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A Storyteller, Unbecoming

Painted houses in Shekhawati region, Rajasthan, India. Photo by Ahron de Leeuw (CC BY 2.0).

Namrata Poddar | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,636 words)

 

I remember writing workshops and story gods — firm believers in the real, in an alabaster universal and unhappy endings.

I remember hearing for the nth time from story gods: do not write about writing. I would nod. Of course. Last thing the world needed was another writer staring deep into their navel.

I remember visiting a Thai restaurant with my cousins once. They ordered jasmine rice with red, green, or Panang curry. I ordered coconut rice, as usual. A cousin snapped shut the menu and said, “You had to be different again?”

I remember writing workshops and lessons from story gods — no adjectives, no adverbs, no prepositions, no over-thinking, no over-remembering, no over-feeling, less interiority, more action, the usual elements of white male style.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver, John Updike, and John Cheever. When it was time to be diverse, there was Grace Paley and James Baldwin. When it was time to be radical, there was Bob Dylan.

I remember growing up in a city once called Bombay and the carrot halva cake Ma had made in the shape of a human heart for my fifth birthday. I was wearing an overused Jinny & Johnny dress discarded by one of my rich cousins. I bent over the candle, squinched my eyes, and made a wish: please please please Krishna, let Mumma and Papa be here for my next birthday too.

I remember Bombay years and Papa singing, always singing aloud with whoever was playing on our red National cassette player. Unlike Ma or Didi, my older sister, I was the one to hover around him. As he ironed his cotton shirts for hours, I would sit cross-legged on the floor next to him, pored over my drawing book with Camel crayons. Once done ironing, he would introduce me to classical North Indian, to devotional and ghazal singers, to Bollywood stars. I must have been 6 or 7 then and my parents had yet to call it quits. I don’t recall every name, but I remember Ravi Shankar, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mohammed Rafi, Kishori Amonkar, Nargis, Meena Kumari. I told Papa I liked Madhubala the most — she had a Colgate smile. Nargis and Meena Kumari cried too much.

When Ma and Papa called it quits, I remember looking for another model of that red National cassette player in electronic stores for years. I never found it.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.
 
I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember summer vacations when my parents hadn’t exactly called it quits. Papa was no longer living with us in Bombay and had moved back with my grandparents in Calcutta. For several summers, we visited Papa, Dadu, and Dadi at the Poddar house in Bara Bazar. A typical May afternoon in Calcutta, thunderstorms and pounding rain, followed days of homicidal heat. Didi was busy playing Ludo with my older cousins in our room upstairs, but I wanted to watch rain fall on Bara Bazar streets. I hopped down to the gaddi on the first floor where Dadu was chitchatting with the neighbors passing by. He was perched on his rocking chair in his usual outfit — a silk beige kurta and a white muslin dhoti — with one of his English dictionaries in hand. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology was his favorite, but I don’t remember the edition he was reading that day. I pulled his kurta and dragged him to the main door so we could watch the rain. “What nice smell, Dadu!” I clutched his walking stick, as tall as me, and watched the parched street exhale fumes as if Aladdin’s lamp had been rubbed and a genie might appear any moment. Dadu removed his Gandhian glasses and inhaled theatrically. “Petrichor,” he said. When I asked him to repeat the word, he opened his dictionary and raised my index finger to a page starting with P. I stood on tiptoes to see the word clearly and nodded each time I repeated, pet-ree-chaur.

I remember standing on tiptoes to touch Papa’s sitar, enthroned above a bookshelf with locked glass doors. I’d started reciting The Daffodils from my English textbook; reading poetry in Hindi, Marathi, French, Spanish, or Creole would come later in life. Reading in my mother tongue may never happen; Marwari is a space of my heart, of family, music, dance, and a part of me wants to protect us from texts. That day, though, as I tried to reach Papa’s sitar, I remember squashing the tip of my nose against the glass door and staring at the hieroglyphics on Papa’s hardcovers — voluptuous curves in black ink extending in all directions and connected by a horizontal line.

I remember recounting the story of Romeo and Juliet to Dadi when she visited us from Calcutta to help Ma who’d taken a third job since we didn’t have Papa or his income around anymore. I must have been 8 or 9 and I parroted every word Betsy Miss taught me at school that day. “Shayspeare wrote the world’s most famous love story. The world remembers it even after 500 years.” I stood against the lime-washed wall of our one-bedroom flat in Bombay, locked my palms, and brought them closer to my chest, as we did in the elocution period at school. When I was done, Dadi continued shelling peas and discarding the pods into a circular cane basket. “Dying because you can’t live without your beloved?” She lowered her glasses and gave me the grandma look. “But that’s desperation, beta. Not love.”

I locked my palms tighter into each other. “Betsy Miss said Shayspeare wrote the most famous love story!”

I remember Bombay years and singing with my teenage sister who’d started learning French: Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? I didn’t understand the language but I loved feeling my tongue around those foreign words; I enjoyed their familiar tune, too. I knew then I would learn French on growing up. What I didn’t know was how hard I’d fall in my love of the different.

I remember undergraduate years of Business School in Bombay and repeating to my uncles and aunties for the nth time that I did not want to get married to their Marwari friend’s brother’s cousin-in-law’s nephew whom they were proposing as the brightest possible future for me, a divorcee’s daughter. I did not care to pursue an MBA, IAS, IFS, CFA, or software engineering after marriage should my future husband allow me either. Instead, I wanted to pursue my love for French and an education in the Arts — now.

“MA in French literature?” one of my uncles said. “What next, M.A.D. in Swedish cake baking? Soon, you’ll go mad, child. Mad!”

“Oho, whose salvation vill your degrees achieve anyvay?” my aunt added, sipping the last of her chai.

I remember undergrad years in Bombay and my first class of Yoga — a casual curiosity, a cheap opportunity. After practicing asanas for an hour, we moved on to a lesson in meditation. I remember the boredom I felt after the first few minutes of staring into the candle’s flame, a way to steer the mind into stillness. What I didn’t know then was how hard I’d fall in my love for Yoga, a worldview rooted in union, and at the other end of my love of the different, a worldview rooted in separation.

I remember begging Brahmin professors at a university in Mumbai to let me in their Masters program in comparative literature. I remember being told that they couldn’t lower the program standards by enrolling baniya Business Majors.

“I mean, Marwaris are good at making money, but culture?” a professor said with her oxbridge drawl, stressing the “w” and “r” instead of the local pronunciation, Marvaadee.

I remember daydreaming day after day about my escape to America, the most hospitable land for immigrants (I believed media stories at that age), the best way I knew to escape a life that would be imposed on me in the name of family and love. I worked hard with my books and won a fellowship for a PhD in French in one of those private American schools that paid a stipend for summer months too.

I remember grad school years in the U.S. and white colleagues suggesting I take lessons in American English, more than once. When my brown colleague — we’ll call her Oshun — found out about this, she put her foot down for us foreign students. Over the years, Oshun taught me how books could save — and kill — but that day, she simply told our white colleague, “Will you cut the racist crap? Indian English is English.”

I remember story gods on a very long reading list whose mastery would allow me to continue a PhD in French literature — Montaigne, Racine, Rousseau, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michaux, Perec, the usual suspects. I remember pleading with the one in charge to replace a few on the list with gods and goddesses closer to my home by the Arabian Sea — once an archipelago of seven islands, my home. I wanted to add black and brown writers who wrote in French. “From the Indian Ocean? Like, who?” the one in charge asked.

I remember visiting Montreal from Philadelphia over Christmas because winter break was too short and the fare to Mumbai five times higher. At the Trudeau International Airport immigration desk, the red-haired officer asked me about my student status in the U.S., then continued his interrogation in French. As he opened a fresh page to stamp my passport, he said, “You speak very good French.”

“Thanks, you too,” I replied.

He stamped my passport over a lingering silence and raised his hand to summon the next traveler.

Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World.

I remember census survey forms. One day, when applying for a job, I was filling out a form online. My buddy Elijah was visiting me in Philly from London and watching a Woody Allen movie on TV. He sat on the couch beside my desk with a bag of pretzels.

“What would you pick for me, bud? Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Black, Other?” I read aloud the relevant options and didn’t need to explain how ridiculous they read.

“Caucasian,” Eli said, eyes fixed on the screen, as he popped another pretzel into his mouth. “Aren’t you guys the real Aryan deal?”

I remember the 20s and their ceaseless game of hellos and goodbyes, a game of switching homes across the planet. Dadu passed away and Papa’s singing was becoming a distant memory since I migrated to the U.S. Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World. I remember a constant longing for home and seeking it in the bodies of men, hoping that lust would lead me to love and love would lead me home.

I remember landing at LAX with Philly years packed in two suitcases. I was excited about a job that would bring free weekends, warmer weather, and new people into my life. I’d said goodbye to my Philly boyfriend, and realized, as one often does after grieving via denial, that I needed to fill my weekends with something other than men. I’d been amassing volumes of personal diaries — another attempt at finding home — but I hadn’t taken my desire for creative writing seriously. Wasn’t that kind of literary life a gora luxury for those who eat, pray, love, and indulge their muse? It never occurred to me that an artist’s life could be in harmony with my life.

The new job offered me enrollment discounts so I signed up eventually for a creative writing workshop. One day, when reworking a story draft at Peet’s, I remember my fingertips tingle and a bubble of silence expand around me as it drowned rush-hour traffic outside and the barista’s calling out the names of clients awaiting their cappuccinos, Americanos, peppermint white mochas, and holiday spice lattes.

I remember a blond friend from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) pulling me aside at a writing conference in Vermont once. “Now I know how much you love your In-dia, but can you teach me how to pronounce Amy-Tuh-Vaah Gosh? He’s my favorite writer,” she said. Her gray-eyed biracial bestie from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) faked a cough.

I remember meeting the friends of a new date at a bar in Beverly Hills. Halloween was approaching and ideas on potential costumes for the next party were being exchanged over dirty martinis. One couple settled on Red Riding Hood and the wolf, another couple settled on cop and prisoner, and yet another, on doctor and nurse. When my date and I were quiet, the desi American lawyer, most talkative of them all, suggested we dress as Cowboy and Indian. I wanted to be liked by my date’s buddies so I decided to play sport, almost. When my date and I went to the party, the lawyer complemented the feathers on my outfit and asked me, what kind of Indian wears bindis on her forehead?

“The thoroughly confused kind.” I winked.

I remember the first visit to my ancestral house in Shekhawati region of India’s Thar desert. The blooming cacti of Southern Californian streets and those first road trips across Death Valley made me miss my grandparents and the stories of their desert past I’d grown up hearing. I remembered family lore and endless variations on how our town was founded by one ancient Poddar family, how Marwari merchants once commissioned artists to paint their homes with the latest trends in the visual arts, how Shekhawati is the world’s biggest open-air gallery.

I called my sister in Mumbai one day, booked our flights, and made my first visit to the ancestors in Ramgarh, one of the richest towns of 19th-century India, a ghost town now that trade routes had moved from the Thar desert to the Indian Ocean ports. Rumor spread fast in the small Rajasthani town that Poddar girls from Mumbai and LA were visiting.

For years, I’d not spoken to Papa. For years, I’d kept deliberate distance from Papa’s family — Dadi, Dadu, cousins, uncles, aunts — as if they were not my own. For years, I’d declared myself a nomad, uninspired by bourgeois, nationalist ideals like roots. For years, I pretended I’d no memory of the letters I wrote to Papa as a child, week after week after week: Papa please come back, Papa I miss you, Papa you promised last summer, Papa I’m still waiting, Mumma doesn’t tell me why you left, Dadi doesn’t tell me why you left too, yesterday I heard that Kishori Amonkar song on TV, today I saw Guru Dutt’s poster in a store, do you know Tina’s papa plays the sitar too?, why you left us Papa?

For years, I believed my father had read my letters, because at 7, you believe what the elders in your family tell you, and because at 7, you just goddamn believe.

Walking around Ramgarh, our tour guide showed us Poddar houses, Poddar temples, Poddar cenotaphs, all covered in some of the region’s best preserved frescoes, what pride in roots! The guide took us next to our ancestral house, the Poddar house where Dadu and Dadi regularly spent their winters. He gave us a tour: here, a flour mill made of stone in the former kitchen, there, the outer courtyard where our forefathers traded in spices, wool, and cotton with the passing caravans of the Silk Road, and out there, in the alcove, the bookkeeper’s cabin, across from the main door, so he could check out the visitors before letting them in. I was playing the fresh-off-American-Airlines tourist, taking pictures faster than I could breathe, when Didi sauntered to the gaddi’s corner and picked up a scroll with a thick bed of dust on it.

“What language is this?” my sister asked the guide as she opened the pages with a script that resembled long lists, each line ending with numbers in parentheses. I lowered my camera and walked toward the scroll. The script resembled Urdu as each line started from the right side of the page. Or did it? Neither of us could tell. Like other Bombay Marwaris from Shekhawati region, Didi and I were fluent in Hindi, Marathi, and English. We spoke Marwari with our grandparents, a pure version of Hindi, English, or Hinglish with our parents, and a creolized Bombay Hinglish between the two of us. We used to speak Bengali during our Calcutta summers in childhood too; Didi is more fluent in Indian languages as she lives in the motherland. Yet we felt no shame in not reading our mother tongue. Marwaris I know are seldom nationalistic in the same way as Europeans, Bengalis, or Marathis. As migrant desert folk, we believe in adapting wherever we are — a survival mechanism born from harsh weather and scarce resources.

“Must be Marwari, no?” I said, my desert pride shaky then.

“They call it Moody tongue,” the tour guide said. “A cryptic language written in lists. Men used them to conduct business.” When we asked questions on Moody language, the tour guide said he didn’t know the answers; his ancestors weren’t traders. On returning to America, I googled Marwari merchants from Shekhawati and Moody tongue, and didn’t find much. After a while, I willfully quit; there’s only so much I desired in my indulgence of roots.

Yet I remember that mysterious ancestral script written in lists. And upon my return to LA, I remember calling Dadi in Kolkata after over a decade. We talked nonstop for two hours.

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists.

I remember telling stories to my niece before she went to bed every night I saw her when I visited my family in Mumbai from California. This was my way of making up for becoming her American Masi, making up for the childhood I had missed witnessing: her first birthday, her first walk, her first haircut, her first day of school, her first prize in dance. This was my way of making up to her for the childhood I’d always wanted, one with stories told to me in bed by my parents. I would read to my niece the stories of Shiva, Uma, Laxmi, Ganesha, Arjuna, Aladdin, Ali Baba, stopping often to embellish the story with imagined details, and when my niece would fall asleep, I would whisper in her ear my favorite line from the world of stories: “Tomorrow little one, I’ll tell you a more entertaining story if the King lets me live.”

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists. The liberals organized conferences, workshops, retreats, seminars, symposia, colloquia, caucuses, tea clubs, Boba clubs, chai hours, coffee hours, happy hours, unhappy hours, and advertised these on social media with the image of a raised alabaster fist. The liberals loved to talk. They talked about Art, they talked about Culture, they talked about History, they talked about Science, they talked about Climate Change Capitalism Democracy Refugees Border-crossing Social Justice Gender Justice Reproductive Justice Environmental Justice, and raised their alabaster fists in the air. The liberals were angry, the liberals were earnest, the liberals were determined to make America great again through Art. Above all, the liberals were funny, always funny. And slow on irony.

I remember Bombay years, the April heat, and the anticipation of story books after final-exam days at elementary school. Ma would take me to the raddi wallah, Ramu Uncle, whose “store” across from our residential building was tucked between Good Luck, the stationery store, and Amul, the dairy store. Ma would buy fruits and vegetables from the street vendors nearby while I would sit, yoga style — as I learned to call it in America — on a heap of old newspapers, sifting my favorites from piles of used books and magazines: copies of Suppandi, Chacha Chaudhary, Tin Tin, Malory Towers, St. Clare’s. Issues of Amar Chitra Katha were always my favorite find — or did narrative drive create this memory in its need to inject order and meaning into a fragmented past?

I remember the parcel my grandma sent me from Kolkata as a housewarming gift when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntington Beach with a boyfriend I’d eventually marry — a resplendent lehenga from her wedding trousseau, covered with handmade zardosi embroidery in real silver threads that had survived decades of coastal Indian humidity; not one thread has turned dark. Gopis in different Kathak positions stand on each of the 39 pleats that frame the lehenga’s central-front pleat, where a pale-skinned Krishna stands on one knee, plays the flute, and looks deferentially at a blue-skinned Radha, his Shakti, who dances in joyous oblivion. Hindu mythology is complex and I’m learning to decode the deeper layers of meaning to this androgynous union, portrayed through a reversal of the couple’s skin color.

Each time I open the saree cover that encloses Dadi’s lehenga, the first thing I do is bury my head in it. I inhale slowly the combination of rose, naphthalene balls, and a musty, woody smell I associate with almirahs of Calcutta summers, and I hear Papa playing his sitar, I hear Calcutta rains with Dadu, I hear my Dadi’s laughter as she pickles dates after soaking them in lemon juice for days, and I remember the letter she sent with her parcel: “This one tells a love story too, beta. A story of union and non-possession that goras don’t get. But first, you learn to read.”

* * *

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and non-fiction, and serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, where she curates a series on Race, Power, and Storytelling. Her work has appeared in The Margins, Transition, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She has lived in different parts of the world and currently calls Huntington Beach home.

Editor: Ben Huberman

To Be a Lexicographer Is to Surrender to Folly

Image by GCShutter (via Getty Images)

The arrival in the past 30 years of search engines and vast databases of electronic texts has made dictionaries far more comprehensive, but also much more complicated to compile and update (not that the task was easy to begin with). Andrew Dickson’s Guardian piece on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary focuses on the tension between the cumulative, decades-long process of updating the OED and a world in which few people still pay for hard copies and Google reaps most of the ad revenue from online queries. What is it that keeps this endeavor chugging along? There’s institutional inertia at work, no doubt, but also something even more amorphous: the vocational resistance — one might call it love? — of lexicographers who have embarked on a journey whose end they know they’ll never see.

It takes a particular sort of human to be a “word detective”: something between a linguistics academic, an archival historian, a journalist and an old-fashioned gumshoe. Though hardly without its tensions — corpus linguists versus old-school dictionary-makers, stats nerds versus scholarly etymologists — lexicography seems to be one specialist profession with a lingering sense of common purpose: us against that ever-expanding, multi-headed hydra, the English language. “It is pretty obsessive-compulsive,” Jane Solomon said.

The idea of making a perfect linguistic resource was one most lexicographers knew was folly, she continued. “I’ve learned too much about past dictionaries to have that as a personal goal.” But then, part of the thrill of being a lexicographer is knowing that the work will never be done. English is always metamorphosing, mutating, evolving; its restless dynamism is what makes it so absorbing. “It’s always on the move,” said Solomon. “You have to love that.”

There are other joys, too: the thrill of catching a new sense, or crafting a definition that feels, if not perfect, at least right. “It sounds cheesy, but it can be like poetry,” Michael Rundell reflected. “Making a dictionary is as much an art as a craft.”

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“My Sparkling Brain”: Dealing with Multiple Sclerosis at Age 27

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After getting diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, Meredith White comes to terms with the weight of knowing what that diagnosis brings, and the uncertainties of living in a body with an incurable degenerative disease. Read her essay at The Walrus.

One night, three months later, I slid into an mri machine, a little excited, a little bored, a little anxious. My primary fear was that I had some hidden and unknown piece of metal in me that the magnets in the machine would excite out of my body in a painful discovery. The machine switched on, nothing happened, and I exhaled. Nothing hidden, nothing mysterious. I settled in and lay as still as I could for the next forty-five minutes while the mri clanged, whirred, and clicked. To give myself something to think about, I recited poetry in my head. In what may be the best example of dramatic irony I will experience in my life, a poem by William Butler Yeats came to mind: “I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now…”

Yeats’s speaker has gained prophetic vision through sharing in the drink of the Country of the Young—the land of the immortals, in Irish myth. The speaker is undone by this knowledge of what is, and what is not, to come. He seems paradoxically shrunken, his life condensed to one miserable fact: that he will never be with the woman he loves. Knowledge of what is to come, Yeats suggests, will not spare you from the necessity of experience.

The vision in my right eye never fully returned. With both eyes open, I don’t notice this, but if I squint or wink or cover over my left eye, I am reminded that I carry this small neurological scar and that one day I might have more. I’ve wondered, struggling through a bout of debilitating fatigue, if the fog in my brain and the weight in my limbs might never lift and if this would mean I have to give up my ambition to do, to see, to write, to accomplish anything. I try to look straight at the future, but it dissolves, in my flawed vision, into a continuing mystery with a slight possibility, now, of bad things. A life can feel so small. But there is a contingency plan, phone numbers of the clinic to call if I need to. I take a deep breath. I remind myself that Socrates was wrong: there are many things beyond myself that are worth investigating in the meantime. There are so many activities worth doing with a belief in their certainty. When I go to work. When I see my friends tonight. When I finish this essay. When, when, when.

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A Tale of Two Vegases

View of the strip in Las Vegas. (Kobby Dagan/VWPics via AP Images)

Gayle Brandeis | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,027 words)

 

The Best of Times — March, 2007

The night before I was slated to fly to Atlanta to attend the biggest writing conference of the year, I was sideswiped by one of my vomiting episodes. These hit every few months — hours of intense abdominal pain that came and went like labor, followed by hours of vomiting that often led to a trip to the emergency room; this had been going on for the past 12 years, with no diagnosis. I didn’t want to miss the trip, but I was writhing around on the floor, and heaving into a large mixing bowl, and attempting to keep the anti-nausea suppositories up my ass long enough for them to kick in. I was chanting, “Help me, help me, help me” — words that always burbled from my mouth during these episodes. I wasn’t sure who this chant was aimed at — not my husband, who tended to shy away whenever the vomiting began — but my mom seemed to hear me in Oceanside, 100 miles from my home in Riverside, California. She called and was alarmed when I told her I still hoped to get on the plane the next morning.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced. Before I had the sense to stop her, she purchased a last-minute ticket for my flight. She picked me up in her red Intrepid shortly after sunrise, and I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. I pretended to sleep most of the flight.

My mom and I ended up having a surprisingly good time in Atlanta — we danced together, attended illuminating panels, had a blast with her cousin who lived in the area, ate copious amounts of boiled peanuts; she even made meaningful eye contact with Walter Mosley, who she was certain would one day become my stepfather. When our flight was delayed, she was miraculously relaxed and chatty, and I didn’t feel the need to pretend to sleep on the plane to avoid her. I was plenty sleepy by the time we arrived at the Las Vegas airport, though — it was 1 a.m., and we had missed our connecting flight. The airline gave us the option of staying in the airport and flying home in a few hours, or taking a hotel room and flying home late the next day.

I was so tired, I needed to rest my head on the ticket counter, but I looked up at her and said “Why don’t we stay? Maybe we could see a show or something.” It was the first time I could remember voluntarily extending a visit with her. Our relationship had always been complicated, but when she started to show signs of a delusional disorder 14 years earlier, our connection became all the more fraught.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and soon we were giggling in a free cab on our way to a free hotel room just off the strip. Our luggage was still on the plane, so we slipped into the plush white robes hanging in the closet and crashed for a few hours. We put our rumpled travel clothes back on after our showers, then ordered egg white and asparagus omelets with our free breakfast vouchers and set out to see how much Vegas we could pack into a day.

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Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Crutches from Shutterstock

Britney Wilson | Longreads | February 2018 | 25 minutes (6,304 words)

 

“You good?” you asked, pulling a gray wool blanket up tighter around your shoulders, yawning, and stretching your legs out on the worn blue couch in the corner of my apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me and attempting to do my version of tiptoeing back over to my bed, hoping the slight clanking of my crutches wouldn’t wake anyone.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me. I was in law school. I’d spent the hours before your arrival cursing the fact that I had been born in the middle of February, and praying for your safe journey as I watched the snowstorm that was beginning outside my window.

The night before, on the phone, I had been worried. The news had been forecasting that the accumulation might be pretty significant, and as sad as the thought had made me, I’d suggested that maybe you shouldn’t come after all. You’d promised it would be fine and that you would all be there. I was genuinely concerned, but equally relieved by your determination.

A lawyer friend of mine had perfectly summed up what my transition from college to law school had been like. She said undergrad was alma mater (as in “dear mother”) and graduate school was the stepmom. You initially hate her because she’s not your mother, and you resent the way she seems to be encroaching on your life. Eventually, as you each come to appreciate the other’s unique role, you develop your own separate relationship and become friends. I liked the analogy, but I was two years in, and still hadn’t gotten to the friendly part. I desperately needed that reunion.

The only guy in the bunch, you had offered to sleep on the floor and give someone else the couch, but they’d insisted you take it. They had put you through enough on the drive up. You deserved your rest.

Because I’d known it would take me the longest, I’d let everyone else get ready for bed before me. So, I was the last person to get in the bathroom after our personal updates and in-house karaoke sessions wound down in the early hours of the morning, after you all arrived. By the time I came out, everyone was asleep, except you. I could tell you’d been fighting it.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me.

I stepped around Mia and Monique, who were lying across the floor old-school slumber party style on a pile of extra sheets. Bending down when I got to my bed, I gingerly placed my crutches on the floor next to it and moved an extra pillow to the head of my bed where Lisa was lying at its foot.

You leaned forward from the couch, craning your neck slightly to watch me climb onto the bed. When you were sure I was all set, you leaned back against the arm of the couch and yawned again.

“Alright, good night. I love you,” you said.

“Good night. I love you too.”

As I closed my eyes that morning, flanked by my friends on all sides, feeling supported and at ease for the first time in months, with your voice as the last one I heard before I fell asleep, I wondered where it had come from — the love.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

Letter to a Dog Walking Service

Illustration by Wenting Li

Diane Mehta | Longreads | February 2018 | 21 minutes (5,195 words)

Dear REDACTED,

I’m writing to inform you that you have a terrible way with people. We hired you because you offered predictability in a hectic world. The point is that each day you have sent a different person to walk our dog. We’ve been polite about it. But it stops now. Imagine if every day you came home to a different husband or there was a weird substitute for your onion bagel. But I like variety, you might say. Well, imagine that your substitute for the onion bagel was a kishka and you were a vegetarian, or that the different husband you came home to every night smelled like a kishka, and you were a vegetarian. Consistency over kishkas is the point. You’re supposed to send a regular person on a regular walk on a regular schedule.

When I hired you, I told you about the migraines. Daily since March. I’m not sure how old you are, and whether you’ve had children, but a full-blown migraine is like childbirth in your head. Put it in dog terms, you say. Think of a ferocious, rabid dog inside you clawing to get out and you’re on all fours, crying, stuck with it, and you think there’s no kind of chew toy or meat treat in the world that can stop this.

A two-hour window for dog walking is just the edge of what I can handle. What happens if she is late? Then I will get angry. One of my migraine triggers is waiting. I have learned to avoid situations in which I am waiting, and now here I am stuck waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Kishka of whatever aptitude or variety to arrive. This is not okay for me. Neither is it okay for my new dog.
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Unpacking Forty Years of Fandom For a Losing Team

David Durochik / AP Photo

Kevin Sampsell | Longreads | February 2018 | 18 minutes (4,605 words)

The last time I cried about a football game was in 2009.

When I was a kid, though — oh man! The waterworks from the coiled frustration and utter heartbreak of losing a game, or ending a season with a sad thud, was often too much for me. I’m not sure what is considered normal blood pressure for junior high and high school dudes, but mine was probably pretty high.

If you’re a sports fan, you don’t need me to tell you that watching a game can elicit conflicting emotions. Some times it’s dull, others, exhilarating. It can run the gamut from mildly stressful to utterly exasperating. We tell ourselves it’s fun to watch games — whether it’s the lightning-fast college basketball Final Four, a tense knuckle-biting World Series, or even the high drama of an Olympics figure skating face-off. But is it really fun? Is watching a game, especially football with its rash of injuries and hyper-macho façade, truly enjoyable in the moment? Or do we just endure it so we can process the positive highlights later?

As a sports kid who eventually blossomed into a book nerd, I surprise a lot of people with my unflagging loyalty to a game that is often seen as barbaric, anti-intellectual, and sponsored by horrible right-wing corporations. For a long time, whenever I’d meet someone new, I wouldn’t reveal the fact that I’m a football fan right away. It was like a weird secret. I’d talk about more “intellectual” subjects: poetry, indie films, twee British music, or collage art. Often I would be looking for clues in these conversations, maybe a word or a name mentioned that would reveal that they knew what a linebacker was, or an onside kick. If I found out someone was a football fan, they would often become my new best friend, at least for a while.

I find it utterly refreshing to meet another man or woman “of arts and letters” who admires the sport like I do, and I glow inside with that feeling of camaraderie. Often though, if I slip up and admit that many of my Sundays are spent worshipping guys in full pads and helmets groping and tackling each other while rich old men tally their bank accounts in their executive suites, I am met with pained expressions and confusion. I counter that surprise by trying to illuminate my humanistic connection to the game — my love for discovering the players’ personal stories of overcoming adversity; the bonding community of fandom; the sheer unpredictable nature of all sports; and yes, indeed, the amazing beauty and skill of what these players are able to do on the field. I can still remember plays that happened decades ago and recall them as precisely as my favorite songs.
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The Woman Who Helped Daniel Mendelsohn Become a Writer

Dave Thompson/PA Wire URN:32251193

All writers start their writing lives in different ways. Musicians who prefer writing poetry to writing lyrics; English majors obsessed with Charlotte Brontë; established doctors with stories to tell ─ but some beginnings are marked by subtler shifts of consciousness than others. For The New Yorker, critic Daniel Mendelsohn narrates the improbable origins of his writing career: by getting close with a worldly 70-year-old French women who liked to dance at the music clubs of Charlottesville, Virginia. When Mendelsohn met Ghislaine Signard de Poyen Bellisle Neale, aka Chouky, as an undergraduate classics major, the stories she told about her life were the first time he realized “that the things I’d read about in novels actually happened to real people.” Her influence on him wasn’t simply about finding material, though, or that she taught him how to write. She taught him to think differently about how he spent his waking life, and she showed him that, in his words, “If you open yourself to the world, there will be stories to tell.”

After a while, when she was off somewhere—the swimming pool (“I do my lap every day!”), or Foods of All Nations, the only place she could get certain things that she liked to eat—I’d force myself, as if doing a physical exercise, to do as she did: I’d sit at the table and stare at the patio. Of course, I felt foolish, and, at first, I wasn’t particularly moved; I wondered just what she saw in all this. But one day I found that I’d stopped thinking about what time it was, what I needed to get done, and was actually just sitting there looking at the lilies of the valley. When she got back from her shopping trip, I told her about my little epiphany. She beamed. “Dan_iel_,” she said, in her slightly croaking voice, pronouncing my name the French way. “See? You always are sinking about your life! But I sink about the muguet, and he make me happy.”

She didn’t let me stay home on weekend nights reading. Because she insisted that I take her dancing—straight clubs, gay clubs, tiny dives where rockabilly bands played, motel ballrooms where swing bands swang, she didn’t really care—I started to dance, too; this, inevitably, led me to the next step, which was talking to people in strange places. She took me to my first gay dance at U.V.A., held in a building that was papered with notices for meetings of the Gay Student Union; I’d walked by often but never had the courage to enter. That night, she sent me home with a tall and wiry Kentuckian who’d spent two hours fruitlessly smiling at me until Chouky marched me over to his car and introduced us. The Kentuckian’s father did business in Asia; he had beautiful, beautiful kimonos hanging by bamboo rods along the walls of his bedroom. Above the bed was a woodblock print of squirrels huddling on a winter branch.

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Diary of a Do-Gooder

Illustration by Nusha Ashjaee

Sara Eckel | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,774 words)

In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.

“Hi, Thomas?”

He nodded.

“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”

Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.

“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.

“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.

“No, you people have sent us plenty.”

You people.

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