If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is

By Al Batt

Now that I’m the youngest I’ll ever be, I’ve become a person with ambition.

I did some minor sink repair, which required me to get down on all fours. I’ve realized that I’ve reached the age where I don’t kneel without a plan to get back up.

Did my reaching the pinnacle of human achievement by fixing the sink impress my wife? No, but it surprised her.

The small victory made me happy. I recalled something one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, had written, “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.'”

I thought it and said it.

Festus Haggen taught me to remember things like that. On the TV show “Gunsmoke,” Festus said wisely, “When you learn a thing a day, you store up smart.”

I was a country boy before I ever heard John Denver sing. What was a country boy? A country boy was someone who knew that a pocket was a treasure chest that held the day’s mysteries, and old friends like a hand-me-down Barlow jackknife with a broken blade and a nifty pocket watch missing one hand. A pocket was the perfect resting place for a wishing stone. That’s a stone marked by a single, unbroken ring of quartz or calcite that runs completely around its circumference. I held the stone in my hand and traced the unbroken line with a finger while making a wish.

A country boy was someone who didn’t live in town. A country boy was someone who pushed more animal manure than those who lived in town did. The school bus showed us the difference. Town kids gathered at a central location for the bus. Country kids waited at the end of driveways.

I knew from an early age that I was pretty young.

I understood I had a lot to learn. Luckily, it was impossible not to learn things. Mary Davis wrote, “To walk into nature is to witness a thousand miracles.” Those are learning opportunities.

A wrench slipped from its hold on a nut, and I busted a knuckle.

I learned a new word.

I wasn’t miserable being a country boy. There was the occasional busted knuckle or a dairy cow delivering a martial arts-like kick to my shin, but I knew nothing else. I put J.R. Watkins Petro-Carbo First Aid Salve on both wounds and limped on with my life, albeit with worsened penmanship.

The mailman’s arrival was greatly anticipated, like the contents coming from a bottle of ketchup. We went to the post office to mail packages and to pick up peeping baby chicks. I learned that if you rearranged the letters of “mailman,” he became angry.

Mother read letters aloud, with nothing more than minimal censoring. We learned what family and friends were up to. I grew up when newspapers had gossip columns that let us know what our neighbors were up to.

I grew up thinking volunteer firefighters approached sainthood. I still believe that. I grew up when we had one phone for the entire household. It was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle hanging on a wall and had a rotary dial. No one ever wished they could fold it like a new iPhone. A fancy car was a Buick.

We may not have been rich, but everyone had food. I didn’t know any rich people. I knew a few hundredaires. People suspected some old bachelors of being wealthy, but their lifestyles made it doubtful.

Each year, I went off to school in September wearing new shoes. Shoes that needed breaking in. One of the favorite foods of the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was beaver tail, but our school lunch program replaced it with beets.

My teachers were exceptional. They changed my world. That’s etched in stone—or in an ancient notebook.

Tomorrow became today much too quickly.

The good old days were when we weren’t always good, but we weren’t old either.

Were the old days better than today? I don’t know.

But I plan to improve this day by saying, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”