aisle, settled into her thin pillow. She’d never sleep, but it was nice to go through the motions. She had a million decisions to make in Paris, and the past week had been a frenzy of panicked planning, but for these eight hours, she was mercifully unable to do a thing.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  There were no red suspenders in this southern boy’s closet, no blustering race-baiting to mark his career. The public had no difficulty understanding the high moral tone of LBJ’s presidential oratory. He despised the false rhetoric of those Dixiecrats who feigned class solidarity with poor whites—rhetoric that typically involved angry appeals to white supremacy. As president, when he advocated civil rights, Lyndon Johnson spoke the language of brotherly love and inclusiveness. In spite of all this, the old country-boy image still haunted him. 6 • • • Presumably by coincidence, as President Johnson stood tall under the glare of the national spotlight, TV network executives discovered the hick sitcom. Three of the most popular shows in the 1960s were The Andy Griffith Show; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Beverly Hillbillies. All revived the homespun, albeit unassimilable, traits of good old “Sug,” the rural pol of the 1840s. Lyndon Johnson fondly remembered Roosevelt as “a daddy to me,” and as town sheriff, Andy Griffith served as the paternal caretaker of Mayberry, North Carolina. The Andy Griffith Show had the feel of the thirties, not the sixties; it was a nostalgic rewrite of the Great Depression, featuring a town of misfits. Speaking about his role, Griffith insisted that he was not playing a “yokel”; the creator of the show described the sheriff as a clever man with a “wry sense of humor” on the order of the late Will Rogers, the good-natured Oklahoma humorist and film hero. As for Mayberry, most problems were solved around Andy’s kitchen table— reminiscent of how Americans huddled around the radio listening to FDR’s fireside chats. Outsiders were welcome in Andy’s world, where the virtues of small-town democracy shone. 7 Though the actor stopped short of saying it, Sheriff Andy was indeed surrounded by yokels, because television traded on the worst stereotypes. Mayberry’s population included the gullible gas station attendant Gomer Pyle (before he got his own show) and his cousin Goober, and Ernest T. Bass, a screeching mountaineer who went on wild rampages. As a writer for Time noted of Jim Nabors’s Gomer, the naïve enlistee “spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung.” He is a “walking disaster,” who in his subsequent spin-off show single-handedly fouls up the bureaucracy of the entire Marine Corps. 8 With the Clampetts of Beverly Hills, as the comedian Bob Hope joked, Americans had their embodiment of TV “wasteland”—a wasteland with an

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “I’m gonna run up to Davis Lake an’ fish.” “We could see the old homestead.” “That place is just a dirty old ditch to me,” Harry said. “Goin’ fishin’.” Just then Carla came in holding a dusty yellow cat and sat in the chair. “Gonna have some fleas in all them red curls,” Grandpa Harry said. “That’s okay,” Carla replied, scratching the cat’s head and sending it into ecstasy. “Couldn’t be more than I get sitting next to him.” And she pointed at me. Harry loved that. He laughed and spit again, but just tobacco this time. Carla didn’t bat an eyelash. Harry told her she oughta know better than pet deer like they was dogs and cats, and Carla said she’d remember. We sat for a few minutes talking about which creeks were fished out and who had been snakebit and how sparse the deer would be come fall. We refused several coffee offers and finally I said we’d better get moving so we could see the falls and take Aunt Lola to Colville to do her grocery shopping. I asked Grandpa Harry if he needed anything. I don’t know what I could do for him, but Dad always asks, so I do, too. “Shit,” he said, getting up and walking us out the door. “I don’t need nothin’. Got these inhalers and I’ll prob’ly be dead before I know it and then I won’t even need them no more.” Carla set the cat down by the porch and we walked across the little bit of grass to the truck. I ground the gears and Harry laughed and pointed and said something I couldn’t hear. We waved and I honked and Grandpa Harry waved his hand back at us. The cat rubbed his boot top and he gave it a gentle shove off the porch. Then he laughed some more and touched two fingers to the brim of his straw fishing hat and stuck out his arm and waved again before he went to work chaining his door. “What will he do?” Carla asked as we turned onto the highway. “He’ll drive up to Davis Lake and fish and shoot snakes,” I said. And I honked a few final times and looked up the bank to see if he was standing there. Carla and I drove back to Barney’s, crossed the bridge, and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the public access. The sun was high by then and the cheatgrass was dry. Grasshoppers zinged through the air and banged into the sides of the pickup. A dull roar like the rumble of heavy trucks rose ahead of us. It grew into a real thunder as we crested the last hill before the road dropped down to the riverbank. We stopped a minute and looked out. The scene was about the same as I remembered it from ten or so years before and about the same as I dream it now.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The earliest and most notable example of a Blood would be Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse in Berkeley remains the cradle of the "slow food" revolution, a restaurant whose ingredients almost exclusively represent the bounty of northern California and the Pacific Northwest of America. Fergus Henderson is a Blood, his food a proud expression of both nation and culture. It's a compelling argument, to say I will cook what's available in season. I will cook what is here. It recognizes the incomparable joys of eating wild strawberries or white asparagus in France, fresh baby eels in Portugal, tomatoes in Italy. The Bloods, in my experience, rooted as they are to place and time, are more likely than not to cook with real, heartfelt soulfulness and integrity, seeking to nurture, sooth, comfort, and evoke, rather than dazzle. I always liked to think of myself as a Blood. Having recently traveled the world, often to very poor countries where being a Crip is not an option, I was enchanted again and again by cooks making fresh, vibrant, hearty, and soulful meals, often with very little in the way of resources. Like with the early culinary pioneers of France and Italy, the engine driving great cooking in Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, seems to be the grim necessity of dealing with what's available when it's available—and making the most of it. I've yammered endlessly, tiresomely, on the desirability of food coming from somewhere, that the sort of regional, seasonal fare that so many French and Italians grew up with is what is missing from much of American and British culinary culture. But now I don't know. There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument. The French "Group of Eight" chefs who decried the introduction of "foreign" spices and ingredients into haute cuisine strike me as the same crowd who want every movie to be a bloated, government-funded costume drama starring the inevitable Gerard Depardieu. I once heard a Parisian chef, while watching a comrade from Alsace make choucroute garnis, comment, "Thees is not French." An element of jingoism hangs in the air when some chefs decry "outside" and "foreign" influences on cooking—a scary overlap between those decrying foreign-influenced food and those decrying foreigners. And the organics mob, so fervent in their recitations of the dangers of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation, often sound as if their agendas are driven by concerns far from taste or pleasure. The "slow food" lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free-range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be-realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night—that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I know, precisely, and yet I do not know. I know, but I think what I really want is to understand the why of the distance between then and now. The why is complicated and slippery. I want to be able to hold the why in my hands, to dissect it or tear it apart or burn it and read the ashes even though I am afraid of what I will do with what I see there. I don’t know if such understanding is possible, but when I am alone, I sit and slowly page through these albums obsessively. I want to see what is there and what is missing and what happened even if the why still eludes me. There is a picture of me. I am five. I have big eyes and a scrawny neck. I am staring at a plastic typewriter while I lie on a couch, on my stomach, ankles crossed, probably daydreaming. I always daydreamed. Even then, I was a writer. From an early age, I would draw little villages on napkins and write stories about the people who lived in those villages. I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my stories, I could write myself the friends I did not have. I could make so many things possible that I did not dare imagine for myself. I could be brave. I could be smart. I could be funny. I could be everything I ever wanted. When I wrote, it was so easy to be happy. There is a picture of me. I am seven; I am happy, wearing overalls. I wore overalls a lot as a kid. I liked them for lots of reasons, but mostly I liked them because they had many pockets where I could hide things and because they were complicated and had lots of buttons and things requiring fastening. They made me feel safe, cozy. In probably one out of every three or four pictures from that period, I am wearing overalls. That’s strange, but I was strange. In this particular picture, I am with my brother Joel and he is karate kicking me as I try to avoid his little foot. He was and is very energetic. We are three years apart. We are having fun. We are still very close. We were cute kids. It kills me to see that kind of naked joy in myself. I would give almost anything to be that free again. When I was eight, my brother Michael Jr. was born, and then there were three of us in all the pictures, often huddled together, or holding hands as we stared into the camera.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  As we all nestled down under the blankets and our chatter quieted down, I could hear the loons calling to one another on the lake that was one hundred feet from the cabin door. In the middle of the night, when I got up to use the outhouse, the flashlight beam bounced ahead of me, illuminating a tiny patch of ground in front of my feet. The darkness of the night was so thick it felt like a velvet blanket around my shoulders. Other than my flashlight there was not a single manmade source of light to be seen. On my way back to the cabin, I stopped briefly, turned off the light, and rolled my neck back to look heavenward. The abundance of stars seemed almost unreal, they were so crowded onto the patch of sky I could see through the tops of the trees. When viewed from Vancouver, the night sky looked nothing like this. The morning came soon enough and, as instructed, the group was at breakfast by 8:00 a.m. Limori ate with us in the living room, and not for the first time I observed, perhaps unconsciously, the strange dynamic that accompanied her. She seemed to be trying to blend into the crowd and have small, casual conversations with those seated near her, but she also appeared to be highly attuned to whatever was going on anywhere else in the room. Midsentence, she’d interrupt herself and call across the room to the kitchen to correct Alice about the way she was doing something. Or she’d seem to be engrossed in one conversation but then interject herself into another conversation going on elsewhere in the room and correct someone about a point they’d made. It was like witnessing omnipresence, first hand. Her energy, for lack of a better word, was in every corner, in every conversation and in every head in the room. And this peculiar dynamic wasn’t one sided. Although we were all sitting and chatting in small groups of two or three and eating breakfast off our laps, we all had our antennae pointed toward Limori. I would strain to stay present with those I was talking to, all the while making sure I didn’t miss anything Limori said, for every word from her was, I felt, a blessing, a message from God and a gem not to be wasted. I could see that others were doing the same; I’d stop in midsentence and realize that the person I was talking to was looking at me but that his or her attention was with Limori, wherever she was in the room. There was a pull on her at all times. Wherever she went we were like hungry orphans grabbing at her skirts: “Please, Miss, feed my soul.” When breakfast was complete we each took a seat on the couches and chairs that encircled the room.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The service was already under way when L. D. Sparks parked his Lincoln at the end of a line of pickups and slipped into the crowd of mourners—a respectable turnout, befitting the prominence of the decedent. Some men were in suits but most wore dress jeans and shirts with pearl snap buttons, the women in somber dresses, purchased from catalogs, that reached to their Sunday boots. Their faces were lean and leathery and strongly formed, marked by the sun, faces you rarely saw in the soft suburbs, more like old family photographs, ancestral in nature, plain and unprettified and not to be trifled with. It was the hands that you finally noticed, chapped and red and laced with veins like braided rope, palms as hard as oak, some men could barely make a fist, and when you shook it was like grasping a brick. They were scarred from accidents and animal bites, knuckles broken by obstreperous equipment, some were missing digits. You couldn’t live in these parts without getting hurt. Compared to a lot of folks, Walter Dunne passed into the next world with enviable ease, his heart having failed to keep the beat. The tent over the grave bucked and billowed in the wind. Anywhere else you’d think it was about to rain, but there was no water in the approaching storm, a blue norther, bringing nothing but cold and trouble. The pastor, gray-bearded with the eyes of a benevolent fanatic, was leading a hymn, and because nearly everybody went to the same Church of Christ in Fort Davis, they joined expertly in the a cappella singing: Yonder, yonder! Yonder in the great beyond Peace and love await Beyond the pearly gate Over yonder in the great beyond! L.D. hadn’t been to church since the Nixon administration, but the song found its way back into his mouth as easily as if he had been singing it that very morning. The familiar harmonies awakened memories, not altogether unpleasant, of his long-forsaken youthful piety, enforced by family and community and really everyone he knew. But look at him now, the silver-haired cynic in a gray westerncut suit and handmade boots, tall, slender, suave, part of the scene and apart from it, a man who knew exactly where he ought to be, on top of the world and in control.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  She gave the dial a spin, she let it land wherever it would, afternoons when she avoided extracurriculars—field hockey or Bible study or Super-8 Cinematography or the Quilting Club—mornings when her parents weren’t up or had left early for church, evenings when, again, she was by herself. She loved Electric Company and Sesame Street though she was too old for them, loved the hyperbole of puppets and the restless, kinetic pacing of these programs. The shape of advertisements ruled the world. Advertisements and comic books and teen fanzines. As she watched television, she gave herself back to her childhood, to some part of herself that had never passed beyond that demographic category. But she also loved reruns: The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres , and Family Affair . She loved Gene Rayburn and Monty Hall. She respected enforcers of justice, such as Cannon, Kojak, and Toma—Tony Musante, so cute—and elegies to place, like Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii Five-O; she loved variety programs, Sonny and Cher and Flip Wilson and Andy Williams and Ray Stevens , who had parlayed his hit “Everything Is Beautiful” into a summer replacement program that year; but she lived for the Saturday night horror films—Chiller Theater and Creature Features . The Chiller theme’s graphic was especially satisfying, a six-fingered hand emerging from some rank Paleolithic ooze. This was a gigantic hand—it dwarfed, just behind it, a tree plucked clean as a piece of driftwood, so that you could get a sense of the scale—a hand the size of a Mack truck. The fingers waved around a little bit, as though signaling to you not to abandon the show during the commercial. Meanwhile, a deep and ominous voice, a voice kind of like the one that announced the radio spots for local drag- and stock-car racing, intoned the word chiller . Long, low, and slow, this guy declaimed it, like it was a wind-borne message of evil sweeping across a steppe. Mostly she watched television alone, since the days were gone when Paul snuggled with her through the horror flicks. She was alone that Friday night in the drafty library along the Silvermine River. She had a Duraflame log in the fireplace and a blanket wrapped around her, but the cold was relentless anyway. Snow fell, cascading, out in the driveway. Gales circled the house like the sound effects of low-budget movies. On the box, during the breaks, WPIX heralded tomorrow evening’s dramatic television presentation—first ever—of the Shroud of Turin. Through these announcements Wendy had grown accustomed to this textile, to the faint traces of a likeness there, and in the midst of this dreamy evening of martyrdom and B-films, the scary weather outside seemed to be appropriate, like Old Testament vengeance. She had played hooky during Sunday School and confirmation classes. Unitarian services: her mother had left the church of her birth and was on this Unitarian kick, though she still tried to keep Wendy interested in Episcopalianism. All the neighbors went.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Although we had not met in person, Gary Bates and I had been playing phone tag for nearly three weeks, trying to set up an interview. As the owner of a successful hardware store, dedicated jogger, and father of three young children, time was his scarcest commodity. Gary’s wife, Sara, was just leaving for a birthday party with the two older children, aged ten and seven. The baby was fast asleep inside the house. “I’m really curious to know what you find out,” she said, leaning out of her car window. “My sister just got divorced and sold her house. I haven’t told her this but I think she’s made a terrible mistake. Her kids are really young. I think she could have stayed in her marriage and toughed it out at least a little longer.” As Gary and I walked into the house, he confided, “Sara and Janine were raised in a very traditional family where divorce is unheard of. And so when Janine got a divorce, her folks were crushed. They just can’t understand why she did it.” After we had settled down with “mid-morning depth charges”—Gary’s name for his homemade double lattes—I asked him to describe his own family. What was it like growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Marin County in the 1970s and 1980s? Gary scrunched his face comically. “Do you want the outdoor version or the indoor version?” “Both, of course.” “Well, the outdoor version is what I think of when I remember my childhood. We lived in a big, old Victorian house just a couple of blocks away from downtown. My folks still live there. All my friends lived close by, and by the time I was seven or eight I could ride my bike to their houses and we’d go all over to town together. I just remember being outside as much as I could. There was a huge old live oak tree in our backyard and we’d spend hours in it, pretending to be explorers or astronauts. My best friend Eric had a tree house in his yard and we used to build magnificent forts and whoop it up with war games that drove our moms crazy. That of course was the point. Another friend’s house was right on a creek. When we got older we took great hikes up the canyon. We just were outside and going as much as we could. I remember how tough it was to come in for dinner, not to mention to have to stay in and do homework!” He laughed, obviously enjoying sharing his memories.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  German Christmases and French Drains My parents came to America from Germany in 1956 and brought their German traditions right along with them, a big one being Christmas. We got our stockings on St. Nicholas Day, a full three weeks before the rest of the solar system. I would always find an orange tucked in the bottom. An orange, mind you. I suspect that treasure was a holdover from the old country, when during the war oranges were a special treat. But for me, I never saw the point. I could just walk a few feet into the kitchen and get one myself. What I needed was candy, especially chocolate. Maybe a Matchbox car. I remember lighting the Advent wreath on each of the four Sundays before Christmas—oh, and those awesome chocolate Advent calendars my grandmother dutifully sent us from Germany! Each day had a cute little door with a piece of chocolate shaped like Santa or something else Christmassy waiting behind it. We also decorated the tree on Christmas Eve and left it up until Epiphany, January 6, which is way later than everyone else. The biggest thing, though, was we Germans opened our presents Christmas Eve after church. I liked that part. Why suffer another twelve hours? Still, despite my parents’ sincere attempts to keep us connected to generations of Germans, those traditions were adjusted in subtle and not so subtle ways in my own family. My wife and I tried, but at the end of the day the only one that made the cut (at least when the kids were young) was lighting the Advent wreath. The first tradition to fall—hard—was presents on Christmas Eve. We decided to be American on that one. Such is the way of tradition, including the biblical tradition. Some things remain, some are adjusted, and some are discontinued—that uneasy dance between past and present, tradition and change, of feeling grounded through time and yet accepting the need to innovate. And by “biblical tradition” I mean now to turn to the story of Jesus specifically, the gospel, or “Good News,” as it’s often called. Christianity was born from the womb of Judaism, and so the story of Jesus the Messiah is deeply and inextricably bound to the story of Israel. But the gospel is also a profoundly creative act—it brings Israel’s ancient tradition into a new here and now by (drumroll, please) adjusting the ancient faith to meet present circumstances , a process that began within the Old Testament itself.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  On slow Sunday or Monday nights, his black Town Car would pull up outside and he'd walk briskly through the dining room as voices hushed and people pointed out that "the chef is here." He no longer ventured into the dining room. He never schmoozed. With his future secure, he gave up his dreams of television. Though he worked relatively little at Saint Germain—or anywhere else for that matter—content to golf and read and dream much of the time, to settle things with old wives and current girlfriends, he did drop by now and again. He'd put on a snap-front dishwasher shirt, some faded checks, his old clogs, and an apron. He'd tell Segundo, or whoever was working saute that night, to knock off early and he'd cook. He'd cook every order off his station, and off others besides. He'd stay till the very end, until the last order was gone. Then he'd dutifully clean and wipe down his station like he'd done when he'd been young and coming up. Afterward, he'd sit at the bar with his crew, who were now allowed to drink at Saint Germain, and they'd review the evening and tell stories and bust each other's balls. They'd tell stories, like the night of the Christmas Miracle, when the restaurant was saved. When they'd stayed, the whole crew, to drink the remainders of all those magnificent wines left over from their new benefactor's table and to congratulate themselves on their good fortune. A few days or weeks later, he'd return. And do it again. He'd cook. He'd cook like an angel. COMMENTARY SYSTEM D I wrote this piece shortly after Kitchen Confidential came out and was clearly feeling nostalgic for my kitchen and my cooks. I still felt like a punk, guilty even, for not working as a chef anymore, for doing something as relatively easy as writing about myself and talking about myself—and getting paid for it. And I think the piece reflects that feeling of homesickness. Leaving day-to-day operations at Les Halles, I felt like a traitor; and by celebrating my old friends, my old life—and some of the less lovely practices of that life—I was revisiting it in my mind, seeking some kind of vicarious absolution. Non-cooks might not understand that when describing a steak caught "on the bounce" or finishing sliced gigot under a salamander, for instance, I was never "exposing" or looking to shock or inform. I recall all that nonsense now with warmth and affection. It makes me kind of sad rereading this piece. The yearning for something that even then I suspected I'd never get back, coupled with the growing realization that I would probably have a very hard time hacking it at this point, make me feel a million years older and many lifetimes removed from the person who put this on paper. THE EVILDOERS Damn, was I angry! This is one mean-spirited rant.