Saints and Sinners: Happiness doesn’t mean perfection
When I went to answer the knock at the door, the chauffeur was standing there. Not my chauffeur (I don’t have one) but Miss Sears’.
He took off his cap, as chauffeurs often do, and handed me a cardboard bakery box.
“From Miss Sears, Reverend,” he said. I thanked him and he turned and left.
After I got to the kitchen of my bachelor’s apartment in Back Bay Boston I read the note pinned to the box. It said, “If these cakes are too hard, soak them in milk.”
This was vintage “cold roast Boston” — frugal to the bone. As Sunday’s leftover roast became Monday’s cold dinner, so a Proper Bostonian lived his entire life.
Miss Sears was not poor (Remember she had her chauffeur deliver the cupcakes to my door!) But she was a New Englander who followed the New Englander’s credo — “use it up, wear it out, make it do.” In this case I, a transplanted Midwesterner, was enlisted to use up the week-old cupcakes.
Is there any admonition we more need to hear — our generation that has wasted its substance on extravagant living? “If the cakes are too hard, soak them in milk.”
With Miss Sears out of the room, Bridey the maid told me she would soon be leaving Miss Sears’ employ. She seemed to be looking forward to it. “I’ll not have to be cold again,” she said wrapping her arms across her chest in a mock shivering motion. In “cold roast Boston,” you put on a sweater; you don’t turn up the thermostat.
My father was also good at putting his rules for living “in a nutshell.” A fix-it man around the house and yard, he would stand back and survey a piece of work he had just finished and say, “Well, it’s better than it was.”
If we want things to be perfect for us all the time, we are going to be unhappy. If we are always comparing ourselves to people who have more than we have, we are going to be miserable too.
One of the secrets of happiness is to search out every occasion in our lives when we can say, “Well, it’s better than it was.”
My father had a couple of other sayings that I have fashioned into rules for living. One was “Just do it.”
As children, we used to be ready with all sorts of excuses when we were asked to do something. My father would hear us out — up to a point. Then he would break in and say, “Just do it.” And we did it.
“What does the book of instructions say?”
That was my father’s first question when I went to him for help on some mechanical problem with my bicycle or, later, with my Model A Ford.
We not only waste a lot of time by plunging ahead on our own without reading life’s book of instructions first, a lot of our difficulties –including many of our problems with our health — are the result of not following the Maker’s instructions.
All of a sudden I am recalling many more of these one-line philosophies of life that have remained with me through the years. But I’ll stop with this one: “Don’t be too cheerful.”
I got that one from Monsignor Ronald Knox, the British priest and Bible translator.
We sometimes fail to realize that telling people how perfectly great we feel or how well things are going for us may actually depress others who are not finding it so good themselves.
We ought to cheer people up. But we ought to be aware that telling others how happy we are doesn’t necessarily cheer them up.
George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.