HAPPINESS DAY

/ janpriddyoregon

Today, March 20th is, according to NPR, International Happiness Day. I am failing to feel it.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful. I am sad even though my life has been fortunate in many ways.

I had imagined family meals with three generations at a holiday table, sleepovers, beach fires. These things are never going to happen. The first clue should have been the grandchild flipping each of us off.

I am, unfortunately, a person who keeps track of successes, a person who aims to improve, to contribute and share. I am a fanatical researcher, and at my age I’ve seen a lot. I am also impatient with myself and others, demanding, and difficult. I send work out too soon. I fail and keep trying. Persistence is a valuable skill, but there also comes a time to let things go. Six drafts in the past year. I worked many days from well before dawn until well after dark again. I thought it was getting better, I thought I was cleaving close to my goal.

I need to stop trying so hard.

When my publisher vigorously defended proposed cover art with a very bad painting of a naked white woman, I reacted . . . badly. Brownish hair, indistinct facial features, and feet and hands hidden in drapery. [There is only one white person in my novel, an eighty-year old widow in Wales.] I sent back the advance and they canceled my contract—likely glad to be rid of me. I was difficult. All on me. I should have kept my mouth shut and trusted that the press would choose one of the other covers, that it would be okay. I have always enjoyed working with editors in the past. Perhaps this project was just too close to my heart. Every step was agony. Authors “always hate their covers” I am assured by friends. I let people down, and I have struggled to apologize for that.

So my weird book has no publisher.

And then a few days ago, my son stepped between a loose dog and his daughter and the dog mangled his hand. He’s going to be okay, but it was a traumatic experience for both him and his child. Painful, hours in the ER, a report to the State Patrol, and a slow recovery, and the owners have not offered anything beyond admitting their dog usually wore a muzzle (“he has a history of biting”) but they didn’t think they’d need it on the beach. They said “Sorry” at the time, but are refusing to talk “now that Animal Control is involved.”

On the coast we have a few friends left, but most of the homes in our neighborhood are owned by LLCs rather than actual people.

I am not happy.

We continue to gather trash off the beach. It’s a good thing.

I recently reported to SOLV: “Most of what my husband, Gary C. Anderson, and I find on the beach is not beach visitor litter but has floated in from boats. In 2019 we collected a half ton of trash, and another couple hundred pounds in the beginning of 2020. During the pandemic, we mostly stopped collecting litter, other than hypodermics and lightbulbs. We began collecting trash again a year or two ago. We spend an hour or two 2-4 days each week. Yesterday, we mostly found bottle caps, broken pieces of colored plastic, and a hundred bits of polystyrene foam. We always find plastic rope and fishing floats, fishing line, lures, strapping tape, bait containers. We have found dozens of Bic lighters, bits of metal wire, commercial and sport fishing equipment, plastic bags, soda bottles, full and knotted poop bags. For over a year we’ve been finding Buoy Beer labels washed down from their collapsed warehouse in Astoria. We have found plastic and metal cutlery, food containers, dogs’ lost tennis balls, shoes and flip-flops and random pieces of clothing, beach towels, oars, large plastic garbage cans (2), and many MANY beach toys. A message in a glass bottle—we located the messenger and returned the bottle. A briefcase with a computer which we turner over to the police. A camera, and a cell phone we were also able to return. Both plastic and wood pallets that we still use, rusted and unrecognizable metal, and several salvageable shovels. If the items we find are useful or funny enough, we hang on to them. Mostly, they are added to our garbage.”

The little stuff—bits of hard plastic aged to crispiness, foams, bottle caps—sifts to the bottom. Usually the rope is only a few inches long, but the day I filled this bucket, there were longer pieces.

I am 72 years old and have witnessed enough inequity and bad behavior in my life that the current national situation about does me in. I will stand in solidarity with others at a Hands Off rally in a few days, but I also need to let go of some dreams and focus on what I can actually do.

On the coast, if we walk a mile or a mile and a half north and then home, our progress is slow because we work our way through the basalt cobbles and bend over hundreds of times to gather trash and pebbles and the rare sea glass. In Portland we look forward to the huge gatherings of crows each evening.

Crows make me happy.

14 thoughts on “HAPPINESS DAY”

  1. Ursula Le Guin had the same complaint about the cover art for A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged was brown!

    I was looking forward to reading your novel but I can wait a little longer. I believe in you.

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  2. So very sorry about your book, and about all the other bad stuff. I hope you find a consider finding a more agreeable place to pub it. I’m glad you and Gary do enjoy your spot of coast we we do our spot of Maine coast. I do think the endless unbelievable dreadful things going on at breakneck speed in our country color many of our waking moments, our thoughts, feelings, perceptions. We are trying to savor our personal great moments when we get them. May more come your way.

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  3. Ugh, so sorry about your book contract being canceled, but maybe it wasn’t the right publisher for it. Even if you had agreed with the cover, something else might have gone wrong. I’ve read where some writers decided to self-publish in part because they wanted control over the cover art. Given that these days writers have to do a great deal of their own marketing, I wonder what publishers actually do besides print the damn book.

    Jan, I love your introspection, how well you know yourself, but try to be more kind to yourself. I don’t have grandchildren, but I have a number of grandnieces and grandnephews. I’ve been amazed (sometimes dismayed) at how their acceptance of me has changed over the years. When they were very young, they’d drag me (literally) out to play with them. A few years later, they can’t be bothered to give me the time of day. A few years later, some are still like that and others hug me when I come home to visit. I just try to be the same with them, consistent, whether they like me or not. I know my sister (RIP) struggled with the aloofness some of her grandchildren displayed toward her. We just can’t always control how people respond to us … although I wish we could.

    These weeks have been so stressful. It’s a struggle–at least for me–to put aside the horrors being committed by our so-called government and just focus on that which brings me joy. I feel guilty if I feel joy when other people have had their rights stripped away from them. I believe part of the plan is to make us all afraid. Afraid to speak, to go out in public, to travel. Rising above that fear takes a lot of energy. That’s why we have to take care of ourselves. It won’t help the world if we are sick in mind and/or body. I do what I feel comfortable doing, which usually involves writing, although there is a “town hall” planned this weekend, not that anyone expects our representative to show up. They are all cowards.

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    • Bless you for all of this. Your response is a great comfort. It’s hard for me to let go of my imaginary elderly years, you know? I’ve moved on so many times, I feel a little lost. I had always thought I would teach until this very spring at 72, but I retired a decade ago. There is a wonderful scene in a novel that made me laugh aloud. The main character is stymied and depressed, so she lies down on her couch and pretty much doesn’t move for three days—she gives in to it. So, I hope this will be one of those times. I’ve found my way before, right?

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      • Yes, we always find our way again. It doesn’t help that our imaginary elderly years is being held hostage by hostile authoritarian forces. It’s hard enough to grow older and deal with all that it brings without a fresh daily national crisis. Sigh. Even in this, I want to believe we’ll find our way again. I have to admit, lying down and not moving for three days sounds like of nice to me right 😉

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  5. I am so sorry to hear about the unpleasantness in the break with the publisher. It’s easier to stay quiet, compromise, and push down the feeling that something’s wrong. You are an outlier in your ability to clarify your vision, speak out, and stand strong in your principles. I think about Ellen Langer’s famous study where people at a copy machine let people cut in front of them because of the word because. Any excuse, even “because I need to make copies” would occasion 94% of them to step aside. You do not step aside just “because.” You’re in that 6% of us who have your own cause. Bravo for you Jan, you’ve been an inspiration to me for 30+years. And when it comes to retirement, although I graduated in 1994 it hasn’t meant that you have stopped teaching me.

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  6. I know you know that I’m telling the truth when I say that it gets worse when you get older or is it odder—well anyway—look at the bright side: we still have each other and so far our social insecurity. I know you and I know you will get through this even if it takes a while. judging by the comments by people who know or love you, it seems either you have a lot a people who care about you and your happenings or there’s a bunch of people out there who are suffering too and have gone completely numb cannot move or and need your help—everyone needs a goal even birding. the hand is getting better, spring is here, we still have coffee, and they call it a book because all the other four letter words have been taken—thank you, Leslie Nielsen

    so, in conclusion your honor, I would like to thank all those parents in the world because without them we certainly would not be where we are today, which is not even on the current musk gps space map. kiitos

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    • Thank you, Katherine. The brief they prepared, describing what the cover should be about, was spot on, I think. If only they hadn’t defended that particular design so vigorously . . . I mean to write a blog post about cover art. One of my all-time favorite novels has been published with a dozen different covers over the years. On page 1, Mia Havero is described as black-haired, etc. One of those covers shows her with blond hair and green eyes, half-naked and white.

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