Category Archives: Happiness

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

alice0042dspng“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I was in a funk this morning, so I started looking for Six Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. It wasn’t difficult. It only took me about a half an hour:

  1.  Sunday night, I woke up and glanced at the clock. It was 2:22. I remember laughing and rolling over to go back to sleep. Monday night, I woke up and looked at the clock. It was 3:33! I thought, “Oh, mysteries of life” and fell back to sleep. I woke up again and immediately looked at the clock. It was 4:40 and all I could think was, “Dangit! Four more minutes and I would have nailed it!”

deer-212737_12802.  As we backed out of the driveway and turned up the hill, I stopped the car and said, “Carlos, look! Two deer!” Two small does stopped at the corner of Miss Sarah’s yard to look at us with their ears perked up. We didn’t appear too threatening–just another clunky metal purring thing with heavy round feet. They tiptoed across the road and into Mrs. Hodgson’s azaleas. Carlos whispered, “deer!”

10658710_10204082009963555_7281379235282340952_o3.  When I got back home after dropping him off at school, I stepped out on the deck. There’s a sourwood tree out there that I tried to cut down many years ago. My saw was too small and my arms too weak, so I gave up on it. Now, the sourwood tree grows up and over the deck, giving us shade from the heat, a perch for chickadees, and brilliant red leaves in the fall. As I admired the leaves, I remembered–leaves don’t “turn” colors in the fall. The colors that we see now have always been there, but the green chlorophyll that the plants need to make fuel overpowers the color during the spring and summer. When the year turns to the months of rest, the chlorophyll dies away and we can see the colors that have been there all along.

10679498_10204082009723549_2392038021595593732_o4.  Then my eye fell down to a row of shells that we found on our vacation this year. Oysters, whelks, conchs. As they bleach in the sun, all those plain grayish shells start to show their colors too. Pink and brown, orange and cream. From the bottom of the sea to right here on my deck. Then I remembered that half of my state used to be at the bottom of the ocean a long time ago. And the water in that river that runs through the backyard is the same water, recycled from the ancient ocean, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Jordan, the Nile. Nothing is so far away after all.

10733867_10204082009443542_5464091185153558402_o5.  I went back inside to load the dishwasher. And who do I spy outside the kitchen window? It’s another writing spider. This one is much smaller and browner–the male of the species. If all the pretty yellow girls are “Charlotte,” I decide he will be named “Charlemagne.” Welcome, spinner, to our space. When I stepped back outside to get a better look at him, the dewdrops made his web sparkle in the gray morning haze.

10661655_10203813515051350_6537100019182294571_o6.  Time to make breakfast. I stirred together some oatmeal and milk, then added a dash of salt. I diced up a Honeycrisp apple to throw in before cooking it. I put a sliver of that apple in mouth and the flavor was so perfectly what I wanted at that moment, that my first thought was, “I don’t care if they cost $5 a pound. I’m going to buy these every week until they’re gone. This is why I went to graduate school–to afford these apples.”

Six impossible things before breakfast. Impossibly sweet, impossibly strange, impossibly magical.

I sat down on the couch and booted up my notebook computer while my oatmeal cooled. In a house built of bricks in 1961, on a hill that was carved by that river over a few million years, under an impossibly blue October sky from which leaves of red and orange fall with a whisper, I tapped my finger to a glass screen and connected myself to every other part of the world. I saw Catie standing in a field of orange marigolds in Bhutan, the cinnamon rolls that Beth’s daughter had made in France, and Lucy’s brand new baby down in Dublin.

It’s ALL impossible yet so precious and close. And here we are, right in the middle of it.

C+ Living

school-303928_1280Raise you hand if you are a bit of a perfectionist…Raise it high. And straight. But just high enough that your upper arm doesn’t flap. And be sure you aren’t blocking anyone behind you. Is that a pit stain? Might be a pit stain, so lower your hand ever so slightly to get that situation covered up. But does lowering your hand imply that you’re less of a perfectionist? Might be. Raise it high. Oh but the pit stain. And not too fast or the arm will flap. It’s hard to hold that hand up for this long. Need to work out more. Weight bearing activity reduces the chances of osteoporosis……..WHAT WERE WE TALKING ABOUT?

Oh yeah–perfectionism.

I live with it. Being a perfectionist doesn’t mean that my life is perfect–it means I feel constant guilt because it’s NOT perfect. So maybe I’m a lazy perfectionist.

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend about people who either give themselves 100 points or zero points. Anything less than perfect is an utter failure. She and I were at the employee Health Fair. We were at  the height and weight station for BMI calculation. I got on the electronic scale and it said, “One at a time, please.” We each got our BMI and consulted the chart. Hers was 25 and she was crestfallen. “It’s in the overweight category!” This woman ran 12 miles this weekend, so she was a little bit annoyed with the BMI number. I looked at the “Healthy Weight” category. Guess what the highest range was for healthy BMI? 24.9

One tenth of a percentage and she was dissatisfied. Stuck in the wrong category after all that work. Damned by .10 on a broad scale.

It reminded me of grades and school and all those arbitrary measures we impose on ourselves. Is a 92 really that different from an 89? Is a BMI of 25 different from 24.9?

I have to remind myself constantly that C is average, not A. In those times, I shoot for C+ living. Average, with a teensy bit to acknowledge some extra effort.

This Blue Sky Is Not Beautiful Because…

As I walked between buildings this morning with my face in my smartphone and my head filled with project deadlines, housekeeping minutiae, goals and dreams and regrets that make up the miasma that sublets my head, a red rosebud caught my attention.  I turned off the phone for a second.

I took a deeper breath and pushed it down through my tense muscles, all the way to my feet. My feet sent back the message that I was walking on a pebbled path made of gentle curves, passing under five old oak trees.  My brain wafted down the word “psithurism”–the word for the sound that wind makes in trees.  I couldn’t help but smile.

At the end of the path, I stopped on the sidewalk to let a car pass, even though I had the right of way at the crosswalk.  Reflexively, my mind clicked over to berating the car’s driver for not seeing me…but I stopped and chose to breathe again.  I lifted my eyes, and this is what I saw:blue sky

Such a surprise, to SEE the sky and accept with grateful wonder that I get to live in a place on a day in a moment when that color is right there for me to see.  No charge, no ticket required, no restrictions apply.

At that moment, what words popped into my head?

“This blue sky is not beautiful BECAUSE of anything.  It just IS. It is and it is beautiful.

Not because I have a job.

Not because my clothes match and smell nice.

Not because my son’s potty training is on or off track.

Not because the scale said a certain number.

Not because I met that deadline.

Not because I wrote today or slept last night or ate the right balance of carbs to protein or remembered to take the school supplies to the teacher.  All those things that fill my mind have nothing whatsoever to do with this blue sky that brings me such delight.

And no self-respecting Georgia Girl could dive into a sky like that without humming “Blue Sky” by The Allman Brothers.  Here’s one of only five recordings of “Blue Sky” from the glory days of the brothers, the band, the Betts.  This version was recorded live in 1971 at SUNY Stonybrook.  It’s long, because it was the 70s.  Worth every single second–breathe your way through it instead of playing Candy Crush or worrying about carbs.

“You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day.  Lord y’know it makes me high when you turn your love my way. Turn your love my way…” Click the photo of the band if you’d like to go back to that day:

stonybrook

Portuguese Has a Word for This Feeling

 

Here’s a gift to you from G today. It’s pronounced “sow-dah-day.” Portuguese is the only language that has a noun for this feeling.

Take this word and tuck it into your heart. If you are missing someone, remember the joy and let it propel you.
10495568_513502678780694_2284352562159971681_o

A Life Made From Crumbs

sparrow-381566_1280

Image courtesy Pixabay

In this story, I will attempt to weave together a stale Nutrigrain bar, a trip to Bermuda, the loneliness of mothering, two sparrows, and an Anglo-Saxon parable from the Venerable Bede.  Hold on to your butts, kids, because THIS is where a liberal arts degree can take you…

Last week, I took the two littles to the beach for a week.  And you know how–even on vacation–you’re still The Mom?  Butt wiping, breakfast fixing, tantrum abiding, sunscreen applying Mom.  I hit a point on Wednesday when the black cloud of sadness that nips at my heels caught up with me, all because of a stale Nutrigrain bar. When I asked Carlos if he wanted Cheeries for breakfast, he said “Yes!”…but he didn’t eat them.  So I gave him some grapes, which he stomped into the carpet.  So I asked him if he would eat a cereal bar and he said, “YES!”  He didn’t.  He smeared it into the rented yellow couch and giggled.

It broke me.  My motherator locked up.

I retreated to my bedroom where, in the space of two minutes, my frustrating morning escalated into a sobbing fit.  “I will die alone. No one gives a shit about me.  Why should they? I can’t even feed my kids.  I suck at taking care of them.  No one takes care of ME. I am so tired and lonely and tired of being lonely and this is just the way life is and you might as well suck it up.  This is as good as it gets. You are born alone, you die alone, with some yammering and distraction in between. Oh, and you’re overweight, you haven’t written in a week and that spot on your belly is probably ringworm.”

At that moment, in that despair, I saw my life as this long string of me waiting to be handed whatever was left over, whatever was unwanted, whatever was not quite good enough.

I was still holding the remains of the Nutrigrain bar.  Instead of wiping it into the wastebasket, I slid open the glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.  I crumbled the apple filling onto the glass-topped cafe table then stepped back inside.  I took a deep breath and sank into the rented yellow chair to stare listlessly out the window from the air-conditioned comfort of my room.  Because when you’re going to have a snot-slinging fit about how miserable your life is, it’s best to do it while enjoying the view from a beachfront condo while your two healthy kids watch PBSKids in the other room.

Within a few minutes, a sparrow hopped onto the balcony railing then down to the table.  She pecked at the crumbs before flitting away.  She came back with a companion and the two of them made a feast from my leftovers.  The smashed cereal bar that had broken my spirit–to them it was a banquet beyond imagining.

As I watched them reveling in their treasure, I remembered a little sparrow from Bermuda, when Richard and I went there for the first time in about 2002, maybe 2003.  We stayed at a fantastic resort called The Reefs in a cliffside room.  One morning, a sparrow perched on our balcony.  It hopped down to the terra cotta tile floor to search for crumbs.  I noticed that one of its legs was misshapen.  It stuck out to the side at a painful angle, but it didn’t seem to slow the little bird down.  That leg was the leg the bird had been given–what choice did it have?  We named the little bird “Gimpy” and we adopted him as our own pet project.

For the rest of the week, I smuggled scones, dinner rolls, breadsticks, tea sandwiches and biscuits back to our room to feed Gimpy.  There was a German waitress at the dinner service who saw me wrapping rolls in a linen napkin.  When I told her why I was doing it, she brought a basket of rolls from the kitchen and whispered, “For your leetle buhd.”

I was sad to leave Gimpy, but it’s not like we could take him with us. He had to live his life, a life of crumbs, but a life of crumbs in Berumda. We had to leave him to that, to love him as best we could, while we could, then we had to go our way.

Now, you Christians are probably humming, “I sing because I’m happy!  I sing because I’m free!  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me!”  I love that song.  But here’s another thought on sparrows and eternity and whether or not we matter.

The Venerable Bede, a monk from Anglo-Saxon England, wrote this story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa 627, so he’s not on Twitter @VenerableBede):

“When we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your lords and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.”

All we get is this swift flight through a warm hall, picking up the crumbs from a great feast. It can be enough.  We make joy for ourselves by feeding frail birds on stolen bread.  We make a life from crumbs. We keep flying.

Imagine the delight Richard and I felt when we returned to The Reefs six months later and found Gimpy alive and kicking on the terrace.  That was a good day, a sweet day.  We stood there on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a vast ocean, in the last year of our life together, and we laughed into the wind because our little bird lived.

That’s the story that came to me last week.  I flew out of that dark place on sparrow’s wings.

Sunday Sweetness–A Piece of Poppy

Do you have a cozy quilt that makes you feel safe?  Did you have a special “lovey” when you were a kid?  I have a tiny “piece of Poppy” that I carry with me everywhere because it reminds me that I am loved by a very generous boy who wanted me to feel better. Today’s story is called “Five Security Blankets.”  Click on one of the stars in this quilt to read it!

quilt-112550_1280

 

Swimmin’ In the Rain

A Man In Love

A Man In Love

Let’s see…for the month of July, we’ve spent $1000 on pool repairs and maintenance.  What with bad weather, assorted sicknesses, and a brief green period, the pool has sat idle for most of July.  If we divide that $1000 by 3 people going swimming 3 times each and that comes out to….carry the one…borrow 10…old math vs. new math….too much damn money and not enough fun!  So I left work today with one goal in mind:  GET IN THE POOL.

(Oh, and by the way, the bikini still hasn’t been worn.  It was too BIG!  I’ll try again with one size down.)

Anyhewwwww.  We got in the pool.  Vivi started some elaborate game that required her to corral a bunch of stray pool noodles (that she referred to as “dawn horses” or Eohippus) and some rubber balls (baby sabre tooth tigers) while Carlos and I worked on him kicking and blowing bubbles.

And not 10 minutes into our swim, it started to rain.  Big plunking drops that hit the surface of the water so hard, each drop made a bubble pop up.

“OK, let’s get out of the pool!” I hollered in my best upbeat yet not-to-be-contradicted Mom voice.  I shuffled towards the steps with Carlos in tow.  Vivi set the Eohippuseseses free in the deep end and headed over.  She pointed to our cups, sitting beside the steps and said, “Aw, man!  The rain is getting in our water!”

Wait, what?

Duh.

The rain is getting in our water?  And we’re getting out of the pool because…we might get wet?  Wetter?

I stood still and listened for a moment.  No thunder.  No lightning.  No high winds.  Just plinky plunky rain on our heads that were already wet from being in the pool.  Hell, it was warmer in the pool.

So we got back in.  And we LAUGHED about it.  I turned my face up to the sky and let the rain plunk and plink on my skin.  Carlos practiced holding on to the wall and kicking.  Vivi went back to the life of a nomadic prehistoric herdsgirl.

We went swimming in the rain.  Because sometimes you follow an old habit just out of habit, but when you look around, there’s no real REASON for that habit.

Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo 
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo 
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo…

I’m singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feelin’
I’m happy again
I’m laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun’s in my heart
And I’m ready for love
Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I’ve a smile on my face
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin’,
Singin’ in the rain

Dancin’ in the rain
Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
I’m happy again!
I’m singin’ and dancin’ in the rain!

I’m dancin’ and singin’ in the rain…

Why am I smiling
And why do I sing?
Why does September 
Seem sunny as spring?
Why do I get up
Each morning and start?
Happy and head up 
With joy in my heart
Why is each new task
A trifle to do?
Because I am living
A life full of you.

(Hit it, Gene Kelly! If you’ve never watched this segment from the movie, PLEASE do yourself a jaunty little Tuesday kind of favor and take four minutes.  It’s totally worth it.)