I like happy endings. I don't know why this needs an explanation. To me, it's akin to liking oxygen or chocolate. But then I sit down and watch Great Expectations (the old BBC version) and am forcibly reminded of why I hated the book in high school. As the camera pulls away from the closing shot of Pip and Estella playing cards because their circumstances prevent them from the kiss they would both prefer, I gnash my teeth at having spent several hours of my life watching them come to this impasse. (What did I expect? I'd read the book...)
Last year, I saw Take Shelter, in which Michael Shannon spends two and a half hours trying to decide whether or not he's losing his mind. We still don't know. I had to grip the arm of my seat to keep from running out of the theatre.
I am aware that not all outcomes are good, that shit happens, that the agony of defeat is a more common experience than the thrill of victory. I get it. I just don't want to watch movies about it. I'm a firm believer in round stories, ones that tie up the plot's loose ends and put the hero to bed with his beloved at story's end, wedding rings on both their hands, smiles on both their faces.
There's a whole raft of difficult-but-uplifting movies in which the hero dies for a good cause, the protagonist goes to jail for his reprehensible behavior or a lover's moral slip dooms a promising romance. Lessons are learned, tears are shed. If these are your favorite movies, I admire you.
But I like happy endings.
I suppose the argument against them is Realism. That Seabiscuit doesn't always win the Santa Anita, that David doesn't always slay Goliath, that the U.S. Olympic hockey team can't always be counted on to beat the Russians.
But they DID. So that's realism, if realism is defined as "this really happened." Some define it, instead, as "something that feels gritty and hopeless, or pointless and boring," because so much of life genuinely feels like that. Of course the great bulk of daily occurrences are not stunning victories.
But, for the stories that are not over yet, for the races still being run, the stories in the process of being written...for the sake of my life in progress, I get to choose which books I read, which disc I stick in the DVD player, which outcomes I watch. I get to cast a deciding vote in the outcome of my own life's story. Happy endings better prepare me for a happy ending of my own, give me courage and inspiration for my particular battle of the day. And I need all I can get.
Here's to happy endings.

PeggySue's book

My friend PeggySue Wells' book is out! Rediscovering Your Happily Ever After, it guides the newly and not-so-newly-divorced woman through the rough waters of her new world.

I want to write about it because I'm still all warm from the experience of reading it. If you know PeggySue, you know she is a tonic--warm like your favorite blanket, bracing like a stiff drink. (At a writers' meeting at her home, once, a newcomer hesitated to take the "best" chair, and PeggySue, hollering from the kitchen, put her, and everyone else, at ease by shouting, "Shut up and sit down!" I still cherish the moment of cutting-through-the-crap.)

I feel like I just spent an afternoon with PeggySue, and I feel better for it, after reading her book. And I'm trying to put in words what was so special about it. I think it's that aspect of cutting-through-the-crap. In the midst of my divorce, I had to get to what worked, and quick. I didn't have time for hesitation, for meandering, for staying at home and sucking my thumb. The situation demanded ACTION of me--and (unlike PeggySue) I HATE having to act. I prefer thumb-sucking, navel-gazing, and any other inactivity you can hyphenate. I had a bracing friend who saw me through those difficult years, and I wish I had had PeggySue's book.

Some favorite parts:

• "The only person who believes an excuse is the one serving it up." p. 198
• "Courage is about DOING, [Mary.]" Emphasis added. I will ask to check to see if the original ms. had my name in it. It should have. p. 147.
• "A snare has a deceiving degree of attractiveness." Amen, sister. p. 51.
• "Whether my past makes me or breaks me depends upon how I respond." p. 91
• that she quotes ME! (see page 39, something I don't remember saying. I feel flattered.)

There are a lot of things I could have quoted. My friend PeggySue is eminently quotable.

And her selection of quotes from other people are notable, too, and come from all over the map. I find that refreshing.

That brings me, I guess, to what I find most helpful: PeggySue loves and honors the Lord, first and foremost, without making me want to crawl under a rock. Jesus is winsome and loving and bold and fierce, and the process of following Him will make the follower more their true self, not some flannel-board copy, not a nicer person with a slightly better grip on their temper or their drinking problem. What I see in PeggySue's book is an author who has become more like herself in the process of going through her own divorce.

When we follow Him, He molds us into His image. What I never used to grasp is that image is individual for each of us, and the more He molds and shapes me, I become more of an individual (albeit, an individual that plays better with others than I ever used to.)

But it all takes COURAGE, and that is the strongest virtue I carry away from my time with the book. Courage, courage, courage. We all need it to face the hard stuff in our lives, and this book mixed COURAGE with enCOURAGEment.

It was a tonic.

Thanks, PeggySue.

Beatles Lyrics

The other day I listened to my stack of Beatles CDs. I still love Beatles music--something about the melody and the words...well, the words don't fight the notes, and they have an interior coordination. The words fit.

I have always thought that some of the lyrics were just impossible. "You Can't Do That."/"You're Gonna Lose That Girl."/"If I Fell in Love with You." I have ALWAYS thought, of those, "Oh, puh-leeze, John." (Because I always thought it had to be John writing those, since I couldn't attribute all that emotional tantrummery to that adorable Paul.)

But the other day as I listened I noticed that what qualifies a song for that list really branches into a lot of their music. A lot. What I mean is an attitude that views love as a commodity, a bargaining chip that can be withheld if it doesn't look like the exchange will be sufficiently advantageous. A detachment. "If I fell in love with you/would you promise to be true/and help me understand..." What happened to falling in love without seeing in advance if it's a good deal? "It's the second time I've caught you talking to him/And I have to tell you one more time I think it's a sin/I'm gonna let you down, and leave you flat/Because I told you before, you can't do that." I would put as many miles as I could between me and any boyfriend who treated me like that today. Or, "(I'll) give you all I've got to give/If it makes you love me, too/I may not have a lot to give/But what I've got, I'll give to you/I don't care too much for money/Money can't buy me love." So he says, but it's not how he begins. This is a guy who never seems to give himself to his girl--he holds himself back, standing on the edge of the pool of love, skimming the surface with his toe, writing songs about what would happen if he jumped.

Deep relationships? Michelle is about a girl he isn't able to talk to. Yesterday is about love gone wrong, and he wasn't even connected enough to know why. Day Tripper-- the title says it all.

Terrific, tuneful, songs--thoughtful songs. But not songs with a depth of heart and an ideal of love for a lifetime. It's a body of work dedicated to emotional detachment. A lot of interpersonal politics, mixed with a major dose of navel-gazing, it culminates in Imagine, a hymn to detachment, after taking a tour through the macabre, en route (the "Butcher" album cover, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, and my personal least-favorite, Why Don't We Do It in the Road?)

I'm not writing this to gripe. They are what they are, and I've always sung along. Just a few years ago, Things We Said Today came on the muzak while I was trying on jeans, and I went straight out and bought the CD, convinced I could not go another day without it. I still love it.

But what happened to my generation? These songs were our emotional wallpaper. A friend of mine, decades ago, wrote a thesis about lying. She likened it to peeing in a swimming pool--it contaminates everybody's swimming experience. Lying degrades our ability to trust each other. In the same way, bad spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax contaminate our language and dull the sharp edge of our ability to express ourselves.

I wonder to what extent my generation's ability to feel is dulled by the assumptions inherent in Beatles lyrics. It's not so much about what was said, as it is about the assumptions what was said had as a foundation. What struck me, as I listened to my CDs, was that I was like a goldfish seeing for the first time the water I'd been swimming in all my life. It's hard to see what has always surrounded you.

My generation fell in and out of love like any generation, got married left and right, but we seem to lack that gut-level grip on forever that commits to marriage. I was ambushed, the day before my foray into the Beatles, by a description in a 1912 novel:

There was a power in marriage, something apart from the law, or from religion, something apart from passion, love, or romance. (T)he unforgettable impress of one life upon the other...In some deep eternal sense, that which had once been joined could never be set asunder any more for ever.

Does anyone I know still think that way?!? When I married, did I?

I would have said I did, but I see now that my heart never did commit to my marriage. I held myself back, got married, and figured I'd add to the initial commitment incrementally, as it got safer. Of course, it never did. You can't build trust when neither partner is quite willing to be the first to jump in the pool. Marriage is a tie, and yes, it can be broken. But my point is that, lots of times, we never really made the kind of commitment that my 1912 novel described in the first place. I'm not blaming the Beatles, for as likely as not, they were just reporting on state of the water in the pool they, too, were swimming in.

The house I grew up in has been torn down. No great loss, really--a cinderblock structure Daddy built by hand, it lacked indoor plumbing until I was two. I remember more about the surrounding woods than the house.
What I remember is my grandparents'. Old, old places--the oldest house in Mt. Lakes, New Jersey belonged to my paternal grandparents. Two hundred fifty years of atmosphere met you at the door. Or the big brown 20's bungalow that belonged to my mom's folks.
I collected dream houses on every trip to town, my nose pressed against the passenger window. I populated my collected mansions with wealthy families with five daughters apiece, each with three syllable names: Jessica, Jennifer, Genevieve (this, back when every friend this only child had was either Debbie or Linda.) They wore pleated dresses and sat on seats in front of casement windows, when they weren't running down winding stairs to collect invitations passed through the brass slot in the front door.
Then some real houses came along. The house where we raised the boys still stands in Ohio; we were only its fourth family in a hundred years. I've moved on to my own bungalow, a place that suits me so perfectly it takes my breath away. I am so thankful.
I was then, and am now, looking for slices of home. A banister here, a window there, I collect pictures in more file folders than I like to admit I own. I understand the old Brook Benton song about the boll weevil who was "lookin' for a home." I love the patriarch Abraham, who sought "a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." For some, it's a beach or a creek or a mountain, but for me, it's always a house. A friend in college wrote a song she titled "The Living Room of God's Love," and that's where I want to live. The house is just the box that represents heaven until I get there.