Seven things I love

Esther Allen listed a few beautiful things that deeply affected the Uruguyan pianist and writer Felisberto Hernández. Take a look at Lucas Green’s list, wherein we learn of seven things he loves, in meme form; look well, too, to Verbal Privilege’s seven and to Parmanu’s. Here are seven of mine:

• My bracelets, constant jangling companions, all of them gifts from friends: a large glass-beaded bracelet from an outcast cousin in Taiwan; a red stretchy one from G when she’d gone to Ghana; various color bangles from the Frugal Traveler’s first (I think) trip to India; silver and gold from my mother.
• Parallel parking.
• Bodies in unexpected, heartstopping motion—a woman adjusting a shoulder strap with her face to the sun and her heels clicking down the street, a man using a precise finger to circle the air in patient demonstration, a dog trotting about like a horse, a horse flexing its nostrils, and above all the utter giddiness coiled up in a body just waiting to spring out.
• Dancing.
• Sorting through items of a life—which is to say, snooping around. I find intimacy this way; it’s one-sided and completely unfair, yes, but that’s part of the attraction.
• Seeing connections between news bits—or brilliant writing about the making of things—and the fiction I dream up. For example: The first little story I’d written in graduate school was based on a New York Times article about a traveling advertisement that was publicized on the clothing of cyclists. The connection made sense to me, I was on a Ha Jin kick at the time, and I realized I could write about a China that didn’t involve crying mothers and daughters, or feathers and fortune tellers, or tragic histories involving footbinding and concubines—except now I should take up those subjects as a challenge, shouldn’t I?
• Fashion in the street, thanks largely to The Sartorialist. Yes, then, to the woman in short shorts, brown leather jacket, a gentle headband, and, most important, walking those long, long legs.

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Here are a few more loves I am also committed to: 12:34, a.m. or p.m.; sniffing freshly shaved pencils; beautiful sentences tasting like gumdrops; listening to other people’s stories and watching their enthusiasms; book covers from Vintage, Turtle Point Press, Archipelago, New Directions, Picador, anything by our own Charlotte Strick; dreaming the way a writer dreams (thank you, Naguib Mahfouz, for your dreams); pretending to be tougher than I actually am; my job description—making sure the commas go where they should go; and my dog, and all dogs.

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Tag, you’re it, mothersucker.