4 Things that Make Me Happy These Days..and one that doesn't.

Taking care of the one that doesn't first: I was almost done with this post, when my computer froze, and no matter what I did, I couldn't save or recover what I'd written.  So this is a second, grumpy attempt.

1.  Laughing (and I'm an easy laugher).

Quiz:  Who recently said, "I live for laughter"?
a)  Hillary Clinton    b)  Newt Gingrich    c)  Mitt Romney    d)  Antonin Scalia
(answer below)

Always make me laugh:  Jay Leno's "Headlines" (I said I was easy), Albert Brooks, Joan Rivers, Martin Short, "Frasier" reruns.

Used to make me laugh, but doesn't any more:  Chelsea Handler
Didn't use to make me laugh, but does now:  Steven Colbert

Smartest comedian--Male:  Jon Stewart
Smartest comedian--Female:  Wanda Sykes (her long monologue on education is as intelligent and perceptive as if she'd spent her life teaching)

2.  A movie and a short story.  This weekend, TCM showed Rene Clement's brilliant 1951 film "Jeux Interdits" ("Forbidden Games"), which I hadn't seen in perhaps thirty years.  I've been reading the anthology of the Best American Short Stories of 2011.  The editor wrote that she had chosen traditional stories that emphasized plot rather than just atmosphere.  After reading six or seven stories with a character suffering from anomie, staring into a gray river, and contemplating the rope in his/her closet, I was about to give up hope.  And then I read Claire Keegan's "Foster," the best short story I've read in a long time.  Thinking about the two works, I realized they have much in common: both focus on a young girl (Paulette is five or six in "Forbidden Games"; the narrator of "Foster" is eight or nine) who are taken from their family, live with a "foster" family before losing them too, and repeatedly cry out at the end ("Michel, Michel, Michel" and "Daddy, Daddy") leaving the reader or viewer with the same sense of loss and emptiness as the two girls.

"Forbidden Games" opens with Paulette, her parents, and her dog on a road jammed with Parisians fleeing from German bombardment and quarreling among themselves.  The parents are killed, and Paulette is forced to leave them, clutching her dog, which is also dead.  A woman grabs the dog away from her and flings it into a stream.  Paulette wanders off to retrieve the body as the straggling procession moves on without her.  She is finally taken in by a peasant family.  There is no romanticization here.  The family is loutish and, barely aware of the war around them, conducts endless petty fights with their only neighbors.  But Paulette is befriended by their son Michel, who is perhaps 12 or 13.  They bury the dog, but feel the grave needs a cross, and so begin their forbidden games: burying animals and stealing crosses for their graves.  At the end, the Red Cross takes Paulette away, and when last we see her, she is lost in a mass of people at a train station, calling out desperately for Michel.

In "Foster," the young narrator is given away temporarily (it seems) by her family; her mother is about to give birth to another child, and the narrator is too young to be useful around the house.  Or at least that seems to be one possible explanation; why she's given away, what the relationship of the couple who take her in to her own family is, how long she will be there--all of this is unstated.  The couple she stays with is better off (this is Ireland in perhaps the 1980s) and (it seems) childless.  They are kind, but generally undemonstrative.  The most quoted line in the story is the foster mother's: "There are no secrets in this house, for where there are secrets, there is shame."  But of course there is a secret--that the couple has had a young son who drowned in a slurry pool.  Still, the drowning was an accident and hardly seems shameful.  The girl knows as much happiness there as she's ever known, but at the end, she is returned to her original family, the motive for her return as vague as the motive for her being sent away.  The foster father has trained her to run and to run fast, and as the car pulls away, she jumps out, runs back, leaps into her foster father's arms, and cries out "Daddy."  Keegan's style is exact--spare and precise, but not minimalist.  Perhaps it's too precise to replicate the consciousness of a nine-year-old, but the story is tantalizingly touching.  (Keegan is Irish, but the story was first published in The New Yorker, so qualifies for the volume of American stories.)

3.  Language.  For several years, I had a website, the Grammar Doctor.  Every month there'd be a grammar quote, a grammar question, and a grammar gaffe.  Readers could submit grammar questions, which came in from all over the country (and occasionally from abroad).  Finally, it got to be too much (unpaid) work, so I gave it up.  Even though these were the George Bush years, I liked to take the grammar gaffe from sources that should have known better.  The distinction between 'who' and 'whom' has almost (thankfully) disappeared, but people insist on using 'whomever,' most of the time incorrectly.  The New York Review of Books gets it wrong at least half of the time.  When Sarah Palin says three times in an interview about the potential nominee, "Whomever it is," well, it's Sarah Palin. But when the interviewer says something like, "He'll throw his support to whomever is finally chosen," I flinch.  No, no, no.  I know 'whomever' seems logical because of the preposition 'to' which needs an object.  But the verb, 'is chosen,' has to have a subject, and that subject is 'whoever.'  It's the whole noun clause, "whoever is finally chosen," that's the object of the preposition.  Let's just agree to banish the word 'whomever'--at least that's my solution.

4.  Lists.

Answer to quiz:  c) Mitt Romney.  No joke.