happy happy joy joy

We just got back from a road trip to Indiana. L's grandmother celebrated her eightieth birthday. (I hope I'm that spry at eighty.)

The road trip itself was a kind of trial run for a much longer trip to Disney World later in the year. Can kids and parents cope with each other while being strapped into a moving box for hours on end? I'm happy to report, yes. We did all the hokey stuff. We sang. We ignored each other in favor of computer games. We searched in panic for shelter when Caleb announced that he had to pee NOW! And we talked.

Some time between mid-state Indiana and home, L started asking me about joy. "When did you begin to experience real joy?" she asked. Real joy. She meant not a happy moment, such as a birthday, but a deep immersion in satisfied well-being, a deep sense of . . . well, I guess you'd call it gratitude or thankfulness. Those are different words than joy, but to me they express the same thing. Gratitude and thankfulness are, in my mind, the beginning of any real and wholesome ethic.

"Not until the last few years," I said. She didn't seem to like the answer. I thought perhaps I was being too serious about it. (I can definitely treat a question much too seriously.) "Not really until I was out of work," I continued. "During that time I felt so full of gratitude for the realities of living, for the common but important things that we pass over now." That answer didn't seem to satisfy her either.

So let me, then, ask and see what might come of it. Joy. When have you or did you begin to experience joy, to know what it means and where to find it?

Oh, we're also getting a dog. More on that later.