Editor’s Note: Russell Frank has won a national award for his StateCollege.com columns. Find out more here.
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What was the happiest moment of your life?
Quick! Don’t think about it. Just blurt out the first thing that pops into your head.
I’m talking to you, reader, but I’m also talking to myself.
The question tops StoryCorps’ list of Great Questions to ask an interview partner. StoryCorps’ mobile recording studio will roll into Bellefonte on Aug. 5 and stay parked there for a month. The idea is to make an appointment to interview someone whose story you’d like to hear and preserve, show up at Storycorps’ Airstream trailer and, with the help of a Storycorps staffer, start asking questions.
One copy of the recorded interview goes home with you on a CD; another goes to the American Folklife Center archives at the Library of Congress. About 30,000 such interviews are already there, adding to an ever-expanding group portrait of who we are.
It’s a wonderful project, one that I as a folklorist wholeheartedly believe in. (In fact, my dissertation consisted of transcripts and analysis of personal experience narratives I recorded with a bunch of old-timers in California’s Gold Country.)
But I’m bothered that I don’t know what I would say if someone were to haul me into that Airstream and ask me to relate the happiest moment of my life. It seems like such a moment ought to be among one’s most vivid, cherished and therefore most readily retrievable memories. Or at least, one should be able to summon a sort of hit parade of happy memories and then rank them.
Clearly we’re already well past the first-thing-that-comes-to-mind stage here, so let’s try working through it. We can start with some obvious categories of experience: childhood, love and marriage, parenthood, achievement, and what might be called the sublime, which could cover a range of experiences from spiritual grace, to ecstatic communion with nature, to the joy of watching your favorite team win a championship.
An immediate difficulty is that childhood memories are so much less top-of-the-mind than recent ones. I imagine some of you can summon powerful under-the-Christmas tree memories of a new puppy or a new bike; I don’t recall ever being made that happy by a present, though my kids have bought me some pretty snappy neckties over the years. (This one isn’t on Storycorps’ list of Great Questions, but What is the best present you ever got? could be a good prompt.) Gifts aside, I think of my childhood as having been happy overall, but I’m hard put to recall a specific happy moment.
Onward, then. For me, a couple of strong candidates from the love-and-marriage division are the moments when I realized that a woman I loved, loved me back. I can think of one such moment in particular that involves a sunny room, a sea breeze, and white poppies outside the bedroom window, but I’ll keep the details to myself.
Parenthood: The births of one’s children are obvious contenders. I remember the first one most vividly, probably because it was the first, and I enjoyed the third one most, probably because I was most relaxed, but births are so life-changing that they summon a whole complex of emotions – happiness mixed with awe mixed with relief topped off with a mighty sense of responsibility.
And then the bambini are home, smiling and cooing and sleeping on your chest and crawling and walking and talking and singing in the choir and playing in the orchestra and hitting home runs. I think I have been most moved by my children when I have seen them being sweet to each other, but I can’t recall a specific, situated moment where I could tell you where we were and what we were doing. So we have to move on.
Achievement: Graduations? Nah. Getting the game ball after hitting a pair of doubles in a Peewee game? Pats on the head from teachers? Job offers? Acceptance letters? Nice, but not really close. Doctorate? Tenure? Very sweet, but also anti-climactic, as many of life’s biggest moments are: You’re rarely as happy as you expected to be when something you pretty much knew was in the bag becomes official.
The Sublime: I’ve figured it out. My happiest moments have occurred when the sublime merges with the ridiculous. This is wholly in keeping with my personality. So here’s my tentative winner — tentative because it happened last year, which gives it an unfair advantage over more distant memories.
My sweetheart – she of the sunny room, the sea breeze, etc. – and I were backpacking in Yosemite National Park. At dusk we found a flat spot for our tent on a rock outcropping overlooking a waterfall. After we had set up camp and eaten, a full moon rose over the falls and there was something about the beauty of the place and the beauty of the evening and our joy at being together and the fact that we were totally, totally alone that made us lunatic. We danced dangerously on the rim of the river canyon and sang every moon song we could think of – and there are a lot of moon songs.
Now it’s your turn.
