Today I felt slightly sick. Norovirus has reached my neighborhood; Sunday was the day I spent on the bed-to-toilet-to-bed circuit but I still feel drained and peak-ed. I went into town. I felt sick of going into town on the same tedious business that's been eating up my energy this winter. I feel the need for a feel-good blog post. Maybe readers want one too.
Thinking about things that made us happy when we were children is a well documented way to feel good now. If reading this post makes you feel good, please share either a thing that made you happy, or a link to a post about several things that made you happy, when you were a child.
It's been said, with some truth, that children aren't what some adults prefer to call happy. Children have not lived long enough and made enough life choices to look back with satisfaction on the effects of their life choices. They can only experience moments of joy, or enjoyment. So? What did we enjoy?
(Some psychologists say this exercise works best if you don't try to pick the "top" ten or twenty things, but just write a list, as long as seems right to you, as fast as possible.)
I found that what leaped to mind were things that come close to the idea of adults' happiness with their life choices. Not that I didn't enjoy other things besides learning experiences. I did. I liked hot baths in winter, cold showers in summer, sweets, that fluffy cardigan that I hung on the fence post where someone else could take it home the first day, snuggling up beside Mother on the couch, cuddling cats, hanging out with horses, and the sheer novelty of eating Cheerios in front of a TV set that was blaring an ad for Cheerios during a summer road trip. I had favorite toys, favorite clothes, favorite shoes, favorite songs, and favorite foods. However, children's natural motivation is to gain competence, and what stands out in memory are moments when I was gaining competence in some way. Even when I thought of my first favorite flowers...I had several favorite flowers and trees, as a child, but I associate the memory of writing the words "yellow, joyful" with a moment of gaining emotional competence.
1. Yellow forsythia in bloom...especially the yard full of overgrown forsythia at the house we rented when I was five years old, but any and all forsythia will do. (So, when I was six years old, I saw yellow forsythia in bloom again and felt cheerful. At school Mrs. Fatso was having a very grouchy day. I whipped out my crayons and paper and drew a lovely picture of a big old farmhouse with its front yard full of overgrown forsythia, just for her. Mrs. Fatso snarled, "Nobody can see what you drew, or wrote, or whatever, with a yellow crayon on white paper. You just wasted your time and your crayons! Now sit down and be quiet!" I sat down and quietly thought about how easy it was to be happy about the approaching spring and the beautiful yellow flowers, even if Mrs. Fatso wanted to be unhappy. In fact, it was easy to think that being unhappy was something Mrs. Fatso needed or deserved. I could be happy aaaallll by my little self!)
2. Reading a good book. When I was seven years old, that meant a book that someone had said was too far ahead of my grade level for me to enjoy it, with bonus points if it contained things that Herbert W. Armstrong said were not real and should have no place in even children's books, like fairies or witches, and even more bonus points if all the important characters were girls. When I was thirteen, it meant a book with fortuitous combinations of words in it, especially poetry. When I was fifteen, it meant a book that made me think, reflect, learn, and/or argue; and it still does.
3. Music with a fast, not heavy, beat. At first I liked dancing about or bouncing up and down to the beat. When I was three some adults thought my baby voice was close enough to tunefulness to be taught to sing. Not many years later, some relatives who were a bit vain about their trendy new gadget made my first recording of a new hit song--"Rocky Top." All subsequent musical milestones became pleasant memories. My home town was in a state of musical ferment at the time, because the Carters did so well with their music and so many other people had at least sold albums or arranged regular paying tours. Band and chorus were things cool kids did. The siblings and I had our little circuit of disabled elders to whom we sang, and to whom our tapes were circulated, as "The Three Bigguns." (Talk about corny dad jokes? Most of these people remembered my tall, slightly humor-impaired father as having been a little kid, so now we were "Little whatever-his-real-name-was and the Three Bigguns.") Of 27 kids in my ninth grade music class at school, 18 had been paid for musical performances or recordings before our ten-year reunion. I sang for scholarship money in college, officially retired from show business at 22, but recorded a retrospective album at 27. Then I got tinnitus and let music slide away.
(Learning the classics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77hneLgt33k&t=29s )
4. Learning to ride a bicycle. I don't like pushing uphill and riding the brakes downhill, so I'm not a bicycle enthusiast, but at times when I lived in flatter country I was one.
5. Having my very own strawberry patch. A suspicious amount of the work that goes into a strawberry patch did itself when I was at school, but I never asked and Dad never told. Anyway I tended my own berries in summer, and that was fun.
6. Learning all the textile crafts in middle school. There still exist things I embroidered, wove, sewed, and quilted before I learned to knit, and I have even crocheted. I'm not sure why I zoom-focussed on knitting and let the other crafts go, in my early twenties. Probably the fact that Mother sewed, one of the great-aunts crocheted, and one of the neighbors quilted, for the neighborhood, had something to do with it. Nobody else in my neighborhood was much of a knitter. So I was.
7. Learning to type. On Mother's old Corona typewriter, from the early 1950s before the Smith and Corona companies merged; it would do as much as 30 words a minute and went to the repair shop every few months, and it made writing stories ever so much easier.
8. Learning to drive...a horse. I never really had a horse of my own, though we boarded a pony with whom I bonded to some extent. The pony had come to her owners cheap because of a foot injury and, after four or five years of luxurious idleness, she didn't want to carry humans about again. But one of the great-uncles had a sweet old Morgan mare who was strong enough and patient enough to give riding lessons to as many as four children at a time, and there may still exist old snapshots in which I was one of the four. So in due course I was taught to drive that old mare.
9. Writing my first full-length novels. They were, of course, very bad novels, bit it felt glorious to have outlined and written all those words on one topic.
10. One non-Barbie doll I had. I was given some baby dolls, which I considered repulsive, not at all like the resl thing. When I played with them I might have been releasing some repressed feelings about the few people I'd seen who were even younger and smaller than I was, because the "games" they suggested to my mind were "Pull off their arms and legs and stick them onto different places" and "See how far they float downstream before they sink." (I wasn't cruel to babies, at the age--four to six--when I was either ignoring or dismembering baby dolls. I wasn't sentimental about them but I would check their diapers and enlist help to change the diapers before leaving the vicinity of a whiny baby.) Barbies interested me, when I was seven and eight and on into my teen years, because they weren't meant to appeal to motherly instincts; they appealed to artistic instincts, they were models to make clothes and build houses for. Barbies were serious fun. But in between there was one "child" doll, packaged with shoes and the ability to stand on its feet, that I liked carrying around and showing off. An aunt had found and bought the doll at the airport and named it Cynthia Ann. I liked Cynthia Ann partly as a souvenir of the aunt's visit, and partly because she was a pretty doll with rich dark brown hair/ What made her special, though, was that, when I took her to school and everyone wanted to pose her "walking" and "waving," and her cheap plastic arms and legs fell off, I could snap them back on. Cynthia Ann was fixable junk.
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