An Evening of Delights

On the evening of Sept. 23, I was honored to be invited to Des Moines’ Storyhouse Bookpub for an event called The Event of Delights to present a work inspired by the essays of Ross Gay. In particular, the essays he wrote for The Book of Delights and its recent follow-up The Book of (More) Delights.

I’m still making my way through the first book, but The Book of Delights is, well, a delightful collection of essays where Ross identifies the little things in his life that bring him happiness. To be honest, I did not expect to like these stories as much as I so far have. The essays are not without edge or the dents that come with living life, which makes them all the more uplifting.

The efforts of the owner of Storyhouse Bookpub's owner have to be commended as well. She moved heaven and earth to bring together eight local writers to create work that celebrated Ross’s book. She also had prints made, pencils engraved, and an author flown in. I got to share a story, hear other folks delights, and meet some wonderful new people.

Since it has been a little while since my last post I thought I would share the sort delight I brought to the bookstore over the weekend here.

(If you’re reading this and happen to be in Des Moines this coming weekend—specifically on Sunday, Oct. 1—I’ll also be one of the authors at the Windsor Heights Book Fair from 12-6 p.m. where I’ll be selling copies of my novel.)

In any case, here is my delight. I hope you enjoy it!

My Delight: “My Darling”

A man cannot live on bread alone, though I suspect I could make a decent run on just clementines.

If you have not taken the opportunity to gorge yourself on these miniature oranges, then you have not sampled the most potent of nature’s delicacies. Imagine an orange—already one of the superior fruits with its sunset shade, its decisively sweet tang, and the peel which offers an easy way to transport and unwrap.

Now remove the few less-than optimal characteristics of the orange. If you’ve trimmed your nails the rind is often too thick to penetrate or might take multiple attempts to remove. It’s also slightly more difficult to tell just by holding an orange when you have a prime pick in your hand.

The clementine fixes these minor annoyances. Peeling one is easier than removing a glove. Its taste is more perfect than your rudimentary orange, both sweeter and more sour—it could be candy were it not for its direct lineage entangling it with the mandarin orange and the sweet orange.

Also, it is smaller—which might be sub optimal for most foods, but not so here. I don’t have any need to carry clementines in my pocket, but should society collapse and require me to grab the necessary provisions, I believe I could fit as many as five clementines in each of my pockets, providing much easier rationing than the single orange that might fit in their place.

In the case of all amazing citruses—oranges, tangerines, clementines, mandarins (even lemons and limes)—they are even incredible in how they are discarded. Firstly, there is the sheer serotonin satisfaction when you are able to remove the peel as a single, contiguous unit. Then, should your garbage disposal reek of the less savory remnants of other food, the clementine is a purifying force, banishing those other odors when introduced to the disposal.

So life changing are the effects of the royal clementine that I have a distinct memory of when I first encountered it (no such formative memories exist for my introduction to bananas, pears, mangoes, or watermelons). I must have been about seven because it was when my family was still going to St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, meaning my parents were still together, so it makes sense that I would have the capacity to be jealous of my sister (two years younger) for emerging from children’s church having—before me—sampled something she’d been told was a “clementine.”

I scoffed at the name and the idea that my younger sister had discovered something before me with a name that reeked of miners, caverns, and sorrow.

Unlike a great many of my peers, I have had no bad experience with religion. As a kid who had yet to discover the pedantic joys of internalizing the proper nouns of The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars—committing the endless names of the biblical family trees to memory was elating.

Yet—like Eve and Adam—I think that perhaps my best remembered religious moment came from biting into that fruit. Whatever, disasters might have followed in life after that sampling, I wouldn’t go back to before it.