Delightful
Tulips and throwing shade at my three-week-old
Have you listened to the Delights episode from This American Life? It’s old, from early 2020, but it’s one that stuck with me when Tanner and I listened to it on a long drive two years ago.
The premise is simple: five acts about different types of delights — which defined by Merriam-Webster as “a high degree of gratification or pleasure; joy.”
Acts Two and Three particularly moved me: I think Foster and Cole (especially New Cole), from Act Two, would be fast friends, thanks to their love of transportation. And Noriko’s story in Act Three spoke to the part of me that lived alone for eight years: In hindsight, I didn’t appreciate living by myself, doing (largely) what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I would still pick my life as it is a million times over, but there are times when I’d like to snap my fingers and be back in, say, my 2015 life for a day.
Tanner and I reference our own delights with some regularity. None of ours are fancy, but they do elicit the same kind of joy I think you’ll feel after listening to that episode.
A few of mine:
The hawk: Google Photos tells me I first spotted our neighborhood hawk1 in March 2022, perched on a tree in our side yard. I wouldn’t consider myself an ornithology enthusiast — I feel like bird watching is an old woman’s game, and I am 35, aka still cool — but for some reason, I am enamored with this hawk. So enamored that I’ve done ridiculous things like get excited by a dead mouse in our backyard because I wondered if the hawk dropped it. (Rereading that last sentence and I take back what I said about still being cool.)
The single tulip: Our yard is close to full bloom right now — yellow forsythia, red Japanese maple, pink and white and purple azaleas. We inherited all these plants, but we’ve lived here for about four years now, so I’m familiar with everything we see each spring. Or so I thought: On Tuesday, one red tulip sprang up in the middle of a garden bed that has no tulips.
I made a noise of shocked awe when I saw it. I’m not willing to call said noise a gasp, because I don’t think it was, but Tanner did, and he teased me for the fact that one flower would elicit such a reaction. But that’s the thing about delights! Sometimes we don’t pick what brings us joy.
Sally, When the Wine Runs Out: Am I biased because this song has my daughter’s name in it? Absolutely. Does this song slap? Also absolutely. Sometimes, when our Sally is particularly fussy, I sing parts of it to myself: “ankles hit the two step, Sally makes my head hurt.” We had a bad night of no sleep last week and “heard it through the grapevine, she can be a diva” just kept ricocheting throughout my brain.
Skip-the-line ebooks: One of the three libraries2 where I have a card offers skip-the-line loans on ebooks: You can get a copy of a popular book without waiting in the holds line, which can be weeks or even months long. (The other side of the delight coin is despair, and I am never more full of it when the Libby app won’t even put a number on how long it’s going to take me to get off the holds list. Don’t say “several months”! Make something up!) At my library, you only get to keep this book for a week, and you can’t renew it, but the exhilaration of passing all those other suckers waiting for a book is motivation enough to read quickly.
Foster’s book recall: We were reading the last few pages of Little Excavator on Sunday night when the boy started reciting it himself, word for word, without even looking at the pages. This book memorization trick of his also extends to I Love Trains! and Moo, Baa, La La La, among others. I know he is not some uniquely talented genius preschooler for this, but dadgum it if it doesn’t knock my socks off every time. Kids! So often not delightful, but when they are, it HITS.
We believe it’s a red-shouldered, not a red-tailed, hawk. And yes, we did check out a kid’s book on hawks from the library that was ostensibly for Foster but actually for Tanner and me.
Sorry for the flex.