Double Dipping Delight

Part 3 in the 4-part series inspired by The Book of Delights features: a loving imitation of Ross Gay, cardboard skyscrapers, and unpacking procrastination

My local library got the eAudiobook of The Book of Delights — delight! I can now listen to Ross Gay punctuate lists of small joys with the word delight — delight! (This is my best imitation of Ross Gay double-dipping the word delight — delight!)

In his entry for January 11 Gay writes about Stacking Delights, which is to say stockpiling delights to write about later. To me this also sounds like a form of procrastination — the writer of a 4-part series that promised to write a delight every week for the month of May and is now sending out Part 3 in October. Anyway. Gay comes around to the idea, and writes it on his hand, of “temporal allegiance”. That we shouldn’t hoard or delay sharing delight, lest it stagnate, or fester, or contort our brain into an imagined and impossible perfection. That the whole point of his project was to find the delight of THAT day, an unplanned encounter with the world.

But that is what I did. I encountered a small act of creativity that gave me delight and boxed it up to be unpacked later. Why did I do this? Well, we were moving house at the time and I had quite a bit of animosity towards literal boxes. Boxes labelled: absolute misc. (my girlfriend’s); and MODERATELY FRAGILE (mine). Titles that I find funny now but irked me at the time.

Boxing up my possessions — one of my long held delights is how many esses the word possessions possesses, which is funny, because I don’t own many things. But boy do I love to complain about how many boxes my girlfriend has. I’ve helped her move from house to house three of four times and there are boxes, the heaviest ones, of course, that I’ve never seen unpacked, never seen inside of. I’ve spent a lot of time grizzling and grumbling and thinking too deeply about boxes as metaphor. And that is why, perhaps, I couldn’t share this delight of someone enjoying boxes:

My girlfriend and I were at the grocery store. As we walked the aisles a stack of cardboard boxes moved above the shelves like a lumbering skyscraper. We quickly turned the corner to follow the shifting skyline but it had disappeared. Only a minute later another stack made its way to the back of the store. Between the shelves we saw a young man, balancing the build in his hands. Not long after we encountered him in the frozen food aisle, shelving blueberries. We liked your cardboard tower, we said. With a smile and without hesitation he pulled out his phone to show us more of his creations. My favourite was a curious cardboard worm breaking through the polished concrete floor, tilting a curious head to the sky.

And there it is, months in the procrastinating, a delight from May that lasted all of a minute, hibernated through the Naarm winter, coming out just in time for October spring, coming out to play.

Read or listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of the series here:

Uncled

Delight as Revenge

Thanks to the sound support on this post from Nat Riley.