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from LYING: A METAPHORICAL MEMOIR by Lauren Slater

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The summer I turned ten I smelled jasmine everywhere I went.  At first I thought the smell was part of the normal world, because we were having a hot spell that July, and every night it rained and the flowers were in full bloom.  So I didn’t pay much attention, except, after a while, I noticed I smelled jasmine in the bath, and my dreams were full of it, and when, one day, I cut my palm on a piece of glass, my blood itself was scented, and I started to feel scared and also good.

That was one world, and I called it the jasmine world.  I didn’t know, then, that epilepsy often begins with strange smells, some of which are pleasant, some of which are not.  I was lucky to have a good smell.  Other people’s epilepsy begins with bad smells, such as tuna fish rotting in the sun, dead shark, gin and piss; these are just some of the stories I’ve heard.

My world, though, was the jasmine world, and I told no one about it.

(2000)

from CONVERSATIONS WITH STUDENTS transcribed from Louis I. Kahn

***

At Rice University, renowned architect Kahn tells of his encounter with some rocket scientists.

I was asked by the General Electric Company to help them design spacecraft, and I was cleared by the FBI for this.  I met a group of scientists at a very long table.  They were a very colorful looking lot, pipe-smoking and begrizzled with mustaches.  They looked odd, like people who were not ordinary in any way.  One person put an illustration on the table, and said, “Mr. Kahn, we want to show you what a spacecraft will look like fifty years from now.”  It was an excellent drawing, a beautiful drawing, of people floating in space, and of very handsome, complicated-looking instruments floating in space.  You feel humiliation of this.  You feel the other guy knows something of which you know nothing, with this bright guy showing a drawing and saying, “This is what a spacecraft will look like fifty years from now.” 

I said immediately, “It will not look like that.”

And they moved their chairs closer to the table and they said, “How do you do you know?”  I said it was simple.  If you know what a thing will look like fifty years from now, you can do it now.  But you don’t know, because the way that a thing will be fifty years from now is what it will be.

(1968)

from HAPPY BIRTHDAY OR WHATEVER by Annie Choi

***

Memoirist Choi has a plan.

I was going to have the best birthday ever.  It would start with a parade—a dizzying spectacle of floats, prancing palominos, and the country’s loudest marching bands.  There would be troupes of mimes and contortionists, foul-mouthed drag queens, and a man juggling little girls on fire.  Monkeys dressed in powder blue tuxedos would throw candy and tiny bottles of whiskey to the hordes of my fans lined up along Sixth Avenue.  A dozen Michael Jackson impersonators, from his pre-op “Rock with You” days to his current noseless incarnation, would handle the sixty-foot helium balloon version of me.  As the Grand Marshal, I would ride on the back of an elephant and wave as streamers, confetti, and twenty-dollar bills cascaded over me.  After the procession, my friends and I would drink all the liquor in Manhattan, break tequila bottles over our heads, and pick fights with the Hell’s Angels.  The next morning we would crawl into work at the crack of noon, nursing hangovers and picking glass out of last night’s clothes, and proclaim that the only birthday that could’ve been more historic was Jesus’ bar mitzvah.

(2007)

from GHOSTS by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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71-year-old mathematics professor James Nwoye bumps into a former colleague and gives him news of his wife.

“Ebere is no longer with us; it has been three years,” I said in Igbo.  I was surprised to see the tears that glassed Ikenna’s eyes. He had forgotten her name and yet, somehow, he was capable of mourning her, or perhaps he was mourning a time immersed in possibilities.  Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.

(2009)

from ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

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Washington Post reporter Bernstein gets information from a Justice Department attorney about who might be caught in the investigation of the political espionage and dirty tricks—”ratfucking”—that became known as Watergate.

Higher than Mitchell?  Dwight Chapin was a functionary, an advance man and glorified valet, servant to Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman. At most, there were three persons who went higher than John Mitchell: John Ehrlichman (maybe), Haldeman, and Richard M. Nixon. Basic strategy that goes all the way to the top. The phrase unnerved Bernstein.  For the first time, he considered the possibility that the President of the United States was the head ratfucker.

(1974)

from AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE by Lucy Grealy

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10-year-old cancer patient Grealy, heeding her mother’s admonitions not to cry, looks up from a chemotherapy injection to see her mother’s eyes filled with tears. 

Suddenly my perception of the world shifted.  I wasn’t the only person in the world who suffered.  I had always heard other children wailing from behind closed doors all along the corridor outside Dr. Woolf’s door, so it would be false to say that I found myself hearing them for the first time or more clearly.  What happened was more hallucinatory.  My sense of space and self lengthened and transformed, extended itself out the door and down the corridor, while at the same time staying present with me, with my mother, who, to my profound discovery, was suffering not just because of, but also for, me.

(1994)

from THE BEST OF BETTY by Jincy Willett

***

Dear Betty:

My grandma Claire used to read your column every morning with her first cup of coffee and cigarette of the day.  She called “Ask Betty” the real news. She said that following the progress of your career over the years was her only truly wicked pleasure, and that it was like watching a massacre through a telescope. What did she mean by that?  She got throat cancer and died, and the last thing she said to me was, “There are too atheists in foxholes.” My mom said she was out of her mind.  What do you think?

Fourteen and Wondering

Dear Wondering:

That your grandma Claire will not have died in vain if you will heed the lesson of her life: Don’t smoke.

(1987)

from THE NIGHT THE BED FELL by James Thurber

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Thurber describes his extended family in 1910s Ohio.

Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets.  Old Aunt Melissa Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth), suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street.  Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube.  To avert this calamity—for she was in greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods—she always piled her money, silverware and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading: “This is all I have.  Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have.”  Aunt Grace Shoaf also had a burglar phobia, but she met it with more fortitude.  She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for forty years.  The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary.  She always claimed that she scared them off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway.  When she went to bed she piled, where she get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house.  Five minutes after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say, “Hark!”  Her husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep or would pretend to be sound asleep.  In either case he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other direction.  Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair.

(1933)

from RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

***

LeBlanc introduces the first of several teenagers whose intertwined lives she followed for ten years.

Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx.  She dressed even to go to the store.  Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything.  She didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she was resourceful with what she had—her sister’s Lee jeans, her best friend’s earrings, her mother’s T-shirts and perfume.  Her appearance on the streets in her neighborhood usually caused a stir.  A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a huge, inviting smile, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went.  You could be talking to her in the middle of the bustle of Tremont and feel as if lovers’ confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides.  Grown men got stupid.  Women pursed their lips. Boys made promises they could not keep.

(2003)

from KEW GARDENS by Virginia Woolf

***

A Kew Gardens flower bed on a July afternoon.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

(1921)