Happiness is not living your life and nothing bad ever happens. Happiness should be that a lot of things happened, and you went through them and can be together again. That’s real happiness.
(Suzhen Liu, Discover Love Within, Forthcoming)
These are not the words you want to hear when you return from the gym on a sunny Sunday morning. I had convinced our youngest to go with me to the gym for the first time, but the oldest decided to stay at home. “Maybe that’s God’s way of telling me to go to the gym instead,” he added, perhaps appealing to my spiritual philosophy to keep my outrage in check. “Do you want me to tell your mama about it, or do you like to do it yourself?” I asked, knowing that my wife would not be happy hearing the news. When I told her, I saw the well-familiar thunderclouds appearing on her face, but suddenly she started laughing. As it turned out, her hairdresser had just told her the story that her son had first incurred a 500 dollar fee by parking her car on a handicap place, and by failing to pay for it, got her license revoked. She concluded that our pain didn’t quite compare with that mess.
That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, my wife laughing over the turn of events. More than that, she had a simple solution to fix everything. She suggested to use the tv that wasn’t connected in our son’s room because of a missing cable outlet and switch it with the one in the family room. While I had to do some cleaning in the basement to get to all the cables, the surprise was that our son connected all the wires effortlessly and 30 minutes later we had a working tv again. All it cost me was a 25-dollar fee at the local community center to have the old tv recycled. You would think that this is the kind of event that ruins your day, but strangely enough I felt because of it that our family is coming together. Go figure!
No comments:
Post a Comment