The Bruce Report

The edict does not come from George Bush or Stephen Harper who, to my knowledge, have not yet gotten around to examining the impact of the “Alec Bruce” equation on global security. It does not come from my beautiful, intelligent wife, who tends to share my iconoclastic sense of humour. And it comes not from my two grown kids who, long ago, abandoned all hope of engineering my mood to suit their particular purposes.

No, it comes from one M. van Geest, a reader of this column who has a bone to pick over my definition of the word, “joy”. Allow me to explain.

Not long ago, I wrote a piece declaring, among other things, that in a wise economy joy is like luck: You make your own, or you die trying. This inspired van Geest to shoot back: “It is every day that the paper is full of misery and bad news. Recently, I read in the newspaper that New Brunswickers are the happiest people in the country. The next day, someone has to point out all of our shortcomings, plus tell us that joy is luck. That is too bad. . .You might want to read more about Muhammad Yunus [this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner and micro-credit pioneer]. It will uplift your spirits.”

I occurs to me that I owe this reader a fuller explanation of my point. After all, we are immersed in that most “wonderful time of the year”, and I’m about nothing if not spreading the joy. So, my dear van Geest, here’s what I know about the subject, up close and personal, pulled from the archive of memory and yearning.

On May 17, 1977, I took a chance and kissed a girl. Her lips were as soft as summer and twice as sweet. Three-and-a-half years later, I persuaded her to marry me. Tomorrow will be our 26^th wedding anniversary. That’s joy.

On October 6, 1981, I helped deliver our first child, a baby of such stunning beauty that even the attending nurses gasped. Almost three years later, I was on deck for the birth of our second daughter. Again, the room swooned. That’s joy.

On December 23, 1984, three months into my first real job, I acquired four tickets from the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild entitling me to four garbage bags and two hours to fill them with toys, clothes and a Butterball turkey. At 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, after hours of riding the trams, subways and busses of downtown Toronto, I arrived at our hardly heated, second-floor flat to play Santa Clause. My three-year-old daughter hugged my neck and wouldn’t let go until she fell asleep in my arms. That’s joy.

In the early part of this decade, I sent both of my daughters to the best Canadian universities that money could buy, not for the bragging rights but because I wanted them to have the satisfaction of completing glorious courses of study at institutes of higher learning in the freest nation on earth. They did. And that’s joy.

Last week, my babies (now 25 and 22) came home to celebrate Christmas. The youngest regaled us with tales of statistical modeling in marine biology. Do, for example, overall population counts of wild salmon trump overall biomass calculations, and what does all of this mean to the world’s food supply? The eldest merely wanted to know our thoughts on early childhood education and whether we believed the latest psychological mumbo-jumbo that posits nature over nurture as predictors of academic success. Then we played monopoly, and they took my boardwalk, twice. And that, too, is joy.

The point is, dear van Geest, joy is something you make for yourself when you make it for those around you. Sometimes that entails telling people that God’s gift of peace, humanity and wisdom is being squandered by war mongers, charlatans, incompetents, authoritarians, and crypto-fascists. Sometimes people listen; sometimes they don’t.

As Mahatma Gandhi said: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? Victory obtained by violence is tantamount to defeat. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Such is the luck of life. And only we can make it good.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.