Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Finding Places to be Happy
I’m trying to remember what it means to be a kid at heart.
I want it to mean to be free from worry. To be carefree. And I have memories of being carefree when I was a kid. Riding my blue bike down the dirt road near our house. Ice skating on a pond in the scraggly woods just past the farmer’s field, where there was also a small cave that I’d go into when it was summer. I pretended to be an Olympic figure skater. I’d practice for what seemed like hours but there was no point to the practice. It was all a dream. I just wanted to twirl on the ice in the woods, so I did but not very well. It didn’t matter.
There was no one there to judge me.
When I was a child, being free from worry was rare. I worried about my mother all the time. She was unhappy or ill or very tired, depending on the day. She didn’t complain, she just wilted, held her lips in a straight line, shaking her head no if I asked what was the matter. “Nothing. Nothing is the matter.”
And so, leaving the house on my bike or taking off with my ice skates hung over my shoulder was the only way to escape the wet wool weight of being in the house with my mother.
I loved that bike so much. I repainted it blue every summer. In the winter, I swabbed white polish on my skates, polished the black heels, and bought fresh white laces for the new season at the pond.
Maybe being a kid at heart is finding places to be happy.
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Photo credit: Tyra Baumler
5 Comments on “Finding Places to be Happy”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I think I’m more carefree NOW than I was as a child. It doesn’t mean I’m happy all the time, but I’m also not worried all the time about school, finding acceptance and my father’s tendency to beat his children. Now, at this time of life, I’m not competing with anybody for anything. I have no ambition except to enjoy life. Other than money — the national worry — I don’t have a lot of other stuff to worry about. Health? What will be will be. I’m still here, right? That’s good enough.
Bikes and rollerskates were a big part of life in the tiny town I lived in. The skates were metal, including the wheels, and attached to the soles of our shoes making use of a skate key to move the fingers of the skates inward to grip the soles. Freedom was either skates, a bike or convincing your older sister to drive you to the stock dam that was our swimming hole.
Your bike was your transportation to happy places and I think you’re right
I LOVED my bike. We all did. No cell phones, so we could hit the road and ride for miles and no one could call us home. We were joyfully OUT of touch.
me too, and we would be gone all day