Put on a Happy Face

the author and her sister

On the way to dinner in Minneapolis at the trendy South American restaurant, Hola Arepa, we met Donna, an ancient relic of a woman sweeping grass clippings into a dustpan in her front yard. She wore a pink pinafore and a wig that rested on her head like an affectionate cocker spaniel. Donna invited us to come into her garden, a sea of purple phlox, and even to walk behind the house where tomatoes proliferated despite the rainy summer. This woman made me smile. It was entirely involuntary and got me thinking about all the forced smiles I've pasted on my face over the years.

We seventysomethings were born into the thick of mid-century striving and compliance, every day another opportunity to be good and do good. True, we made a jailbreak in the '60s, splattering our insides Pollack-like in every direction on the blank canvas of adolescence, but the die had already been cast. You have only to look at the photographs. We were the little darlings of the post-war American middle class and we had to look the part. We had to look happy. Do the research in your own photograph albums. Not the digital ones, living untethered in the cloud of unknowing. Not even the looseleaf ones with slippery plastic sleeves. I mean the frayed chronicles of family life where pictures of varying sizes, some sepia, some polaroid, some with scalloped edges, are affixed with adhesive corners to the stiff paper and labeled, for example, "Susie's sixth birthday, 1951." You will notice that the studio shots of your grandparents are serious business. I imagine the women corsetting up, the men straightening their collars and cuffs as they get ready to pose for the photographer on the Bowery. No one is smiling. Everyone understands the gravity of the sit. It's the proof of their arrival, their material heft preserved for posterity. Check out the whipped confection hairdos, the pocket watches. Now, fast forward forty or fifty years. The photograph has become more than a recognition of accomplishment. It is now, above all, an occasion for flaunting family happiness. There is no yelling, no withdrawal of affection on the Kodak Brownie. Everyone is saying cheese.

Children sometimes defy convention and insist on authenticity. I have known them, these guerillas in pajamas, to show fierce resistance to smile-for-the-camera, contorting their faces into grimaces that will never make it onto holiday cards. It's one of their secret weapons. If you ask a monster-faced child to smile, you will get something artificial that looks like it's masking an upset stomach.

At the same time, there is an entire body of thought that turns the act of smiling into a spiritual practice. The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, writes that a true smile comes from dwelling in awareness. You don't wear it like an article of clothing and it has no utility. It won't help you ingratiate yourself with your colleagues, making up your face with the corners of your mouth pointing out towards your ears. A true smile is simply a response to noticing how remarkable it is that you're here on the planet. It conveys the sense of being alive, experiencing all at once the in here of yourself and the out there of the world, encountering the gardener in the pink pinafore.

Occasions for smiles of awareness don't arise on schedule like visits from the wedding photographer, wandering the hall from table to table, documenting the bride and groom standing in turn behind each group of overstuffed relatives. They are sometimes mixed with loss. Recently, on a September day, the grass an end-of-summer green scattered with the first fallen leaves, we ran into an old friend walking out of the cemetery in Stockbridge, an idyllic place rich in historic resonance. She wanted to know if we had visited her husband's grave. "Not recently," I admitted. "Do you think he's comfortable in there"? "I hope so," she said, with a wide open grin that spoke of her gentle love for him and invited our collective wonder at his passing. "This could be the real estate of our future," we thought out loud, standing on the sidewalk. Entering the gates then, her smile at our backs, we stopped at the grave of our friend, piled with small stones of remembrance.
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Fixing a Hole

Minneapolis message

We are fixated on fixing. When I was a hospice chaplain, I always thought I had the best job in the office. The hospice staff diverged from the medical model, devoting its best practices to keeping the patients comfortable at a point along the living-dying continuum when all the treatment options had been exhausted and none of them was working any longer. Still, there were a great many questions to ask, problems to solve. The nurse had to figure out which medication would alleviate George's intractable nerve pain and which would help him sleep when he was overwhelmed with anxiety. The social worker had to assess Margaret's caregiving team to determine if her husband and daughter were up to the challenges. I had no such agenda. I was not required to bring my laptop with me when I visited patients and their families. I was just there, doing the hard job of not fixing.

I was a chaplain from a Jewish background with no traditional credentials, no ordination. I approached people empty handed, without a communion wafer to offer, a string of rosary beads to worry. I was, to say the least, an anomaly in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a floundering mill town where there were Catholic parishes that catered to the Irish, others that drew the Polish families and still others where mass was said in French. There were additionally the usual mainstream Protestant churches and a great many storefront Pentecostal iglesias. My liturgy rose like smoke out of the fire of the stories that people told about their lives. At first, many of them would deny the importance of their experience. They would say "I don't know. I grew up in Chicopee. Went to work the night shift. Got married, wife and I had a couple of kids. That's about it." But with a little prompting, Red, a World War II vet at the Soldiers' Home, reverently described the stillness and patience he learned, waiting for a deer at the edge of the dark forest, his preferred cathedral. Daniel told me how fortunate he felt growing up on a farm where there was plenty to eat...how during the Depression he saved his apple cores to give to hungry boys at school. Mrs. Murphy spoke rapturously about Elvis, his portrait prominently displayed alongside the Blessed Virgin on the walls of her apartment. Some of the stories were tragic, parents outliving children. Some patients were so estranged from their families that no one ever came to visit them. Nurses with years of experience imparted two crucial lessons. They taught me, the novice, the greenhorn, that sometimes men who seemed charming and gregarious in old age had abused their wives and children and they taught me that I couldn't fix all the brokenness that came hobbling out of the past. I began the long study of being with people, which is a far, anguished cry from doing for people. Whatever the arc of the story, I told the hospice patients that their wanderings were sacred like Moses at the Burning Bush, like Jesus fasting in the Judaean desert. I told them the biblical figures shared their fear, their yearning and sometimes they believed me.

I am retired from hospice now and no longer have the same story-listening privileges. Still, the narrative of life is all around me and my witnessing remains essentially the same. In the supermarket, assaulted by fluorescent lights, lurid Enquirer headlines and candy in improbable colors, I find myself porous to the young women and old men on the check-out line. This one is expecting her third child in four years. That one just buried his wife. It's only the convention of separateness that restrains my instinct to make it all better. Still, when someone I love is in trouble - and when is that not the case? - I continue to feel the need to fix the hole where the rain comes in. I forget, I remember, and I forget again that deep listening is often the palliative that people are wanting and not getting, that being willing to look someone else's pain in the eye without blinking it away is, for the most part, the best I can do. In that optic embrace, in the loving appreciation we share, the two of us, the speaker and the listener, become our most fully human.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish at the bottom of the page. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.