The Best Thing That Happened Yesterday
a notebook excerpt
Yesterday I interviewed a writer who disappeared. We were recording remotely using an online platform. A few minutes into his answer to my first question, the line tracking his audio went dead and he vanished. He resurfaced a few minutes later.
“Did your WiFi cut out,” I asked.
“No, I wish,” he said miserably. “I don’t want to tell you what happened, but I will.”
What had happened was that he panicked and his arm reached out, without first consulting his brain, and slammed his laptop closed. For some unknown reason interviews make him go to pieces, he explained. He was sorry.
I have frequently wished I could just shut the lid of an awkward interaction and disappear without further comment. All the time I would love to ‘X out’ of the tab, literally or figuratively, take three deep breaths, and reemerge newly composed. But I’ve never seen anyone actually do this, and also this writer is older and decorated and grandfatherly, someone who holds himself slightly apart from the world of other writers in a way that seems cool and self-assured. It seemed to defy some natural law that he would go to pieces, or that he would X out.
We continued. A question or two later, I heard tension start to build in his voice, and then he was gone again. When I returned, I asked if he was okay. He told me he was putting his computer out of reach so that his arm could no longer end the interview without first consulting him.
The interview proceeded, underwritten by some suspense, but we got through to the end with no more vanishings. And he offered me an idea that I liked. When he wants to focus his daily journaling or note-taking practice, he begins by answering the same question:
What is the best thing that happened yesterday?
Naturally, I asked the writer what was the best thing that happened to him the day before. After some thought, he told me that while he typically doesn’t like chickpeas (“I struggle with chickpeas” was his phrasing) his wife had made a delicious chickpea dish for dinner the night before. In the middle of doing the dishes he took the wooden spoon she’d been stirring the big pan with, and scraped the perfect last bite, of all the crispy, salty refuse. The wooden spoon and the perfect bite were the best thing that happened.
Together, we mused on the fact that the last bite, the one taken during clean up, always tastes the best— and better even off a wooden spoon. It’s because the wood is porous, he said, so it holds the memory of all the past meals. On the wood spoon you are tasting all the last-bites ever.
Anyway, that was yesterday. Any number of good things happened yesterday, but I think that was the best.
other things top of mind as of march 22, 2025
Thresholds is back this month with thanks to the Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub. We’ve got four new interviews, including Lidia Yuknavitch, Carvell Wallace, Maya Binyam— and one more coming next week. You can keep up by subscribing to .
- put together a lovely post on play, specifically playing as one tool humans use to entertain ourselves while also resisting chaos, calamity, brutality and autocracy.
Approfondement is a French word that means 'playing easily in the deep,” writes Tom Robbins. Who in your life has this skill?
This detail from Hieronymous Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony.
