The Slippery Slope of Joy

A few years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a drug rehab facility by a friend of mine who was one of its alums. My friend, like most of the rest of the gathering, was African-American, and before we lit into our dinners, a minister stood up and began to clap on the upbeat and half sing and half preach a welcoming incantation that had the whole room on its feet, clapping and nodding and shouting amen’s.

     The whole room, that is, except me. I was fascinated by the spontaneous response of the other attendees. But I remained seated. This was in part because there was a lot of Jesus talk in the reverend's incantation, and I do not believe in Jesus. Even if I did believe in Jesus, I regard Christianity's persecution complex as unseemly among any but the persecuted, which I am not. 

     On the other hand, I do not wish to offend, and so at such times as this I never know how to respond, especially if the music is any good. As I remained seated, my host looked down at me and, seeing that I had begun to tap one foot slightly, gave me a wry smile. 

     “Easy now, Andy” he said.

      When Cordelia fatally refused to flatter her father, she declared that she could not "heave her heart into her mouth." I share this problem, though not her predicament, as my father was not King Lear: Dad distrusted flattery, dismissing its practitioners as people who, "you know, try to crawl in under your vest." 

But it's not just flattery I find difficult. It's joy, especially of the unalloyed variety.  
     This morning my wife and I went to the farmer’s market, where one of the University's marching bands was putting on a freeform concert at which, for a donation of $25, you could conduct the band in one of its numbers. I stood listening to the jolly racket they made and enjoying their line-dance moves as they blatted and blasted their way through seventies standards-turned-marching-songs.

     I began to imagine what would happen if I were to fork over $25 and climb onto the little stepladder that passed for the conductor’s dais. I began to choreograph the whole routine. I would identify myself as Arturo Bernstein, perhaps, and play the martinet maestro, commanding them in a German accent to play their pianofortes pizzicato, keep their allegros andante and their andantes al dente and so on, then tapping my baton and declaring, “All right, on seven,” to my wife's astonishment and the crowd's delight. 

     I remembered how Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye used to take up the baton and lead whole choruses and orchestras in what seemed like spontaneous routines that were actually carefully rehearsed. I would try to follow in that tradition. So on and on I fantasized about my act and the gales of appreciative laughter from the crowd and the musicians, until my wife and I had finished buying vegetables and returned to the car.

Today was Whole Earth Day here in Davis -- not just Earth Day, mind ou, but Whole Earth Day. So this afternoon my wife and I headed off to join the throngs that had gathered on the university quad to celebrate the Whole Earth with whole drum circles, falafel, tie-dye booths, and didgeridus. 

     The crowd was full of people who seemed time-locked in the early seventies (which is the period most people mean when they say the sixties) with their long hair and gypsy outfits and beatific grins. Face-painted and beaded and bare-midriffed young persons in eccentric head gear and sloganeering T-shirts traipsed barefoot through the grass, hackey-sacking and hula hooping, romping and cavorting.

     A capoiera drum line wended its way toward the dance stage, with a large crowd bumping around in rhythm in its wake. My wife began to follow as well, and as I stumbled after her, I managed a couple of slight knee bends and maybe two sways and a few rhythmic shrugs as the drummers led us along. 

     But all this festivity only brought back to me how ill suited I was to my own era, how unfit I am for some varieties of human company, how much time and energy I have spent trying not to make a fool of myself, only to make a derisive ass of myself instead.

        Maybe I would have been better off in upper class 19th century England, when decorousness rather than disinhibition was one of the cardinal virtues. But I don’t really think so. I think that just as I felt stuffy and out of it in the 1970s, I would have suffocated in the 1870s.

     The great ballplayer Satchel Page once prescribed three roads to happiness: to work like you don't need the money, to love like you've never been hurt, and to dance like nobody's watching. 

     I don't know what the hell he was talking about.