Verndale comes up a couple of times in the book. When he was a boy, his family vacationed there for a month every summer at his grandparents.

His mother grew up in Verndale, Minn., near Brainerd. 'Like we are constantly in the presence of caretaking and tenderness.'įor Gay, who lives in Philadelphia, Minnesota looms large. 'As a whole, I hope that this book is a kind of sustained meditation on - not only the potential but the fact of our persistent caretaking of one another,' he said. 'Like I am working hard to focus on this task I have set myself which is to notice something delightful in my life that day - and it is clear when there are times that it is not easy.'Įach essay in 'The Book of Delights' has its own focus, but he says there is an underlying theme. 'The labor of attending to my delight is evident,' he said. As the reader follows him through his year, he reveals details of his life as a biracial man in America. 'And not 30 seconds later, walking toward Eighth, giggling at my good fortune, a tufted titmouse swooped by my head, landing on a wrought-iron gate, upon which a pedestrian walking past me immediately pulled from her snazzy jacket pocket a baggie of crumbs and the bird hopped directly into her hand, nuzzling the goodies intermittent with tweeting towards its new pal, the bird and woman both nodding at me gawking at them, smiling at my bafflement as though to say 'We are everywhere.''īut 'The Book of Delights' is not pollyannaish or saccharine. 'How often do you get to see someone slow-dancing with a pigeon!' it reads. And sometimes it's just the unexpected, like in the essay 'Bird Feeding.' There's even one about how people leave their possessions untended on Amtrak trains in a way Gay believes may not happen elsewhere. The book contains essays on things he saw in his garden and interactions with people he meets. 'Or something sweet and reminds us of the good. 'It feels to me that it often involves an element of surprise or an element of 'I didn't know that,' or 'I didn't know that I knew that,' or 'I forgot that'' he said.

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay