I visited the grocery store Sunday afternoon. That’s a little off schedule. Normally, I do my grocery shopping early Sunday morning, after I take a walk and just as the store opens. With the afternoon comes more activity. More people, more bustle. In Sunday’s case, more music. A man stood in the parking lot playing violin, far enough from the entrance to avoid being chastised by management but close enough to capture the attention of shoppers. Grocery shoppers, these days, are in a hurry. Their heads are down; they peek over the top of their masks. This time they slowed down. Listened to the violinist. Recorded him on their cell phones (he was good). Some of us found our way to his open violin case to drop in some crumpled bills from our pockets. He wasn’t there to delight me. If I believe the sign he had posted, he was there for some help paying the bills for himself and kids, who he parents alone. Hearing him, seeing him playing his heart out in the hot afternoon Texas sun was a delight all the same, and the soundtrack to my short shopping excursion.
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As earworms go, a guy could do worse than “Isn’t She Lovely.” This has been my fate since yesterday in the morning, when I rounded the far end of the lake and came upon a shirtless young man sitting on the edge, his feet dangling over, but not into, the water, playing his guitar. It was early for guitar playing, something much more likely to happen around sunset than sunrise in this area. And he was on the commercial end of the lake, by the road, not nestled into the romantic set of the canal. Even so, there he was, strumming along, not looking up. I had a podcast playing in my ear, “The Daily” from the New York Times. Morning walks are for the news. Evening walks are for phone calls or audiobooks. Unless I skipped the morning walk, in which case it’s back to the news. As I passed, over the hushed voice of Michael Barbaro, I could hear gentle plucking of the strings and a very soft hummed melody. “Isn’t She Lovely.” I don’t know anymore what Michael Barbaro was talking about, as my mind was filled with nothing but that song as I walked the next half hour back home.
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A couple got married on Water Street Saturday night. Water Street is not really a street. It’s the name of a mixed-use development on the water. Though there’s no signage in place now, in the architect’s early renderings of the project, WATER STREET is prominently signed across both sides of the monorail track that runs overhead, cutting through the development and circling all around the business district. Riding the monorail is on my bucket list. But it only operates during business hours on weekdays, times I usually have my own business hours to attend to and have little time for taking a birdseye tour of my neighborhood.
The Water Street plaza is built so that a walkway extends out into the lake, like a tiny pier, something for the gondolas to navigate around. As I came through on my walk on Saturday, en route to the canal, I saw a crowd had gathered on the little pier. This is unusual. Some days there might be a person leaning on the rail looking at the water, or a couple lounging in the heavy turquoise Adirondack chairs that someone dragged down there. But never a crowd. And folks were dressed up fancy, like they were all going out for the night, which is also unusual these days. Even though the restaurants are open, and they have plenty of business, they don’t have groups. Four or six at the most.
As I turned into the plaza—the plaza and the water cut the walking path, so a person has to go in, across, and back—it all started to make sense. There was another little group of four up by the swanky seafood place, making their way toward the big group on the pier all in a row, arms linked, trying to match each other’s slow steps. They were a bride and groom, each with a companion, making their way down the walk to share their nuptials on the water with family and close friends. I couldn’t drop down to the pier and continue my route without inserting myself into a dozen wedding videos being captured on smartphones. I cut instead between the taco shop and the Italian joint, around a building and across a small patch of grass to get back on the path right before it turned into the canal. Other folks coming the opposite way were doing the same, cutting across the grass and around the building, seeing the wedding on up ahead. Folks on the plaza were at a standstill. Everyone was happy. There was, after all, small wedding taking place on a tiny pier in the middle of a pandemic.
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In Ross Gay’s No. 73 “The Wave of Unfamiliars,” he writes of being waved at by people he didn’t know, and was reminded of his grandfather’s practice of waving to everyone on the country roads of Verndale, Minnesota.
. . . to the driver of every passing truck or car he raised his first two fingers to the stiff brim of his John Deere ball cap and cut them through the air like the gentlest initiation of a curve ball ever. it was an elegant wave, understated, that intimated an older time of neighborliness, which is actually the present time, too, evidenced by my two unfamiliar wavers.
Now, I initially missed the Minnesota part. The scene he was describing was familiar, as these things are to anyone who has lived in a country setting, especially in the rural Midwest. But I was listening to Gay read his book on audio, not reading it myself, and sometimes I distract and miss little cues to a story, like the name of a state. I smiled at the familiarity as he went along, thinking he was talking about Indiana. But then he got personal. When you’re from a place like Minnesota, you aren’t ready for authors on a national scale to write about the small towns you knew as a kid, or your college town, or, by gosh, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. But also let me tell you, the experience of having an author be familiar with the places of your childhood is nothing like having Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox seem to be familiar, and loudly so, with things you’ve never told them. I’ve now experienced both, and can assure you one is very satisfying. The other, terrifying.
But my grampa’s waves got more impressive as he kept it up out on the country roads past Wadena and Staples and New York Mills and Alexandria. My grampa was like an ambassador. He waved all the way down to Saint Cloud and over to Duluth. He waved down to the cities when we went to see Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek do their thing. But nothing confirmed my grampa’s fame more than when he waved us down to Brainerd to see Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. The huge statues, toward whom he touched the brim of his cap, bellowed, “Welcome Mathew and Ross Gay from Langhorne, Pennsylvania”: my grampa, Virgil Seaton, was the mayor of Minnesota!
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In No. 82, “Kayte Young; Phone Number: 555-867-5309,” Gay tells the story of meeting friends, and noticing one, Kayte Young, had written her name and phone number on the ID tag inside her backpack, an act he found to be adorable, and also one that stirred a memory.
But Kayte’s naming and phone numbering her bag, which truly filled my heart with flamingos, or turned my heart into a flamingo, strikes me as a simple act of faith in the common decency, which is often rewarded but is called faith because not always. Like the time when i was delivering papers in the predawn, cutting paths through the dew-wet grass in between the apartments, and I found, on the sidewalk, a wallet with five hundred dollars in it. There was plenty of identifying material in the wallet—not a license or credit card, but other things all with the same name on them. When I found that one of those things was something like a frequent-gamblers card issued by one of the Atlantic City casinos, I decided this was dirty money and I might as well get some. I’m sure I would have figured out how that money belonged to me even if I found evidence in the wallet that the owner was a frequent donor to Oxfam or Amnesty International, as I needed that new Steve Caballero mini and about four hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of gummy bears. But he wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, keep that money today. Maybe in part because I can afford my own gummy bears, but even more so, I think, because I now believe in the common decency, and I believe adamantly in faith in the common decency, which grows, it turns out, with belief, which grows, it turns out, with faith, and on and on, as evidenced by Name: Kayte Young; Phone number: 555-867-5309.
I am pleased to know that the next time the story comes up at a family gathering about how I left the $1.35 I stepped over on my way to school in the 2nd grade sitting there in the puddle where it had become encased in ice on a frigid morning, because it didn’t belong to me (it turns out it belonged to my sister, who lost it on her way to school an hour before), I can point to faith and believe and the common decency and suggest to my family that is a great delight.
*
Gay closes his collection of delights on his forty-third birthday, a year out from when his project began. He recounts a few remaining delights of that last day:
Among the delights—noticing on a patch of at-first-look barren ground no fewer than four colorful tiny flowers in bloom, one of them pink as the sky over the cemetery in Bloomington on lucky nights, one yellow as the sun. A black cat on the way to the kombucha store (they sell other things—I was getting booch) whom I startled awake by yelling Gato! [. . . ] A tiny bee alighting in the gully between my knuckles. A hummingbird hovering close enough to fill my left ear with wind. A very sweet hello from the woman stocking shelves, rubbing her eye with her fist and smiling. [. . . ] And a handwritten letter in which my friend explained that delight means “out from light” and is etymologically connected to delicious, to delectable, which I did not know despite this past year turning and turning delight over, which connects delight also to cultivation. Makes it a garden.
I am inclined to sum something up, as this has been a “yearlong project,” and so today is kind of a graduation, or a funeral, where someone, in this case me, offers a commencement address or eulogy. Why delight now? the inclination wonders. Or, What have I learned from delight. Or, god forbid, My year of delight. Though those might be catchy titles of books I won’t be writing, I have nothing to sum up. Because today is the day of my birth.
My friend Pat told me about the village next to his mother’s in the Philippines where, a few years back, a typhoon had leveled most of everything. Salvaged from the wreckage, stacked in the gazebo that had survived, were all the doors.
Take from that what you will. We still have all the doors.
*
This month, we’ve been reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights together. I don’t have a set of questions for you as we reflect on these little essayettes. Instead, I just have one—whether in the pages of the book or in the byways of your week: what delights have you encountered?
In July, we’ll be delighting in The Book of Delights together. We invite you to pick up this book and join us in some delights of your own.
Reading Schedule:
Our conversation will focus on just two or three essayettes each time, drawn from the following sections:
July 15: Ch. 1-34
July 23: Ch. 35-68
August 5: Ch. 69-102
Beginning August 12, Laura Boggess will lead us in a community reading of Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakeable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness by Rick Hanson. Resilience is a quality that is important not just in crisis, but in everyday living. Combining neuroscience, mindfulness and psychology, Hanson works toward development of “twelve vital inner strengths hardwired into your own nervous system” to learn how to cope and thrive. (Read Laura’s announcement post.)
Finally, in September, Callie Feyen will take us to the theatre with Sonia Barkat for Winter Stars: Three 10-Minute Plays: From Tragedy to Fantasy to Comedy. These compact little plays carry deep truths we’ll explore together.
Photo by Shevchenko Alexander, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Will Willingham.
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Megan Willome says
I love that you felt so seen, reading Ross Gay’s tale of waving.
And what’s delighting me today is this line of yours: “It was early for guitar playing,” Thanks for welcoming us into your world.
L.L. Barkat says
Megan, I love that you pulled out that line, which just sounds like a poem starter, doesn’t it?
Will Willingham says
It was surprising, you know? Very much caught me off guard. But Gays’ waving story, and its strong Minnesota placement, was a joy.
Yes, it was early for guitar playing. 🙂
Bethany R. says
I love what you shared about leaving the money you found in the puddle, and later discovering it was your sister’s. Delight.
Laura Lynn Brown says
What a delight, and a rare gift these days, to hear live music. Of course the morning guitarist wasn’t there to draw a crowd. And the grocery store guy had a pandemic-driven purpose for his serenade. But it plucks my heartstrings to think about the, well, faith of that man, to come to a public place and open his case and write a note about why he was there. Some might see it as persuasive writing, or even manipulative. I’m going to call it something my English department colleagues have been talking about in planning our syllabi and other communication with students this fall: transparency.
If I were to write a delight riffing off of this, I might write about all the musicians who would go on the “what is giving you life in this pandemic?” list —giving concerts on social media from their homes (Andy Gullahorn and Jill Phillips, Joy Ike, members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Dave Von Bieker), posting weekly songs or tunes (Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, Sarah Jarosz, Tania Runyan), singing worship music from within a church, whether during a service (Elise Massa and the Kohn family at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh) or not (Liz Vice and friends in Manhattan). I can’t think of a single example of music I came upon in the wild.
The delight about the backpack is touching, both the trust in writing her phone number and the fear that the backpack might be lost. It also makes me think she’s caring for herself as her parents once might have, in writing a name on clothing tags before sending her off to summer camp. Even more touching is his confession. This could serve as a writing prompt: write about a memory that recalls something you did that you wish you hadn’t. Confess it without self-condemnation.