Be Happy

I have gone through a lot of napkins at Willow, between wetting them under a tulip glass of Happy Hour White and writing on them, but I was not writing on them last night. I was taking a break from recording stories and just relaxing.

It had been a busy and fairly productive day at the office. It is the eve of the first big Holiday week, after all, and a lot of folks will be out of town. It is a good time for it. No one knows what the impact of the Super Committee is going to be, and hence, no decisions are possible, or don’t seem to be, and I drafted a report for the companies on our team.

I have no idea what is coming, but a positive attitude is a good thing, and tends to breed positive outcomes.

That was one of the first things I learned in The Fleet. Trust me, a gigantic mobile aggregation of steel boxed filled with endless bangings-and-thunderings with nothing to do but work, eat and sleep for months on end is disconcerting.

It has a lot in common with a short sentence in a Federal Corrections facility, only louder.

On one of my first line periods out of Yokosuka I passed a Lieutenant Commander from one of the attack squadrons in the passageway just outside Mission Planning at frame 107. I greeted him with a little sardonic humor and he responded with a genuine enthusiasm and sunny smile: “Have a great Navy day!” He said. “It is great to be at sea again!”

I ducked through the hatch into the anti-room to the Mission Planning space and got a cup of day-old coffee. Sitting on a stool at one of the fold-down planning tables, I smoked a Marlboro from the $2.00 carton I bought at the smoke-shop, I considered the fact that he was happy, and I was not. The answer seemed plain enough, inescapable, really. Get happy.

It was just crazy enough to work. I was stuck there anyway, and with only a binary choice of misery or something else, I set about the business of getting happy.

Along the way, I invented a salacious and surreal detective story that I published each day in the ship’s newsletter, the Midway Multiplex. A chain of command that could be grimly serious actually interceded to protect my freedom of expression. It was hard time, but fun.

A decade later, the words of Bobby McFerrin’s infuriating song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” summed the thing up. What I did not know at the time was that a capella hit wasn’t as mindless as my mantra from the USS Midway.

I hope I did not stick the song in your head this morning, but it is stuck in mine and I hope I can pass it along to you. The philosophy in the lyrics actually has a patrimony. The noted Indian mystic and sage Meher Baba often used the expression “Don’t worry, be happy” when communicating with his devotees in the West.
He died in 1969, a little before I had an interest in Indian spirituality, or planning strike missions against parts of the sub-continent where it originated, but I have seen the words on inspiration cards and posters of the era. The song became an improbable hit after appearing on the soundtrack of the tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail, and that is how I discovered that the Navy and mysticism had something in common.

It is actually a pretty neat philosophy in four words.

So, although things pretty much suck these days, I was humming as I pecked at the office keyboard. I started out my report this way:

“Gentle Colleagues,

It has been a while since I got you an update on the business landscape. We have had some interesting moments of late. On this dreary misty day I am curled up by the fire in my lushly paneled office high above Glebe Road in posh Arlington, listening to the monotonous drumming of raindrops on my mahogany desktop. This being the sort of damp day that calls out for hard-hitting reporting, I thought I would walk you through what has transpired in the last flurry of Government task orders and outline some events that will shape the award of the next Big One….”

I summarized some of the antics of the customer, and was just mashing the “send” button when two colleagues stuck their heads in the office and suggested we stage an Occupy Willow moment before the drive home.

“Dammit,” I said. “Be happy!” I shut down the computer, threw some things in my briefcase and decamped with them to the elevator lobby and the amble in the mist down the block, across Fairfax Drive, up the patio and into the bar.

Old Jim was holding down his end of the Amen Corner, and things were slow enough that we had a chance to flirt with Tinkerbell and our buddy Holly.  There is a hint of sadness in her presence. She is leaving the staff to take a position of increased responsibility at the big sports bar down the block. Her last day at Willow is Saturday night.

While her loss saddens us, we are happy for her.

Jon-no-H and the Lovely Bea showed up presently, and my colleagues tucked into a signature flatbread and the tower-of-power stack of fish and chips. The happy hour white was making me feel the same way, and got a call on the cell from the Left Coast outlining a plan to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway. Any time I get a little down, what with the daunting problems we confront, I can use a jolt of reality.

There are hard times, and there are HARD TIMES. It is all relative.

I said I would consider attending the ceremony in Honolulu next summer, and marveled at the concept of a trip that did not feature multiple cases of dementia and a snow-bank as the primary ingredients.

When I got back, Old Jim passed me a note written on a napkin and carefully folded into a square. I don’t trust notes like that. I was sitting in McP’s bar in Coronado one time with my pal, the legendary liberty hound JoeMaz, when a similar note was passed down the bar. We had attended a wedding for a Midway shipmate earlier that afternoon and as the soft dusk came over the village we were getting serious about shore leave.

We were still in full dress white uniforms, the ones with the stiff choker collar. I think mine was unhooked and open. I am pretty sure that JoeMaz had his cuffs rolled up to display the strictly non-regulation dragons embroidered on the underside, and a t-shirt with a bright red band on the collar exposed in his similarly undone tunic.

Joe unfolded the napkin, glanced at it and passed it over. “Commander,” it read in block letters, “You are a disgrace to your uniform.”

I put it down and looked up and down the bar, which I suddenly realized was populated by a platoon of SEALS from NAVSPECWARCOM on the Amphib Base adjacent to downtown Coronado.

“Would you consider this to be a threat?” I asked Joe.

He shrugged. “We might get our asses kicked. Do you want another drink?”

“Of course.”

The note this evening was ominous, too, but in a different way. I opened it and read these words: “Don’t be shocked. Management is actually going to count how many times they top off your white wine. Heard near the kitchen. Destroy this note.”

“Damn,” I said to Old Jim. “Do you what this means? Are you going to start another boycott?”

He shook his head. “No, and I am not worried about it. Some places I go comp you every third beer.”

“Those are real bars,” I said. “Not Willowesque bistros.”

“Exactly my point. This is the closest and nicest place on the block. Just go with the flow and we will see what happens.”

“You are right, Jim.” I looked at the level of the pastel beverage in the tulip glass in front of me. It was either half-full or half-empty, depending on how you decided to view it. “Screw it. Don’t worry.”

“Exactly,” said Jim, slamming his longneck Bud on the mahogany bar and reaching for a Duck taco. He munched hard and swallowed. “Keep ‘em coming, Holly. Be happy.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com