This I Believe

This I believe–

I believe in having happy endings once a day. In Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine, a young boy of the late 1920′s grapples with the infinite in the measurements of his own universe: “All I know is I feel good going to bed at nights–That’s a happy ending once a day. Next morning, I’m up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to remember is that I’m going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything OK.”

I gave Dandelion Wine to my dear friend Cheri not long before she took her life two years ago this month. Cheri too had the mischievous spirit of a pre-adolescent boy. Puckish and unpredictable, she changed as quickly as seasons do, and like a ten year old, reveled in their comings and goings. If one turned her pockets inside out, they would likely contain smooth stones for skipping, a bird’s feather, pieces of time-worn glass. She collected moments. She sought the bits in others that she recognized as unique and therefore treasured with singular devotion. She pulsed with LIFE, and she grasped its anomalies and idiosyncrasies with bracing awareness.

“To Paige: for sharing the passion,” Cheri once scrawled to me in eager lowercase letters. Honestly, my understanding of passion before knowing her had romanticized it into melodramatic sentiments: the finding of one’s true love, reading Neruda’s poetry, being staggered by Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa. Happy endings weren’t measured in daily increments but in a sweeping worldview that overlooked the day’s pleasures. Cheri’s life and her unexpected death taught me to cherish the perennial peace of a day well-lived, with passion but not in expectation of it. This peace is unassuming. It can be summoned to fill you with slow and deliberate warmth when you’re nothing but a brittle shell. It can be the simple awareness that today is ending for tomorrow. The paradox of Cheri is that she taught so many this essential lesson, but never allowed it to embrace her. Forever sleepless, my friend’s spirit became shadowy and forgot its aliveness. Nights and days, as we know them, didn’t end and begin anymore.

What happens if a day can’t have a happy ending? In the days that followed her passing, I imagined Cheri going to bed at night, only to rise and pace the lengths of her bedroom until the sun showed its face. Did she ever read Dandelion Wine? I wonder this. Did any of her days have happy endings? I hope this. Did she identify with the boy, who screamed silently across Bradbury’s “vast inverted pond of heaven” “I’m really alive!”? I know this to be true. Cheri’s stilled life holds no less meaning because she lost the language to her ever-expanding universe.

My universe will be no bigger than the boy’s. My nights will not be more or less. My days will not be shorter or longer. And the beginning and ending of each is my time to “lie a while”. It is my time to not forget that I’m alive, to be OK with life’s abruptness, to bless its fugitive moments and the people who dart in and out of it too quickly, to give thanks for evenings and mornings and all of the time in between. I must believe this.