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 Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Beer too confined his scholarly writing to the pre-Revolutionary period, but his sympathy with the loyalists came out in striking comments in his books and essays, which illustrate dramatically the political relevance of the loyalists for those of a “Pan-Anglian state of mind” in the early years of the twentieth century. He concluded a study in 1907 with the statement that the American Revolution, “in so far as it led to the political disintegration of the Anglo-Saxon race,” ran counter to the deepest tendencies of history and that in the future the Revolution may well “lose the great significance that is now attached to it and will appear merely as the temporary separation of two kindred peoples.” Ten years later, in a book written during World War I to explain the necessity for “a co-operative democratic alliance of all the English-speaking peoples,” Beer developed his earlier conjecture into a flat forecast that ultimately there would be a reunion of the two nations, though he warned against any “premature forcing of the pace.”27 But it was left to Lawrence Gipson, one of the first American Rhodes Scholars (1904), in his fifteen-volume British Empire Before the American Revolution (1936–70), to work out most fully the favorable view of the loyalists consistent with the world that was being created by the “imperialist” historians. The goal of his enormous work was to justify the old British empire against the “terrible indictment” of the Declaration of Independence, and to do so by presenting “a detached, unbiased view of [it] under normal, peace-time conditions.” It is a defensive view, full of nostalgia. Britain’s trade acts were not offensive, Gipson wrote, they were made to seem so by colonial smugglers. The Declaratory Act declaring Parliament’s supremacy “in all cases whatsoever” was nothing new; it was modeled on the Irish Act of 1719 and had been effectively operative at least since 1696. Responsible people in the colonies did not object to the presence of British troops; such objections were generated by the Sons of Liberty, “these zealots,” who deliberately raised in an otherwise inert populace “an ineradicable hatred of the British government,” apparently to serve private purposes. Gipson’s warmest sympathies in the volumes on the Revolution are reserved for the loyalists. His first publication, in fact, which appeared sixteen years before the first volume of The British Empire, was a sympathetic biography of a loyalist, Jared Ingersoll, of Connecticut; and in the last volumes of the Empire series he continued to adjust the balance of interpretation more in the loyalists’ favor. Their plural officeholding is indulgently explained, their opinions defended, and their responsibility for the outcome discounted.28

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Petersburg to bear on his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926)—a glorification of the Roman municipal bourgeoisie; and Sir Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution (1939) looked at the rise of Augustus through the spectacles of a liberal who saw on his visits to Italy the names and trappings of Augustan Rome used by a new dux , Benito Mussolini, and wished to expose in a very Tacitean way the thuggish similarities between the two regimes” (45, 164). In all those cases powerful sociopersonal interactions between past and present resulted in towering achievements, works we call classical in both senses of that term. And, of course, their multiplicity serves as a corrective each on the other. The second example concerns the historical reconstruction of earliest Christian art. Thomas Mathews discusses “how the Emperor Mystique came to be the controlling theory for explaining the development of Christian imagery,” and he asserts that “the need to interpret Christ as an emperor tells more about the historians involved than it does about Early Christian art. The formulation of the theory can be traced to three very bold and original European scholars in the period between the wars; the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, a German Jew of a well-to-do merchant family; the Hungarian archaeologist Andreas Alföldi, son of a country doctor; and art historian André Grabar, a Russian emigré, whose senatorial family held important posts under the last Czars…. If there is a single common thread uniting the life and work of these three great scholars, it is nostalgia for lost empire. The three imperial states in which they were raised, and which they fought valiantly to defend, they saw crumble ignominiously in the horrible chaos of the First World War and its consequences. The glory of the czars, the might of the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian emperors, could never be restored” (16, 19). Mathews judges that interaction of present and past to have misinterpreted early Christian art and then draws an explicit analogy between his own corrective reconstruction and the “quest for the ‘historical’ Jesus, an enterprise that verged on reducing him to the product of wishful thinking on the part of his first disciples. Since Christ wrote nothing himself, the historian is necessarily limited to sifting through the distorted impressions of a circle of people who were very deeply affected by their experience of him. The Christ of Early Christian art is quite as elusive as the ‘historical’ Jesus. As in the written sources, so in the visual monuments Christ has many guises, depending on who is visualizing him. We are faced, then, with the difficult task of understanding as far as possible the impression Christ made on people when they, for the first time, were seeking to represent him. Hitherto he had existed only in the hearts of believers, in the visions of mystics, in the words of preachers; now he has to have a life in stone and paint” (21–22). Historical reconstruction is always interactive of present and past.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But scholars could call in to their help the “fantastic memories” so “well attested” of illiterate people. They felt that a text could remain from one generation to another unaltered, or altered only by inconsequential lapses of memory. This myth has remained strong even to the present day. The main points of confusion in the theory of those scholars … arose from the belief that in oral tradition there is a fixed text which is transmitted unchanged from one generation to another. Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales , pp. 9–10 When I was in grammar school, my family lived in Naas, about twenty miles west of Dublin. During the Second World War petrol was restricted to professional necessity, so our Vauxhall car spent six years with its wheels removed and its axles on upturned butter-boxes in the garage. In those carless days when I was about nine or ten years of age, my father and I went for long walks along the main Dublin road. He recited poetry to me, and I learned it by heart. It was not great poetry, but the going price for Kipling’s “Gunga Din”—whole, entire, and correct by the end of the walk—was sixpence. My father is gone now; so is the sixpenny piece, and so is the Naas-Dublin road as once it was. But I still recall large snatches of that poem, and with its recital come back the houses and fields of that road, the voice, smile, and walking-stick of my father. Though the poem stays with me, what I experienced on those walks was not oral tradition, however. It was only oral transmission. My father and I both presumed a written text, a scribal tradition. It was in a book at home, and both our versions were certified against that archetype. Any disputes could be checked against that original, uniform version. The process was scribal tradition transmitted orally and received aurally. Both of us operated within scribal, not oral, sensibility. If we had operated within a scribal register but with an oral sensibility, We would have considered that written version to be just another performance comparable with our own (and in no way normative for it). But the words on the page controlled absolutely our remembrances and our repetitions. It was scribal tradition transmitted orally and received aurally within a scribal sensibility. When I was eleven my family moved to Donegal as my father became manager of Ballybofey’s Hibernian Bank (now gone also). I went to a centrally located boarding school, St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, which had a large component of native speakers of Irish. All our classes (except English) were in Irish, and normative speakers like myself who wanted to improve our Irish went to certain regions around the west coast of Donegal in the summers to live with Irish-speaking families.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Why this emphasis on the name of God in that context of divine and human responsibility for creation? The word “name” can mean identity or reputation. Name as identity is what is on our credit cards, driver’s licenses, and passports. It is what we have in mind when we speak of identity theft as stealing one’s name. Name as reputation is what we mean when we say somebody has a good name. Your identity is internal to yourself; your reputation is how others see you, judge you, assess you. It is what the biblical book of Proverbs means in this piece of poetic parallelism: A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold. (2:1) Your good name is the favorable view that others have of you. Name is your reputation or, in other cultures, your face, your countenance, your honor. The name of God means both God’s identity and God’s reputation as known externally to human beings in God’s world. But why does “hallowed be your name” come immediately after the opening invocation of the Lord’s Prayer? Recall, from earlier in the chapter, what happens when you walk into the house(hold) of another person in the ancient biblical world. How does it look to you? Are fields and flocks, servants and dependents, slaves and aliens, married and unmarried members in good shape? Do all get enough? If all is well, you praise the name, you extol the reputation of the householder. If, then, you wander the earth seeing God as the world’s divine Householder, do you praise God for a job well done? Do you “hallow” the name (reputation) of that God? Or would you like to bluntly say to God, the Father/Householder of the World, “How’s that working out for you?” 3 Hallowed Be Your NameHallowed be thy name. Matthew 6:9, KJV Hallowed be your name. Matthew 6:9, NRSV From 1965 to 1967 I was studying at the French biblical and archaeological school just north of the Damascus Gate and the Old City of Jerusalem—then in Jordan. It was the École Biblique for short, but we called it the “Cold and Bleak,” because its thick stone walls made our rooms totally cool in summer and ditto in winter. We used wooden footrests and fingerless gloves to keep our extremities functional as we worked at our desks. And we brewed strong Arabic coffee to keep warm—coffee with a consistency rather like that of a rubber handball. For our first study tour we went to Egypt immediately after Christmas in 1965. Our group stayed overnight at Suez and set out in a nine-car caravan the next morning. We crossed the canal on a car ferry around three in the morning, before the first ships were allowed through, and headed south toward Mount Sinai. Our cars, announced as “desert-proof,” were aged American ones left over from the 1950s, but kept mobile by superb mechanics.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  44 The Bog Queen Where did they bury the dog after she hung herself, and into the roots of what tree are those bones entangled? I come blessed like a river of black rock, like a long secret, and the kind of kindness that is like a door closed but not locked. Yesterday I was nothing but a road heading in four directions. When I threatened to run away my mother said she’d take me wherever I wanted to go. —Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Terrance” T he house I grew up in sat in a bog, and in the middle of the house sat my mother, well into her dotage. All my life, she’d blamed the place— anus of the universe , in her parlance—for robbing her of every artistic inclination. Daily, she willed it to slide back into the Gulf it sat on the edge of. In my thirties, it actually started to sink: plots of land once three feet below sea level got to four. Houses sagged and listed on their brick stilts, and one end of a church parking lot disappeared into a sinkhole. The refineries that pumped toxins into the sky were showing around their rivets starbursts of rust, and fewer and fewer pickups lined up for parking slots every year. Young people started to move away after high school. Among those left behind in tract houses and trailer parks, the oc casional meth lab set off a spectacular explosion. Due to the acid-green poisons poured into bayous and backwaters, the cancer rate shot through the roof. Every family had its fair share of tumor scars and chemo stories. For others, the guns their fathers once pointed at squirrels and possums were increasingly turned on each other or taken between the teeth. You’d think the destruction of the town would’ve left Mother, who’d cursed it for decades, doing some celebratory chicken dance on Main Street. But in a wry twist, Mother has come to love the house in the bog. She’s had it painted egg-yolk yellow. With the red roof and green lawn, it looks like a child’s crayon piece, with my mother inside it dwindling into a line drawing. But the swamp is eating Mother’s house, too. Wet rot gobbles at the window fittings, and purple wisteria vines edge in, followed by various species of lizard and beetle. She finds, sleeping in the clothes hamper, a chicken snake big around as her wrist. A neighbor has to come with a hoe and a garbage bag to haul it off while Mother stands aside with a small snub-nosed revolver. All the house’s screens are imploding, their frames no longer square, and the back doorjamb is edged with encroaching honeysuckle. Mother sits in the house reading the Bible along with histories of lost civilizations and books of gnostic mystery ordered from far away. Plus The New Yorker and Artforum .

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When Mother and I had taken off for college, Daddy had stood on the back porch under the clothesline with the white cat slung over his shoulder like a baby he was burping, and he swore he’d come visit his first vacation. He said, Come Halloween, Pokey, at the latest. Old Pete’ll come walking up the road, making the rocks fly high. So stop that snubbing, you and your momma both. Make me wanna hork. He spoke these words out of his own wet face, wiped with the back of his rawboned hand, but it was all bullshit, his promise. I knew, and he knew I knew. Between us stood the tacit contract that come vacation time, old Red would need Daddy’s help nailing asbestos siding up at his camp, or our backyard fence would require mending, or so-and-so would be laid up and Daddy could use the overtime. He’d never set foot on this campus. His drinking schedule had become too inviolable. Plus, these college folks with whom I was hobnobbing wouldn’t know how to speak to a man who’d graduated grade six and spent days off cleaning his squirrel gun. In our household, I’d been assigned Daddy’s sidekick. Starting as a toddler, I’d kept a place standing beside him in his truck, and for the rest of his days, his lanky arm still reflexively extended itself at stop signs, as if to stop a smaller me from pitching through the windshield. But all through my drug-misty high school years, Daddy had floated through the house with an increasingly vacant stare, leaving a wake of Camel smoke. Over time, I followed the books Mother set down like so many bread crumbs to her side, and soon she was leaning in my doorway to hear Otis Redding or the sardonic Frank Zappa squawk. Once, she’d coiled my hair into a pinned twist that matched her own and we’d sat in an opera house half floodlit as a mournful soprano pined: Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore—I lived for life, I lived for love. That was Mother’s altar. Forget our scattered Sunday sorties into yoga and Christian Science. The theology Mother pored over—Buddhism mostly—was more theory than pursuit, and Lord knows why they baptized my sister, Lecia, Methodist. But I saw the shine in Mother’s eyes as that opera washed over her. Which music Daddy cared diddly for. The volumes that towered around Mother’s bed were partly stacked up to block him out. For his part, a book was a squatty form of two-by-four—useful, say, for propping open a window with a broken sash.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider’s silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendía family. The prodigal José Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½ , written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony. It was sometime on that ride that Mother asked me what was I reading. So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection. I can hear her voice made harsh by cigarettes asking, What’s in your book? This was a hairpin turn in our life together—the pivotal instant when I’d start furnishing her with reading instead of the other way round. Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper. I said, A family. She said, Like ours? Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours? Meaning: as divided as ours. We passed some Jersey cows staring at us like they expected us to stop. I said, I wish Daddy had come with us. Oh, hell, Mary, she said, upending her drink, rattling the ice in the cup’s bottom. Read me some. I tried to explain how little sense the book would make starting from there, and how I was too engrossed to go back. But she was bored and headachey from the drive and said, Well, catch me up. It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I’ve done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery. On the road that day, I did the same, only with better material, and—no doubt skimming past the sex stuff—I let those elegant sentences issue from my mouth like mystery from a well rubbed magic lamp. She was rapt. She gasped. She asked me to read parts over.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bump in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century—with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features. She said, Don’t look at me that way. We got up at five. It’s cocktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice? I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider’s silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendía family. The prodigal José Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony. It was sometime on that ride that Mother asked me what was I reading. So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection. I can hear her voice made harsh by cigarettes asking, What’s in your book? This was a hairpin turn in our life together—the pivotal instant when I’d start furnishing her with reading instead of the other way round. Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper. I said, A family. She said, Like ours? Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours? Meaning: as divided as ours. We passed some Jersey cows staring at us like they expected us to stop. I said, I wish Daddy had come with us. Oh, hell, Mary, she said, upending her drink, rattling the ice in the cup’s bottom. Read me some. I tried to explain how little sense the book would make starting from there, and how I was too engrossed to go back. But she was bored and headachey from the drive and said, Well, catch me up.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  We stand alongside the falling-down ring where our horses ran a gymkhana. We find the house where Mother left us with the stable owner’s family when she ran off to marry the bartender. There’s the phone booth alongside a trout pond where we once called Daddy sobbing because we’d forgotten Father’s Day. Each time we recognize a spot, it’s like some book’s clear overlay page falls across the old landscape, the green scene rising up articulately around us—a 3-D pop-up. We get littler at those times, standing closer like we used to as kids, and the hoots and hollers we’ve been making to stay brave—those dwindle down. We dwindle down, two women almost gone into girls again. In the car, Lecia slides on her sunglasses, saying, I almost thought I’d dreamed this place up. But you’ve gotten down every dot and tittle. She cheers the manuscript with all the big-sister praise she brought to my first step off the high board, and that pat on the head matters more than any review I’ll get. I’d only really wanted her and Mother not to be pissed off. Midafternoon, I steer the car across the Rockies to the town where Mother’s bar was and where we went to school. That place left the most shadowy specters in Lecia, since it’s no doubt where she gave up being little once and for all. The day she called Daddy collect and announced to him that he had to buy us plane tickets to get us out of there, some light in her clicked off. Doing that meant bailing out on the mother she’d spent her whole young life courting and placating. We flew from there wondering if we’d see Mother again—alive or dead. There was no visitation plan, no schedule of phone calls set up. Just my ten years’ sister with the round-eyed, glassy gaze of an opium addict, as she set the big black phone in its cradle before telling me we had to pack. We get closer to the town, and Lecia starts rifling her purse for hand unguents and lip gloss and chewing gum. She wants a Coke. She wants to stop and check in with her office by pay phone. I’d expected all this. The motel we booked—a Norman Bates–type Econo-lodge—has the only vacancy this last minute. At the check-in counter, the pinwheel mints have melted into their wrappers, their inner whirls gone smudgy pink. The TV doesn’t get cable, and the bathroom sink has a tiny cup of the type dentists give you for antiseptic. In the dusty windowsills lie papery gray moths. Sliding off her shades, Lecia peels back the flowered spread and stares down at a rough blanket the color of mustard. I was going to take a nap, she says, but there must be all species of bed louse here. So when I head off to find our grade school, she shoulders her massive purse like a duffel bag, saying, Let’s march.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Also, there’s the copy of the first poem I published at age nineteen, with the stains of many beers where it had been spread across the damp surface of many bars, a page smoothed out for men no doubt too bleary to read it. We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We’re like totem animals in each other’s foreign cosmologies—like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I’ve turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved. Age about twelve, I’d ceased to shoot pool and scale fish, stopped tuning in to the Friday night fights after Ali and Liston, nor did I follow the Yankees with the intensity Daddy thought their due. My very last visit when Daddy was still upright and continent and unparalyzed, he’d squired me to a New Year’s dance at the American Legion club, a place so skeevy neither Mother nor Lecia ever—to my knowledge—set shoe leather in the joint. I dressed for the occasion as I might have for Sunday school or a job interview. Daddy steered me by my elbow through the threshold onto the sloping floor of scarred sky-blue linoleum, inside the boxy paneled walls with imitation knot holes that could—with sufficient liquor—make you feel stared at by all the veterans who’d drunk themselves into early graves in that place. Folding chairs were drawn around small tables whose treacherous wobbles required matchbooks, and the matchbooks advertised kits you could write away for so as to finish high school and become an artist or beautician or drill press operator. The women’s room had the shocking dead-meat smell of a butcher shop and a mirror whose crack left it in the shape of Louisiana. And since January first was Daddy’s birthday, he’d joked that the party was for him. One after another, I’d danced with the men he’d worked on oil towers with and caught bass with, guys who’d built the garage studio for my mother one blistering summer. Two elementally nicknamed Red and Blue, men monosyllabic in every way. One named Buck, one Bubba, one Sweet. Not one didn’t have a union card in his wallet, and their faces were weathered as dried fruit. Your daddy’s so proud of you, how smart you are and your writing and all. The Texas two-step we did, the cotton-eyed Joe, swing dancing I could barely keep up with. At the end of the night, the ladies’ room sink was plugged up with puke, and two disputes had been taken outside—one over a pool game, one over Lord knows what. By the time Daddy grabbed my hand for the last dance, the floor had begun a slow tilt-a-whirl around us. His squinting bloodshot eyes stared over my shoulder as he glided me around to The Tennessee Waltz . We listed through the song. I don’t remember midnight.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Exploring his inner world, however, and the context into which his ideas and passions flooded, opens up a new vision of the Reformation. “I AM THE SON of a peasant,” Luther averred, “my great-grandfather, grandfather and my father were all true peasants.” 1 This was only half the truth. If he came from peasant stock, Luther grew up in a mining town, and his upbringing was to have a profound influence on him. Martin’s childhood was spent in Mansfeld, a small mining town in the territory of the same name, where wagonloads of charcoal would file along the muddy roads, and where the smell of the fires of the smelters hung on the air. He would remain loyal to Mansfeld throughout his life, referring to himself as “from Mansfeld,” enrolling at the University of Erfurt as “Martinus ludher ex mansfelt,” and corresponding with the counts of Mansfeld until he died. 2 In 1546, he set out, ill, on what was to be his final journey to Eisleben, trying to settle yet another dispute between the counts. He knew that the trip could cost him his life, and it did: He died still trying to put matters right in Mansfeld. Yet this deep connection has been almost completely obliterated in the image of Luther we have today. 3 Most biographies have little to say about Luther’s childhood. Unlike his birthplace Eisleben, and unlike Wittenberg, where he spent most of his life, Mansfeld never became a site of Lutheran pilgrimage. But to make sense of Luther, one has to understand the world from which he came. There had been mining in the Mansfeld area since about 1200 but in the mid-fifteenth century a new process of refining allowed silver and pure copper to be separated after the initial process of smelting. 4 Highly capital-intensive, this technological innovation led to the involvement of the big financiers of Leipzig and Nuremberg, and it brought an economic boom to the area. Mansfeld was soon among the biggest European producers of silver and it produced a quarter of the continent’s copper. 5 Copper was used in combination with tin or zinc, as bronze or brass, in the hundreds of household items produced in towns like Nuremberg, and it played a large part in the lifestyle revolution in this period, as people began to acquire not only glass and crockery but also metal dishes, pans, and other implements for use at home. Luther’s father, Hans Luder, probably through connections of his mother’s family, heard of the new mining leases that were up for sale in the 1480s, and moved first to Eisleben, where Luther was born in 1483, and then to Mansfeld.

• From Shunned (2018)

  —Joseph Campbell W e arrived at the house by midafternoon, the sun high in the sky, the pine trees’ succulent aroma seducing me to relax. For all my talk of loving big-city life and embracing the concrete jungle, I noticed how much I missed the intense green of Oregon, white-capped Cascades touching heaven, the tree line of noble evergreens pointing upward. There was a sameness and stability here; any changes were slow, imperceptible, lacking human contrivance. We found the house as always, in quiet repose, the blinds pulled down like resting eyelids. We broke through the silence with one turn of a key and began our habitation routines. Everything was as I’d remembered it, barstools lined up in an even row under the tiled kitchen counter, macramé wall hanging over the river-rock fireplace. I set a few decks of cards and poker chips on the long wood dining table and then followed my dad through the sliding glass doors leading to the back deck. He stopped still and took a deep, satisfying breath, then walked over to open an outdoor cupboard to the rear of the garage. I joined him there, and, without a word, he handed me several cushions. Together we laid them on the empty patio chairs like pieces of a puzzle. We went inside and joined the others to finish settling in. I avoided the upstairs bedroom Ross and I used to share, choosing instead to sleep in one of the smallest rooms, tucked downstairs behind the kitchen. Because it had twin beds, it was usually reserved for Sheena and Tyler. Without the children, the house felt empty, and without Randy and Marlene there were whole rooms left unattended, which made everything feel off kilter. Returning to the kitchen, I found Mom putting away the last of the groceries. Ove was already in the garage, pulling out the bikes. We all went for a short ride through the area, past familiar homes and vistas. It felt good to move, to get my heart pumping, shaking loose the odd awareness of being there, knowing what faced me, what faced us all that weekend. I wanted to capture each moment like an emotional photograph: the lighthearted mood, the genuine goodwill, the ease born of familiarity, the love. Part of me was relaxing, but another was vigilant and intent to soak it in, to remember every nuance. Ordinary things, like chopping vegetables with my sister or doing dishes with Mom, were potent with a bittersweet melancholy. I wondered if they felt it, too, the small stone in the pit of my belly. Friday turned to Saturday, and the time unfurled like ribbons in a gentle breeze. Breakfast slipped into pool time, which naturally led to another, longer bike ride, which naturally led to lunch together on the shady deck—cold fried chicken and potato salad. With full bellies, we settled in for a lazy afternoon. Dad disappeared into his room for a nap, and Ove went out to play golf.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  But last year we got it changed to include turtlenecks and letter sweaters. Still, we can’t wear jeans. Otto’s got a clip-on tie and a gold shirt he got for a dollar at the Safeway store. He’s got the shirt on now. He scoots by me and steps into the aisle to put on his good pants. He’ll wear his letter sweater, too. It’s a green cardigan with a gold DT. People always give us shit about our DTs. When we walk into a match some creepo always yells out, “Oh, here come the DTs!” Then he pretends to be drunk and wobbles around yelling about seeing snakes and spiders. In my bag I’ve got a gray cotton turtleneck Mom bought me for road trips when we got the rule changed and an old-fashioned sleeveless pullover letter sweater and a big floppy thug hat Carla got me for my birthday. With my baggy bell-bottomed cords I look like an escapee from The Little Rascals show. Mom and I used to watch them on TV together. She’d get up early for work so she’d have plenty of time to put on her makeup. I’d sit with her and we’d watch The Little Rascals in her room. She loved it because she used to go to their movies when she was a kid. She said they were called Our Gang Comedy then. I was always late for school. I suppose it would be smarter for us to just wear our good stuff right from home instead of getting dressed on the bus. But real comfort, like old jeans and flannel shirts, is something you don’t like to be without unless you absolutely have to. Not even for a six-hour bus ride. We pull into the Custer parking lot and a few Custer and Battleground guys pelt the bus with snowballs in a friendly way. The Lewis and Clark bus isn’t here yet. The door opens and the sharp cold air rushes in. On a hill behind the school, snowmobiles swarm. Either the ring of their two-cycle engines or the shot of cold air arouses Kuch from the nap he began around Coeur d’Alene. I sit and wait for him while he knots his tie and pulls his hair back into a ponytail and fixes it with a rubber band. If he can sleep through a road trip he has truly achieved tranquility. * * * Schmoozler is off in a corner of the bleachers reading Semi-Tough to some Custer guys. They’re all chortling and guffawing. We beat them in a real close match this afternoon. I felt good all through my match. It went into the third round. We stuffed my nose before I went out and it only bled a little. I got really dizzy after it was over, though. When the ref raised my arm I had to grab on to him to keep from falling down.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Zeroes still glared near my name on the sales report as November slipped into December. Like the weather, things between Steve and me had cooled off. Our summer brush with intimacy had been real and touching, but neither of us had worked to sustain it. When opportunities presented themselves, I dated other men I found interesting, preferring the early phases of romance, before the rose-colored glasses come off, when the other person sits before you full of promise and compliments. Even so, Steve was a steady presence in my life. We had a strong affinity for one another and I knew I could count on him if I was ever in trouble. Christmas was new territory, arriving at a time when I didn’t want or need a fresh challenge. This would be my first year celebrating. I’d always looked at Christmas as an indulgent pagan celebration that made a mockery of Christ and “pure Christian” worship. Over the years, as part of my Bible study, I’d done extensive reading about the history of the holiday and the role church and politics had played in its creation. I knew Christ was born in the autumn, not the dead of winter. And I’d always been taught to steer clear of birthday celebrations, also fraught with pagan rituals true Christians avoided. The whole premise of Christmas was flawed from the Witness point of view. Up until that year, Christmas had been just another day to me, sometimes spent in repose, other times skiing with a group of Witness friends on Mount Hood. Occasionally the entire family came together for dinner, taking advantage of a time when few of us were working. There was no tree or gift exchange. If Christmas happened to fall on a regularly scheduled meeting night, like Tuesday or Thursday, it was often business as usual. I loved a good party, and that was the tack I chose to create distance from my years of piety. Like all my other ideas about faith and religion, I decided to let go of my grip on the old story and give Christmas a chance. It could be fun, and Lord knows I needed some light and joy in my life. I made a point to stroll along Michigan Avenue and see the sparkling lights of Watertower Place, then throw money into the Salvation Army tin guarded by a suspiciously thin Santa chiming a bell outside Marshall Fields. Steve and my work friends Cindy and Catherine were on my shopping list, and I needed stocking stuffers for my colleagues. For the very first time, I purchased Christmas cards and sent notes to my friends and former coworkers in Portland. I missed them all and was delighted to receive many cards in return, some with long, handwritten notes updating me on their lives.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I didn’t tell him about how she walked around naked and just peed right in from of me and stuff. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression. Kuch described how his girlfriend, Laurie, handled his Hodaka in dirt and pointed out the cleanness of the welds on his Yamaha, the new spoked alloy wheels and the new rear disc brake he and his dad had put on that afternoon. He traced a dirt track in the air for me and drew in the ruts and showed me the line he’d ride to stomp ass the next weekend in the race at Post Falls. We wiped our greasy fingers on the grass and stared up at the stars. We lay back against the Thompson Park benches and talked about how fast our first two years of high school had gone and about how weird it felt to be beginning the last one in less than a month. I was already getting nostalgic thinking about all the great times being over so soon. And it’s a lot worse now that I’ll be graduating in a few weeks. Tanneran once told us that college is where you make your lifetime friends. He said college is where you begin your intellectual growing and that you just grow away from your high school friends. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be true. I never want to lose the friendship of Kuch or Otto. I guess it can’t turn out to be true if I don’t let it. “Ya know what I’m gonna do instead of goin’ to college?” Kuch asked, popping another beer. “Win the Spanish Grand Prix?” I replied. “Besides that.” “What, then?” “I’m gonna go on a vision quest,” he said. I didn’t say anything for a minute or two. I’d read about vision quests in several books, but I learned the real detailed stuff about them from a book called Seven Arrows by a Northern Cheyenne named Hyemeyohsts Storm. The circumstances under which I read that book consisted of Kuch yelling and screaming, “Read this sonofabitching book, man. It is un-fucking-believable!” It has nice pictures, but outside of the part where the Indian kid fucks his mother, I didn’t bend the edges of too many pages. I originally turned Kuch on to the subject of the American Indian early in our sophomore year. I got into it by way of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man . From Berger I went to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , to Black Elk Speaks , and then to everything I could get my hands on. I liked learning about the Indians, but Kuch freaked out. He rampaged through Indian fiction, history, anthropology, and also through the Wickiup Tavern in Springdale on the border of the Spokane Indian Reservation. For a while it looked like I’d created a monster. “Why a vision quest?” I asked. “I’d like to see if I can’t find my place in the circle,” Kuch replied.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  While Jon pays, Ames grabs a bat, shares a terse nod with the old- timer behind the counter, then Velcros closed a batting glove tight to his left hand and takes a few practice swings. The old ritual comes to him without thought. Ames’s shoulders hum with loose energy as the bat goes round and he waits for a cage to open. He finds a perverse comfort in the way his body reacts, a bodily experience below thought. Maybe Jon really does know something of somatic therapy, in his own way. Back when Amy and Reese lived together, on certain spring and summer evenings, Amy would walk down to the Parade Ground at Prospect Park, where the high school boys, mostly Dominicans, played baseball. She came for the thwack that occurred when a ball thrown hard and straight struck the leather pocket of a glove. She longed for that sound. She longed for her own high school past that snapped forward out of time’s stream at the necromantic power of baseball’s thwacks and plonks. She’d sit on a bench, far enough away that the boys—or their dads—wouldn’t make eyes at her, and she’d listen as the sounds of the game raised the ghosts of muscle memory. She could feel the batter’s step forward, readying the pendulum of body weight to swing to the timing of the pitcher’s windup. At every heard thwack the muscles in her arm came alive, remembering how her glove jerked back at the impact, how they sprang to snap a throw from third to first. All that smooth power her body had once had, ready to obey her every thought. She had missed it. She missed how obviously impressive it had been. The way women noted that impressiveness with their eyes and other boys chose her as their friend. The ease with which it all had been given to her. Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn’t fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn’t deserve such a good dog. She’d thought she’d have that dog forever—when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last. Now, as Jon sends the ball into the chute, Ames’s bat flashes round, and after a few minutes, it is indistinguishable from practice at college: the two of them silent, the chunck as Jon feeds the ball into the machine, the tsing as it hits the aluminum bat, so that their conversation becomes a wordless call-and-response—chunck-tsing, chunck-tsing, chunck-tsing, and on and on—until Jon breaks the meditation with a “my turn.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina gives a shy but pleased smile. The backs of her knees push away her chair as she rises. She carefully picks the sushi plate back up, then bends and sets it in front of Reese before lowering herself onto the rug, so that her bare feet, toes polished dark red, are tucked sideways behind her butt, and her body weight rests on a hip. “When I first moved in here,” Katrina explains, “my ex kept most of the furniture. We bought it all to fit our old place. I was the one who was leaving, and I didn’t feel entitled to take what seemed to belong to that other space—or if I had, it would have felt mean-spirited. So I didn’t have anything and ate sitting on the floor the first weeks I was here. The first night, I remembered that once when I was a little girl, we had to leave our house because it needed some structural repairs. My parents rented a place in Burlington, which was supposed to be furnished but wasn’t. It was too expensive to get furniture just for two months’ rental. But instead of showing me her worry, my mom told me that on very special occasions, a family could have indoor picnics. She put the food on a tray and spread a blanket over the bare linoleum, and made like it was just as fun as eating in a park. When Dad came home a week or two later with a table he’d scrounged somewhere, I was disappointed. When that memory came back to me I cried, maybe ’cause of the divorce, maybe just because of nostalgia. Now, when I’m alone, I prefer to eat on the floor and think of my 9 mom. This is the moment when Reese names the sudden softness and need that she has been developing for Katrina a “mom-crush.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yes, I know it’s a good idea! You should listen to your mother more! Maybe if you put something appealing on the registry, I’ll even approve of it, and generously get it for you.” She winked, and Reese, in that moment, wanted to be her daughter. So now here are Katrina and Reese, scanning bar codes on swaddlers and wearable blankets. Even perusing the socks area had brought them close to choice overload. Who knew infants needed so many styles? Especially since it seemed that a baby would outgrow each sock size in a matter of months. In front of a stand of socks for nine- month-olds, Reese experiences a wave of sentimentality for the impossibly tiny infant socks. Where does the time go; the days when her baby’s feet could be measured by her thumb were so few, so precious, she imagines she will one day lament. “Oh my god,” Reese tells Katrina. “I’m, like, missing the days when our baby was just an infant, and she’s not even born yet.” Reese and Katrina tend to use “she” pronouns for the baby, even though they had yet to find out the sex. Katrina has a pretty solid grasp on the difference between sex and gender and Reese isn’t one to think that sex doesn’t matter. Even if her kid turns out to be trans, it’s helpful to know in which direction that trans will travel. “Premature nostalgia is better than what I’m feeling.” “What are you feeling?” “Consumer fatigue. I knew this shit was going to be expensive, but oh my god, looking at this crap, it’s overwhelming. UGG makes fucking baby shoes! Fifty-five dollars!” “For Sale: Baby UGGs, never worn.” “We are living the saddest short story ever told,” Katrina snorts, then points to the swaddlers. “Can we just dress her in those wearable blankets for the first year? It’s not like she’s going to care if she isn’t in designer clothes, and it'll cost a fortune to have to buy all this every three months. Let’s just put her in blankets, they'll last longer.” Reese shrugs. Now that she has seen that Coach makes little baby shoes, her inner brand whore is crying out to scan them onto the registry. But, really, it would just be in terrible taste to let her first mothering disagreement with Katrina be over whether or not to dress their kid in designer brands. They'd have all of the teenage years for that shit. Downstairs, a glass case displays the breast pumps: sleek electronic affairs that look as though they’ve been designed by Steve Jobs—era Apple. Smooth, white curves, with a minimum of buttons. “Fancy! They even have an app! Can we share one?” Katrina asks. “Or do we each need our own?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Go with your friends,” Reese tells him. She angles a stream of smoke out the side of her mouth, and waves the cigarette cherry in the direction where they’ve slipped away. He nods gratefully and steps lightly after them. A few moments later, Thalia comes out. “Oh my god, I had to escape the baby transes in there. One of them was complaining about how a cis woman looked at her today at the store. That’s how wounded she is, she can’t take being looked at. Two eyes appraising her is trauma. I can’t take it.” Such is the explosion of girls transitioning in and around the Brooklyn drag world, and so devoid are these girls of their own trans history, that Thalia, having been on hormones not quite two years, has found herself forcibly placed in a maternal role. Her tone evinces a teenage mother’s exasperation with children, having just been one herself. Without asking, Thalia takes the cigarette from between Reese’s fingers and puffs hard. Reese laughs. “This is the moment.” “What is the moment?” “The moment you just said your mother would never get. When a daughter finally has kids of her own and begins to understand that her mother knew best all along.” Thalia exhales and hands the cigarette back to Reese, who declines it. “Don’t be smug about it,” Thalia says. “Maternal smugness is very annoying. Remind me to tell that to my mother next time I call her.” She lifts the sole of her shoe behind her, twists herself with easy balance to stub out the cigarette on it, and flicks the filter into the gutter. Her lashes curve luxuriously around her eyes even when she doesn’t wear mascara, and tonight, she’s worn the mascara thickly, making the amber irises appear bright and unearthly by contrast, illuminated as they are by the orange light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps. Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting. Normally that means avoiding the unflattering orangey glare of streetlights. Yet Thalia, with her dark curls and smooth skin, stands resplendent as a Greek pop star in the fiery hues. In Reese’s memories of childhood, night had a different blue- black tone than in her adult life. And, in fact, she later learned when she returned to visit Madison after a long hiatus, this change in the color of night was not an illusion of time and remembrance but a

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Your own estrogen levels seem to have run low,” Reese says, but without much venom, like she’s too tired for niceties, rather than really trying to hurt him. “Tm told my crow’s feet are dashing.” Reese sighs. “I don’t want to talk about how you look, Amy. I’m not going to do that.” “Of course. That’s fair.” He ignores the “Amy” part. The name doesn’t offend him, it’s just a name no one says anymore. “I just wanted you to know you look great.” Reese shrugs, then licks the edge of the ice cream sandwich he had brought her. Her disinterest surprises him. He had figured on the compliment mattering to her. “Hey, he says, affecting a light tone, “’'m putting myself out there, admitting how great you look.” She gives him a look like he’s just stepped off a spaceship. “Oh,” she says finally, “I get it. You were giving me that compliment as a guy. You're used to women acknowledging compliments like you’re a 29 guy. It’s true. His compliments tend to have, at a minimum, the effect of being noticed. She performs a gruesome parody of batting her lashes and clutching her heart. “My stars! Lil ol’ me?” “All right, Reese.” “You're lucky I even agreed to come here. You're not getting a boy-crazy teenager on top of it.” “T can see that.” They had first met at a picnic here. A trans lady picnic. He still had his apartment near the north side of Prospect Park. The one they had lived in together. Over time his memories with Reese in the park had been replaced by new ones. The places where he jogged, where he read by the pond, or watched birds—hoping for one of the red- tailed hawks that nested there, often settling for an escaped songbird, or, if hard-pressed, a swan. But seeing Reese reframes everything, conjures up the past. He can’t quite figure out if she suggested meeting him here as a tactical move. Something to throw off his confidence. He can feel the lack of their prior intimacy—though whether or not that absent closeness is forever gone or like a child playing hide-and-go-seek, he’s not quite sure. The rusty hinge of a grackle sounds from the trees overhead. He’s about to apologize, to say that he made a mistake and go home, when she offers him the ice cream sandwich. For the first time all afternoon, she lowers her guard, with something like a smile. “Look,” she says. “I played along a little. I waited with those other women and let you buy me ice cream like we were just another hetero couple out on our hetero Sunday date with the boringly hetero idea to go to the park. Now have some ice cream, I don’t want to eat all of it.” He takes a bite, and she pulls it back. “One thing I'll tell you, though,” she says. “You move differently than before.” “Move differently?”