Category Archives: human behavior
Happiness, by Design.
Tonight, PBS aired the carefully-prepared documentary about our emotional life, Part I. For the first hour — was it just the presence of deeply-dependent Dad, my own forlorn sense, or the brain crashing after another episode with sumatriptan succinate? — I cried. Thesis: Happiness is an outgrowth of satisfying relationships. Subject: A-socialized children, Asperger’s…….all about isolation, that increasingly-terrifying reality. The inability to bond. Let’s get really familiar. I am exposed. Spotlight: OFF.
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Second hour addressed abusive relationships, the tragic story of one boy who was bullied literally to death, and then evolved into the inevitable narrative of love relationships – how they form, why, what happens to them, all within the ever-lovin’ context of, you guessed it, marriage.
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As usual, I fixated on the entire presentation like a lost soul at an evangelical tent meeting. Why, after all these years, I still fed off this stuff with no hope for a cure was in itself baffling. The college-educated woman in me zeroed in on the subtext; the tireless salespitch for marriage as an institution? or, was there room for something less terminal – perhaps the depth of love, and its binding properties? This was, after all, a scientific “study.” Yes; “studies” showed that marriages became increasingly less satisfying for the couples, but, when children were added, more stabilizing for both. Professional counseling to the rescue and, voila! – happily ever after, just in time. Part I, Finit.
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Of course. Just in time for the new year, steering us toward Epiphany, we are led to celebrate Happiness, the reward for all willing to form satisfying human relationships by working at them, getting counseling, and above all, staying together.
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This theme resonating until my cranium and brain could no longer stand the symbiosis, I began my blinding crawl through the Unanswered Questions. 1.) To what extent do humans require training in the art of forming satisfying relationships? 2.) Who decides when they are? 3.) How many more books will be written (and, documentaries filmed) before we are ready to take a serious look at culture, and just exactly what role the habits of those who bear little resemblance to us do to achieve stasis, stability, security, and attachments that last? 4.) When will the West turn its head away from the mirror and stop the endless looping of conventions that feed the same outcomes, decade after decade, century upon century?
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It’s nice to think about Happiness. It’s nice to recollect moments, perhaps in childhood, or reflected in home movies and family albums, of frozen bits of it. Each of us has a story, but most of us are unwilling to tell it in terms that are singular enough to set us apart; we have been taught, after all, to find the ways in which we bear similarities. And, then comes the task of acceptance.
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Those of us who can more easily speak of oddity, distance, lack of cultivated behavior, or a blatant honesty that seems to make most around us uncomfortable, hardly become part of the social landscape. Rather, we become the subject of such “studies”, effectively distancing us further from the very thing to be sought after: connection.
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Were I, for example, to suggest that, at the moment when spouses or even partners recognize their lack of satisfaction with each other, they each find another who can, with gentleness and care, pull the puzzle into a picture……..imagine the uproar. Once we’ve vowed before witnesses to cherish each other forever to the exclusion of everyone else, we are thereafter programmed to reject each other for finding something worthwhile in another. It never occurs to us as either couples or within the context of society that the labeled culprit, the unnamed paramour, the suspected predator, the ultimate villain, might actually be a person worthy of respect whose heart is pure! Those who document with intent to honor one who sets out to meet the needs of another, even to recognize that which society will not permit any expression, are viewed as purveyors of sleaze and pornography. Sexual infidelity diminishes in the glare of this illumination; yet, the light generated is always subdued by the shadows which form.
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And so we need, above all, clarity. We must stand in direct Light. We cannot suggest anything that might lead our children down paths of destruction. But, we should broaden our scope, expand our capacities, and welcome differences that extend beyond our tediously familiar and increasingly undigestible recipes for social stability. If we were founded as a country upon principles that welcome all under God, then perhaps the happiness we tell ourselves is ours for the asking might better be sought outside of the confines of convention and the traditional counseling that seeks to maintain it. Perhaps we need to go deep — into that less-familiar place called solitude, the closet of our souls, where the thought of relationship with anything but the self we were given at birth can be known and loved.
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I so desire to be able to turn from this tablet at this moment toward the face of a precious someone who declares adoration for me. But, of greater importance at that moment would be: can I return what is offered me, in even greater measure?
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Perhaps we might find each other, alone together. I hope that, if this is so, we both have room in our hearts for an endless expression of each other’s breadth and depth, our arms wide enough to embrace anyone placed in our path. We walk this life in momentary bliss; the next, finer hour will reveal all.
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© Ruth Ann Scanzillo 1/5/10
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THE EMPTY SEAT.
Dad slowly lowered his once-nimble body onto the hardwood pew. First row was best for him. As Bronze Star-awarded forward observer under Patton, he belonged close to the action. Placing his cane nearby, I checked to see if he was comfortable and turned to begin preparations for the evening’s musical performance.
This was my 23rd year as ‘cellist with the Erie Chamber Orchestra. Our annual Christmas concert, always held at the local Romanesque jewel affectionately known as “St. Pat’s”, was well beyond its 30th year and everybody planning to attend knew what they would get when they arrived: a nice medley of orchestrated carols; the sweet youth chorus from a nearby cathedral; more nostalgic if redundant medleys of all the holiday favorites; a visit from Santa for the velveteen children, home again, home again, jiggedy-jig, Merry Christmas!
Yes; everything would seem to happen as predictably tonight as ever before.
But, this year and every year since Mom’s passing, I was ever more eager for the moment when our conductor, Bruce Morton Wright, would take his place at the front of the orchestra. Because, at that moment, I would be turning my gaze to the sixth or seventh pew on the opposite side of the center aisle.
Mom was as different from Dad as pudding from cake. She had been raised by sectarian Protestant fundamentalists, and the dogma which bound her were legion. Fiercely loyal to the purity of the Lord’s Table for communion, all those in the fellowship were indoctrinated to shun all forms of Christendom represented by the “organized” church. As such, any Catholic church, therefore, was completely off limits; one was never to set foot inside the domain of the “pagans”.
My career evolution, that of performing with a professional orchestra, was particularly difficult for Mom to digest. Rehearsing on Sunday afternoons. Playing concerts in Catholic church sanctuaries. Expecting “true” Christians to attend these performances. Too much for the aging brain of a steeped-in-the-Scriptures devotee to the doctrine of separation, of touching not the “unclean thing.”
But, not, apparently, for Mom. I was never sure what turned her toward me instead of away, but once that first tentative toe stepped into St. Patrick’s Irish Catholic Church it brought the rest of her with it and she never missed a concert thereafter. And, she always chose a seat at the end of the sixth or seventh pew, in full view of the ‘cello section.
She’d spent most of her life as a dressmaker. A “seamstress”, as they were called in her day, she forsook a career in New York when the Great Depression descended, married my father, and raised three children. Mom loved to sew late into the evenings, after the house had gone quiet. I was especially touched when, mysteriously, she’d set aside her favorite passtime to dress in her Sunday best for me on concert night.
The year she died, playing this and all concerts was a mixed blessing. Music had always been my solace, through all hardship, through every transformative and dissonant episode of my life thus far. But, I was missing Mom in her special place that first year, and couldn’t help noticing the peculiar empty seat at the end of the pew. So, at the end of that concert, I walked over to make myself known to the man, woman and young girl who had chosen to sit beside it.
I asked them why they had left that spot empty at the end of the pew. When they disclosed that a friend who was to join them had not, I told them about my mother – her life, her death that summer from cancer. I described her early years as a sewing student of my grandmother, how she had begun to earn money as early as age 11 doing alterations. To my astonishment, their young daughter spoke suddenly: “I’m 11 years old”, she declared. “And, I sew, too!” Her parents confirmed. Indeed, she was a budding seamstress.
I left St. Pat’s that night in serendipitous, amazed solitude. The glistening snow was no match for the thousand points on the stars in my universe. Mom had visited me; of this I was absolutely certain.
And, visit me she would again, every single year at St. Patrick’s for the Erie Chamber Orchestra Christmas concert and every other concert held there during the season. Right there, at the end of her pew, where nobody else dared appear.
Here we were again, 15 years hence. Instruments tuned, the concert about to begin. The harsh winter not yet having descended, I turned to view an absolutely packed house. Yes; standing room only – except for one, lone seat at the end of pew seven by the aisle. Unbelievable. Not an empty seat in the entire church, but for the place where Mom had brought her spirit. I smiled the private smile reserved for this moment alone, and sailed through the first half of the concert toward intermission.
Had I wings, they would have flown me to that spot. Did the man, woman, and young lady know why there was an empty seat at the end of their pew? Would they mind a story about it?
The guests were very gracious. They listened without interruption as I held forth about my mother. I told them, too, about that first year — the young girl who had disclosed her love of sewing. Thinking that I had shared my lone miracle with appreciative if silent concertgoers, I finally stopped narrating. The woman, who had been riveted to every word, spoke. She said: “ I, also, am a seamstress. I make ball gowns, and costumes for the Historical Society.”
There was no snow tonight to compete with the glistening shimmer in my soul. Dad and I headed home together, to reminisce each in our own personal place. Looking at him now, I could see ahead to a time when he might also speak to me from beyond the limits of this present world.
Since Mom was alive, dressmaking has long since become a lost art. Soldiers now scope out the enemy from remote location and electronic transfer in cyberspace. Our world is whizzing toward an uncertain future, perhaps more indefinite than ever before. Our traditions, and the very institutions that founded them, seem at times perilously close to life-altering annihilation. Our disciplines, and the skills that make them possible are challenged by the formidable, mind-replacing machine at every turn. Paradigm shifts notwithstanding, much of that upon which we have depended for sustenance, nourishment, encouragement, and security is in serious question. Predictability has nearly vanished.
But, there is life and hope and future beyond this still-pale frame. The Providential Power of our universe reveals something precious every second – perhaps, waiting right beside each of us, in the next empty seat.
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© Ruth Ann Scanzillo 12/5/09
[RETIRED]music teacher/drama coach, Erie City public schools
professional ‘cellist, Erie Chamber Orchestra
PO Box 3628
Erie PA 16508
all rights reserved.
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