The Book of Delights

Gay starts this essay by describing his enthusiastic hand gestures during a conversation. He frequently smacks himself or the people around him while laughing, especially hitting his own chest, near his heart. He is delighted when he realizes he incorporates gestures he learned from his friend Walton, and he reflects on how much people borrow from those around them.

Gay sees 100 pieces of Botan Rice Candy at a shop and purchases two (even though he wants them all). He delights in the fact that there are no pig or horse bones used to produce the gummy candy and remembers when his father brought Gay and his brother to the Asian Market in Levittown, PA. The Asian Market was next to the Levittown Beauty Academy, where the young white girls studying there marveled over Gay and his brother’s hair. He particularly remembers checking out of the market, when his father bought three Botan Rice Candies, giving one to Gay, one to his brother, and eating one himself.

Gay focuses on the relationship between the redbud tree and the dogwood tree. To Gay, the redbud takes special attention to notice and appreciate, and he considers it to be a beautiful understatement. Redbud and dogwood trees are often planted together because of an ancient Christian tradition that says the dogwood tree represents Jesus and the redbud represents Judas. Gay easily traces the white blooms of the dogwood to the widely Christian view of whiteness being an expression of purity and goodness, while the redbud is a cousin to the tree from which Judas supposedly hung himself. Gay thinks the way rosebuds look like kissing mouths would be enough of a reason for Puritans to associate the rosebud with the less divine, though he views the rosebud as so much more.

In healthy forests, the weak trees are supported by the stronger ones by sharing nutrients underground. The soil in which this transference occurs is called fungal duff. Gay describes joy as the duff of humanity—the underground union between all people.

The title is the comment a young man made to Gay after the wind blew his glasses off the top of his hat. As the man looked from the lenses to Gay; Gay told him that things will get better, and the young man thanked him.

Gay collects four purple flowers from the walk from his house to his office: violet, mint blooms, ivy, and lilacs, which fill the room with fragrance. He passes several purple flowers he does not pick, one of those being the grape hyacinth in Gay’s neighbor’s garden. Yesterday, the neighbors caught Gay kneeling down beside the flower, breathing deeply.

Gay studies the elderly crossing guard as she escorts two middle-aged women across the street. The woman is nearly 70 or 80, always smiling, and never sits, despite a comfortable-looking perch a few feet away. She has tremors, like Parkinson’s, that make her consistently nod her head. Gay imagines her as the boatwoman helping people across the street as if it were the River Styx and thinks how comforting it would be to enter the afterlife and be greeted by her nodding smile.

Gay prefers poetry readings to poetry books because the body communicates more than words on a page can. While books, especially used books, carry messages from past readers, they cannot communicate like the sweat stains on a performing poet, someone playing with the hem of their dress, or fishing an eyelash from their mouth mid-reading. The body communicates in the process of fading away, which makes it more valuable. Books never die and preferring books to bodies will not stop bodies from dying.

While recording delights, Gay has found a new delight in the feeling of discovery. For example, sometimes he sees birds flying through the Detroit airport when he travels, and every time, he is struck with delight. He looks around to see if anyone else shares his delight, and wonders if his impulse to find someone else who has noticed the birds supports the theory that delight grows as it is shared.

In this entry, Gay copies a letter he received from a high school student in California. The letter had been forwarded from many different addresses to find Gay, and the student writes about his favorite poem of Gay’s, which is “the chickenshit one,” and asks Gay how long it took him to complete the entire poetry book and what the “chickenshit” was (150).

Gay habitually licks the outside of his coffee cup to clean up the dribbles of liquid. He first started doing this after seeing his college professor, Susan Blake, do it. He remembers wondering if she was trying to flirt with him and if cuplicking was a middle-aged way of communicating desire. Now, however, Gay himself is middle-aged and knows that his teacher was not flirting, but merely cleaning her coffee cup. He is overly cautious about licking his cup when around his students, whom he calls “beginning-aged people” (151) and is careful to never make eye contact while doing so.

He also remembers when this professor, who insisted that he call her Susan, handed back the first 60 pages of his dissertation covered in red ink with a copy of the book Writing Prose. He ends the essay with the question, “How do we thank our dead teachers?” (151).

Gay confesses his love of bobbleheads and remembers the toys of his childhood, one of which he used to beat his older brother until his grandmother took the toy and hit him on the head with it. Gay pretended to be knocked out, a skill he practiced in the car with his brother, until his mother called his bluff. Gay wonders if the bobblehead itself delights him, or the silliness of the toy, which reminds him that people love goofy things and can be childlike, which encourages soft-heartedness.