Nat

Today’s edition of “All Things Considered” on NPR featured a story on John Nese’s store in Los Angeles, called Galco’s Soda Pop Stop. Nese inherited the store from his father and now stocks over 500 types of hard-to-find soda pop. He carries a brand of root beer made from sasparilla bark, and he even carries rose petal soda, which he imports from Romania.

Not only is this my favorite kind of radio feature story, shedding light on a particularly unusual and whimsical slice of American life, it took me back to the product attachment I used to have as a child. Items that resonate in this way include Chuckles candies and Necco Wafers, cotton candy, Stan Mikita hockey helmets, Eskimo Pie mint ice cream bars, and Schwinn bicycles. Chuckles and Necco Wafers hold a special spot because we used to stop at Ada’s Penny Candy on the way home from church with my father every Sunday. He bought the Sunday New York Times there, even though we subscribed for home delivery every other day of the week. Ada wrote every regular customer’s last name on the copies of the paper in black grease pencil. The candy was the real reason my dad bought his paper there, though he loved Ada and served with her on a town political committee.

I am a product marketer’s dream. When a particular product establishes a place in my memory and my life, it stays there forever. So when I was in the Phoenix Airport last month, I was thrilled to come across a kiosk that sold Chuckles and other throwback candies. I could even remember, 25 years after I ate my last packet of the fruit jellies, in which order I always ate them, from least favorite to most: green, orange, red, yellow, black.

The radio story captured my imagination not only because I loved the idea of seeing all of these unusual sodas in one place, but also because I couldn’t imagine the business sense behind making an obscure soda in a very small operation with such narrow distribution that no one has ever heard of it. There is only one reason to invest in making a product like this: you want to connect with a person like me.

I can’t wait to go. Please listen to the story. If you ever go to L.A., please visit the store and let me know how it was. Here’s the link, if you want to buy online. You can buy old fashioned candies, including Chuckles, there too. Yum.

Today was the first day back at work after vacation, and my boss was incredibly gracious and let me work the morning at home before going to the airport. I flew 16 hours yesterday to get from Spokane to Boston (via Phoenix and Las Vegas), and I’m flying back out on business now. So it was a great relief to have my boss give me this flexibility today.

One of the lessons I’m learning from Michael is to appreciate the small blessings that come our way. Today was a perfect example, and I’m heading out on business now feeling great.

My boss also just returned from a trip, and she extended exactly the courtesy she would have wanted her boss to extend her. I love that kind of thoughtfulness. I’m very fortunate to have the boss I do, because this is the way she always thinks. For a long time, I worried about the parts of the job that I found difficult or annoying, and naturally those types of circumstances then magnified in my mind and my experience.

Now I’m working hard to focus on the little things that go well. It turns out to be really easy if you just remind yourself to do it. I’m catching myself being grateful more frequently. Many parts of my life seem better, and I suspect it’s because I am just noticing how much there is to appreciate in my life.

First day back has been great. I’m expecting tomorrow to be the same.

Last night my mother and aunt hosted a dinner party to honor my grandmother, in lieu of a memorial service. In addition to my mother and aunt, we had two families who had been friends of my grandmother’s for decades, friendships that had started with the parents and grandparents of those present.

It was a really nice occasion on every level and especially entertaining because my grandmother’s lawyer, Pete, told a handful of amusing stories about my grandmother’s sense of what was proper and improper about his business attire when he visited her. Pete was the third generation of lawyers in his family who had served my grandmother, and he drew the hardest duty in being the last. Not only did he manage all of her finances for the last 3 years, but he also managed her health care appointments because all of us in the family live 3,000 miles away.

The man is a saint, patient, good natured, philosophical about the extent of his duties, right down to waiting with the body while the funeral home came to the apartment. We were all extremely fortunate that he was willing to shoulder the responsibility.

My grandmother was demanding and particular, but she was also grateful and gracious towards those who assisted her. She lived long enough to appreciate those on whom she had to depend.

The other family included the surviving son of my grandmother’s best friend and his wife. They are very busy people, with substantial business and philanthropic responsibilities, and they are leaving tomorrow for a Hawaiian vacation. In some sense, this dinner was a duty, but they all performed it with lighthearted grace and kindness.

It was a wonderful tribute to my grandmother, to her indomitability and character that these friends have remained faithful for 50-70 years. It was also a tribute to their constancy to her and to us, the kind of support that we can’t ever repay.

Today I did some work cleaning up my grandmother’s apartment. She passed away in January. She had an amazing life, living almost to 100 and remaining in her own apartment to the very end. It was a good life for her, I think.

Cleaning up the apartment was bittersweet. Because she kept such an orderly home and because she kept to a tight routine in her later years, her apartment looked as if she had just stepped out to run an errand, except only for the plants, which hadn’t been watered in three weeks. I tried my best to revive the seven African violets, which lined the window in her study.

Mainly I looked for keys, threw away dead plants and food from the freezer, and visited with my memories as I dusted and opened drawers. As hard as it is to visit a loved one’s home after the owner is gone, there is a ready barrage of reminders of what we shared.

What really struck me, though, were the conversations I had with the manager and superintendent of my grandmother’s apartment building. When I thanked them for all they had done to help my grandmother continue to live in their building at the end of her life, they both told me how much they loved her and how difficult it was to have her gone.

That is the great lesson from today, and the abiding joy: there are kind people in this world, and they will go out of their way to help you do what you couldn’t do on your own. Love is quite a legacy.

The end of vacation is bittersweet, of course. It is always hard to reconcile the feeling of being completely relaxed with the imagined pressure of returning full bore into one’s responsibilities. One of the things I’m challenging myself to do this year, though, is to enjoy each nice moment without looking past it toward the next likely challenge.

So here I am, with my wife and stepdaughter safely deposited at the airport, waiting for my later flight in a great independent cafe in Palm Springs. The music and coffee are good. I have a private table with an electrical outlet and a high-speed internet connection. I’ve been able to download some movies and TV shows for my flight later today, and I’m catching up on email.

Palm Springs is one of those places where you can imagine that a large number of residents feel grateful every day for the palm trees, sunshine and mountain views that abound here. We will return next winter, as we did this year, and if we’re lucky, my stepdaughter’s field hockey team will earn an entry into the tournament they hold every Thanksgiving week right up the street from our favorite hotel. It is great fun to think that we would come back here before the end of the year.

In short, I love having a happy experience that I’m likely to repeat in the near future. My wife likes to say that we are creatures of habit, and I guess I would say that she is a creature of habit, but I’m happy to go along when the habits are so entertaining. Palm Desert is great for tennis this time of year, sunny and dry, and I took a lesson yesterday to try to revive my singles game. My instructor, Katie, had a great, easy way of thinking about the game.

Don’t think so much, she told me. It’s a simple game. Get the ball back over the net. She teaches a method that has the following slogan, “Form is not a fundamental.” What it means in the context of tennis is that you are just as likely to be responding to “an emergency situation” as to hit a shot with a perfect setup from a location you expected. Wow, what a life parallel.

In these cases, she says, do your best to get your racket on the ball and try to hang in there for a situation that’s more to your liking. Like all great instruction, and I find this especially from great athletic coaches for some reason, the most useful principles sound like a life philosophy.

So here I am in paradise for a few more hours, seeing my improved forehand approach shot in my mind, loving the bright sunshine on the sides of the Santa Rosa mountains, and thinking that it will be summer soon enough at home.

For the last two days, my family and I have played tennis on vacation with several strangers, and the experience has been great. Players of all ages and skill levels have been polite, encouraging, and friendly to all of us. It has made the games great fun, while still providing a competitive outlet.

I’ve been saying friends whom I’ve called on the phone, that it is easy to be happy and friendly on vacation, but the point is that meeting friendly people always makes me feel good about my life and about humanity in general.

One lesson my parents taught me over and over when I was young was that it’s always smart to make it easy for people to be nice to you. They reminded me that good manners, helpfulness, and sociability combine to make a likable person, and they demonstrated by their own behavior that making an effort to be friendly all of the time made our home and their workplaces better.

Our family vacation this week is teaching the same lesson to my stepdaughter, but she has known it for years. I was proud yesterday when an older gentleman complimented my stepdaughter on how pleasant she was to play with.

I am grateful for the chance to start over, no matter how many times I have to do so. I have started to kick my sugar habit dozens of times in the last 2 years. Usually I start on a Monday. Then, if I don’t make it to Thursday, I figure, Well, I’ll start next week. I always feel good about starting.

When I’m in the gym, I watch the hard core athletes with admiration. I used to envy them, until I realized how silly it is to feel that others’ discipline is something to envy. Nothing would keep me from approaching fitness the same way but the lack of determination to do it. That’s what I love about the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” It makes us accountable for taking control of our habits.

My habit since writing this blog has been to start and stop. In part, I stop because it requires a great commitment to be a widely read blogger, to scan other related blogs and cross-communicate with their authors. I have other projects that keep me from doing this.

Nevertheless, it is a worthy project to document here what I find about the search for happiness. More and more writers and researchers are taking the subject seriously.

My take for today is that we can always renew our intention to find a healthier way to think about our lives and our world. My great friend, Claire, told me today about the power of surrender. To surrender apparently derives from the idea of giving oneself up, or to give back more than was given. There are many efforts to which we can sensibly give ourselves up. Giving ourselves over to improving our thought is a very good start.

I played in a simple round-robin tennis tournament today with my wife and stepdaughter. Even a year ago this would have been unimaginable to me. I was terrified of under-performing. But my wife convinced me that when you play, all you have to do is make the experience pleasant for those around you, win or lose. This is so simple. It is easy for me to compliment those who play well, even if they are beating me. And the thing is that in a morning, I am bound to have some good shots along with the bad ones.

It is better not to be afraid. I am giving up certain kinds of fear. This is where renewal always begins for me.

What do you do to make tomorrow better than today?

In 2007, I visited Memphis, Tennessee, for the first time. I loved the city, and I loved my visit. People went out of their way to be friendly, the food was great, and you can sense a city whose citizens are working to make it prosperous. An African-American colleague drove me around one afternoon. She took me into a bar outside of town where she had to make a sales call, a bar with a large Confederate flag and an all-white clientele who seemed surprised to see a black woman come inside. Later that afternoon, she drove me past the museum that has been erected inside and around the motel where Dr. King was shot and killed in 1968.

It is good to be reminded that the effort to create a friendly, tolerant society happens every day, in the way we treat strangers and in the attitudes we convey to our children. My friend shared her day with me, and she talked openly about the times and places where she still feels uneasy being an African-American woman walking by herself. Happily, she said, there are fewer and fewer places where she thinks about it.

Dr. King spoke out about the injustice he saw in parts of America in the 1960s, but he also spoke with conviction and eloquence about his hope for a better future. Hope and determination together can change the world. They have changed the world. In his famous speech, Dr. King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I wish the same today, that my child and all other children will be judged by the content of their character. I expect to be judged by my character as well.

Michael and I have been working on a book for a few months now, and we took this weekend to get away and make a major dent in it. It shouldn’t surprise me that the work would be so much fun, I guess, but I have spent much of my adult life afraid of long writing projects.

So, today we compiled the notes that we have been writing in 15-minute bursts since November, and we turned them into an outline. Michael did the typing, which I love because it lets me pace while we talk and think. Writing for me is easier when I’m not actually writing. It is typical of Michael to make things fun for me.

The best part of the day is finding work that doesn’t feel like work. To have any activity unravel from oneself effortlessly and focus the mind so that it requires no strain can be the best kind of inspiration. That was true for me over and over today. I have been wanting to remember what a joy it is to be working, and it’s easier for me when the work is entirely my invention. The collaboration makes it even better. It occurred to me in a cafe before dinner that writing a book with another person cuts the number of words in half for each of us. Huh.

Where am I going with this? Just that spending two days thinking about how to cultivate happiness automatically puts me in mind of how to appreciate being happy. My grandmother, who passed away this week, taught me about the state of happiness years ago when I was 18. I had broken up with a girl I adored. I had been moping around for days or weeks when my grandmother came to visit with my parents. She was always glad to see me, but she became very angry with me after dinner.

“You’ve got to snap out of this,” she told me after dinner in her hotel room. “Nobody wants to be around somebody as sour and withdrawn as you are. We will put up with you because we love you, but the people who don’t love you won’t stay with you for a minute if they don’t have to.” I was shocked to be called out by her like that, but she said it in a way that really shook up my thinking.

Naturally she was right. Unhappiness itself doesn’t drive people away, but the way you wear it does. Like it or not, that’s just a cold, hard fact. Better to adopt as friendly and hopeful a demeanor as you can. With any luck, it will draw toward you people whose company will console and reassure you. Maybe they will make you laugh, or at least forget yourself for a minute.

Friendship and love can be our salvation, even when it is friendship and love we have lost. This is what I have been feeling since last night, when Michael and I arrived at the hotel and started to work. I have felt it today. I feel my grandmother near as I write, and I am grateful to her.

My stepdaughter had a group of her friends over to the house today to watch movies and eat pizza. There is nothing like spending a few hours in the company of teenagers who like one another to make you feel hopeful about the future. Of course it helps if they also like adults and are polite, which her friends are.

They know how to laugh and how to be kids together. What is remarkable about them is that they don’t try to impress one another by being sophisticated, or worldly, or cynical. Teenagers like this are a reminder that adults could also choose to retain the best parts of their youth. The group likes to take pictures of one another laughing and smiling. They are easy to be with, and they are good to one another.

It is a relief when your child finds friends who are reliable, have good judgment, and know how to be good friends to one another. We would all be lucky to have such a group. The fact that many of them have been friends since kindergarten suggests that they know how lucky they are too. I’m very happy they opened up their circle to let my stepdaughter in during junior high.