Happiness

Happiness has as many names, at any given moment, as the dreams in a person’s heart, and as many definitions, in any particular historical era. as there are human beings looking for her.

As a child, what I wanted was a baby doll with a bottle, and a few years later, the doll I’d seen in a toy store, with brown eyes like mine, and braids and a beret, and real little shoes with straps.

Time passed.

As a teenager I once observed what I was feeling while enjoying creamy vanilla ice cream with walnut-and-caramel topping: a peaceful, expanding inner brightness. The light needed rebooting after each spoonful, and turned instantly dark in the emptiness of the bowl. I’d need  another serving.

Time passed.

I wanted to write.

I wanted to find my soul mate. We’d laugh at the same jokes and sing the same songs, walk to the same beat, side by side, and appreciate each other’s’ innermost selves.

I wanted to get married.

I wanted to have children.

I wanted to write. I wanted validation. I didn’t want to get old. I didn’t want anyone whom I loved to die. I wanted the Geula. I wanted to find an apartment I loved.

Time passed.

I wanted.

I wanted.

*

Sitting on the grass in a Jerusalem park with my first grandchild (whose blonde curls had not yet been cut,) I pointed to an apartment in one of two identical buildings overlooking the trees and said, “You see that merpessert  up there,  Elchonon? At the top of that building? That’s where I want to live someday.”

I made inquiries, and much to my delight and surprise, a realtor told me that that apartment was for sale. I went to talk to the owner, and as soon as I walked in and saw the big living room windows looking out into the trees, I knew that this was it. Hashem would give it to me.

The price was too high, but the realtor said, “Don’t worry, he’ll come down.”

He went up.

The realtor said, “Wait.”

I waited.

He went up.

Hashem has many ways, I thought to myself.

Every once in a while, I’d walk through that park and think, Hashem has many ways. But one day, looking up at my apartment with a confident, dreaming heart, I saw to my dismay that the whole porch had been walled up.

Those walls fell in on me. My legs felt  uncertain, as if they’d melted beneath me in the sun.

I crossed the park’s grassy expanse and climbed the hill up to where the buildings stood. When I got to the top, standing there on the sidewalk with wobbly legs, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I sat down.

Time passed—probably about a minute—whereupon an elderly gentleman approached, proceeding with slow steps from the direction of the park. I saw him glancing down out of the corner of his eye at the middle-aged, lip-sticked lady in high heels, seated—strangely enough–on the curb of the parking lot between the two buildings. “Ha’em ani yechol laazor lach, geveret?” he asked. Though I doubt that he was actually wrapped in a tallis, that’s the picture of him that remains in my mind’s eye.

Crestfallen and desolate, I thought to myself,  Who knows? Why not? “Excuse me, Sir,” I said, “do you know of any apartments for sale?”

The old man gave a deep, graceful bow, and with a grand, theatrical sweep of an arm, he replied, “Sheli, geveret.” Mine, madame.

I followed him upstairs, into the building where my apartment was no longer, and when he opened the door, a tree full of branches and leaves greeted me through his living room window. The place was a wreck, and he hadn’t closed up his porch because he didn’t have a porch, but I thought, who cares. We would paint the apartment and fix the bathroom and the kitchen.

It turned out that he was a widower. Alone in his grief, he had let the apartment self-destruct.

I loved living there.

Time passed

Somewhere along the line, something started bothering me.  I felt limited. I wasn’t sure how to define it, but I told myself that I felt cramped. We need a merpesset, I decided finally. If only we had a merpesset! I want to be able to go outside. I want to be able to stand under the sky, I told my husband.  I want to see the stars.

We built a merpesset.

*

Years before, my sister Andrea A”H, in Massachusetts, had given me a little red plastic hummingbird feeder like the one I’d once admired on her back porch. But I didn’t have anywhere to hang it up.

The first day that the merpesset was completed fell on a Friday. Late in the afternoon as Shabbos approached, I hurriedly pulled out the unopened box from where I’d stashed it at the back of a low kitchen cabinet, quickly read the instructions regarding how to clean the red plastic disc and how to make the prescribed special hummingbird drink—four cups of boiling water to precisely one cup of white sugar; cooled off the mixture in the refrigerator, as stipulated, and hung up the feeder in the corner of the porch.

Dashing around for all the last-minute tasks before candle-lighting, I glanced outside at the porch and to my amazement, lo and behold, a tiny, exquisite little glossy-feathered, shimmering bird that I’d never seen before–emerald-green and violet and blue, was already hovering over the feeder and dipping his teeny beak into the tiny feeding holes in the plastic cover. How did he know to come and drink? What had informed him so fast of the feeder’s presence and purpose? Had some scent of sweetness drawn him? Had the color red alerted him to his food’s presence? Did the symbolic flower petals imprinted in plastic around each of the holes echo some image imprinted in his teeny brain, signaling where his sustenance was located?

But as I opened the matchbox and was about to bentch licht, I was seized abruptly by self-doubt. In my great rush, had I made any mistakes? Had I counted the cups of water correctly? Was the proportion of water to sugar correct? Had the sugar dissolved completely, and boiled for the full prescribed minute? Had I completely removed all traces of the detergent after washing the feeder, as the instructions had stipulated?  These things were very important, the instruction  booklet had informed me. The birds can be harmed—they can even die—if the directions are not adhered to exactly.

So no sooner had I hung it up than I rushed outside, removed the feeder from the hook, and dumped out the sugar water. After Shabbos, I would start again.

“Are you going to daven out on the merpesset” my husband asked with a smile before leaving for shul.

“Oh yes!” I replied. “Yes!”

I dragged a chair out to the porch.

And now I’m going to describe something that I’m afraid is indescribable…an inchoate experience that’s really too elusive to be captured by words.

But I want to try, because that Shabbos night I experienced the happiness at the root of happiness.                                                                     

                                                                   *

The air was still. In the dusk, lights across the valley, in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, twinkled through the leaves and branches, and blackbirds and sparrows and doves were settling noisily down for the night—quacking and chirping and cooing, each species with its distinct song.

Pink drifting clouds floated overhead.

“Come,” King David exhorted me from the siddur, “sing joyfully to Hashem….Let us call out to Him. For a great G-d and a great King is He, above all heavenly powers….In His power are the hidden mysteries of earth.”

Just then, a movement over to the right caught my eye. The tiny black, violet, and emerald-winged hummingbird had returned, vertically hovering, insistently and purposefully, in the now-empty air where more than an hour before, for a few seconds, he’d come upon his heart’s desire. In his grain-sized brain, the precise location had been recorded.

That’s when it struck me–and here’s what I fear I won’t be able to describe —that this teeny little bird’s intelligence was a slight and slender aspect of G-d’s endless Intelligence…and G-d exists.

You’ll say, what, you didn’t know that already?

Yes and no. I’d known it in my heart,  and intellectually. But now, all at once, I knew I wasn’t by myself out​ there on the porch. And for the next quarter hour or so, a shining, silent serenity expanded steadily and ecstatically within me and…beyond me, filling me to the brim, and beyond the brim, with happiness. G-d exists.

So that’s what humankind’s looking for: the joy at the root of all other joys. I wouldn’t seek happiness in its endlessly varied disguises, nor ever fear anything in this life again.

Like the hummingbird, I’d remember. 

*

It wasn’t so. I’ve  wanted and feared a thousand things, a thousand times, since that quarter-hour on the porch.

A matter of fact, I realized recently that what I really need is to  install an outdoor air conditioner and enclose the merpesset inside sliding glass walls.

I already see it in my mind’s eye. How happy I’ll be! Come rain or come shine… sitting out on the porch with pen in hand,  a cup of coffee in the other.

                                                     This story appeared first in Ami Magazine