Tenderness

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 Educated (2018)

  We trapped mice to feed it, but sometimes it didn’t eat them, and we couldn’t clear away the carcasses. The smell of death was strong and foul, a punch to the gut. The owl grew restless. When it began to refuse food, we opened the back door and let it escape. It wasn’t fully healed, but Dad said its chances were better with the mountain than with us. It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong. —I WANTED TO TELL SOMEONE I’d failed the exam, but something stopped me from calling Tyler. It might have been shame. Or it might have been that Tyler was preparing to be a father. He’d met his wife, Stefanie, at Purdue, and they’d married quickly. She didn’t know anything about our family. To me, it felt as though he preferred his new life—his new family—to his old one. I called home. Dad answered. Mother was delivering a baby, which she was doing more and more now the migraines had stopped. “When will Mother be home?” I said. “Don’t know,” said Dad. “Might as well ask the Lord as me, as He’s the one deciding.” He chuckled, then asked, “How’s school?” Dad and I hadn’t spoken since he’d screamed at me about the VCR. I could tell he was trying to be supportive, but I didn’t think I could admit to him that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying. “Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.” “It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now. “If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.” I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something. —IN MARCH, THERE WAS ANOTHER exam in Western Civ. This time I made flash cards. I spent hours memorizing odd spellings, many of them French (France, I now understood, was a part of Europe). Jacques-Louis David and François Boucher: I couldn’t say them but I could spell them. My lecture notes were nonsensical, so I asked Vanessa if I could look at hers. She looked at me skeptically, and for a moment I wondered if she’d noticed me cheating off her exam. She said she wouldn’t give me her notes but that we could study together, so after class I followed her to her dorm room.

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

  On a cold afternoon in late November, when Miss Parks wasn’t in the office, I was walking toward the back of the office and noticed her desk drawer open. I stopped to close it and inside I saw… a stack of checks? All her paychecks—uncashed. This wasn’t a job to her. This was something else. And so perhaps… was I? Maybe? Maybe. (Later, I learned Woodell was doing the same thing.) That Thanksgiving a record cold spell hit Portland. The breeze coming through the holes in the office windows was now a fierce arctic wind. At times the gusts were so strong, papers flew from the desktops, shoelaces on the samples fluttered. The office was intolerable, but we couldn’t afford to fix the windows, and we couldn’t shut down. So Woodell and I moved to my apartment, and Miss Parks joined us there each afternoon. One day, after Woodell had gone home, neither Miss Parks nor I said much. At quitting time I walked her out to the elevator. I pressed the down button. We both smiled tensely. I pressed down again. We both stared at the light above the elevator doors. I cleared my throat. “Miss Parks,” I said. “Would you like to, uhh… maybe go out on Friday night?” Those Cleopatra eyes. They doubled in size. “Me?” “I don’t see anyone else here,” I said. Ping. The elevator doors slid open. “Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet. “Well. Okay. Okay.” She hurried onto the elevator, and as the doors closed she never lifted her gaze from her shoes. I TOOK HER to the Oregon Zoo. I don’t know why. I guess I thought walking around and gazing at animals would be a low-key way of getting to know each other. Also, Burmese pythons, Nigerian goats, African crocodiles, they would give me ample opportunities to impress her with tales of my travels. I felt the need to brag about seeing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike. I also told her about falling ill in Calcutta. I’d never described that scary moment, in detail, to anyone. I didn’t know why I was telling Miss Parks, except that Calcutta had been one of the loneliest moments of my life, and I felt very unlonely just then. I confessed that Blue Ribbon was tenuous. The whole thing might go bust any day, but I still couldn’t see myself doing anything else. My little shoe company was a living, breathing thing, I said, which I’d created from nothing. I’d breathed it into life, nurtured it through illness, brought it back several times from the dead, and now I wanted, needed, to see it stand on its own feet and go out into the world. “Does that make sense?” I said. Mm-hm, she said. We strolled past the lions and tigers. I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else.

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

  Or are you excited, caught up in eager anticipation of something new? Whatever the feeling, there’s no need to push it aside. Pleasant or not, let the feeling in. Accept it as part of what it means to be you at this moment. Meet the feeling with curiosity and openness. Explore it. Note how this feeling registers in your body and how those bodily feelings change—subtly—from one moment to the next. Whether your current experience is pleasant or unpleasant, just witness and accept it. Whether events in your life are presenting you with good or bad fortune these days, just witness and accept those events. See them as part of the inevitable ups and downs that all people experience, no matter what part of this earth they call home. And just as surely as all people face good and bad fortune, and experience pleasant and unpleasant emotions, all people—all the world over—yearn to feel good, safe, peaceful, and healthy. Alongside this awareness of suffering’s inevitability and the fundamental sameness of all people, you can choose to wish yourself well. You deserve this kindness as much as anyone. Now, put your intention for this particular practice session, whatever it is, into words. This will shine a light on the path you choose and help you get back on it when your mind inevitably strays. Begin by lightly calling to mind your own good qualities. If it helps, briefly visualize an event that exemplifies one of those good qualities. No need to launch an exhaustive hunt for the “best” good quality or the “best” exemplifying event. Just lightly accept whatever good quality or instance of it that comes to mind. No need to judge or rate it. Simply let it remind you of what’s good in you, what touches your heart about yourself. Then, gently offer the classic wishes of loving-kindness to yourself, choosing phrasings of these classic sentiments that best speak to your heart. May I feel safe and protected. May I feel happy and peaceful. May I feel healthy and strong. May I live with ease. See yourself as being a dear friend to yourself. It may help to first conjure up the feelings of warmth and tenderness you might feel toward a small child, or a kitten, as innocent as these small creatures can be. Experience how your face softens or your heart expands in their presence. Now imagine directing these same feelings of warmth and tenderness toward yourself. May I feel safe. May I feel happy. May I feel healthy. May I live with ease. Between each phrase, pause for just a moment and drop your awareness down to your body, to your heart in particular. Note and accept whatever sensations arise there.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I didn’t like him much. Janet, however, who called oftener, I took to at once. She was eighteen or nineteen, big-boned and handsome; a born barmaid I had thought her when studying her photograph - so I was rather tickled to learn that she worked as a tapstress in a City public-house, lodging with the family who ran it, in their rooms above the bar. Florence fretted over her like anything: their mother had died while the sisters were still quite young (their father had died many years before that), Florence had had all the raising of the girl to do herself and, like older sisters everywhere, was sure that Janet would be led astray by the first young man who got his hands on her. ‘She will marry without giving it a second’s thought,’ she said wearily to me, when Janet paid her first visit after I moved in. ‘She’ll be dragged down having babies all her life, and her good looks will be spoiled, and she’ll die worn out at forty-three, like our own mother did.’ When Janet came for supper, she stayed the night; then she would sleep up in Florence’s bed, and I’d hear their murmurs and their laughter as I lay in the parlour below - the sound made me terribly restless. But Janet herself seemed marvellously unsurprised to see me dishing up the herrings at the breakfast-table, or putting her brother’s linen, on a wash-day, through the mangle. ‘All right. Nancy,’ she would say - she called me ‘Nancy’ from the start. The first time we met I still had the bruise at my eye, and when she saw it, she whistled. She said, ‘I bet it was a girl done that - wasn’t it? A girl always goes for the eyes every time. A bloke goes for the teeth.’ When the house wasn’t being shivered to its foundations by the thud of Janet’s footsteps on the stairs, it was trembling to the arguments and the laughter of Florence’s girl-friends, who came by regularly to bring books and pamphlets and bits of gossip, and to take tea.

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

  Here’s how to dive in: In these “found” moments, take in the faces and body postures of others. These need not be people with whom you are currently interacting. Mere passersby are great targets for informal practice. Think of it as harmless people-watching, albeit with respectful distance and loving intent. Consider your commute. On the train, in the car, or in the parking lot, instead of staying wrapped up in your own thoughts, take time to notice the people around you. Imagine the ways—small or large—that they might be suffering right now. It can be helpful to remember that no situation is 100 percent good (or bad). Each moment, for each person walking this earth, contains some unique blend of good and bad fortune. As Armistead Maupin writes, describing Mona’s Law in the book series Tales of the City: You can have a great job, a great apartment, and a great relationship, but never all three at the same time. With this awareness in mind, take a close look at those others with whom you cross paths. Look for nonverbal signs, however small, of their suffering—a grimace, a furrowed brow, a heavy sigh, or slumped posture—any clue that this other person is carrying some burden on his or her shoulders or in his or her heart. Witness this suffering with your whole body, not just with your eyes and your mind. See if you can feel in your own body and your own heart the heavy load that this person endures. All people suffer. At some level, whatever flavor of difficulty another faces will feel somewhat familiar to you. Lightly let your heart and mind reflect on that source of shared pain for a moment. Next, into this moment of empathy, extend a simple wish for the person’s release from pain and suffering. Try saying one or more of the following classic phrases, silently, in your own mind and heart, directing your good wishes to this particular person: May your difficulties [misfortune, pain] fade away. May you find peace [ease, strength]. May your burdens be lifted. As with all phrase-based practices, it’s not the words you choose that matter, but rather the feelings these words evoke. Experiment: Try new phrasings until you find a phrase or two that truly moves you, or leads to a subtle shift in the physical sensations of your heart. Remember, you’re not engaging any sort of magical thinking by doing this. Shifting your stream of consciousness toward compassion is no metaphysical trick that instantly whisks away all suffering from this other person’s experience. Your aim with this informal practice is far more humble and realistic. It is simply to condition your own heart to be more open and concerned about the pains and predicaments others inevitably face. Put differently, although your focus is completely on other people in this practice, the person who is most changed by it is you. Celebration: Meeting Another’s Good Fortune with Love

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

  Compassion: Meeting Suffering with Love By nature’s design, we all recoil from pain. Suppose you’re cooking dinner with brand-new cookware and mistakenly pick up that fancy, all-metal, oven-ready pot lid, forgetting to use a pot holder. It’s only natural that you drop the lid in a clamor as you yank your hand away. The haste of your recoil probably spares several layers of skin. And so it may seem with suffering of all sorts. Your first instinct may often be to look, leap, or pull away, or otherwise hang back. Increasing your distance from the source of pain can seem like the best way to spare yourself the added suffering that may come from being too close to it. Compassion does just the opposite. It moves toward suffering, not away from it. It seeks connection, not distance. Compassion is what rouses the father who, without a moment’s thought, rushes toward his bloodied child after a playground accident, scooping her up in his arms to comfort her and attend to her wounds. It fuels the hospice volunteer, who reads poetry to the gentleman she met just last week who’s facing imminent death from colon cancer. It can move you to gently place your hand on a coworker’s arm, as you absorb her recounting of the difficulties her family is now enduring. Indeed, the latest evidence from studies of primates (both human and nonhuman) suggests that compassionate responding like this is just as natural, just as hardwired, and just as beneficial to our species as is our evolved instinct to recoil from burning sensations and other forms of physical pain. Compassion is love. It flowers when you recognize some kind of physical or emotional pain within the other person. I dare say that no human experience is purely 100 percent good. Life experiences are instead virtually always some rich amalgam of good and bad. Think of it as a vibrant tapestry, in which the gilded threads of love and good fortune are interwoven among the darker threads of pain, sorrow, and loss. Equally true, no human experience is purely 100 percent bad, nor need it be. Even the heaviest of human experiences—sudden grief or joblessness, natural or human-orchestrated disasters and other brushes with mortality—can be lightened appreciably when you recollect simple truths such as “this too shall pass” or “I’m not in this alone.” Indeed, such braiding of adversity with hope and love, of destructive with more reassuring emotions, is the secret to resilience. Resilient people are the ones who bend without breaking and who eventually bounce back from even the most difficult life challenges. Instinctually, they can see some form of light in the darkness they face.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery. The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population. Tens of millions of rain-soaked corpses littered the roads and fields, and their disappearance had huge effects on the countryside: rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub and predator populations crashed. Rabbits have recovered since, though never to the numbers that we once thought normal. And while the virus is less virulent now, outbreaks still occur.

• From Educated (2018)

  She laughed, closing her eyes and throwing back her head in a way that nearly broke my heart, she looked so much like my mother. I stayed with Angie until the funeral. In the days before the service, my mother’s siblings began to gather at their childhood home. They were my aunts and uncles, but some of them I hadn’t seen since I was a child. My uncle Daryl, who I barely knew, suggested that his brothers and sisters should spend an afternoon together at a favorite restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. My mother refused to come. She would not go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie. It was a bright May afternoon when we all piled into a large van and set off on the hour-long drive. I was uncomfortably aware that I had taken my mother’s place, going with her siblings and her remaining parent on an outing to remember her mother, a grandmother I had not known well. I soon realized that my not knowing her was wonderful for her children, who were bursting with remembrances and loved answering questions about her. With every story my grandmother came into sharper focus, but the woman taking shape from their collective memories was nothing like the woman I remembered. It was then I realized how cruelly I had judged her, how my perception of her had been distorted, because I’d been looking at her through my father’s harsh lens. During the drive back, my aunt Debbie invited me to visit her in Utah. My uncle Daryl echoed her. “We’d love to have you in Arizona,” he said. In the space of a day, I had reclaimed a family—not mine, hers. The funeral was the next day. I stood in a corner and watched my siblings trickle in. There were Tyler and Stefanie. They had decided to homeschool their seven children, and from what I’d seen, the children were being educated to a very high standard. Luke came in next, with a brood so numerous I lost count. He saw me and crossed the room, and we made small talk for several minutes, neither of us acknowledging that we hadn’t seen each other in half a decade, neither of us alluding to why. Do you believe what Dad says about me? I wanted to ask. Do you believe I’m dangerous? But I didn’t. Luke worked for my parents, and without an education, he needed that job to support his family. Forcing him to take a side would only end in heartache. Richard, who was finishing a PhD in chemistry, had come down from Oregon with Kami and their children.

• From Educated (2018)

  nerves were dead. “I scraped off so many layers,” Tyler told me, “I was sure that one morning I’d hit bone.” Dad’s fingers began to bow, bending unnaturally backward at the joint. This was because the tendons had begun to shrivel and contract. Tyler tried to curl Dad’s fingers, to elongate the tendons and prevent the deformity from becoming permanent, but Dad couldn’t bear the pain. I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it. While I was away, I had scoured every video store within a hundred miles until I’d found the complete box set of The Honeymooners. I held it up for Dad. He blinked to acknowledge he’d seen it. I asked if he wanted to watch an episode. He blinked again. I pushed the first tape into the VCR and sat beside him, searching his warped face, listening to his soft whimpers, while on the screen Alice Kramden outfoxed her husband again and again. * It is possible that my timeline is off here by one or two days. According to some who were there, although my father was horribly burned, he did not seem in any real danger until the third day, when the scabbing began, making it difficult to breathe. Dehydration compounded the situation. In this account, it was then that they feared for his life, and that is when my sister called me, only I misunderstood and assumed that the explosion had happened the day before.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘For the goshawk,’ wrote White, ‘the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was.’ But he walked as if the walking itself were the secret, not his attention to the feelings of his hawk. Even in the aftermath of my father’s death my tattered heart knew that the secret to taming hawks was to take things slowly. To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity. But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’ White noted in his day-book. On it went. He took Gos with him to the pub, took him fishing for carp, took him to Banbury in a motor car. ‘He had to learn to stand that bustle,’ wrote White, ‘as we all have to do, however little we visit it.’ And he did. Just as the despairing soul will finally comprehend its helplessness in the face of continuing horror and bear it because there is no alternative, so with Gos. He had no alternative. There was no softness in his taming. He had to learn to bear things through being frightened all the time, just as White had learned there was no escape in his own education. Down the small roads and grassy rides and across fields damp with standing hay, White walked himself into the landscape. Whole days went past on foot, the novice austringer sinking gratefully into the rhythm and weather of the land. Walking home in the evening along the high-hedged Buckinghamshire lanes he watched ‘the red moon perceptibly rising’, which he ‘had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn’. At night the world became magical by virtue of its emptiness, and the Ridings a place of mists and stars and solitude. This was his patient excursion into the fields and back into the past.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Hawks have been traded for centuries, I chided myself. Of course she was alive. Seven hours is nothing. Think of the seventeenth-century falcon traders who brought wild hawks to the French court from as far away as India. Think of the Fifth Earl of Bedford importing falcons from Nova Scotia and New England; rows of perched hawks in wooden ships, hooded and still, and the lowing of cattle that were carried as cargo on those ships to feed them. And as we drove onward, I thought of White’s goshawk, of how much worse its journey had been than this: first from its nest to a German falconer; then by aeroplane to England, then by train from Croydon to a falconer called Nesbitt in Shropshire; then to a different falconer in Scotland as part of a swap that didn’t seem to come off, for the hawk was returned to Nesbitt. A few days’ reprieve in an airy loft, and it was back on a train, this time to Buckingham, a small, red-brick market town five miles from Stowe. And that is where White picked it up. How many miles? I reckon that’s about fifteen hundred or so, over many days. I’m not altogether sure how the hawk survived. Small souls, sent far from safety. In the opening pages of The Goshawk , White describes the awful journey of his fledgling hawk: torn from its nest, stuffed in a basket, and sent to a strange land to receive an education. He asks us to imagine what it was like, to put ourselves in the hawk’s bewildered, infant mind; to experience the heat and noise, confusion and terror that was its journey to his door . ‘ It must have been like death,’ he wrote , ‘the thing which we can never know beforehand.’ What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we’ve learned from the world. A while ago, in a yellow tin chest in a college library, I found some photographs of White as a toddler . They’re silvered prints of a dusty Karachi landscape; a jandi tree, long shadows, a clear sky. In the first the boy sits on a donkey looking at the camera. He wears a loose shalwar kameez and a child’s sun hat, and his small round face has no interest in the donkey except for the fact that he is sitting on it. His mother stands behind him in impeccable Edwardian whites, looking beautiful and bored. In the second photograph the boy runs towards the camera over parched earth. He is running as fast as he can: his stubby arms are blurred as they swing, and the expression on his face, half-terror , half-delight, is something I’ve never seen on any other child. It is triumph that he has ridden the donkey, but relief that it is over . It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Zac to all Allen kids but Caroline: Hey, you guys go rescue Caro who is locked in bathroom. Zac to Caroline: Caroline, are you out? Conner to Zac: This is bad Zac to Conner: Mom is onstage Conner to Zac: Can I break the door Conner, a few seconds later, to Zac: There is no other solution right now and I gotta go to school Conner, now on a mission, to Zac: Nothing else is working Conner to Zac: [Sends a selfie, with him now wearing his high school football helmet and full pads and jersey.] Conner to Zac: Door is going down Zac to Conner: No Conner to Zac: I got my pads on dad can I just get her out this is not working Zac to Conner: No Kate to Zac and Conner: I’m coming home in a sec Zac to all kids: Caroline just wait till mom is finished and I will call you Zac to Caroline: In the meantime just do what you always do in the bathroom. That ought to keep you busy for a couple of hours. In the selfie, Conner’s expression is one of outright determination, of commitment and concern, of “Caroline, I’m comin’ for you!” And, friend, this is what I picture when I think of you out there fighting all kinds of darkness, spiraling out… Jesus came for us—for you and me, with our arms crossed. Bitter, cranky, unsure, doubting, cynical, negative us. I know I said the interrupting thought that shifts all the others is I have a choice. And there is one reason that is true. It’s because Jesus first chose us. It’s because He busted down the door and rescued us in His beauty and kindness. He suited up and came for us. And that is why we aren’t cynical, expecting the worst. Because we have been promised a forever better than we can imagine. [image file=Image00043.jpg] 12 Less Important I Choose to Serve God and Others Not long ago, I snapped at one of my IF:Gathering colleagues. Worse still, this was a new coworker, someone who doesn’t yet know me and thus doesn’t know that I’m generally not a snappy person. Worst of all, I didn’t apologize. At least, not at first. I won’t go into detail about what she did that catalyzed my—let’s say “passionate”—response. But I reacted with such agitation, such animation, such temper, that I completely shut her down. I saw that I’d shut her down. Only an imbecile wouldn’t have noticed that. But did I remedy the situation by asking for forgiveness? Nope. I went on with my day.

• From Educated (2018)

  he usually wasn’t—he would play the part of the ruffian, a hardened “Whatcha gonna do about it?” expression disguising his face. But after, when it was just the two of us, the mask lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my brother. It was his smile I loved best. His upper canines had never grown in, and the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a child had failed to notice until it was too late. By the time he was twenty-three, and he got himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated sideways inside his gums and were ejecting themselves through the tissue under his nose. The surgeon who removed them told Shawn to preserve his baby teeth for as long as possible, then when they rotted out, he’d be given posts. But they never rotted out. They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy. * — IT WAS A HAZY summer evening, a month before I turned fifteen. The sun had dipped below Buck’s Peak but the sky still held a few hours of light. Shawn and I were in the corral. After breaking Bud that spring, Shawn had taken up horses in a serious way. All summer he’d been buying horses, Thoroughbreds and Paso Finos, most of them unbroken because he could pick them up cheap. We were still working with Bud. We’d taken him on a dozen rides through the open pasture, but he was inexperienced, skittish, unpredictable. That evening, Shawn saddled a new horse, a copper-coated mare, for the first time. She was ready for a short ride, Shawn said, so we mounted, him on the mare, me on Bud. We made it about half a mile up the mountain, moving deliberately so as not to frighten the horses, winding our way through the wheat fields. Then I did something foolish. I got too close to the mare. She didn’t like having the gelding behind her, and with no warning she leapt forward, thrusting her weight onto her front legs, and with her hind legs kicked Bud full in the chest. Bud went berserk. I’d been tying a knot in my reins to make them more secure and didn’t have a firm hold. Bud gave a tremendous jolt, then began to buck,

• From Educated (2018)

  parents, but I understood instinctively what was at stake. As long as we had never asked, it was possible to believe that they would help. To tell them was to risk the unthinkable: it was to risk learning that they already knew. Audrey did not wait, not even a day. The next morning she showed my email to Mother. I cannot imagine the details of that conversation, but I know that for Audrey it must have been a tremendous relief, laying my words before our mother, finally able to say, I’m not crazy. It happened to Tara, too. For all of that day, Mother pondered it. Then she decided she had to hear the words from me. It was late afternoon in Idaho, nearly midnight in England, when my mother, unsure how to place an international call, found me online. The words on the screen were small, confined to a tiny text box in the corner of the browser, but somehow they seemed to swallow the room. She told me she had read my letter. I braced myself for her rage. It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it. *2 I had to read those lines a number of times before I understood them. Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to convince me I had only imagined. She believed me. Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the accident. Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way. I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me. Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not. That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined. I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged. I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed.

• From Educated (2018)

  While his brothers wrestled, Tyler listened to music. He owned the only boom box I had ever seen, and next to it he kept a tall stack of CDs with strange words on them, like “Mozart” and “Chopin.” One Sunday afternoon, when he was perhaps sixteen, he caught me looking at them. I tried to run, because I thought he might wallop me for being in his room, but instead he took my hand and led me to the stack. “W-which one do y- you like best?” he said. One was black, with a hundred men and women dressed in white on the cover. I pointed to it. Tyler eyed me skeptically. “Th-th-this is ch-ch- choir music,” he said. He slipped the disc into the black box, then sat at his desk to read. I squatted on the floor by his feet, scratching designs into the carpet. The music began: a breath of strings, then a whisper of voices, chanting, soft as silk, but somehow piercing. The hymn was familiar to me—we’d sung it at church, a chorus of mismatched voices raised in worship—but this was different. It was worshipful, but it was also something else, something to do with study, discipline and collaboration. Something I didn’t yet understand. The song ended and I sat, paralyzed, as the next played, and the next, until the CD finished. The room felt lifeless without the music. I asked Tyler if we could listen to it again, and an hour later, when the music stopped, I begged him to restart it. It was very late, and the house quiet, when Tyler stood from his desk and pushed play, saying this was the last time. “W-w-we can l-l-listen again tomorrow,” he said. Music became our language. Tyler’s speech impediment kept him quiet, made his tongue heavy. Because of that, he and I had never talked much; I had not known my brother. Now, every evening when he came in from the junkyard, I would be waiting for him. After he’d showered, scrubbing the day’s grime from his skin, he’d settle in at his desk and say, “W-w-what shall we l-l-listen t-t-to tonight?” Then I would choose a CD, and he would read while I lay on the floor next to his feet, eyes fixed on his socks, and listened. I was as rowdy as any of my brothers, but when I was with Tyler I transformed. Maybe it was the music, the grace of it, or maybe it was his grace. Somehow he made me see myself through his eyes. I tried to

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close. She scratches her fluffy chin with one awkward, taloned foot; sneezes when bits of errant down get up her nose. And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived. Those long, barred tailfeathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal acceleration through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade. The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey. Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing brakes, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow . I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera . Response: kill . But later these misapplied instincts stop being funny. At just past six o’clock a small, unhappy wail came from a pram outside the window. Straight away the hawk drove her talons into my glove, ratcheting up the pressure in savage, stabbing spasms. Kill . The baby cries. Kill kill kill . Two days pass. I sit and walk, and sit and sleep, the hawk almost constantly on my fist. My arm aches and a damp tiredness grips my heart. A farming programme on the radio. Wheat, borage, rapeseed. Polytunnels and cherries. The hawk is alternately a hunchback toad, a nervous child or a dragon. The house is a tip. Scraps of raw meat decorate the bin. I’ve run out of coffee. I have forgotten how to speak. My mouth makes small, mumbled assurances to the hawk that all is well. She meets them with silence, with thready, nervous cheeps through her nose. As I walk she follows my feet with her eyes as if they were two small animals moving about the house with us. She is interested in flies, in specks of floating dust, in the way light falls on certain surfaces. What is she looking at? What is she thinking?

• From Educated (2018)

  chest; for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect. I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg. I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion. When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead, praying. Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die. About three weeks after the fire, Mother announced that the skin around the edges of the burn had begun to grow back, and that she had hope for even the worst patches. By then Luke was sitting up, and a week later, when the first cold spell hit, he could stand for a minute or two on crutches. Before long, he was thumping around the house, thin as a string bean, swallowing buckets of food to regain the weight he’d lost. By then, the twine was a family fable. “A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather

• From Educated (2018)

  He will, she wrote. But it’s hard for him. It reminds him of the damage his bipolar has caused to our family. I had never heard Mother admit that Dad might be mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father, so when Mother asked why I hadn’t come to her sooner, why I hadn’t asked for help, I answered honestly. Because you were so bullied by Dad, I said. You were not powerful in the house. Dad ran things, and he was not going to help us. I am stronger now, she said. I no longer run scared. When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and silver. Emily is being bullied, I wrote. She is, Mother said. Like I was. She is you, I said. She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story. I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.” I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn? Yes, I remember that. There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘For the goshawk,’ wrote White, ‘the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was.’ But he walked as if the walking itself were the secret, not his attention to the feelings of his hawk. Even in the aftermath of my father’s death my tattered heart knew that the secret to taming hawks was to take things slowly. To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity. But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’ White noted in his day-book. On it went. He took Gos with him to the pub, took him fishing for carp, took him to Banbury in a motor car. ‘He had to learn to stand that bustle,’ wrote White, ‘as we all have to do, however little we visit it.’ And he did. Just as the despairing soul will finally comprehend its helplessness in the face of continuing horror and bear it because there is no alternative, so with Gos. He had no alternative. There was no softness in his taming. He had to learn to bear things through being frightened all the time, just as White had learned there was no escape in his own education. Down the small roads and grassy rides and across fields damp with standing hay, White walked himself into the landscape. Whole days went past on foot, the novice austringer sinking gratefully into the rhythm and weather of the land. Walking home in the evening along the high-hedged Buckinghamshire lanes he watched ‘the red moon perceptibly rising’, which he ‘had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn’. At night the world became magical by virtue of its emptiness, and the Ridings a place of mists and stars and solitude. This was his patient excursion into the fields and back into the past.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Tomorrow, in the bars, you will write the epitaph. Lance closes the door with the intended slam! of Dean—perhaps with that gesture trying to push the ghost away: Not yet! ... And with the false courage of someone who has just dodged one bullet in a rain of bullets, he stares now challengingly at the chorus in a desperate effort to squelch their triumph—and in this crucial moment: mercifully, mysteriously, Lance looks Radiant—as if he, who has always relied on miracles, still expects some miraculous salvation. And it comes. Before the whispers of false sympathy can conclude his reign, the door opens behind Lance, and a meek Dean appears, the few clothes dangling pitifully from his arms. He walks slowly to Lance—waits—whispers (but we can all hear him in that dreadfully quiet house): “Lance—Im—sorry.... Lance?... I dont really want to go.... I—I just get kind of afraid sometimes.... I thought youd kick me out first.... Lance? Can I come back?” Lance faces Dean—gratefully and with a look that could be only compassion, flickering, but unmistakably there. “Tonight,” Lance said, “you can stay tonight—if you havent got a place—but—for your sake—itll be better—tomorrow—if you do leave.” Now Lance turns to the startled faces before him, as Dean disappears into the bedroom. “Whats the matter?” Lance said smiling—disappointing—oh, deeply, deeply—the waiting chorus, forced to retreat. “Whats everyone so somber about?” He leaned against the fireplace, like an actor aware of his enthralled audience. “Our life,” he sighed, “is meant to be a series of love affairs—nothing more. And you all know that. And who knows whos just around the corner?... Come on,” he said, passing gracefully from one awed person to another, “drink up!” And the buzzing has not come, the chorus is bewildered—as Lance O’Hara says, his back solidly to the Ghost tapping at the door to be let in (or—is it possible?—will it retreat now in peace?...): “Lets have a gay time!” 2 It was Sunday. I woke up, and the glare of the sun on the ocean was flooding the room through the slanted blinds. The man was sitting propped on one elbow on his bed looking at me. Several times during the night I had wakened, wondering apprehensively what his reaction would be in the morning. Immediately after—last night—he had sat smoking in the dark, and I had pretended to fall asleep. Throughout the night, he would sit up, light a cigarette.... Now I see him smiling at me. “You want to sleep some more?—it’s still very early,” he said. “Or you want to drive somewhere and have breakfast?... How about Arrowhead?”