Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Introduction

Introduction Last month I dreamed about a family so famously happy that the government commissioned a study of them. “Unearthing the secret of happiness ,” the principal investigator said, “would spread blessings around the globe, ending all wars and thus altering the courses of human history and evolution.” Accordingly scientists began the study with great enthusiasm and high expectations. Magnetic resonators thumped. Neurologists scanned, and psychiatrists questioned and probed. Hematologists drained quarts of blood, and biologists sequenced DNA, dividing and subdividing , recombining and multiplying, using machines hidden beneath a mountain in Utah, the devices so secret that aside from the investigators only the Central Intelligence Agency knew they existed. Alas, despite the expenditure of a black hole of money and intellectual efforts so intense that three score researchers collapsed and had to be bused to sanitariums to undergo nerve cures, the study failed to reveal the source of happiness. In dreams, and actually in waking life, knowledge depends as much upon happenstance as it does upon planning and investigation. Two months after the study ended, a plumber flushing a pipe running under the basement of the family’s home cracked a slab of granite and discovered the house sat atop a river of nitrous oxide. Laughing gas has drifted misty across my years, some of the zephyrs, I am afraid, generated by the soiled and the bawdy or, as aficionados of southern barnyards know, by bluegrass marmalade. Most of the gas, however, percolates from my character. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson described “the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner.” I grew up as one of those boys. I’ve had a fortunate life. Never have want or mood pinched years into frowns. I have been extraordinarily lucky. As rainbows appear only in the sunshine, so my days have been bright. Consequently this is a happy book, perhaps not one that people unable to shake the burden of thinking themselves burdened will enjoy. The matters I vii viii | Introduction recount are uncomplicated, not like the recollection of the girl whose beloved was a dental student and who, when he traveled across the country on a fellowship, pulled one of her molars so he’d have something to remember her by. My mind resembles flypaper. Clouds of small doings buzz through my days and stick to consciousness. Names pepper my pages, those of turnips and strawberries, for example, yellow Aberdeen and strap-leaf red-top among the first, lady finger and New Jersey scarlet, Peabody and Scotch runner among the second. I like poking about and compiling lists, say, of things found in an old barn: mole traps, a hay fork, bush hooks, the bottom of a churn, a lightning rod, hog scrapers, and, if a person is sharp eyed, a milk jester or lactometer for measuring butterfat. Teeth, declares an old Roman saying, are shrubs, the roots of which dig below the gums deep into the earth. To keep teeth healthy one must feed and water them, and being an amateur gardener, I write much about food and drink. None of the meals I describe are fancy. Last week Vicki and I ate at Panda Express in the food court on the university campus. We split helpings of fried rice, broccoli beef, and black pepper chicken. My mind works by association, and thinking about peppered chicken reminds me of the ancient definition of man, a biped without a gizzard. Birds, of course, have gizzards, and I write about birds, indeed about the natural world. Instead of leaning on the everlasting arm, as the gospel song puts it, I kneel on the ground, raking through grasses, searching for caterpillars and spiders. Natural matters are more complex than people usually think. Since I teach at a university, I have the leisure to ponder. The definition of man started me thinking about angels. Although angels are bipeds, they have wings, can fly, and from a distance look like birds, convincing me that they have gizzards, albeit since angels confine themselves to a diet of milk and honey, I assume that lack of use has caused the gizzards to atrophy, like the human appendix. Oddities take flight in my essays. In January I read an article about an entrepreneur who, after losing his position on Wall Street, began breeding ducks with four wings, mallards, I think. In greener economic times, the man had spent a year as a broker in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Most of his customers were sheiks...