14,000 things to be happy about. by Barbara Ann Kipfer

Saturday was a banner day for this book lover at the Deseret Industries Thrift Store on East Flamingo Road, not so much for this book lover who's moving in a few months.

Therefore, I found four Indiana Jones novels to join The Peril at Delphi, which I hadn't started yet, but I knew I wanted to read more after this one. I also found Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout, one of the Nero Wolfe series, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. At the same time I found the Heinlein book, I was also holding James Herriott's Dog Stories, but the paperback copy looked deeply aged, and to me, it's the kind of book to possibly bump into at one of the three bookstores in downtown Ventura. Either that or the library there.

I had also spotted a fat paperback called 14,000 things to be happy about. by Barbara Ann Kipfer. I flipped through it, found various things that have made Kipfer happy in a list on one page after another, 14,000 in all obviously. An amusing idea, but not much use to me, it would seem.

Then today happened. We went back to the thrift store because Dad had found a blue desk he wanted, but hadn't been very vocal about it until yesterday. That's what determined that we would go back today, and after Dad got home from work (I'm free, by the way, practically finished at Cox Elementary as its library aide. I cashed in the rest of my vacation days and my personal days, and the only day I have to show up again is the last day of school for students and support staff. I will use these coming weeks wisely in reading, writing, and movies I've wanted to see for a long time, as well as preemptively throwing things out, donating others, and arranging the rest for packing when it comes time), we went back.

14,000 things to be happy about. stuck in my mind when we got there and I went looking for it after we found out that the blue desk was gone, another desk in its place. Items at Deseret Industries pass through Las Vegas quicker than people do. Fortunately, the book was in the same place that I put it back, and I looked closer at that. Kipfer's introduction essentially states that this book is a product of 20 years of first writing down in a "tiny spiral notebook" things that made her happy, through larger notebooks and finally to personal computers, from sixth grade to 1990, when this book was published.

I flipped the pages again, looking at what had made her happy in very few words: A white-gold sunrise. Late Sunday breakfast. Loud radios. Night lights. Eating the right food. And still more. 13,994 more.

In my permanent book collection is a copy of The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, which is to me today what Andy Rooney was to me when I was 11. Andy Rooney taught me that you can write about anything so long as you make it interesting enough. Woodworking, the interior design of fast-food restaurants, his experiences in World War II all were fascinating to me because he made them interesting to read. The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency touts on the cover "On the Implausibility of the Death Star Trash Compactor" and "Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)", which teaches me that you can go even further, twisting a famous work to another perspective to make people laugh and also say "Hey, I never thought of it like that!"

So I bought 14,000 things to be happy about., surprisingly the only book I bought at Deseret Industries today, but I couldn't find anything else I wanted as badly as the Indiana Jones novels, the Nero Wolfe novel, the Heinlein novel, and the first volume of Dwight D. Eisenhower's memoir of his White House years, from 1953 to 1956. Plus, looking over the paperback shelves again, I saw that I cleaned them out of all the Indiana Jones novels they had.

The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency is my Bible, for inspiration on how I should approach my work, thinking about other ways in which a story can be told or which a blog post can be written, looking for the way that suits me. In that vein, 14,000 things to be happy about. will be my second Bible. Sure it's one person's epic list of what makes them happy, but many of these things make me happy, too. But for me, it's not about reading the list and being happy about those things. Whenever I look through this book, it will be to find something to write about, most likely for this blog. For example, overdue library books. I don't know why that makes Barbara Ann Kipfer happy, but I can write about my experience with them as a public library patron, and also working at Cox Elementary, where overdue books weren't such a factor, so long as students returned them some time, preferably before the end of the year, although with the librarian I worked with, it became an unnecessary federal case every time. After all, most returned their books so that they could get more, which was the policy there.

Or railroad stations. There's the one in San Juan Capistrano that you walk past to reach that dirt road with those small houses lined up at the side, acting as either souvenir stores, tea houses, or historical societies. With those overhanging trees across the road, it's where part of my soul lives. I could write about that some time, too.

But also, looking at these things in this book, I can also wonder why these things make Kipfer happy, perhaps even what they were since I don't know what many of them are, and I can also reach as far back in my memory as I can for some of them.

I'm not sure if I'll use the book title to mark these posts, but if you find more than the usual number of posts per month in this blog, you'll know why.