They unfurled the family treasure. We all sighed at the sight of hooked leaves underfoot. My grandfather kicked the corner over with his block of a shoe and there it was — documentation. Grandmother and I were entwined forever in Daddy’s strong script. She gave me a squeeze.
For more than 50 years, Vereen Bell served the Vanderbilt University community as a teacher, scholar, colleague, and mentor. His fellow Vanderbilt professor and longtime friend Mark Jarman shares a remembrance of Bell with Chapter 16.
The aluminum measuring cup was scuffed from so many years of use and had no value — except to me. That’s why when its handle fell off, my reaction was totally unreasonable.
I had just finished my first-ever dish of angulas, baby eels, properly called elvers. They are a tasty specialty of Basque cuisine and come in a quarter-pound serving of tiny two-inch long animals, which look like thin transparent noodles with two black dots of eyes at one end.
From the Chapter 16 archive: If there’s not enough time to read, why am I working so hard to send another book into the world?
From the Chapter 16 archive: This type of travel is not meant to soothe; it’s not like a seven-day cruise where the aim is to make sure you never feel lost, unsure, or in want. This travel is about want. About loneliness. About insecurity. About all those things that go into the poems that stay with you, the ones that risk and surprise, that ache to be written, and that talk back to you on the page.
