How Did Happy Go?

My sister Agatha and I traded calls all day yesterday, always missing each other, and now she’s busy watching AMAZING RACE because she’s on the East Coast feed and has no time for me, ha ha ha. But the message she left yesterday is a keeper, because she was calling in between a party for a bridal shower and drinks at another bar, and needless to say, she was a bit tipsy. In between giving me the important details of how tipsy she was, she said “Hope, you know, that happy mood is doing well for ya, because for me? It IS!”

So how IS my happy mood doing, without the benefit of bridal party shower alcohol? Well, I can certainly tell you all that it IS exhausting to consistently be HAPPY. C’MON! GET HAPPY! GET HAPPY AND STAY THERE! DON’T MOVE A SINGLE MUSCLE FROM THE HAPPY ZONE! DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT! AH! I SAW ONE CORNER OF YOUR MOUTH DROOP INTO A FROWN! CUT IT OUT! You start to feel like that poor newscaster in Batman. Hysterical painful laughter leading to death because the Joker dosed your lipstick with Happy Poison.

So what happened was Happy kinda boiled down to a Pleasant Bemusement. Which is still better than Mopey Whining.

I’m not lying, it does take work to consistently focus on the happy, or pleasant stuff. I’m not saying my heart got instantly lighter. But I did smile more. At silly things.

Like this morning at church, Percy and Petunia’s little baby Paddy was wearing the Jack Skellington baby hat I got for him. (and me without my camera, but it looked a bit like this.) I held him for two seconds, then when I tried to pass him back, he reached for me, because he doesn’t know I don’t really like kids, I just like to buy Jack Skellington baby hats for them. So I end up holding the little guy for most of the songs, which was funny.

Like the other baby girl, who’s a bit older, but not by much, and she was wearing a cornflower blue dress, and held on to her mom’s hands while her pudgy baby leg stretched out and pudgy baby foot pointed like she was skipping along the sea shore. That was amusing too.

Like Lewis the Dog and his Pink Puppy Paw Pads , who’s staying here for the weekend, and when Roomie Jekyll and her boyfriend left to go see a movie, he jumped up on the couch to wait for them to come home, like a cat would, here.

Like how my goal yesterday was to name the characters in my zombie script, and several folks at the Act One reunion dinner were more than happy to volunteer ideas, including their own names, and how we discovered one of them had parents named Dale and Gale. Dale and Gale! How can that NOT make you smile? I ended up not only naming my characters, but figuring out the first and third act while I was at it. (Second act? We don’t need no stinkin’ second acts.)


It’s the little things, folks. If you find enough of them, it could almost constitute a lot of waking moments that could constitute a life.

I think I need to take my camera around with me more often.