LETTERS FROM HOME: HAPPINESS IS 2 DOGS, A SUBVERSIVE BOOK ON COLD MORNING

Jan. 27, 2000

Dear Carolyn,

The brittle cold this week makes it hard to let go of the blankets in the morning. How DC must lovingly despise the sight of me snuggling deeper into the covers as she arises early for work.

The cold affects everyone. Lucy steps out the back door and immediately plops onto her outdoor bed. I wish I had her bladder. Cold temperatures turn Hank frisky. He returns from patrolling the backyard prancing like a cowboy in town to two-step on a Saturday night. He utters a guttural sound I associate with happiness.

Lately I've been taking a happiness inventory. With the dogs it's easy to do. The crunch of bones being gnawed and the pungent scent of marrow, the stubs wagging as hard as they would if they were tails two feet long are happiness incarnate.

Like Hank, DC dances when she's happy. And dancing is one of the things that makes her happy. After watching Fred Astaire do The Continental in an old movie a few nights ago she bounced around the house for days.

These cold mornings, Hank and Lucy keep me company as I stay in bed and read. I have been immersed in a subversive book called "Something More." It is subversive for its insistence on living an authentic life and especially subversive because she didn't write it for people like me.

The title, "Something More," just struck me the right way. I didn't know it was written for women until well into it.

The book's message is this: To have an authentic life you must have a loving relationship with your own spirit, and to do that you must answer your spirit's yearnings. In other words, honor yourself.

I suppose the author meant these words for women because many sacrifice themselves for others and can lose themselves in the process. But men can commit the same grievous error, silently shouldering their responsibilities or desperately avoiding them, in both cases living in the absence of passion and joy to the detriment of their souls.

The author, Sarah Ban Breathnach, has woven the sage words of poets and prophets into her book.

"What if Life's meant to be our sweetheart?" wrote Willa Cather.

What if you awoke every morning cherishing your relationship with life. Your relationships with everybody else would take care of themselves. They are just reflections of your relationship with yourself, anyway. Something that bothers you about another person is something you don't like about yourself most of all.

Is this a message only women need to hear?

When we first moved back to Cape Girardeau from California, DC said the words "I'm not happy" many, many times. She doesn't say them anymore. Resignation or adaptation?

It is more difficult to gauge my own happiness. It seems not to be measurable, as with a dip stick. Some days, joy comes. Some days, it's a struggle to find the goodness. Where did it go? But you would not know one if not for the other.

Ban Breathnach thinks many people confuse happiness and joy. That external events most often precipitate happiness or unhappiness whereas joy is the absence of fear.

"Joy is where your life began, with your first cry. Joy is your birthright."

The wind blew especially hard one morning this week. It made me think of Ganado. Such a lonely place to want to live, an Indian reservation in New Mexico, I thought back then. But such an adventure you had. You are what Ban Breathnach esteems most: a woman with a past.

When I finally arose and went into the bathroom I discovered it was so cold upstairs because the window had blown open sometime during the morning. The bathroom was arctic.

I ran back to our room and dove in, happy and overjoyed to be back in bed.

Love, Sam