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 A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  τηλύγετος [Ὁ]. 7, ov, an old Ep. epith. of children, of uncertain origin and sense. In some places it manifestly means a darling son, petted child, GAN οὐκ Ἰδομενῆα φόβος λάβε, τηλύγετον ὥς 1]. 13. 470; τίω δέ μιν ἶσον ᾿Ορέστῃ, ὅς μοι τ. τρέφεται θαλίῃ ἐνὶ πολλῇ 9. 143, 285; the same sense is implied when it is used of an only son, ὧς .. πατὴρ ὃν παῖδα φιλήσῃ μοῦνον τηλύγετον Il. 9. 482; ὅς οἱ τ. γένετο Od. 4. 11 54.; ὡς δὲ πατὴρ ὃν παῖδα... ἀγαπάζει .. μοῦνον, τηλύγετον τ6. το ; and of the son of one’s old age (Giyovos), as in h. Hom. Cer. 164, cf. 284; so also, λιπὼν .. παῖδά τε τηλυγέτην, οἵ Hermioné, the only daughter of Helen, ll. 3. 175 ;—once of two sons, perhaps twins, Φαίνοπος vie, ἄμφω τηλυ- yéTw 5. 153:—later Ep. followed the Homeric usage, Mosch. 4. 79, Ap. Rh. 4. 719 :—in Eur. I. T. 829 (the only example of the word in Att.), τηλύγετον χθονὸς ἀπὸ πατρίδος, it seems to bear the sense of τηλοῦ γεγονότα, born far away, far-distant, as it certainly does in Simmias ap. Tzetz. Chil. 8. 144, τηλυγέτων .. Ὑπερβορέων ἀνὰ δῆ- μον, (The Ancients mostly held it to be a compd. of τῆλυ (-- τῆλε) and γενέσθαι, either -- τηλέγονος, born afar off, or = ὀψίγονος, late-born. But the former interpr. will not suit the passages in Hom.; and for the other, the sense of Time given to τῆλε is without example, except in the late word τηλεδανός (which itself is not quite certain). Of modern scholars, Buttm. (Lexil. s. v.) assumes that τῆλε, τηλοῦ, is of the same Root with τελευτή, and interprets τηλύγετος (with Orion in Etym. G. 616. 37) 6 τελευταῖος τῷ πατρὶ γενόμενος, the last born or born at last, much like éyiyovos; Déderlein (de ν. τηλύγετος Erlangae 1825) refers it to ΧΨΘΑΔ, τηλ-εθάω, so that it would Ῥε -- θαλερὸς γεγώς ; or else (Hom. Gloss. 1. 228 sq.) connects it with ἀ-ταλ-ός ; Curt. suggests a possible connexion with 4/TEP, τερ-ήν, Skt. tar-unas.) THAV-Qpoos, ov, heard from afar, loud-voiced, Hesych. (where however the alph. order requires T7A€Opoos). τήλωθεν, or rather τηλῶθεν, Adv. = τηλόθεν, A. B. 1423. τηλῶπις, ἐδος, pecul. fem. of sq., Orph. Arg. 898. τηλ-ωπός, dv, (MW) seen from afar, far away, τηλωπὸς οἰχνεῖ Soph. Aj. 564; so fem. τηλῶπις, Orph. Arg. 898; in 1193, Herm. restores τήλιστον. 2. metaph. of sound, heard from afar, iwa Soph. Ph. 216; cf. τηλεφανής 2. τημέλεια, ἡ, care, attention, attendance, Hieroci. ap. Stob. 477. 50; τημελία, Schol. Ar. Vesp. 604. τημελέω, to take care of, look after, c. acc., χώρει πρὸς 'Αργος παρθέ- vous Te τημέλει Eur. 1. A. 731; τ. τὴν κεφαλήν Plut. Artox. 18, cf. 2. 148 Ὁ, Sext. Emp. M. 7. 249; c. gen., τημελοῦσι ποιμένων Simon. Iamb. 18; σώματός τ᾽ ἐτημέλει Eur. L T. 311; cf. Plat. Legg. 953 A. τημέλη, 7, tare collat. form of τημέλεια A, Β. 66.

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

  You’re still my little girl,” Alice said, arranging my ringlets into the perfect Shirley Temple spiral curls that she loved. I had never before seen Alice flustered or with tears in her eyes. My father showed up shortly, giving me a brief hug and Alice a breezy hello before he hefted the suitcases Alice had lined up by the door. We watched him as he made a few trips to place the luggage in the car before he came back to retrieve me. Alice bent down to give me a kiss on my cheek, leaving a residue of her perfume on my clothes. My father opened the door, and Alice followed us part of the way toward the car, her heels clicking on the cement. “You take care of my daughter, Jim,” Alice called out. My father’s hand tightened on mine, his jaw hardening. “Goodbye, Alice,” he said. “Get in the car, Celena.” Once I was buckled in, we pulled away. Alice hadn’t moved. Her brownish blond hair was pulled into a ponytail that accentuated the slimness of her face and the sad fatigue that had settled in her features. At first I liked the idea of living at my Uncle Joe’s. He had two children, my cousins James and Tammy, with whom I’d played during prior visits. We’d raced each other up and down the street with my father snapping pictures and sometimes arranging us in poses for the camera. When he could afford it, he took all three of us to an amusement park or movie. My cousins’ mother, Aunt Terry, was one of the few white people in the neighborhood. She always seemed delighted to see me, making a big deal about how pretty and smart she thought I was. All this changed when I came to stay with them. I was squeezed into an already cramped bedroom with my cousins, a single mattress set on the floor at the foot of their twin beds for me to sleep on. Almost immediately Terry expressed her resentment of my living in her home. The house was a small, boxy structure caged by iron bars that fitted the windows and front screen door. The interior embodied the decline of Aunt Terry’s mental state. The sofa and easy chair were worn and sagging. The carpet was frayed. The stale odor from the cigarettes Aunt Terry and Uncle Joe chain-smoked never seemed to clear completely from the grayish air. As a small child I had a habit of walking on my toes without realizing it, an idiosyncrasy my aunt particularly hated almost as much as she generally disliked me. In the early evenings before my Uncle Joe came home, she made me walk the length of the living room heel-to-toe with a clothespin fastened over my nose.

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

  Her eyes told us that she was closer to God than we could ever be. “We don’t want you loose harlots and your bastard children here,” she shouted. “You hear me? Your kind’s not wanted here. You’re nothing but a yellow nigger with green eyes and good hair. You’re not foolin’ anybody.” The encounter left my mother looking frail, the smile with which she’d greeted the woman disappearing as she eased the door closed. “Why did that lady yell at you, Mommy?” The only answer I received was a hug. Too young to know we struggled to live our lives, I had no idea my mother shielded me from certain realities. For me, she’d spin pleasant fantasies. We had no money to buy things that weren’t necessities, but window-shopping turned our lack of funds into a game. We could pretend to purchase the things we saw on display. We went for picnics in the park, meeting placid, idle women in crocheted tops and homespun dresses, sunning themselves, with children as old as me still nursing in their mothers’ arms. In the rain, blocks away from home, we listened to the drops fall on our umbrellas and splashed through or leaped over puddles. Games were my mother’s way of keeping me from feeling the cold and tedium of long walks in unpleasant weather. If I grew tired, my mother lifted me to her hip and let me rest my head on her shoulder, her long dark hair draping my arms or whipping about in the wind, obscuring my vision of cars that whizzed past us. In a pinch, we hitchhiked. My attachment was primordial, existential, a sensory umbilical cord of warmth, touch and scent that filled the minimal span between us. I luxuriated in the softness of her skin, the combined warmth of our body heat, and the moist and slightly sour scent of saliva when I sucked my two middle fingers while patting her breast. Sometimes, I went to daycare; other times, not. Once, my mother told me she had quit one of her many temporary jobs because she couldn’t bear to wake me in the mornings before she left for work, which often set me to crying. She wanted to be sure that we were friends, that she lived with me in my child’s world where everything appeared new, exciting and ripe for exploration. Possibly she sought to reclaim a childhood she had not lived properly herself. At fourteen years old, my mother was forced into the maternal role of caring for her brothers after my grandmother Gladys was struck down in her prime by debilitating depression, taking to her bed for years. The smothering sadness returned to stalk Theresa during her own experience of motherhood. I have vague recollections of the various men in whose homes we stayed. A house on stilts, the door in the kitchen opening to a spindly forest of trees, with no balcony to block a bone-breaking fall.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  With Dev, my every practical impulse has snapped off like a spigot turned tight. So what if I’m invisible to Warren or he to me? My rent’s paid. I have my boy. In six weeks, I’ll start to teach three days per week, three or four classes per day. No other fact sinks in. Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms. For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine. Eventually, the insurance company starts to squawk, and while the doctor doesn’t like sending me home with a bag strapped to my leg, they figure I can get up every morning after breastfeeding all night, load the baby into the car seat with diapers and changes of clothes and miscellaneous crap. I can drive to the clinic, get on the table, have the catheter taken out, then wait, breastfeeding in the hall, till four to see if I can relieve myself of urine before then getting re-catheterized—a length of flaming skewer slid into my body’s rawest corridor. Warren seems hardly to register any of this, sleeping every night unperturbed downstairs. Every hour and a half or two, Dev squawks, and I stagger to his crib, change his diaper, latch him to one breast then another, burp him, swaddle him. Then back in my solitary bed, steal an hour or two of sleep before Dev eats again. Born three weeks early it’s as if he’s trying to catch up, he just needs to be bigger than my scrawny body could tote. (He grew at twice the normal rate, and I’d have been smarter nursing him in the bed, but I’d been warned—ironically—that it’d ruin my marriage.) Maybe I don’t resent Warren more because he’s the only author of relief for me. He walks in the door like clockwork every day at six, the hour Dev inexplicably begins to holler as if being bullwhipped. And only Warren loves him enough to advance toward that flaming shriek. What’s wrong with him? Warren says, taking him from me, handling him like rare glass. He’s clearly unhappy here, I say. As Warren folds the boy to his body, I enter the only certain stretch of rest in my day. Hold his head, I say. It’s damp. Maybe tuck this blanket around him. Bring an umbrella in case it starts to mist. And when you change him, use the white cream. I’ve got him, Mare. Just let me do it. I plod back up the stairs and pitch forward, imploding in a black-brained sleep.

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

  I saw, though, that Theresa was tremendously kind to her and even seemed to believe that Gwyn had potential to improve beyond her present abilities. I often observed my mother patiently explaining things to her, someone I considered a pathetic figure. Gwyn would swivel her head, moaning and making what we children called “retarded sounds.” Along with the care of Gwyn, Theresa’s other duties included washing the property’s sheets and towels. We children were individually responsible for our own laundry, but the adults had a different system when it came to linens. My eighth birthday came and went, yet Theresa and I remained banned from each other. Finally, after a month had passed, one of the demonstrators took pity on us and ended the forced separation. After that we were more careful about how much time we spent together. The next time we visited, Theresa took me to my room and shut the door. “I have a present for you,” she said. Into my hands she placed a thick book with a red cover and a picture of a gold chariot pulled by a team of white horses. “It is the Bhaghavad Gita . Open it to the middle, where there are pictures.” I flipped through the dense text until I reached the midsection, where I found enchanting images of exquisite beauty. I had never seen anything like it. Here were vibrant colors of blue, purple and pink, nature bursting in tuberoses, lilies and verdant green meadows. Cows were beautifully ornamented with necklaces of flowers, a smudge of red on their foreheads; they even wore earrings. Every picture also featured a magical, glowing, blue-skinned person with long dark hair and fine silk clothes. “This woman is so pretty,” I said. “He is a man, and his name is Lord Krishna,” Theresa said. My gaze shot up from the book. I stared at my mom. Was she putting me on? “This woman here is a man?” I pointed at the blue being to make absolutely sure we were talking about the same person. “Yes. But he is a special man because he is actually an enlightened being. God sent him.” “Really?” Theresa took the book and turned to a different page, showing me a picture of the blue man as a baby. She set the book back in my hands and said, “When Krishna was small, his mother found him putting dirt in his mouth. When she demanded he open his mouth, do you know what she saw?” Theresa’s green eyes danced as she watched my face. “What?” I asked. “When he opened his mouth, she saw the whole universe. Can you imagine how shocked and surprised she must have been? That was when she realized that the universe is too much to understand.” Krishna’s mother had glimpsed the visual of a concept that had been mentally plaguing me. I fell in love with the story, a great weight lifted off my shoulders.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Warren says, taking him from me, handling him like rare glass. He’s clearly unhappy here, I say. As Warren folds the boy to his body, I enter the only certain stretch of rest in my day. Hold his head, I say. It’s damp. Maybe tuck this blanket around him. Bring an umbrella in case it starts to mist. And when you change him, use the white cream. I’ve got him, Mare. Just let me do it. I plod back up the stairs and pitch forward, imploding in a black-brained sleep. Around eleven, the door swings wide, and Warren lays Dev in my arms before tiptoeing downstairs to his pallet in the living room, where the white-fog machine throws up each night a wall of noise beyond which we don’t exist. He’s working, going to grad school full-time. I have to breastfeed anyway, the argument goes. Then Mother flies up to help, a sober mother who sees frying chicken and assembling lasagna as a way to mend all the chaos she’d brought in the thirty years prior. All my life, she lived in a state of irritation predicated on either drinking too much or not having drunk enough. Never (is this true?) did I lie in bed and have her cook for me. As a child, when I got measles and chickenpox, she’d announce, I just don’t like sick people, leaving me feverishly staring at the TV’s flickering grown-ups. On this trip, Mother is transformed. She goes with me to the clinic every day, helping me load the baby in the car. Most evenings she brings my dinner steaming from a tray—doughy dumplings in oniony broth, chicken collapsed off its bones, turnip greens with fatback. Afternoons, she lies in bed with me, the baby between us kicking his covers off as I gaze at him. Mary, I believe you’re gonna stare the skin off him, she says. Sober she might be, but she’s still capricious as a cat. After about a week, when I’ve gotten used to counting on her, she disappears one day. I’d run out of diapers, and she’d rushed heroically off to the store. Her first hour away, I figure she got lost. An hour later, I decide she’s had a car wreck. An hour after that, I know she’s dead or stopped at a bar somewhere, so I wrap Dev’s bare ass in a towel held together by duct tape and lug him to the market in a stroller, finding no sign of our car in the lot. Late that afternoon Mother prances in with brochures for tours of Russia and China. She is—miraculously enough—cold sober. But she met a man at a travel agency next to the grocery store, and he took her to lunch and to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum. By then she’s built up enough goodwill during the visit that I let it slide.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Just the orderlies. I actually don’t think she made contact with anybody. I came out of my room and saw her do a flying side kick. Very Bruce Lee. Then later, she went bye-bye on the gurney. We stand in silence outside the barren dayroom for a while. I’m conjuring their tormented faces—Tina’s and Betty’s, Flora’s and Willy’s—arrayed before me like plucked blossoms. The prayer’s automatic, and it comes like a burst of lightning—some version of God help them. Petitioning whatever light I’m starting to believe in to shine on them. Give Betty a bite to eat, and free Will’s face of sores. Chase the demons from Flora, and lower Tina into a single pair of loving arms. Whether you believe prayers like this affect external affairs doesn’t matter. They measure the overhaul in my psyche and character. Time for meds, ladies, a passing nurse says. Pam turns on her heel, but I hang there a long time in that eucalyptus odor, which conjures up so many sickrooms. Mine when I was a kid and I viewed the world through a scrim of fever, and my mother’s white hands smoothed Vicks on my chest; Dev’s those nights he choked for air in the vaporizer fog; Daddy’s before he died. It’s unhip to fall to your knees, sentimental, stupid, even. But somehow I’ve started to do it unself-consciously. Behind a door, my body bends, and the linoleum rises. I lay my face on my knees in a posture almost fetal. It is, skeptics may say, the move of a slave or brainless herd animal. But around me I feel gathering—let’s concede I imagine it—spirit. Such vast quiet holds me, and the me I’ve been so lifelong worried about shoring up just dissolves like ash in water. Just isn’t. In its place is this clean air. There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open—an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there. How long passes? Somebody knocks on the door for group. I creak to my feet, feeling lucky—which I maybe haven’t felt since the early glory days with Warren—lucky for my nutburger family, and for the near-strangers who’ve carried me the past nine months. Joan, before leaving town, and Deb and Liz and Janice come every day. Most of my putative friends—writers and academics and drinking buddies—not at all. Even Joe, who’s landed back in the joint on an old car-theft charge, sends me daily missives using stamps he can ill afford.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  οἶκτος, ὁ, (οἴ oh!) pity, compassion, οἶκτος δ᾽ ἕλε λαὸν ἅπαντα Od. 2. 81, cf. 24. 438; οἶκτός τις ἴσχει κατακτείνειν a feeling of pity prevents him from .., Hdt. 5. 92, 3; οἴκτου πλέως Soph. Ph. 1074; οἶκτον ἔχειν φρενί Id. Aj. 525; ἐμοὶ yap οἶκτος δεινὸς εἰσέβη Id. Tr. 298 ; ἐμοὶ μὲν οἶκτος δεινὸς ἐμπέπτωκέ τις Id. Ph. οὔξ ; θνητοὺς .. ἐν οἴκτῳ προθέ- μενος Aesch, Pr. 239; δι᾿ οἴκτου ἔχειν τινά Eur. Hec. 851; εἰσῆλθέ μ᾽ οἶκτος εἰ... Id. Med. 931:—c. gen. objecti, compassion for .. , πόθος καὶ otros τῆς πόλιος Hdt. 1. 165, cf. Eur. Hec. 519 :—in Aesch. Supp. 486, Linwood’s correction, οἰκτίσας ἰδὼν τάδε, is almost necessary. 2. the expression of pity, lamentation, piteous wailing, Simon. 5; οἶκτος οὔτις ἣν διὰ στόμα Aesch. Theb. 51; τόνδε κλύουσαν οἴκτον Id. Cho. 4113 οἰκτρὸν οἶκτον ἀΐων Id. Supp. 59; κλύω τινὸς οἴκτου Soph. Tr. 864; οὐκ οἴκτου μέτα Id. Ο. Ο. 1636 ;—and in pl., παθόντος οἴκτοις by the wailings of the sufferer, Aesch. Supp. 386 (lyr.); ἄϊον οἴκτους ods οἰκτίζει Eur. Tro. 155; τοὺς οἰκτιρμοὺς ἐξαιρήσομεν καὶ τοὺς οἴκτους Plat. Rep. 387 Ὁ ; οἴκτων λήγετε Eur. Phoen. 1584, cf. Andoc. 7. 28, Plat. Apol. 37 A, Legg. 949 B. II. an object of pity, Plut. Mar. 1, cf. Schaf. 5. p. 106. oiktootvn, 7, =foreg., Hdn. Epimer. 232. οἰκτρίζω, f. 1. οἰκτίζω, Hesych. οἰκτρό-βιος, ov, leading a pitiable life, Paul. Alex. 4. οἰκτρο-γοέω, to wail piteously, Hesych. 5 , 3, tA oLkoupos — οἰμώζω. οἰκτρό-γοος, ον, wailing piteously, piteous, λόγοι Plat. Phaedr. 267 Ὁ. οἰκτρο-κέλευθος, ov, going a wretched journey, Manetho 4. 222. οἰκτρο-λογία, ἡ, piteous discourse, Poll. 2.124., 4. 22, 33. οἰκτρο-μέλαθρος, ov, pitifully housed, Manetho 4. 33. oiktpos, a, dv, pitiable, in piteous plight, κοιμήσατο χάλκεον ὕπνον oixrpos, of persons, Il. 11. 242; so, Aesch. Supp..61, Soph. O. T. 58, etc.: c. gen., οἰκτροὶ τῆς μεταβολῆς to be pitied for .., Plut, Flam. 13. 2: of things, pitiable, piteous, lamentable, ἕτερα πεπόνθαμεν οἰκτρότερα Hdt. 7. 46; οἰκτρὰ συμφορά Pind. O. 7.142; πημοναί, ἄλγος Aesch. Pr. 238, 435, etc.; οἰκτρὰ yap βόσκειν [ἡ κήρ] Soph. Ph. 1167 :---οἰκτρόν [ἐστι], c. inf., Aesch. Theb. 321 (lyr.). 3. in contemptuous sense, οἰκτρὰ τέκνα sorry fellows, Auson. Ep. 40; οἰκτρὰ τραγῳδία miserable, Eust. 1691. 34. IT. in act. sense, wailing piteously, piteous, οἰκτροτάτην δ᾽ ἤκουσα ona Od. 11. 421, cf. Soph. El. 1066; οἰκτρᾶς γόον ὄρνιθος, of the nightingale, Id. Aj. 629 :—so Hom. uses neut. pl. as Ady., οἴκτρ᾽ ὀλοφυρομένη Od. 4. 719, cf. το. 409, etc.—Regul. Adv. οἰκτρῶς, Aesch. Pers. 688, Soph., etc., Andoc. 34.15; Comp. -ότερα, Anth. P. το. 65; Sup. -ότατα, Eur. Hel. 1209.—Besides the regul. Comp. and Sup. οἰκτρότερος, οἰκτρότατος, Hom. has an irreg. Sup. οἴκτιστος (4. ν.), but οἰκτίων never occurs.—Schweigh. has altered οἰκτότερος, in Hdt. 7. 46, into οἰκτρότερος, from several Mss., cf. Jac. Anth. 3. p. 648. οἰκτρότηξβ, THTOS, 7, piteous condition, Poll. 3. 116. οἰκτρό-φωνος, ov, with piteous voice, Schol. Il. 17. 5.

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

  “He didn’t mean it.” She slipped into the room, closing the door with a quiet click and sat next to me. “Do you want some gum?” She dug into her jeans pocket for a pack of Juicy Fruit and pulled a slim silver stick from the cheerful yellow jacket, ripping it in half and handed me my portion. I took it wordlessly, unwrapped it and popped the powdery pale bit of treat into my mouth. “It’s okay,” she said a little louder. “Just wait here like he said. We’re going to leave soon.” Satisfied that I was placated, she smiled, putting a finger to her lips, and she left as quietly as she came in. Between apartments we sometimes stayed with my grandmother Gladys, crowding onto her sofa bed. I would not come to recognize my grandmother’s fun side, her love of jazz and preference for Miles Davis over Bing Crosby during the Christmas holidays, until I was much older. She took a girlish pleasure in dancing, putting on family skits and, believing her feet to be her best feature, decorating her toes with rings. As a small child, I knew her only as dour Gladys, with her tight headscarves, drab clothes and large purses that hung flat and old-ladyish from her shoulder. I spent long days in her apartment, an interior of beige blandness. The plastic artificial flowers placed on the coffee table and end table to brighten the place had only added to the feeling of lifelessness. I recall sitting for hours with a small bag of candy to keep me quiet while she rocked away the hours in her rocking chair, frowning to herself. My grandmother hated cooking, so we ate most of our meals at Thrifty’s Drug Store. Catching sight of my mother wearing blue jeans could set my grandmother off on a tirade accompanied by tears. “Where did I go wrong?” she wailed. “God have mercy! You’re a good Catholic girl, Theresa; that’s how I raised you. You got to stick with your own kind—Creole people.” My mother would roll her eyes and I’d laugh. Her distress was so overstated that it held a comical quality. “The devil has the chile, Theresa. She’s an imp,” my grandmother yelled when I giggled over her ravings. “She’s a child, Mama,” my mother said. I’d dance around my grandmother, making faces, teasing her, hoping she’d lose her temper, while my mother lounged on the sofa. “You see?” my grandmother said. “You see what she’s doing? You better teach that little imp a lesson: slap her behind.” When she made a grab for me, I darted away, too quickly for her to catch. She’d stumble forward, clutching nothing but air, then give up and break into melodramatic sobs. Her despair fascinated me. Normal, everyday things like my braided kinky hair, fitted at the ends with colorful plastic barrettes, made her nervous.

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

  Other times we stayed home and hung out at the pool in the apartment complex. Having never learned to swim, my father would sun himself on one of the white plastic pool chairs while Alice waded into the cool water, carrying me on her hip, my arms and legs wrapped like octopus tentacles around her body. Try as she might, she could not peel me off to begin my swimming lessons. I could see clear to the bottom of the pool and the dip of the cement alarmed me. I’d wiggle myself higher into Alice’s arms to escape the water lapping against my shoulders. My father laughed genially from the safety of his chair at my frantic attempts to cling to Alice. Sometimes he’d follow us along the perimeter, calling out encouragingly for me to kick my legs or place my face in the water. I could not trust him at these times. He wanted me to swim, but would not put even a toe into the water himself. When we finally went inside, a warm towel would be wrapped around me, and with eyes burning from chlorine, I’d skitter to the bathroom, waiting for the comfort of the dry clothes Alice brought me. Soon all the terror of the swimming lesson was forgotten as I ate a hot baloney sandwich prepared by my father, the white bread soaked with grease and mayonnaise. My life took on a regular rhythm as Alice eagerly stepped into the maternal role that my mother had vacated. She provided me with dolls whose blond hair I continually brushed until they were balding. My clothing, which Alice kept neatly folded in my dresser, smelled of Tide detergent and lavender. On weekends she plaited my hair into two braids and tied them with ribbons that matched the colors of my clothes. Among Alice’s relatives, I was called her little girl. When I wanted comfort, I learned to go to Alice. Possibly, at such a young age, Alice and my mother blended into one and the same person for me. They looked very similar to each other, and I don’t recall missing my mother with Alice around. But one afternoon, just as suddenly as my mother had departed, Alice left too. My father and I returned to the apartment to find all the furniture gone. Alice had taken what belonged to her. In shock, I walked the length of our bare living room. Then I sat on the floor while my father paced, phone to ear, his jaw clenched with tension. By the end of the week, my bags were packed. Jobless and struggling financially, he thought I might fare better under Alice’s care, and so, like the furniture, I went too. In Compton, where Alice’s father, Lewis, had a house, I was given two rooms: a bedroom and a playroom equipped with every toy Alice thought I should possess, as well as a school desk and handwriting booklets. Alice valued education.

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

  My attachment was primordial, existential, a sensory umbilical cord of warmth, touch and scent that filled the minimal span between us. I luxuriated in the softness of her skin, the combined warmth of our body heat, and the moist and slightly sour scent of saliva when I sucked my two middle fingers while patting her breast. Sometimes, I went to daycare; other times, not. Once, my mother told me she had quit one of her many temporary jobs because she couldn’t bear to wake me in the mornings before she left for work, which often set me to crying. She wanted to be sure that we were friends, that she lived with me in my child’s world where everything appeared new, exciting and ripe for exploration.

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

  hanging out there with several girls, a giant velvety black moth flew in through one of the windows and attached itself to the neck of one of the girls. She beat at the thing with frantic hands, but it clung to her, unmoving with its enormous furry legs curled against her skin. The rest of us tried to help her, but she would not keep still and hopped about until she fell over a stack of chairs and box springs, dislodging the moth, which glided aggressively toward the rest of us while we screamed and tried to shield our faces. It flew over my head and found its way back out through the window. The ginger kittens I stumbled upon were hidden in a bramble of bushes not far from the building. I heard their mewing before I saw them, a mound of squirming little bodies under the protection of the scraggly branches. The mother was nowhere in sight, but that wasn’t unusual. I’d come across kittens before, and if I came back to their hiding place often enough, eventually I’d see the mother. These kittens were newly born. Their eyes hadn’t opened yet. Their ears were still flat against their heads. I stayed for a while, watching them and then went on my way. I came back a few times, but never saw the mother. On one occasion I sat a little ways away and waited, hoping to see a mother cat, but I never did. I wondered how long they had been on their own. Knowing they would starve to death, I gathered the babies, scooping them into my t-shirt, and went back to my dorm, where I ran into several other girls, who oohed and aahed over my find. Happy to commiserate with others, we immediately planned a feeding schedule. Within an hour we’d scrounged up some doll bottles and filled them with milk. Adapting instantly to our new mama roles, we snuggled their tiny bodies and fed them, watching their tiny pink tongues lap at the droplets of milk. One of the girls had an end table with a small cabinet that the demonstrators never inspected because she usually kept nothing in it. The cabinet was big enough for two shoeboxes, in which the kittens lived

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

  Tim was new to the community, and every day we kids were required to divide our time into two-hour slots to act as a sort of babysitter for him. He took immense pride in the fact that he’d been technically born dead, a fact that seemed to explain his mental retardation. Most of the adults humored him, holding out their hands to have him slap them five and often asking him how he liked living in Synanon. He always said, “It’s super!” which elicited the expected response, “All right!” This exchange was repeated all day, and Tim never tired of it. The demonstrators put Tim in as many school activities as he could handle and physical education. Physical education in the Synanon school had always been rigorous. Like inspection, it was performed military-style, and unless you were seriously ill, there was no getting out of the drills we were put through. After countless sit-ups, leg lifts, pull-ups and pushups, we ran a mile and a half to three miles, five days a week, in all weather. We ran in hailstorms, the small lumps of ice pelting our faces and bodies, and we ran in hundred-degree weather. We ran up steep hills, down the highway and around an enormous track. I always focused on my breath, ignoring side cramps and any other kind of bodily pain. “Keep going,” I chanted to myself. When that failed to stimulate me, I switched to “You can do it!” forcing my mind to override my body’s complaints. I found the exercise easier when I knew how long I would be running than when we veered from familiar routes. I was fast, usually the first girl to finish behind the three fastest boys. Buddy normally ran alongside us, speeding up and slowing down, always watching for slackers. He did not tolerate slow runners, instead urging them to pick up the pace by barking in their ear and running on their heels. Anyone he caught walking was made to start over from the beginning. After our runs we played an hour or two of sports. We played every sport: baseball, football, soccer, hockey, tennis, handball and others. There was a call to action that demanded the physical excellence Chuck spoke about in his manifesto on raising children: “They’re going to know how to punch, too, they’re going to know how to do what they’re told, they won’t be such sissies and babies. Their imprinting is changing completely. It just might be that we have a hell of a good thing going.” The child’s age was hardly a consideration. Once, during a mandatory six-mile race through the hills, I found two small girls no more than five or six years of age huddled in the grass, crying. “Please help,” they’d called out to me. “We’re lost.” Others had run past them without even a backward glance. I stopped and took their little hands in mine, urging them to keep going.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  πέπων, ov, gen. ovos: Comp. and Sup. πεπαίτερος, -τάτος :—properly of fruit, cooked by the sun, ripe, mellow, Lat. mitis, Hdt. 4. 23, Bacchyl. 46, Soph. Fr. 190; opp. to ὠμός, Ar. Eq. 260, Xen. Oec. 19, 19; of wine, Ar. Fr. 563, etc.; πέπονα ποιεῖν τινα, by beating him, Com. Anon. 285. Ῥ. of imposthumes, ripe, ready to suppurate, Hermipp. Θεοΐ 3; cf. πεπαίνω I. 3, πέπανσις. 2. σίκυος πέπων, a kind of gourd or melon, not eaten till quite ripe, whereas the common σίκυος was eaten unripe, Hipp. 497. 21, Plat. Com. Aas. 1, Anaxil. Incert. 3, Arist. Probl. 20. 32, 1, etc. ; (also πέπων alone, ap. Ath. 68 E): proverb., μαλθακώτερος πέπονος σικύου Theopomp. Incert. 5; so, πεπαίτερος μόρων Aesch. Fr. 244; π. ἀπίοιο Theocr. 7. 120. II. metaph., as always in Hom. (more often in I. than in Od.), and in Hes., in addressing a person, mostly as a term of endearment, kind, gentle, πέπον Καπανηιάδη Il. 5. 109; ὦ πέπον 6. 55., 9. 252, etc. ; Κριὲ πέπον my pet ram (says Polyphemus), Od. 9. 447 ;—in bad sense, soft, weak, ὦ πέπον, ὦ Μενέλαε Il. 6.553; ὦ πέπονες ye weaklings, 2. 235; Κύκνε πέπον Hes. Sc. 350, cf. Id. Th. 544, 560:—once so in Trag., πέπον my friend! Soph. O. C. 515. 2. mild, less acrid, ῥεῦμα Hipp. Vet. Med. 15 :—then metaph., Att. mild, gentle, πεπαιτέρα yap μοῖρα τῆς τυραννίδος Aesch. Ag.1365; μόχθος πέπων softened pain, Soph. O.C. 437, etc.: c. dat., ἐχθροῖς π. gentle to one’s foes, Aesch.Eum.66. (Cf. πέπειρος, and for the Root, v. sub πέσσω.) πέρ, enclit. Particle, adding force or positiveness to the word to which it is added, being probably a shortd. form of πέρι in the sense of very much, however much, altogether. Its usage is most extensive in Ep, and Lyr. poets, being in Att. added only to Relatives and Particles. Its force is confined to the word to which it is annexed. Usage: 1. in Hom. very often with an Adj. and the part. ὦν, ἐπεί μ᾽ ἔτεκές γε μινυνθάδιόν περ ἐόντα all shortlived as I am, Il. 1.352; Ἰθάκης κραναῖς περ ἐούσης 3. 201 ;—mostly to call attention to something objected to, like καίπερ (4. ν.), ἀγαθός περ ἐών however brave he be, Lat. guamuis fortis, Ib. 131, etc.; κρατερός περ ἐών 15.164; κύνεός περ ἐών 9. 3733 δουρικτήτην περ ἐοῦσαν ο. 343; φίλην περ ἐοῦσαν 1. 587 ; μέγαν περ 1; 6 π. μεστὸς τῶν τοιούτων ποικιλμάτων Plat. Euthyphro 6 C; cf. ᾧ ἐόντα 5. 625; 30 ἰῃ Trag., ἄελπτά περ ὄντα Aesch, Supp. 55; γενναζός 1178 Tépa — πέραν. περ wv Soph. Ph. 1068; also with a Subst., ἀλόχῳ περ ἐούσῃ Il. 1. | πρὸς ἔσχατον πλοῦν to bring him to the end of his voyage, Pind. P. to.

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

  The rest of us tried to help her, but she would not keep still and hopped about until she fell over a stack of chairs and box springs, dislodging the moth, which glided aggressively toward the rest of us while we screamed and tried to shield our faces. It flew over my head and found its way back out through the window. The ginger kittens I stumbled upon were hidden in a bramble of bushes not far from the building. I heard their mewing before I saw them, a mound of squirming little bodies under the protection of the scraggly branches. The mother was nowhere in sight, but that wasn’t unusual. I’d come across kittens before, and if I came back to their hiding place often enough, eventually I’d see the mother. These kittens were newly born. Their eyes hadn’t opened yet. Their ears were still flat against their heads. I stayed for a while, watching them and then went on my way. I came back a few times, but never saw the mother. On one occasion I sat a little ways away and waited, hoping to see a mother cat, but I never did. I wondered how long they had been on their own. Knowing they would starve to death, I gathered the babies, scooping them into my t-shirt, and went back to my dorm, where I ran into several other girls, who oohed and aahed over my find. Happy to commiserate with others, we immediately planned a feeding schedule. Within an hour we’d scrounged up some doll bottles and filled them with milk. Adapting instantly to our new mama roles, we snuggled their tiny bodies and fed them, watching their tiny pink tongues lap at the droplets of milk. One of the girls had an end table with a small cabinet that the demonstrators never inspected because she usually kept nothing in it. The cabinet was big enough for two shoeboxes, in which the kittens lived when we were away from them. Over several days they finally opened their eyes, which seemed too big for their little, furry heads. They looked around in wonder. We were all in love, naive to think we could keep five kittens hidden and quiet all the time. An older girl, Gretchen, soon learned of our secret pets from one of the younger girls. On the fourth day, Gretchen burst into my room, her gaze roaming my space. “What do you want?” I asked. Her nostrils flared as she focused her attention on me. “Did you actually bring kittens here?” she demanded. “They would have died,” I said. “Something happened to the mother. She never came around.” Gretchen crossed her arms, her lip curling up slightly. “Where are they?” “In Jane’s room.” Gretchen turned on her heel and I followed her, speaking to her back. “We’re taking good care of them.

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

  Sleepovers were rare, but I enjoyed those times with my mother most of all because they reminded me of when it had been just the two of us and Synanon had not taken over our lives. We’d have dinner, then go to Theresa’s room, where we’d spend time looking over her record collection and reenacting her favorite musicals, coloring, cutting out paper dolls, reading storybooks and talking for hours. I discovered that Theresa could easily step into a child-like world and live there for hours, which created a kind of whimsy to our relationship. “Did you know that if you stand very still and are really quiet, you might get a chance to see a fairy?” Theresa said to me one day while we walked through a small wooded area. We stopped and looked up at the tops of the short trees that grew toward each other, creating canopies of branches that blocked out much of the sky. “Shh,” she whispered, eyes suddenly wide, index finger placed to her lips. I watched her stoop down to peek behind some low plant growth, gently pushing aside a cluster of tall clover. Birds chirped and chattered around us. I knelt to have a look, too, my heart hammering in my chest, wondering whether she had found something. Theresa was not pretending. The fairy world existed for her. When she spoke of the nature fairies to me, her green eyes would cloud over as if she were looking into that world. “Let’s sit down and wait,” she suggested. “We have to let the little forest fairies know that they are safe with us.” We made ourselves comfortable on the earthy floor, neither talking nor moving for ten minutes or so. I remained attentive, alert to the movements of any shy elusive creatures that were only inches high. Theresa finally gave a little laugh. “Come out, little fairies.” “Come out,” I echoed. When we saw not a single fairy, we finally stood and continued walking. “Did you know, Celena, that there is a community in Scotland that gardens with the help of fairies?” she said. “No,” I said. Theresa’s eyes glowed. “It’s simply amazing. All of the vegetables are triple in size.” She raised her hands, opening them wide to show me how large some of the vegetables grew to be. “One day we’ll have to visit. You won’t believe it; it’s just out of this world.” She took my hand. “Would you like to see that one day?” I nodded, and I wondered: if we could go to Scotland, could we also go other places, like back to Los Angeles? “Theresa, do you think we’ll always live here in Synanon?” I asked. My mother’s lips flickered in an attempt to keep her smile. “Synanon is a wonderful place in its own way. They have a lot to offer us.” We left the cloistered, wooded setting and walked back into the open.

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

  around me, and with eyes burning from chlorine, I’d skitter to the bathroom, waiting for the comfort of the dry clothes Alice brought me. Soon all the terror of the swimming lesson was forgotten as I ate a hot baloney sandwich prepared by my father, the white bread soaked with grease and mayonnaise. My life took on a regular rhythm as Alice eagerly stepped into the maternal role that my mother had vacated. She provided me with dolls whose blond hair I continually brushed until they were balding. My clothing, which Alice kept neatly folded in my dresser, smelled of Tide detergent and lavender. On weekends she plaited my hair into two braids and tied them with ribbons that matched the colors of my clothes. Among Alice’s relatives, I was called her little girl. When I wanted comfort, I learned to go to Alice. Possibly, at such a young age, Alice and my mother blended into one and the same person for me. They looked very similar to each other, and I don’t recall missing my mother with Alice around. But one afternoon, just as suddenly as my mother had departed, Alice left too. My father and I returned to the apartment to find all the furniture gone. Alice had taken what belonged to her. In shock, I walked the length of our bare living room. Then I sat on the floor while my father paced, phone to ear, his jaw clenched with tension. By the end of the week, my bags were packed. Jobless and struggling financially, he thought I might fare better under Alice’s care, and so, like the furniture, I went too. In Compton, where Alice’s father, Lewis, had a house, I was given two rooms: a bedroom and a playroom equipped with every toy Alice thought I should possess, as well as a school desk and handwriting booklets. Alice valued education. Whenever I spoke, she corrected my grammar. “Black English” was a pet peeve of hers and my father’s, though she was more stringent in scouring the dialect from my tongue. “That way of speaking will only hold you back,” she’d snap. Her expression soured when I’d blurt out, “Watcha doin’, huh?”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life. Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off— Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline. Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an ex pectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point. Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut. The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view. I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  We stare at each other to stave off the inevitable spat over who misses work. Warren’s down to his last few vacation days; I’d have to reschedule forty student conferences. But enough of the night sparkles through me that I say I’ll handle it, then I add, It’s good for me to get out every now and then. I hope so, he says. A few heartbeats keep me there in silence till I say, Was that sarcastic? He meets my eyes again, saying, Of course not. I start up the stairs and stop. I feel another urge to slide my arms around his strong middle and have him hold me, but if he withdrew, peeled my arms

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Pam claims her broke-dick husband has slam-dunked her for partying with truckers at roadhouses, which is preferable to folding his effing socks and stuffing the faces of her five mouthy kids. In group therapy that day, Pam got called out for wearing a Please Kill Me T-shirt. This message terrorized the only guy on the ward, a schizophrenic kid named Willy. Willy has scarlet acne emblazoning both cheeks, as if he’s being continuously slapped from the inside. He’s at the next table hunched over watercolor paper, meticulously painting a Greek keyhole pattern using black ink and a brush made up of only a few hairs. Two seats down from him is beautiful Flora, whose raving red hair hangs a torch in any room she enters. Often screaming in psychosis, Flora spends a lot of time in a padded room, tied down by leather four-point restraints. Medicated into a stupor, Flora is that day, and a nurse helps her odd crafts projects of gluing together hunks of foam into a kind of arctic-looking city. Pam says, You know what we should call this? The Maniacs’ Art Club? Tina says. Crafts for Cunts, Pam says. Please don’t use that word, says skinny Betty. Lovely Betty with the swan neck and the shiny black hair. St. Betty of the Perpetually Ducked Head. Age about thirty, looks sixty. As a child, Betty was consistently raped by her famous professor father, which kept her ever after starving herself almost to death. She’s assembling a wreath of fragrant eucalyptus using shades of muted green with faded yellow roses. You’ve gotten really good at this, Betty, I say, and it’s true she’s found a meticulous but subtly tinted order. You should work in a florist’s shop, Tina says. What do you do, anyway, I mean, for a living? She shrugs. (I’d later find out she took care of the wheelchair-bound father who’d raped her.) Do you find it morbid, Tina says, that we’re making wreaths? What does that conjure for you? Wreaths make me think of Christmas, skinny Betty says. That is my least favorite time of year. I meant gravestones. You find them on gravestones, Tina says. Maybe they want us all dead, Pam says. Well the feeling’s mutual. I hate those bitches. Which ones? I want to know. All of them. I say, What’s not to like? They’re nothing if not nice. You’re like those people who fall in love with their kidnappers, Pam says. Like what’s-her-name. Who held up the bank. The rich bitch. Betty says, Patty Hearst. How many suicide attempts does everybody have? Tina blurts out. I have unlucky thirteen. People go around with their various numbers. I have only about half of one, I say. You’re bullshitting me, Tina says.