Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Another rivulet of snot tried to forage a new path down my top lip, to meet its demise in the fluffy prison of a guarding Kleenex.

Being awoken at 4.30am by another sniveling Woodbridge (fils, not mere) then incapable of re-entering slumber is a touch of hell, especially when combined with the biochemical riots underway in the various and sundry avenues of my sinuses. So I decided to stay home, work will wait.

Shuffling around house and home in a house coat, it suddenly struck me that my whole life has been one of the pursuit of happiness, happiness being never less than a fingertip away from a sure capture. Sometimes (much) farther, but never closer, it taunted in a way that seemed to say that it actually did want to get caught, but alas, it couldn’t. Some unknown Natural Law was firmly in place, disallowing fraternization between yours truly and itself.

Surrounded by a nasal cacophony representing my body’s interminable war against microbes, happiness seemed farther definitely than a fingertip’s length away right now. A-tchoos crescendoed, heralding I hoped, the triumphant cry of a successful repelling of some detachment of miniscule attackers along a vital part of the city’s walls. Give it to them good, boys!

Yet though the din and haze of biological warfare, I cast about for a time when I could maybe, perhaps conclude that I was happy and like figures appearing out of an Oregon Coast fog, I could just make them out here and there: running down the guy who’d beaten everyone on the soccer field and dispossessing him of the ball to the eternal gratitude of the goalkeeper. The first time I stepped into the cockpit of a Boeing 747 in flight (thank you, British Caledonian of late memory). The stinging tears as my Southwest Airlines flight pushed back from the Boise airport carrying, not my girlfriend and me as I’d wished, but only me. Walking down the long, long green carpeted hospital hallway carrying a Flip video camera as I padded my way towards room 319 two years ago to meet for the first time ever, my son and heir.

The pursuit of happiness is the only guaranteed part of the happiness hunting business. One always runs after, seeks out, but never finds happiness in the present or the future. One always remembers happiness, always remembers being happy this or that time. It seems happiness always has its hand in ours even as we think it doesn’t.