The balloon seemed to come not so much from another place, but another time. Out of the past, or maybe the future. From a different summer anyway, one with birthday and graduation parties, a summer we’d seen before or one yet to come.

It fell slowly, floating toward the field during the bottom of the eighth inning of Opening Night of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, a game under the lights at Dodger Stadium, where the Dodgers were hosting the Giants. A square, multicolored foil balloon, the kind everyone professes to hate because they get caught in power lines and take a million years to decompose, but which remain a staple of celebratory gatherings. Celebrate! was, in fact, printed across the front. In this pandemic summer of isolation and distance, where there wasn’t much to celebrate, the balloon seemed lost. On the ESPN broadcast, play-by-play announcer Karl Ravech sounded incredulous. “How does that happen,” he asked, “with nobody in the stands to blow up balloons?”

The balloon touched the infield dirt between first base and second, just a quick kiss, then rose again, drifting low over the ground. None of Ravech’s broadcast partners had an answer to his question. The telecast was silent for a long moment. The players, the umpires, all of us at home watched the balloon. Finally, Ravech asked again into the silence. “Where did that come from?” He sounded shaken, awed. A masked ball boy ran out and grabbed a foil corner, pulling it off the field. The Dodgers’ quick-thinking organist began playing Nena’s eighties hit 99 Red Balloons, the plaintive chords echoing through the empty stands.

Read More

©Ellis Rosen

In February, in our family iMessage group, my brother asked our mother to indulge his craving for egg salad sandwiches. “That is so weird,” I replied. “I dreamt of mom’s egg salad two days ago.” It had been years since I had eaten it, but chewing in my dream, I realized the crunch of the celery that my mother added was the secret. “I had the same epiphany!!!” Dustin texted back. “The celery!!!”

He went on: Maybe this was the chemo he was doing, but Chinese and BBQ from spots we liked out of state were also appealing. He beat—by half a second—a message I was in the midst of sending about how I longed for food from those exact places. We exclaimed at the chances. Dustin joked that my two-month-old had “given us magical powers,” or that our family dog was controlling our minds. “THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST,” he said.

When my brother passed away at twenty-nine from complications of leukemia some weeks later, I livestreamed his funeral in Florida from under lockdown in France. The distance between us was imponderable, as great as it could ever be. We’d both wanted the egg salad. That the connection between us would be cut did not follow. Grief breaks your heart; also, it breaks your brain. While we keep the people we love in our hearts, it began to seem that Dustin was in my head more than anywhere else.

Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote,  that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.”

Read More

© Jana Behr / Adobe Stock.

The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom. I’ve been told these particular beasts are fallow deer of the menil variety, which means their usual darker tones have been leached by genetics to soft cuttlefish and ivory, and they’re the descendants of a herd brought here in the sixteenth century as beasts of venery, creatures to be pursued and caught and cooked. The look of the estate hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still an extensive patchwork of pasture and forest—except now the M25 runs through it, six lanes of fast-moving traffic behind chain-link fence threaded with stripling trees. The mist thickens, the light falls, the deer appear and disappear, and the deep roar of the motorway burns inside my chest as I walk on to the bridge that spans it. This bridge is grassed along its length, and at dusk and dawn, I’ve been told, the deer use it as a thoroughfare from one side of the estate to the other. I know my presence will dissuade them from crossing so I don’t want to stay too long, but I linger a little while to watch the torrent of lights beneath me. For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots, and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail.

Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is. Read More

Rolling Stones fans in Norway, 1964. Photo: National Archives of Norway. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Teenage girls are yelping. It’s just after four in the morning and a huge rat—a heaving, greasy, small-dog-size thing—is dragging its weight along the pavement next to us.

“Eurgh, fuck off!” yell fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, one pulling the cord of the hood of her sleeping bag tight so only her eyes are looking out. “You always see them this early, especially in London,” she says solemnly.

We’re all sitting or lying outside London’s Brixton Academy, one night in March 2017. Every ten minutes or so, girls arrive in darkness to wait for the pop-punk show happening the following night. Two friends, fifteen-year-old Lauren and fourteen-year-old Jess from across town in Bethnal Green, were already there at its steps when I shuffled over at three. They greeted me like I was another teen fan, not a writer in her midtwenties. “Come and sit down.” “Are you excited?” Their immediate assumption was that I was there for the same reason. They’d had waffles and whipped cream one of their mothers had made at about one and had been dropped off in her car. Both showed me their supplies for the night, day, and evening. Out of duffels come blankets, a full-size pillow, doughnuts, hair ties, makeup, portable chargers, money, exercise books, marker pens, T-shirts, CDs (very odd), phones, digital cameras, disposable cameras; enough for a camping trip. They are, I thought, camping, just with one of the ugliest backdrops I’ve ever seen. “We’re going to wait until security get here and set up the barriers and then we’ll sleep,” Lauren says. Along the grimy beige pavement down the left of the building, multiple girls are already passed out in sleeping bags like a row of wood lice, some savvy enough to bring foam mats. “Our mums didn’t mind us being here because it’s the last day of term.” She shrugs. “We’ll just say we’re ill or something.” Read More

The bond between author and assistant is often close. But in Donald Hall’s case, his decades-long relationship with his assistant proved to be a lifeline that extended his writing career.

DONALD HALL IN 2014. PHOTO: HENRI COLE.

When Donald Hall interviewed Kendel Currier for the part-time job of typing his correspondence in August of 1994, one of the first things he asked was, “Will you type curse words?” His earlier hire for the position, a woman active in a local church, backed out when she discovered curse words in a letter, and he wanted to make sure Currier wouldn’t quit, too.

Hall found Currier’s response reassuring: She would type whatever he dictated, she told him, and keep a dictionary nearby in case she was uncertain of a spelling. She was thirty-six at the time and, by her own description, a stay-at-home mom and housewife. But she’d done secretarial work in the past, and Hall—not quite twice Currier’s age at sixty-six—was impressed by her professionalism. So, he hired her on the spot, and turned up the next day at her house in Andover, New Hampshire, with a canvas bag that contained a model letter, a stack of stationery, and a transcriber for playing back the dictation on his tapes. “It was as if the universe offered me a gift,” Currier later said, “and I was smart enough to accept it.”

Currier obtained the typewriter she used, an IBM Selectric III, from Hall’s previous typist, Lois Fierro. Lois also offered Currier a couple of tips: Hall insisted on the British spelling “cheque” for a bank check, and spelled “anymore” as two words.

Soon Hall and his amanuensis fell into their daily rhythm: he drove ten miles to her home in Andover to drop off the tape she was to transcribe with a guide sheet, and she typed up letters for the next day, when he brought her another tape. Because they used two briefcases for their transactions, the two rarely spoke. She would leave her briefcase with its finished work between her storm and front doors, where he could easily exchange it with his briefcase containing new work. Hall came early in the morning, and often, when Currier opened the door, he’d have already come and gone. In a way, she says, “we took up our own correspondence, I typing notes to him, and he answering me on the daily tape.”

Read More

Luis Egidio Meléndez, Still Life with Salmon, Lemon and Three Vessels, 1772, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Oranges require orange to be. They are a color expectation. If an orange is not orange, it is no orange.

Oranges originated in China, where they were crossbred from a mandarin and a pomelo as early as 314 B.C. From there, oranges passed from Sanskrit नारङ्ग (nāran˙ga) through Persian نارنگ (nārang) and its Arabic derivative نارنج (nāranj). Traveling to continental Europe with the Moors, naranjas soon dotted al-Andalus and Sicily. Oranges arrived in England from France in the fourteenth century, their bright skins holding a taste of a color that became popular in markets, on palates, and, eventually, in tongue.

For centuries, oranges were orange and, still, orange was not a color—it was called yellow-red. It took another two hundred years for the color to earn its name, to become a form that could give itself to others—to be ascribed to flowers, stones, minerals, and the setting sun.

To the west, oranges followed the path of Spanish missionaries and lent their name to Orange County and the Orange State. In California, the fruit fed the miners of the gold rush who passed through mission towns. In Florida, there were so many groves that, by 1893, the state was producing five million boxes of fruit each year. In this tropical climate—nights too humid and too hot—oranges would ripen too quickly: they were ready to be eaten while still green. And so, from the twentieth century onward, green oranges have been synthetically dyed orange, coated to match consumer expectations. Orange reveals that humans cannot imagine a species detached from its color, even when we are the ones who detach it. Read More