My dad used to subscribe to Reader's Digest magazine (I often fantasized about having Campbell's (condensed) Cream of Tomato Soup (the one you make with milk, whole milk, not the 2% or 1% stuff which is more like water with white coloring) and having coffee lightened with condensed milk while reading a novel in one the RD Condensed Books series and getting up from the table four inches shorter. Ah, memories. Thank goodness for drugs and therapy, eh?
Anyway, Reader's Digest, or digress as I used to call it, as it had, even forty-five years ago, more advertising than articles, always had tons of little jokes and columns (of sorts) such as 'Humor in Uniform' (odd how I was to spend 8 years in the USAF, which often reminded me of Catch-22 but was not nearly as funny as the Reader's Digest editors made it out to be) or Laughter is the Best Medicine. Always good for a smile.
Reader's Digest is still around though not quite as ubiquitous as it once was. I explain to the kids these days (kids=anyone under forty, in my estimation; I am an old soul) it was as if Norman Rockwell had come up with a magazine. I was in my young teen years when it came to the house, like clockwork, in the mid-sixties a decade as turbulent in terms of Civil Rights, the War in Vietnam and other issues as you might find anywhere in American history, but you'd never know it from the pages of RD.
I thought about those little bricks of a magazine arriving via 'book rate' (does the USPS still offer 'book rate' or is that something one of the delivery companies now does?) while reading a story in The Harvard Crimson about Joy is Contagious (even though she still has no temperature).
My forever-juvenile sense of humor (trapped in this curmudgeonly body) is one of the reasons why my daughter, Michelle, isn't called "Faith", "Hope", "Patience" or any of the other virtues/attributes we inflict upon our children as names (Gwyneth Paltrow are you listening? Apple? Is there a little sister named Peach Cobbler in somebody's future?). We always think how cute that name will be, especially when they're teens and subject to non-stop universal observation and ridicule or when they're adults and have the chance to do to their children what their parents did to them. (Actually, when you go to The Crimson, spend a minute here. The depth of coverage, the degree of diversity of opinion and the scholarship and eloquence in almost every piece is marvelous to read.)
Cynic that I am, I was struck by one of the researchers quoted in the story who compared joy to a sexually transmitted disease, “(F)or example, in a network of sexual partners, if you have many partners and your partners have many partners, you are more susceptible to catching an STD.” Thanks for that, Dr. Fowler, Class of '92; I could put a fork in my front lobe and not dislodge that image. You can always tell a Harvard Man-you can't tell him very much, but you can always tell him. ;-)
Proving that one man's ceiling is another man's floor, the article quotes those who are also engaged in a research project on happiness and joy, whose results don't seem to be as cheerful and chipper. Makes me wonder what Hoyt Axton might have made of all of this. This time of year, a Flash of Fire could warm the cockles of even a joyful heart.
-bill kenny
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