IF YOU WANT TO BE HAPPY, YOU HAVE TO WORK AT IT

Sometimes the best sermons come from the strangest places.  Like Gabriel’s Café on Whitlock.

It was there that my colleague Marietta Daily Journal columnist Laura Armstrong and I had breakfast recently with Dick Hodges.  Hodges has is a long-time friend, role model and for a short time in my career was my supervisor in the advertising business. 

Now an octogenarian, Dick Hodges remains fully engaged in current events and sought out Armstrong and me for a friendly discussion over breakfast on a variety of subjects.  As any casual reader of the MDJ can discern, neither of us have a shortage of opinions nor do we have any reticence to state them.

Somehow, after the usual assessment of local politics the subject wound its way around to happiness.  I’m still not sure how we got from school buses to happiness but we did.

It was then I heard a sermon I needed and that has stuck with me ever since.  

Dick Hodges lost a wife and a sister-in-law to cancer.  Laura Armstrong lost a husband and I still grieve over the too-sudden loss of my grandson, Zack. 

That is a lot of sadness for one table.

“Keep it in perspective,” Hodges advised.  “Nobody can be happy all the time.  We all have ups and downs and we must learn to treasure the happy moments when they come.  At the end of the day, you will have endured a lot of frustrations but there will be some good things that will have happened.  You have to remember to look for them.”

Thanks. I needed that.

Today as you are reading this, I will be en route to Athens to see grandson Nicholas Wansley graduate from the University of Georgia.  He will be the third generation to do so.  His mother and father are graduates of UGA as are both his grandfathers. 

Zack was Nicholas’ older brother and would have been graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in civil engineering had he not collapsed and died that fateful September day in 2008 while training for the Atlanta Marathon.

It would be easy to overlook the excitement in what Nicholas has accomplished by focusing on what might have been.  I can’t change the past.  I can enjoy this day.

I don’t know about Laura but I left that breakfast determined to focus more on the happy moments in my life and quit grinding so much on the negatives.  I have great memories of Zack and our once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yankee Stadium and to Fenway Park to see the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox and the extraordinary treatment we got from the locals while there.  Those memories won’t ease the pain of losing him but I will think about them more and of my other good times with him.

I will probably spend a little more time watching sunrises and sunsets because I don’t know how many more I will be privileged to see and it would be a shame to be fretting over the price of gasoline and miss one. One thing for sure, we can never get them back.

I now realize I give the small irritations more attention than they deserve:  Traffic jams on I-75.  People weaving up and down Cobb Parkway yakking on their cell phones.  Narrow-minded and humorless people.  Barking dogs.  Poor customer service.  Baseball caps worn sideways.  Television commercials that assume we are all deaf and/or stupid.  The word “dude.”  Fat people in tight pants.  Airline fees.

This is not to say I will ignore any of the above because each is fodder for a column and you would be disappointed if I got all warm and fuzzy on you.

But I will get things in better perspective.

Dick Hodges has been a great influence in my life because he walks the talk.   He not only cares what is going on around him but he takes the time to get involved, whether it is the future of rail transportation or public education.  He always has.  He still does.

But the best thing he has ever done is to remind me that while I can’t be happy all the time I can appreciate the times when I am.  And there are more of those times that I have been willing to admit.  It was a great, unintended sermon.

And the coffee was good, too.

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