Happy Hour

Happiness is a tenuous state, vanishing under the slightest scrutiny. As soon as we become aware that we’re happy, we break the spell. Most of the time.

I have found a wormhole to happiness, a way to enter and possess this fragile condition, at least for an hour or so.

It starts on my drive home from work, as I reach the neighborhood I live in. Darkness falls early now and I drive with care, watching for evening walkers, a loose dog, a child. I consider how quickly life can cave in, the countless hazards I’ve been spared, through vigilance or luck. The close calls I know nothing about.

I get out of the car and pause on the walkway to admire the silhouette of the giant cedar in my yard, the cold bright stars above it. The air smells of fall leaves and wet tree bark. The porch is lit, waiting for me. I can see the living room through the window, the string of willow lights on the mantle and the mountain sculpture above it. I am smiling already.

The front door is a portal to another realm. I cross the threshold into a place of rescue and reassurance, a habitat my spouse and I created to calm ourselves and honor the natural world. Here is a sconce fashioned of paper birch and manzanita branches; here is a hawk with moonlight on his back; here is a carved wooden owl taking flight from the wall; here is a large photo of a deeply fissured redwood in a forest of ferns.

My wife greets me with a kiss, just like in the old movies, then heads into the kitchen to shake up the martinis—one apiece, never more. Fine gin is strong medicine and should be handled with ritual and respect.

We take our drinks into the living room and sit down to discuss the day. Settled into my recliner, I look over at the electric fire with its obedient orange flames, and the carpet with its undulating lines that remind me of wave-lapped sand, and my wife, whom I have loved every minute of our thirty-eight years together, and my joy is so great I cannot speak, can only wonder how, in this world of microbes and menace and mad men, we have been kept safe, why we were born here and not Somalia. How have we managed to hang onto our vision, our limbs, our minds? How have we survived our blunders, our fathers, the things we will never, ever speak of?

A second thought, the slightest change on any given day, and we would not be sitting here now. Had we been moving toward each other all along? Did our detours bring us together, or did we meet, magnificently, in spite of them? To think that we began our lives no bigger than a grain of sand, then had to swim, crawl, walk, run, bike and drive to reach this precarious moment.

I lift my drink, which never fails to knock the rough edges off my work day, and turn to my wife. I can hardly wait for whatever she might say.

It is this way every night.