I came across the following Kurt Vonnegut quote at a bookshop in Seattle. We were visiting my wife’s sister and her family. It was raining, I’d had way too much caffeine, and I was wondering how the heck Seattleites dealt with this peculiar combination of wet and wired. I’d picked through the kid’s books and was looking for something of my own when I came across “A Man Without a Country“.
Calling me out from the whirr of the caffeine was this voice:
And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
– Kurt Vonnegut (WikiQuote)
Well that stopped me. I realized:
- I was in Seattle, that fabled salmon-smacking place, and a breathtaking amount of miles from New York
- I was with family who loved me
- I’d found an Eric Carle book we hadn’t read
- I’d found this Vonnegut book
- for whatever reason the coffee in Seattle tasted much better than New York’s, and
- when all was said and done I liked rainy days.
I shared the Vonneguts’ quote with my wife and then with my toddler daughter, and they liked it. Of course I mangled it a little–when the next moment came to me and I saw it was good I said, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
There was a pause. Then my daughter replied, “THIS is nice!”
Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.
