3.20.19
On Wednesdays I travel down to Duluth to attend a class at the College of St. Scholastica. My dad, who is 70 years old, volunteers to drive down most weeks; he has errands to do in the relative metropolis of the Twin Ports, or people to visit there. Lately, a woman named Lois has come on the trips as well. Lois is 86, and I suppose she is the kind of older person that younger people often call “sprightly.” Before she rented my dad’s basement apartment, I knew her only as an unusually kind woman with a quick, deep laugh who always greeted me warmly and once dropped off a box of donuts at the Post Office where I used to work, which seemed to be a perceptive and necessary gesture of cheer-spreading.
Lately, Lois has shown interest in my Wednesday class on “the pursuit of happiness” and often asks questions about our class discussions. As we drove out of town last week, she handed me a page from a devotional calendar and said, “Here’s some happiness for you.” It was a pastel-colored image of a seascape with the words “Sometimes it’s important to take a break from our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” She was more than willing to submit to an interview.
My first question concerned the parts of her life that had improved her sense of happiness, and she immediately began to retrieve memories of working at various summer camps in northern Minnesota when she was in her twenties and thirties. The initial draw seems to have been the landscape, but that wasn’t sufficient to keep her there: “I went to the U of M for four years, and when I graduated I thought it would be fun to go live up at the cabin – my parents had a cabin on Hungry Jack [Lake] – but no one was around and I was going bonkers so I went back to camp.” Lois summarized the experience of working at camps throughout the Northwoods as “significant, meaningful, enjoyable,” and said it was the source of lifelong friendships.
The importance of relationships continued to be a theme in our conversation. When I asked Lois if there was ever a time in her life when she realized what made her happy, she almost immediately began to recount an occasion in which happiness was decidedly absent: “One day I was walking up the driveway. It must have been – we had moved up in June of ‘92 to our place. And I was just in tears. I’m not sure why, but later I was thinking about it, and that point in time, we had just moved up and I didn’t know anybody – and I was thinking, what am I doing here? And now, I’m so thankful that I can be in Grand Marais, so thankful for [my friends], and that I can just go around and find somebody I know, and if they’re not too busy and I’m not too busy, we can just sit down and visit.” Lois then recounted how on the day previous she had driven around town looking for a tamarack, whose twigs, when clipped and put in a vase at this time of year, will bloom into their summer foliage. She hadn’t located a tree, but ended up at the coffee shop “where I saw Diane, and another Diane that I know,” with whom it was easy to strike up a conversation. My dad then reminded her of the previous days dinner, which was shared between the two of them, my dad’s partner, and a neighbor who recently lost her husband. “Oh yes, that was a nice time, a very nice time” Lois said, “I enjoy a smaller gathering – with food – not rushed, with conversation, sharing.”
My next question had to do with the relationship between money and happiness: “If someone were to write you a check for one million dollars,” I asked, “would you become a happier person because of it? And don’t feel like you have to say ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’ – really think about it. What would you do with that money?” Lois was adamant that more money wouldn’t mean anything to her personally, as she feels perfectly provided for with her pension from her career in the public schools. If a massive windfall were to come her way, she said she would be “happy to find places or programs that could use it or places it could go.” But I wanted to be perfectly sure that she didn’t have any conception of some kind of material improvement that would also improve her happiness, so I asked her whether, hypothetically, she wouldn’t be interested in more luxurious living arrangements than her basement apartment. “No, and I repeat,” she said, “At my age I’m ready to go under –”
“Or go over,” my dad chimed in, pointing heavenward and smirking.
“That’s right!” Lois chuckled. “At my age I’m ready to go – I could go – at anytime and I don’t need anything.” She put a certain emphasis on these last four words, and they sounded authoritative but not at all dramatic.
Lois seemed to be contentment personified, but nevertheless I wanted to ask her my final question, which was whether there was anything she wanted to do with her life to make herself happier. She thought for a while and then said, “I certainly don’t have a yearning or feel that there’s a need for something. I would thoroughly enjoy going to Nova Scotia again [where she went annually with her longtime best friend, who died last year], but I can’t handle that anymore, so it’s not reasonable and not something I can even ponder. Physically I’m more wobbly and balance is an issue, but in my mind that’s something that goes along with being 86 –” Suddenly, her voice brightened and regained it’s characteristic joviality: “There’s some tamarack trees!” she exclaimed, as we passed a wayside rest that had been amply planted with the deciduous conifer. We talked briefly about the trees before she continued: “I thoroughly enjoy being outside, and that’s probably from my childhood – I grew up alongside Lake Phelan in the Cities, and there was a farmer across the way with a field that I loved to wander in. I once made the mistake of wandering in his field with my Easter shoes on and got them all muddy.” Lois continued, becoming more and more reflective: “Some people like to relax and have a drink, I like to be outside and have fresh air, that’s my drink. I’ve never been married, I don’t have a family – my mother and father have passed, my brothers have passed, my uncles and my aunts are gone. To be honest, I was always uncomfortable because I was never married, but I’m over that. To be a woman and not be married – it was like there was something wrong with you – but I’m finally over that, too.”
We stopped at a gas station in Beaver Bay to stretch our legs and use the bathroom, and she and my dad got back to the car before I did.
“I don’t usually talk about myself so much,” Lois was saying, with audible discomfort, as I got into the back seat.
“Well, sometimes it’s okay to talk about ourselves,” assured my dad. I felt more than a little bad that my interview about happiness had caused Lois to reflect on the greatest sources of unhappiness in her life, which seemed mostly to be things that were behind her and that she didn’t often have a reason to think about. She ultimately returned to her gratitude for living in a community where she knows so many, and has so many friendships – “I’m really thankful to be where I am,” she said. The implicit conclusion seemed to be that, for Lois, turning outwards to the people in her life is much more productive of a sense of fulfillment than turning inwards and reflecting on the nature and history of her own struggles.
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 