Three Beautiful Things 05/07/13: Return to Richard Hugo, Neurological Happiness, I'm Easily Taken In

1. When I go back to Kellogg, it's always is if I never left because of the familiar streets, Cameron, Riverside, Hill, Division, McKinley and so on and the houses I've seen thousands of times.  Stories come alive.  Wishes rush back.  I eat sausage and eggs and hash browns and biscuits and drink weak coffee with Ed and Scott, friends I've known forever.  I also see new things:  deeper cracks in the streets, the once barren hills covered with trees, new turf at Teeter's Field, another bar trying to make a go of it uptown.

I didn't go back to Kellogg today, but on my bus ride to LCC, I returned to Richard Hugo.  I visited familiar poems, marveling at how his poems have shaped my perceptions and helped me see the world.  I saw new cracks, peered more deeply into loneliness, bad luck, renewal, gratitude, the margins, the astonishment at success.  Today Richard Hugo was my old friend, not so much my father.  I am now slightly older than he was when he died.  I can read his poems as a peer, with new understanding, much like I experience Kellogg, as my hometown and I grow older together.

2.  If the scientists in the movie Happy are right, as humans, we are wired to be social, to feel for one another, to help eachother, to live for purposes beyond self-interest.  The chemicals in our brains that are released, the ones that makes us feel good, are activated by cooperation and compassion, not by self-interest....if these neurologists are correct.

3.  I pulled my collection of The Real West Marginal Way off the shelf and began rereading Richard Hugo's essay, "The White Line" and it rekindled one my deepest sources of feeling kinship with Richard Hugo:  being not very critical, especially when watching movies, and, for me, when watching plays, too.  He put it this way, "What an audience I am.  Easily taken in.  By nature not very critical and most receptive."  I've repeated this to anyone who will listen to me a million times when talking about movies and plays.  It's why I don't recommend movies or productions of plays.  I'm too easily pleased.  For years I've gone to movies and performances with the attitude:  "You'll have to work hard to disappoint me."  It's back to being a sentimental sap.  Hugo and I don't care if there are flaws.  We don't care if the movie's corny.  We experience the emotion of it before the critical voice can wreck it.  I've never ever said this about a movie:  "That would never happen" or "That could never happen".  I say that because it did happen: in the movie!  I'm easily taken in.  I believe.  Just like Richard Hugo, it turns out.....