Marotta: No Sweeter Day than This

Marotta: No Sweeter Day than This

Sometimes I lie around thinking up good names for books I might one day write.

I think what fun it would be to do a book called "No Sweeter Fat," for example, from the verse by Walt Whitman where he says, "Having counseled with doctors and calculated close, I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." How great a name would that be, say for a book on self-acceptance?

Of course I wouldn’t want to go too far with the concept until I’d checked out "Books in Print" to see if someone else had beaten me to it. Because that’s how it is in this life: almost any idea stewing along in the crock-pot of our own little brain is likely simmering away in someone else’s too.

Sure, we’d love to believe that we are unique; that what happens to us has only happened to us; that what we think up only we have thought up; but it just isn’t so. We swim in a common stream. So much of what I feel you have felt too. So much of what I suddenly grasp you have grasped yourself. I guess it’s this truth that lies at the heart of that old paradox about how the more personal a piece of writing is, the more universal it somehow becomes.

I look at my diary, whose 35^th volume I’ve just completed this past week, a diary I have kept all this time partly to hold on to the fast-passing moments, yes; but partly too in the hope that its tales might prove vivid and distinctive; that they might furnish some future reader with a lively stream of bright particulars.

Naturally, many of the entries in it are specific to my own life. Like the one about the young woman I met who lost 150 pounds when she had her stomach stapled. ("Don’t ever do it!" she earnestly told me. "The surgery was eight years ago and I still can’t eat a full meal!") Or the one describing my first night in Beginners’ Yoga, when another student suddenly leaped from his mat, dashed for the door, threw up before reaching it, lost his footing and sat down hard. (This entry goes on to tell how nice the teacher was afterward, as if she could just tell that it sent us all back to those fearful primary-school days, when such sudden explosions happened all the time.

But what I find interesting in looking through this journal, is how many of its entries could have been made by anyone.

There is talk of the Red Sox and of the weather, the droughts and the fires that ran rampant in the west.

There is talk of a daughter marrying and a baby soon arriving.

There is an account of a beloved elderly one driving himself to the hospital during his own heart attack.

There is a description of how lucky I felt after another such emergency trip to be with him in the ER, and to hold his feet for him because he felt cold.

Ordinary life, is all it is.

Writing this now, I think of the families I saw picnicking last July Fourth, how happy and carefree they looked.

I think of the young people we all see everywhere now. Kids they almost seem, the girls with their hair tied back, the boys with their narrow hips—if it weren’t for their uniforms.

For last year was the year the Peace ended and the fighting again began.

Whatever the fresh year brings, may we stay hopeful and try to remember: that there is no sweeter day than this day that we wake up in.

Write Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net