Road Trips: Becoming an American in the Vapor trail of the Sixties

by Tamim Ansary

I had assumed, like any self-respecting egotist, that no one had ever loved as I had loved or suffered a disappointment like mine. Sure, others had loved and lost, but they hadn’t lost Lily, so what were they whining about? That night, hanging out with the Widow Van Dorn, I realized there were stories of love and loss far exceeding mine. I didn’t have to be convinced about the precious greatness of the late Mr. Van Dorn to appreciate what this woman lost when he died. She didn’t weep about her story, she didn’t lose control, she never even lost the hearty buck-toothed rabbit-like Midwestern goodness she effused when she found me on her doorstep and remembered me as a friend of Ben’s. She never moved from clunky to cool. She only showed me that you don’t have to be cool to suffer profoundly.

the two indispensable ingredients of happiness are a destination to try for and at least one next move you can make.

One night a week from 8 pm to 7 a.m., every week for the next two years, I sat in a ratty room furnished out of a thrift store and listened to anonymous voices telling me their stories. I don’t know how many of the people I talked to were really suicidal. All of them were unhappy though, and over the course of those years, I learned that Tolstoy was right: unhappy people are all unhappy in different ways. Some are unhappy because they stepped on a land mine in Korea and now they’re housebound, wheel-chair-ridden, and addicted to pain medications. Some are unhappy because they’re young and new in town, and lonely and horny. Some are unhappy because they’re gay and everyone they’ve ever known has tried to make them feel ashamed of their desires. Some are unhappy because they’re a middle-aged woman with two kids living in a nice house in the suburbs and they never thought life would turn out this way. No one I talked to was unhappy in quite the same way, and none were unhappy for the same reasons as I had been; so I didn’t actually have anything useful to tell anyone. In fact, I hardly told anyone anything. Mostly I just listened: all those disembodied voices lamenting over the phone in the wee hours before dawn. All I did was listen, and the only life I’m sure I saved was my own.

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, join the vast communal project of making the world work.

real life doesn’t consist of main points. When it’s happening, real life is a torrent of trivia, all of which matter in the moment, none of which can be ignored, and most of which are forgotten by dusk. Most of life is forgotten.