Hey y'all.
I’m writing this in a hospital waiting room. My wife needed a minor outpatient procedure done (she’s fine) and so we were here at a ridiculous time this morning, to fill out all the forms in person that we filled out last week online. Contrary to their promises, this did nothing to expedite our experience. We are more than an hour past our appointment time.
We were not the only people to have a surgery scheduled this morning: The waiting room is packed, and tempers are short. Since you can’t eat before surgery, everyone is hungry. There is a coffee stand in the lobby, 50 feet away, but drinks are not allowed in the waiting room, so we are all caffeine deprived, as well. Or at least, I am.
There is a TV on the wall playing Law and Order SVU. Some folks are paying rapt attention to this, but trust me when I tell you my nervous system is not prepared to hear graphic details of sexual assault at 7:45 in the morning. There are no windows in this room and the walls are painted an industrial greige, with two-toned greige floors. The chairs are yet another shade of greige. There are two prints on the wall that have all the cheer of the art in a Hampton Inn hotel room.
This room feels like where joy goes to die.
But a few minutes ago, something happened that changed everything.
I can’t see the door to the waiting room from where we are sitting around the corner, but I heard it open, and then I heard a loud, feminine voice say, “Hey baby!”
This was followed by several “How are you doing?”s and a few “good morning!”s. Then she came around the corner and I noticed she was stopping to give a greeting to everyone who made eye contact with her. She was positively effervescent.
When she reached the front of the room, she turned, made eye contact with all of us, and said, “I hope everyone is having a good day today!”
Even we hard core cynics smiled, and a few people replied in the affirmative.
“It seems like you are having a good day,” one person said.
“Oh, I am, baby. I have a good day every day. In fact, I’ve already decided I’m going to have a good day tomorrow!”
And then she turned to the receptionist, and said, “How’s your day going?”
It’s been a while since I was planning on having a good day tomorrow. Hell, it’s been a while since I had a good day. But already planning to have one tomorrow? That is next level. As someone who lives with chronic depression, I know that I can’t just decide to not be depressed. But maybe I can not plan for tomorrow to suck the way today has. Maybe that is a start, anyway.
What I can tell you is that this woman's decision to be happy changed my mood, relieved the hell of a rough morning, and brought smiles to 30 or so people who had not been smiling. And that, as they say, is not nothing.
Five Beautiful Things
Jared Goulette is a New England-based professional mural artist. I love his use of bright colors, over the top scale, and especially the way he uses eyes in his work. (Also on Instagram.)
In recent months, I've been listening to a lot of protest music. No particular reason. One in heavy rotation is Woody Guthrie's All You Fascists (Bound To Lose). Over on Ben Wurdmuller's blog, he's put together a collection of covers from folks like Wilco, Bette Midler, and Rhiannon Giddens, which is my favorite. 
