Everywhere, delight

‘To achieve humanity, you have to share delight.’

So says Bim Adewunmi to Ira Glass in the prologue to This American Life episode 692: The Show of Delights, which she guest-hosts.

Adewunmi was talking about American poet, Ross Gay, who dedicated a year of his life to writing one poem or ‘essayette’ each day about delight. Gay reads some out, one about taking a tomato plant on a plane, and the unexpected delight that it brings people throughout the journey. Here are extracts from ‘Tomato on board’:

I quickly realised one of its stems, which I almost wrote as ‘arms’, was broken from the jostling. And it only had four of them, so I decided I better just carry it out in the open, and the shower of love began.

The flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, every time calling it ‘my tomato’. ‘Where’s my tomato?’ ‘How’s my tomato?’ ‘You didn’t lose my tomato, did you?’

When we got bumpy, I put my hand on the little guy’s container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the little guy in place, the way my dad’s arm would when he had to brake in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favourite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures.

Gay’s collection is in The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, 2019). I’d love to read it.

It was serendipitous a topic, tuning in as I did after returning home from an evening walk which filled me with delight. I didn’t know what the episode was about before hitting play, so imagine my delight when Ira introduced the theme as delight. I was delighted!

On my walk, I spotted a gum tree filled with blossoms. I turned off the path to say hello up close. As I stood beneath it, swaying in the breeze, I heard someone playing a piano. I watched, listening to the music floating out from its mysterious source, looking at the shadows on the gum of the trees opposite.

Further on from the gum was an oak tree of such grandeur I dared not attempt to photograph it, but gazed at its graceful wings, spread in perfect equilibrium, resting gently on the grass below.

Returning to the path, four horses eagerly walked up to greet me, two bending to my proffered hand, allowing me to rub their foreheads. I felt as shiny and clear inside as the blue sky above me, washed clean from the morning rain.

Things I know for sure are when you’ve felt despair, the feeling of joy is heightened, and if you seek out beauty and delight, you find them everywhere.

I hope in sharing my delight, delight makes its way to you.

Thank you for reading.

p.s. if you liked Ross Gay’s poem extracted above, you’ll also enjoy Loitering Is Delightful, published on The Paris Review blog on 11 February 2019, also from Gay’s The Book of Delights.

The gum of delight, 3 February 2020.