A Cup of Joy

Today’s Headline

It should make me happy: missiles have not flown, the earth’s crust has not shifted, and the stock market continues to climb. Despite this trifecta of positive news, I must confess to a certain melancholy of perspective. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m pleased for us all to still be here and to have aspirational optimism for my under-sized retirement account. It’s just that my daughter has the flu, I sense a sort of germ field passing through or over me, and there wasn’t much sleep in my house last night. Unfortunately, I’m unable to take solace in the respite from armageddon with an intact IRA when all I’d like to do is hibernate.

Perhaps I’m being selfish; the flu is its own type of catastrophe, individual and global. It has decimated populations for over a century. Maybe I should be content with my family’s presumptive recovery from viral infection during such an era as the one we live in.

I am. But I have extra time on my hands today, hunkering down within the quarantine of home, and that leads to intermittent monitoring of global news and media. Although I need distraction, what I encounter about our planet isn’t too pretty. Stories of contentment don’t jump to the fore when my thumbs poke about the headlines on my phone news feeds. And no alerts of peace outbreaks and satisfaction epidemics buzz and beep for my attention. Instead, a barrage of bickering, near-miss debacles, and disheartening commentary floods my smartphone screen.

Call me crazy but the absence of cataclysm and casualty is, by itself, not particularly reassuring. So I hug a cup of warm tea, sniff at the large dollop of honey I’ve dropped in the cup, and stare out the window at the edgy light of January. Then I call my uncle.

Uncle H is 80 today. The second of three boys, he is now the sole surviving brother, following the deaths in the past eighteen months of my Uncle M and my father. It is good to hear his voice. I proclaim that today is the last official day of his eighth decade. He doesn’t sound too impressed. But there is a fair amount of noise in the background.

“So how are you celebrating?” I ask.

My uncle has never been one for fanfare; I did not expect him to be doing something elaborate to acknowledge his birthday. Still, I would not have guessed where he is when I call: waiting in line for a haircut.

“Nothing fancy,” he tells me. “A number 4.” When I ask what he gets for a number 4, he’s not too sure. “I don’t think it’s much different from a number 3, 5, or 6,” he says. “Mostly I just need to have my eyebrows trimmed. They do that in the number 4.”

Uncle H has always been able to make me laugh. One summer, when I was seven, he visited me in the hospital, after my hernia operation. He brought ice cream. “We’re not supposed to make him laugh,” my dad told Uncle H, nodding at me. They each took a bite of their ice cream.

“Oh, it hurts, huh?” Uncle H asked. “When you laugh?”

I confirmed it did, and stared at the ice cream in front of me. I wasn’t very hungry and my sad, serious look said as much. Then Uncle H and my father started telling jokes – about ways that they couldn’t be funny. My look melted with the dessert. It did indeed hurt when I laughed but all the shaking turned out to be great medicine. I finished the ice cream, had some dinner, and was discharged home the next morning.

Back in the present, I ask Uncle H what happens next. “After the haircut, I mean.”

Dinner, he answers. “And then my ninth decade.”

We exchange some barbs about both the decade and the opportunity for a male longevity record in the family. Then his name is called for his number 4 cut. He promises not to send me a selfie from the barber chair. When we hang up, it sounds like he’s already sitting beneath some scissors.

The afternoon sky has changed while we were talking, a slight infusion of blue and yellow pastels softening the gray. Tea cup still in my hands, I tilt it back and let the last of the sugary fluid fill me. That’s when I see three words written on the cup’s side:

Love

Laugh

Family

Now there’s a headline, and a reassurance, for the ages.

Or at least the next decade.

2 thoughts to “A Cup of Joy”

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