February 10, 2007--Saturday Story: "What Does Happiness Have to Do With Anything?"--Part One

I inherited a happiness problem. Thankfully, it wasn’t generic.

True, one side of my family, my mother’s, lived perpetually under an Eastern European cloud of pessimism which they brought along with them on the boat from Poland and neglected to jettison on Ellis Island, the way they had their Munya name. Though they set foot on the soil of the new world with a new name, Malone, they nonetheless schlepped along with them the fear that everything, even in this Land of Opportunity, no matter how promising things might look at any moment, would soon turn to catastrophe—good health would turn to terminal illness; good fortune to bankruptcy and ruin; and, metaphysically, good would be overtaken by evil. Of course, events in the larger world would prove them right

And when you compound this dark and brooding view of the universe, which I inhaled, with the fact that I spent most spring, summer, and fall Sundays in Mt. Lebanon cemetery, on my hands and knees in the Munya-Malone family plot, tending to the grass, bushes, and weeds surrounding the graves of my grandparents and a few uncles who had died before I was born, it is difficult to parse whether it was nature or nurture that sent me forth into the world initially expecting less than nothing.

One would have hoped that the fact that my father was from born-in-America stock, his people had emigrated here during the middle of the 19th Century and had not had either to forego their family name or alter their aquiline good looks, and, equally significant for me, had Perpetual Care for their plot in Mt. Hebron Cemetery, all of this should have conspired to make him a classic American optimist who believed that if you worked hard and more-or-less played by the rules (or had the right connections) there was no limit to what might be possible. Didn’t Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe, grow up in a log cabin? What therefore was so different about my father’s first son, Lloyd Zazlo, growing up in a second-floor apartment in East Flatbush? Not that he saw me in the White House, at least I don’t think so, but at the minimum what was so unrealistic or wrong with medical school?

So the nature versus nurture debate was not going to be easily resolved in our living room. Let me, though, for a moment, take you back in time to that very living room, and give you an example:

When I finally found the courage to tell my father that I wanted to study literature rather than go to medical school, he surprised me by calmly asking, “Why?”

His calm was unexpected because I was by his proclamation his Number-One Son, and I had the grades to get into a decent medical school and the hands, he reminded me frequently, to make a fine surgeon.

So, encouraged and further emboldened by his lack of a violent reaction, I told him why—“I want to be happy, and being a doctor will not make me happy.”

Rising to this, less calm, he peered at me as if at a certifiably crazy-person and boomed, “What does happiness have to do with anything?"

I hesitated, thinking, Here we go. Do I really want to fight with him on about this? Maybe I should let some time pass, slink back up to my dorm room at Columbia, hide out there, and maybe I could try to talk with him about what I was feeling after my mother had had a chance to work on him—to remind him, even if I didn’t become a doctor, that I was still Number One.

But it had taken so much emotional effort for me to get to the point where I could blurt out just these few words about my plans that I thought that maybe I shouldn’t wait and get it all over with—like not delaying to get a throbbing tooth pulled. Time was unlikely to make it better. And neither would my mother. Not about something this cosmic.

So to his question about what could happiness ever have anything to do with anything, I said, so softly that I hoped that maybe he wouldn’t hear me and I could slip away feeling good about the fact that I had at least spoken the word—I answered, “Everything.”

But though he was quite hard of hearing, he nonetheless heard me well enough and bellowed so loudly that the neighbors shouted and pounded on the wall common to both living rooms, “Will you shut up in there. We’re trying to watch television.” But even this had no effect on him, though the public humiliation from the Gottliebs next door drove my mother to seek shelter in their bedroom.

“So you want to be happy or just pursue it?” This took me aback, even though he pronounced “pursue” in a way that suggested he was mocking me. But since he, not I, initiated this distinction between being and pursuing, I rose to explain myself in his, not my terms, hoping that might help him understand if not to be happy with my decision.

“Yes, when we studied the Enlightenment in Humanities,” one of Columbia’s required courses for sophomores, “the pursuit of happiness, which you know got written into the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right is not the happiness of drinking beer and watching TV,” I gestured toward the Gottliebs with what I hoped would be conspiratorial contempt. But since my father continued to look at me as he had initially or at the minimum skeptically, I raced to complete my pedantic point, “So to our Founders, and to me, it’s about pursuing well-being, which was their notion of what happiness was.”

At that my father pulled himself up out of his arm chair, straightening to his full six-feet, and snorted, “I told your mother you should have gone to Brooklyn College. I knew Columbia would fill your head with fancy ideas.” And with that he turned to join my mother, presumably to let her know how right he had been.

Left alone, I gathered the laundry my mother had washed and headed for the uptown subway. So he went one way and I another.

I have paused here to take you back, via this example, to an earlier time in order to speak explicitly about happiness,or, as you now know I prefer, well-being, because that has been what all of this has been about—its pursuit.

To be continued . . .