Life Is Good

Last night as we were driving into town my husband Richard said "I like your blog a lot, but maybe just one time you could be really and truly positive.  And as I started to protest, he added: "I know, I know, that's just not your way, but something a little more upbeat.  Try it."  He's a guy who bought us each t-shirts with the legend "Life Is Good," and I have always refused to wear mine.  Too embarrassing, too ridiculous, too untrue.  "What's untrue about it?, he always asks.  "We have comfortable pensions, enjoy good health, have justifiable pride in careers well spent, hey, we have each other."  It's just that  . . . oh, I don't know.  I think life is a grim proposition.  He thinks that we come at these things from such a different perspective.  His family was poor, they lived crowded together, education was minimal, and yet he managed to become valedictorian of his high school class, went on to City College, had a junior year Fulbright in Germany, earned two different Masters, and was a highly praised teacher and department head who now enjoys a very good pension.  What's not to like?  Whereas in my home the auto accident death of my father (when I was six)left a bitter rage and despair under my mother's upper class repression and charming social manner, which we felt, me especially crippled and in pain from a fall at four when I broke bones in my back, and thus an object of repressed, but, oh, yes, still there, impatience, in my mother.  "Get over it," he would say, if I were reciting this story to him.  "Your books, your articles, your Harvard PhD, your children, oh, God . . ." and yes, he is absolutely right.  It's just that tragic sense of life, it's got me under my skin, as that song might go, if Chekhov had written it.  And, yes, it would be better if I did not feast on the parade of horrors in the front section of  The New York Times for my breakfast nourishment.  The mess and agony of our imperial wars, our rapacious and corrupt banks, insane system of health care, the plight of the immigrant workers, the ideologies of the conservatives, oh, on and on. Richard, who cares just as much about these matters, has the benefit of a perspective that comes from his years in AA.  Let go and let God-- something like that.  Or as the stern Vietnamese lady in the spa said when I apologized for my ugly misshapen toes before she began a pedicure, "Get over it." I guess that's another way of saying have the courage to accept what you can't change, another AA thing.  Okay, there is really balmy sweet clean air blowing in our open sliding glass windows here in Sarasota, last night's sunset on the clouds was as extravagantly colored and textured as anything Tiepolo ever painted on a ceiling, one of my daughters is about to fulfill a dream as she graduates from divinity school at age fifty three, the first of my grandchildren is getting married this summer to an absolutely charming young woman whom I so much enjoy talking to, one of my sons just wrote me in long hand, no less, a detailed letter about his life and times, and we had dinner last night with two fabulous, intelligent, witty women.  What's not to like?