Contentment

In my teens I took a Kodachrome photograph in a cemetery in Hancock, New Hampshire.  There was a background of wooded hills slightly out of focus and a foreground of a weathered gravestone and a faded American flag. The day was a little overcast so the colors were muted, which gave the picture a mood I liked. I called it “Veteran’s Grave.”

Now, more than fifty years later, I wouldn’t give the shot such high marks. It had mood, but no punch and was a bit of a cliché. At the time I thought it was art.  It wasn’t that I was uncritical of my own work.  I’ve always believed that a wastebasket was the photographer’s most important piece of equipment, except now it’s the delete button. 

My mother had the habit of fishing my rejects out of the trash and showing them to her friends as examples of my brilliance as a photographer.  It drove me crazy, and I told her so.  “I like all your pictures,” she said. 

But “Veteran’s Grave” she didn’t like.  “It’s sad,” she said, “Why can’t you take happy pictures?”  I rolled my eyes heavenward in search of strength.  I was a deeply insightful, artistic photographer, especially if you didn’t look at the pictures that hadn’t come out.  The cemetery in Hancock reminded me of the one in “Our Town,” a play which I had read.  In my adolescent wisdom, I realized death was part of life. 

My mother doesn’t like to look at the dark side.  After a severe heart attack she was cared for by hospice workers, who tried to get her to sign a do-not-resuscitate order. She was shocked.  “I’m not going to die,” she told them. Now at 96, she’s still around, and the good hospice folk have gone on to more compliant patients. 

She still doesn’t like sad, pictures, sad movies, or sad books. As she once told her teenage son, “There’s enough sadness in the world; we don’t have to dwell on it.”  Now that some of my smart-alecky snootiness has fallen away, I’m starting to agree.   I like best the opening scenes of the book where the characters are living happily before they are tested by misfortune.  If Bilbo Baggins had stayed in The Shire, I would have read on and on before I got bored. I tend to agree with him when he said, “We are plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!

I tried to read Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson because I admired the title.  I didn’t know Grayson was the pen name of Ray Stannard Baker, a muckraking journalist.  I gave up on the book. The author was purportedly a businessman who left the pressures of the city for an idyllic life in the country. I have nothing against blossoms, birdsong, and butterflies, but I couldn’t tolerate Baker/Grayson’s admiration of himself for being more sensitive to them that other men.  If I want to read about the simple life, I prefer Thoreau.

Let me be honest.  I get grumpy, I get depressed, and I worry more than is good for me, but I believe contentment is a wonderful gift.  Now I press the delete button on malformed sentences, but I’d rather write about a dinner I showed up for than a misfortune that made me miss a meal. 

Here’s a quote from the poet James Richardson, who wrote, “Knowing how to be pleased with what’s there is a great secret of happy living, sensitive reading, and bad writing.”  That’s my philosophy.