Track 16 – Happiness

One summer, I taught handicapped children at a camp, and that experience led to the writing of this song, “Happiness”, and it also led to my becoming a teacher. One of the children I was assigned to was a nine-year-old girl who was terrified of the dark. She couldn’t sleep without a light on, and she couldn’t sleep well because of the light.

My job was to sit with her and some of her friends in her cabin, with a minimum amount of light, in an attempt to eventually get them to sleep with just a night-light on. My logic was that if we whistled, we couldn’t be afraid.  So, “Happiness” was the tune that I sang while everybody else whistled the refrain. It worked to some degree, as by the end of camp two things had happened:  “Happiness” was being whistled everywhere we went; and my assigned friend became able to sleep all night with just a night light on.

The other person I was assigned to in that camp was “Buddy”. He was around 23 years old, but he essentially had the mind of an eight or nine year old.  He was very polite and mostly quiet.

From the first day that I met Buddy, I nicknamed him “Arthur” because he wore a brown Stetson hat just like the one that my grandfather, Arthur Ashburn, used to wear. My grandfather Arthur died before I was born, so I never knew him, but have a picture of him with that Stetson hat on. When I showed that picture to Buddy, he quickly liked being called Arthur and after that , whenever anybody would call him Buddy, he would stick out his chest and proudly say “You can call me, Arthur”.

“Arthur” had a distinguishing trademark in that he wore a wooden soup-spoon in his hatband that he used to stir things and make them better. On a cloudy day, he would stir his spoon toward the sun. If you weren’t feeling well, he would stir it above your head. If he didn’t like the food, he stirred the food. He was always stirring something, trying to make it better. When he was finished stirring and was convinced that he had made things better, he would put the spoon back into his hatband, like he was putting his sword back into its scabbard.

Since “Happiness” was being whistled all over camp, from the first time that “Arthur” heard it, he whistled it all the time. It was his favorite tune, and every time that he put his soup spoon back into his hatband, he would start whistling “Happiness”.

Other than stirring things with his spoon, and whistling, one of his great excitements in life was to leave the tip at the diner when we all went as a camp into town on Wednesdays. All week long, he would collect coins that he found around camp.  I would drop change on the ground outside his cabin so that he would find money to put in his little pouch. On Wednesdays, when we went in to the diner, the second that we arrived at the diner, he would go straight to the waitress and give her the tip, before we had even gotten our menus. To this day, I am tempted to leave a tip at a restaurant before we get our menu, just in memory of Arthur.

On the last day of camp, we went to Lake Michigan, and Arthur and I were the “water toters”. We took buckets down to the lake and filled them up with water and brought the buckets up to a big hole where the sand sculpturers used the water to make mud for their sculptures. For two solid hours, I watched Arthur take his bucket to the lake, fill it up, carry it back to the hole, pour out the water, and walk back to the lake to start the process all over again. All the while, he was whistling “Happiness”.

Finally, I stopped him and said “Hey, Arthur! Aren’t we getting a little tired of this, yet?”  He sat his bucket down and looked straight up at me and said: “Mr. Tim, I think I have figured this out. Some of us have big buckets in our heads. And some of us have little buckets in our heads. The little buckets can learn just as much as the big buckets, they just have to make more trips.”  I cried.

Here I had come all the way from Indiana to Michigan to teach him, and instead, he had taught me. That moment inspired me to become a teacher. This song “Happiness” is  for anybody that needs a little “Happy” in their lives. More importantly, it’s for Arthur  . . . as a “thank you” for inspiring me to become a teacher.