Correspondence
My middle-aged female friends and I often discuss our disappointment with the men in our lives, who seem universally unable to engage in meaningful conversation or take an interest in anything beyond video games, their record collections, or fantasy sports teams. So I was thankful for the sensitivity, affection, and self-expression displayed in Ross Gay and Noah Davis’s “The Ramshackle Garden of Affection.”
Mara Thomas
Durham, North Carolina
Ross Gay and Noah Davis may not be the Michael Jordan and Larry Bird of layups and bank shots, but on paper their game is Langston Hughes and Billy Collins. Pure poetry.
Rita Plush
Queens, New York
Ross Gay is an absolute treasure and is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. His ability to name the tenderness in life’s heartbreaks is exactly what I need to move through our aching world.
Noah Davis meets his friend and mentor’s words with a lovely voice of his own: a young man exploring the sweetness and affection of basketball, family, love, life. Reading their letters, I paused many times, filled with gratitude for such beauty.
Beth Hasbrouck
Fort Collins, Colorado
Ross Gay and Noah Davis’s essay-in-letters “The Ramshackle Garden of Affection” [June 2020] hit home for me. I’ve played recreational basketball for many years with coworkers or neighbors, and reading the correspondence between these two men is like hearing again the voices of the many people I have played with: the nuance of touch, the playful banter, the knowledge of your fellow players’ habits — and the ways you let them know you know.
The essay brought back fond memories of men I have loved and lost. I will make sure my young grandsons read it; it has so many lessons for them.
Richard Carnes
Middleboro, Massachusetts
I’ve had a love affair with The Sun for more than twenty years. Some issues I can’t bring myself to give away. April 1995 and July 1998 rest comfortably in my filing cabinet. Now I must add June 2020, because the series of letters between Ross Gay and his pal Noah Davis [“The Ramshackle Garden of Affection”] made me cry.
Gay writes to Davis, “You have to revere and exalt tenderness.” (In this particular letter Gay uses the word tenderness thirteen times.) He always signs his letters, “Love, Ross,” and Davis replies in kind.
This called to mind Sy Safransky’s interview with mythologist Michael Meade in the January 1994 issue, where Meade says witnessing someone crying is “another definition of what I call the water of life, when those tears come from that deep well of human sympathy, human sorrow. At that point we’re human. We’re connected.”
Dianea Kohl
Ithaca, New York
Being a young, tall female, I was often asked, “Do you play basketball?” This annoyed me to no end, and I never took up the game. Ross Gay and Noah Davis beautifully explain the joy of basketball, however, and how it’s about more than just scoring points [“The Ramshackle Garden of Affection,” June 2020].
Later, as an adult, I took up rowing, which has brought me great joy. There’s nothing like eight hardworking teammates surging across the sparkling water. But Gay and Davis have made me feel that I might have missed out.
Thank you for sharing their correspondence. If we all wrote each other such heartfelt letters, it would be a more empathetic world.
Lori VanEtta
Bellingham, Washington
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