Sunday poetry: "Welcome Week"

One of my favorite movies is After Life, a 1998 Japanese fantasy in which the newly deceased enter a way station between this world and the next. Over the course of a few days, each of them is called on to select his or her favorite memory from Earth, after which a film crew (operating on a modest budget) reenacts it and gives it as a gift. The person then moves on to eternity, carrying nothing but a memory of the moment when life seemed most sublime. I imagine that anyone who watches that film is moved to ponder which memory they would take with them. Of course, I cannot choose one offhand. Perhaps when I was younger, I would have named a moment quickly. With time, I have come to view happiness as the riddle that it is. Do we feel joy most at the moments that seem scripted to offer it: birthdays, holidays, graduations, trips? Do we feel it when we are working hard at our area of expertise? Or does it creep up in disguise during the leaner times, when we face trying circumstances but feel an adrenaline rush at simply being needed by others?

I don't know which type of happiness is best. But I have come to realize, over the years, how hindsight sometimes alters those perfect memories. In After Life, the characters are asked to remember the moment at which they felt happiest, and the movie makes a joke about how many younger entrants to the way station choose visits to amusement parks. I have had many moments in the last 44 years, including Disneyland trips, when I lost myself in a state of bliss. I would not necessarily choose most of them as my most prized memory. They lack a certain aura of accomplishment, of euphoria for the right reason. Yes, my self-critic is at work here. I will let him discriminate. In baseball, we talk about earned and unearned runs. Perhaps there's also earned and unearned happiness. Since I just brought up baseball, I'll give an example of the second type. When I was 14, I attended a game in which the Angels trailed by seven runs in the bottom of the ninth. Astonishingly, they rallied for seven runs in that inning, then won the game in the tenth. At the time, I measured my personal well-being by the Angels' success, and when that runner crossed the plate with the winning run, I felt positively out of body -- so much so that (I distinctly remember) I looked up at the night sky above Anaheim Stadium and felt like a miracle had been bestowed.

​I have rarely felt giddier than at that moment, but 30 years later, I have come to question it. Why was I so happy? I hadn't done anything myself, other than sit in the stands and watch someone else win a game. There was no personal epiphany, no long-awaited payoff. I was living vicariously, as I have steadily learned not to do. So that game comes off the list of contenders if I ever reach that way station myself. Along with it go other moments: winning video games as a child, receiving desired toys for Christmas, taunting classmates who taunted me first. None of them were sufficiently earned. On the other hand, I can list any number of memories that retain their luster over the years: graduations, publications, interviews with remarkable people. In 2013, I hosted the launch for my book The First Thing Mastered at a Mexican restaurant in Orange, inviting dozens of friends and sharing food and poetry. In 2017, my daughter crawled for the first time as I sat holding the camera. Those moments were earned happiness. I hope the 1994 Angels still remember that game fondly, since they did the actual work.

Back to The First Thing Mastered. Ah, I love that book. I started it around the time I got married (more earned happiness) and set out to capture the first three and a half decades of life in chronological order. The challenge that I gave myself was to approach every phase of those years without cynicism or ironic distance, reflecting the world as it actually appears to a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a teenager, and so forth until the dawn of middle age. I aimed for 91 pages of sincerity. Among the poems in the young-adult section of the book is "Welcome Week," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. It is one of the happiest poems I have ever written, largely because it's about the first week of college and doesn't know anything that happens beyond that point. Adulthood is exhilarating at times and maddening at others. So is childhood, of course. But those first days in the dorm -- meeting roommates, hanging posters, and creating a ramshackle group identity -- feel like the discovery of an awesome new frontier. It's a momentary rush of the perks of being a grownup, with the responsibilities and hard truths to come later.

For that matter, it's earned. We've worked hard to get into college, passed the tests and done the paperwork. The driver's license is snug in our pocket. Our adult personality is forged, though it will continue to evolve. The campus looks massive around us, countless times bigger than high school, and lockers and permission slips are behind us. All is anticipation, the belief that every step can birth a new beginning. Few things make us happier than the possibility of happiness. My own welcome week in college came in 1998 at UCI, and the memory lingers brightly after more than 25 years. In the poem, conversations in the dorm become "an improvised session / of laughter and half-invented stories"; the freshman residents hang up a banner to assert their independence, "their group name/ in multicolors defying the empty plains." If nothing after September of 1998 had ever matched that feeling, then I could at least say that I had had it once. I count myself lucky to say that I have had it again. Perhaps that's the true definition of happiness: reaching that way station in the sky, and having to resort to picking something at random.