Delights

Abstract

Delights Ross Gay (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 28] The Jenky Yesterday I was working in the yard, getting it into some kind of order (order a very loose usage in this case), and I noticed the goumi bush, with its thousands of unripe speckled berries, crowding the blueberry bush, shading it almost completely. I grabbed a rickety one-armed magenta rocking chair I'd plucked from the street on trash day a couple years back and wedged it beneath the light-hogging goumi branches such that nothing needed to be cut, and the goumi branches became a kind of arbor over the rickety one-armed chair in case someone decided to sit in it, which I wouldn't recommend. As I stepped back to admire my work, I thought, rubbing my chin, Now, that's jenky. Just like the [End Page 29] pear tree whose limb I spread with my friend Brooke's old Adidas trail runner, with her permission of course. And like the old window I propped on a stray log to make a little hot box for my squash, cucumber, and watermelon starts. So jenky. One of the many delights of a garden, I am finding, are the ways it encourages jenkiness. Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators' swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one's relationship to commerce, perhaps. The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism. (Aside: Shouldn't we pause to admire the onomatopoeicness of jenky? Because no word I know sounds more like my crooked shed door. Sounds more like duct tape being ripped from the roll.) To be clear, my efforts at the jenky are modest compared to my folks', from whom I learned it in part, probably to their upwardly mobile chagrin. Which is a good place to say the plain, which is that jenky is a classed designation. It often implies a degree of judgment, often by people still haunted by and sprinting from the tendrils of poverty, about broke people. About broke people things. I am no longer a broke person, and so you would be right to read my affinity for the jenk complicatedly, with a nod to privilege and inheritance both. My folks were, mostly, mostly broke people who had neither the time nor the resources to always fix things the boring way, which is called replacement. And so the hatchback cracked up by a trash truck, the insurance money from which they needed to pay some bills, got fixed (affixed) with a bungee cord. Me and my brother's wristbands were made of the tops of striped tube socks. The hammer we kept under the seat to tap the stuck starter until it went completely kaput. A rectangle of sheet metal screwed into the rusted-out floorboard of the Corolla. A sheet of plywood tossed over the dinner table for holiday dinners. Taped glasses. Shoe goo. Duct-taped car hood. Oh, I could go on. I think I am advocating for a kind of innovation, or an innovative spirit, which seems often to be occasioned by deprivation, or being broke. Or broke-ass. Which condition I am adamantly not advocating. But I am advocating for the delight one feels making a fire pit with the inside of a dryer, or keeping the dryer door shut with an exercise band, which is probably caused by endorphins released from a bout of cognitive athleticism. Which is also called figuring something out. Which is something we all go to school, some of us for years and years, to forget how to do. (Apr. 27) [End Page 30] "My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine" Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it, and everybody loves it, and...