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This week's pertinent promotional email, aimed at lazy media people: Where does your state rank in the list of happiness?
Normally I wouldn't fall for junk like this, but — no, hold on, I fall for junk like this all the time. It's irresistible. Are we happier than Wisconsin? Tell me we're happier than Wisconsin. I don't care if we're No. 49 as long as they're 50.
Turns out we're the third happiest state. (Wisconsin is No. 21.)
So we like it here — noted. But it seems to me that it all depends on when you ask the question. On a radiant May morn, we are the happiest people possible, as if everyone woke up to the news that they had won the lottery and been granted immortality. (Takes a while before you realize that's going to take some really careful financial planning.)
On a bleak January after a fortnight where the temps never mustered the strength for double digits, we are "happy" in the sense that a widowed Swedish farmer in a remote cabin in 1756 was "happy" because he had finished folding all his church shirts, and could die now.
Sometimes you're happy and bereft on the same day. For example, if the pollster had caught me at 6:52 p.m. last Monday, I would have responded, "I'm happy! I'm at Trader Joe's, and the Pumpkin Butter's back! Can't wait to spread it on an English muffin this weekend."
A week before it was 90, and felt like summer eternal, crickets raising a racket in the backyard all night. But the temps had dropped and the leaves had started to turn. The afternoon sunlight was starting to look wan and weak, and sunsets now felt fast and decisive. Some switch gets flipped inside, and you think of hot spiced drinks and soup for lunch and snuggling into thick sweaters. Even better, thick sweaters soaked with soup! Autumn is just the best.
I snapped out of this rather quickly. I have been down the Pumpkin Butter Road before. Many times. You think you're going to be smearing a pleasurably pliable form of pie on your muffin or toast, but it's underwhelming. It doesn't go with anything else except cream cheese, aka bagel spackle.
So it sits in the fridge. You don't throw it away, because Wife might like it. (She does not.) You think, Daughter will like it when she comes home for Thanksgiving. (She does not come home.) When you see it in December, you realize that pumpkin time has passed, and feel a bit abashed for having been swept up in pumpkin frenzy in the first place. And to your horror, you realize you also bought Cranberry Butter.
So ask me at 6:52 p.m. on that Monday if I'm a happy Minnesotan, and you'll get a cheerful affirmation. But follow me around the store as the reality of the repeated pumpkin-butter emotional deflation sets in, along with the realization that the butter is a metaphor for humanity's inability to use the wisdom of disappointment to temper future enthusiasms, and no, I will not say I'm happy. And not just because you're following me around the store, but that's part of it.
It all depends, in other words. There's no way we're all happy all of the time. We shouldn't be. We need those moments of flavored-butter self-reproach to make the truly happy moments seem unique.
By the way, last year we were No. 2 in the happy-state list, so they must have asked before the butter hit the shelves.
