Happiness

I have been sorting, filing, tossing, saving, reviewing, repacking. I have been shuffling my life like a worn deck of cards. I say I do it for my daughters, but we all know I do it for myself. Revisiting that which can’t be revisited, not really.

Some of the evidence is easy to see: faded photos and prom dresses and high school jackets and old Barbies and Star Wars figures and love letters recently reclaimed from my dad’s attic, strewn about the dining room that is not a dining room. Some of the evidence is harder to catch a glimpse of.

This is one of the photos I came across:

I think my mom must have taken it. We were on our way back from a trip visiting my aunt in North Carolina—this I know, because there is a photo too of my brother next to me in the backseat of our baby-blue Oldsmobile, his eyes still swollen from an allergic reaction to insect bites.

My father was probably driving, or—judging from the stillness of the photo—out of the car, pumping gas, buying chips, or maybe another pack of cigarettes.

This aunt in North Carolina, my only aunt, is gone now. This happens, as you know.

That’s one scenario.

Another scenario: Some of the people you love stick around, and yet they are gone from you too. This happens, as you know. Of course you know.

There’s grief, either way.

This photo. Let’s talk about it.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs of my grinning self, but only one like this. One. The sadness in my eight-year-old face is a pervasive, penetrating sadness I know very well—still—thirty years later. It’s an undercurrent, a strong undertow. It feels sometimes as if it is determined to have its way, determined to take its share whenever it can.

Of course I try to remedy this. Some things resist easy fixes.

It’s a particularly difficult sadness to explain when there’s so much photographic evidence—and so much evidence in person and in my writing—to refute it. “You’re so FUNNY! You’re TOTALLY the reason I know I’m NOT READY TO HAVE KIDS AND A HUSBAND! HA HA!” These are the sort of sentiments I hear fairly often. It’s nice to be able to make people laugh. I always wanted to be one of those people, and I seem to have figured out how to do that, sometimes.

But some things are hard to explain, defy scrutiny, don’t like show-and-tell.

I am glad this photo exists. I am glad because I recognize her and know her well. I know what she didn’t know then: that she would make some good choices along the way, choices that would lead to some great happiness, here and there and here and there. I am also sad, looking at those familiar eyes, because I worry I will recognize her in my own daughters. I will watch out for her in them, but if I see her there, I am not sure how I will greet her.

But what of happiness? What of the laughing, head-thrown-back photos, the boxes and albums of them? It’s not that those images are inauthentic. Happiness comes, goes, comes again. I smile more than I feel like smiling (this is true; what are the options?) but I can’t call happiness a stranger, either. I just don’t expect to see her all the time. She doesn’t like the phone, and neither do I. That’s just our way with each other. No hard feelings.

A friend sent me a link to Happiness by Jane Kenyon. A picture is supposed to trump a smattering of words, but this poem more than holds its own. I welcome it like I welcome the photo.