MAKE SOMEONE HAPPY
I have been lying awake, thinking, wondering just what it is that is so necessary about lying awake, thinking. Perhaps it is that there are so few distractions. Our lives are so full of distractions—what needs to be done for our own sanity and for our physical health, what others demand of us, ways that we annoy someone in the room with us and how we can avoid becoming that annoyance. There are three generations living in this house, each person with unique physical needs and demands and varying degrees of happiness. For a short time, with all of us here, the third generational member introduced her charges—she’s a nanny—which made us, briefly, four generational. This addition, if one was observing closely, added a new dimension to the mix. JOY. However did a little bright-eyed girl in a tutu, aged about four, and a little toe-headed boy, around two, manage to do that? Partly by giving the members of the group focus outside themselves.
The children had a bowl of Fruit Loops—oh, that reminds me of a story from my schoolteacher past. Please allow me to insert that here. It was in the sixties when men’s shirts began to have a little loop on the back near the neck. Somehow they became known as fruit loops, and students had begun collecting them by walking up behind the wearer and yanking them off neatly. This teacher was not aware of any of this, so when, as I stood at the chalkboard writing and someone declared, “Look! Mr. Rhoades has a fruit loop,” I thought they meant Fruit Loop, having small children at home who had had them for breakfast; so I did the logical thing—I casually brushed the seat of my pants, inspiring a sudden roar of gay laughter at my expense, and someone had to explain to me why anything was that funny. Certainly it had nothing to do with gerunds.
Back to the present! Winnie and Miles were sharing a bowl of Fruit Loops, and Sean (second generation) was nursing his pain by lying, pillowed, on the couch. When Miles offered him a single Fruit Loop, he opened his mouth into a humorous ‘gawp’ to receive the generous donation and snapped it shut almost immediately, causing surprise and a delighted guffaw from the littlest one. Winnie was intrigued and was not to be outdone. Soon they were rushing to Sean for a repeat performance, and the shrieks of gaiety got increasingly loud.
And, wonder of wonders, (“… and what to my wondering eyes did appear..”) I discovered that everyone in the room was joyful and having a wonderful time, so much so that when the little ones were leaving, they had to kiss every one of us—such is the result of sharing just a little bit of joy.
But, lying in bed just a short bit ago, I was wondering what happens to those little ones when life becomes mundane, parents are separated, school—another new one—has become intolerable, and reactions become blown out of context and seem bizarre so that freakish behavior results and psychiatrists and therapists are needed to sort things our if they really can.
How does one child get to be self-motivated, a teacher’s delight, while another very similar child begins to self-destruct, developing self-confidence in the one case and self-loathing in the other? Another granddaughter, also visiting yesterday, shared something very personal in a rather joyful way, and I wondered if she hadn’t discovered her ability to produce a loud ‘squawk’ sound, both very annoying and quite humorous, as a serious cry for help that no one understood. “When do you do this?” I asked.
“All the time,” was her reply with very bright eyes and a coy grin. She was sharing a secret with Grandpa, who would surely understand because he was a master of strange noises. When my children were little, I developed a ‘hoot’ that would echo down the long street to wherever John had strayed to, and he would quickly appear on the run. It was during a visit to Margaret’s parents’ home in Montana that I discovered why it was so effective. As he was going out to play, he said, “Don’t hoot, Daddy. Just call first, and if I don’t come, then you can hoot.” But he always came running after the first call because there was something about the hoot that he found embarrassing. High school students, hearing somehow about this noise I could make, would ask me to give a hoot for them, and if I obliged, it brought a bit of joy to the classroom.
In Carthage, Indiana, fifty-one years ago, I had a girl whose unusual talent was telling jokes. She kept a notebook of them, and on the senior trip to Washington and New York, she never repeated a joke as she poured them forth on the bus. In senior English class, her hand would go up during serious class work, and she would say, “That reminds me of a joke, Mr. Rhoades. May I tell it?” We were always poised for these daily interruptions, and I always allowed them because it gave my classroom a bit of joy, and the class always allowed me to go right back to the matter at hand.
And I have to wonder, where are the people who always brought joy to my daily life? At 11:15 the other night when I had gone to sleep pondering serious problems, the phone woke me up and a friend who just happened to be doing a service project with his college students at Wounded Knee where it was 9:15, said with a voice that always gives me joy, “Jack, what the heck is going on there?” And he gave me some more joy with his very sound advice. What I wouldn’t give to be the voice of reason for someone out there needing advice.
All this makes me come to this conclusion: we must not become so intent on the perplexities of life that we forget to give heed to the strange voice that sang so lustily, “Make someone happy! Make just one person happy…”
Maybe you could stop listening to that voice in your head that is the “insistent self” which Baha’u’llah said was the reality of Satan in our lives and step outside your skin to offer up a fruit loop or give a hoot to make just one person (or maybe a roomful of people of many generations) happy.
