LETTERS FROM HOME: MAKING YOURSELF NOTORIOUSLY HAPPY

June 21, 2001

Dear David,

Congratulations on quitting your job. I'm sure Chris and Lily and Carrie feel the same, though the little girls haven't really noticed you're home more.

They will accept your new presence as easily as they did your absences that often lasted long into the evenings. You might have more trouble adjusting, but I doubt it.

Enveloped by all that love all the time, you sounded luxuriously happy.

Some of the best decisions I've made were to quit jobs that were finished. The sensor that tells the difference between perseverance and time to move on to the next experience seems to reside in the gut. You just know.

Some of the most bracing periods of my life have been when I didn't know what to do next and yet trusted an answer would present itself. All of us must be like trapeze artists. Holding onto the bar feels secure, but the artistry occurs only if you let go.

"Forget safety," Rumi writes. "Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious."

Leaving Missouri for California and leaving California for other scenes, I felt like a bird who instinctively leaves the nest. There was something more somewhere else yet to be learned. There's always something more for us or else we'd be dead.

Quitting a job is sometimes difficult, sometimes a pleasure. In New Orleans, six weeks as a busboy/handyman at a dinner theater/nursing home where the emcee/owner kept white Aryan publications in his office and the maitre d'/cook's German accent and nasty demeanor had me thinking about calling Simon Wiesenthal.

Speaking of bizarre scenes, DC and I are in love with the movie "Moulin Rouge." It's brilliant, a creative nuclear explosion, a rock opera filled with snatches of sung dialogue stolen from love songs all of us know. We might not even like all of the songs, but they are part of anyone under 60.

I was at your house 30 years ago the first time I heard Elton John's "Your Song." Now the lovers in "Moulin Rouge" sing "How wonderful life is now you're in the world." After 30 more years in the culture, its words and rhythms carry a deepened emotional charge. This movie understands the power of that language.

I adapt the "Moulin Rouge" technique for the golf course. I want to swing the driver as easily as an 8 iron, so while teeing the ball up I think of Madonna and sing a slightly altered version of "Like a Virgin" to myself.

"Like an 8 Iron."

The movie isn't for everyone. Both times we've seen it, people have walked out. Years from now I imagine "Moulin Rouge" will be screened at midnight and young hipsters will dress as Satine the courtesan or Christian the writer or as the evil Duke. They'll dance in their seats and sing along and play act the words like "Rocky Horror Picture Show" fans do.

Not all the songs are good love songs, but good isn't the point. This movie has not a whit of cynicism about its subject or its purpose. Here, good and bad are transformed into art in the name of love.

"Moulin Rouge" dares to be a bit hokey, to embarrass us with the musical library of our yearning until finally we break down and have to admit it, even to ourselves. Yes, love is all that matters.

The Beatles, Shakespeare, the great spiritual leaders said so.

Over and over, the movie repeats this mantra: The greatest thing to learn is to love and to be loved in return. We like to pretend those come naturally, but we're too scared, too defensive for that to be. Making yourself happy is the hardest lesson of all.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.