When I was a little girl, I spent a significant chunk of my time looking for four-leaf clovers. I got grass stains on my clothes every summer searching for them on hands and knees in our yard. Every one I found was promptly preserved by ironing it between two pieces of waxed paper.
When I got to junior high, I enlisted most of my gym class to help me search the archery field while we awaited our turns behind the line. The boys on the next field up must have wondered how those crazy girls ever expected to find the contact lenses we were so obviously looking for. I didn’t dispel their confusion — who would believe we were actually searching for four-leaf clovers?
Indeed, the habit of casting a quick glance over every patch of clover I walk past never left me. On the way to school for a teacher conference, chaperoning a field trip or just walking up a neighbor’s front steps—if there is a patch of grass, I will find myself casting my eyes over it and looking for lucky clovers before I’m even aware of what I’m doing. I still find them sometimes, too.
You might say I collect them.
Of course, I collect other things, too: stamps and postcards, buttons, tin containers. If you are a “collecting” type of person, what you actually collect is just a detail.
But I never thought you could collect intangibles.
Not until my family accused me of doing just that.
“Mom, you have so many grudges! It’s like you collect them.”
“That’s not possible. Besides, I make it a point to stay positive.” Somewhere in the background my husband snorted. Must be his allergies.
“Positive? Really? So what do you think about people who leave their empty shopping carts out in the parking lot?”
“It’s the height of selfishness! Just because you’re done with something, you don’t care where you leave it?”
“Or the store clerks who used to look right past you and say ‘Next!’ to the man standing behind you?”
“Of course, they’re idiots — sexist idiots at that. What am I, invisible?”
“And what about boys who leave the toilet seat up?”
“Now I know you’re just baiting me.”
But it turns out, grudges can indeed be collected — and not just by me. The British author Sophie Hannah has written a book on how she’s elevated the process into an art form. It’s titled “How to Hold a Grudge.”
Hannah believes that grudges can actually be a force for good in your life — as reminders and warnings — if handled correctly. She gives each one a name — e.g., “The Bellowing In The Kitchen.” Then she processes it on a number of parameters, including was the other person’s act intentional? Did it cause real harm? How important is this person in your life?
Finally, she grades each grudge on a scale from one carat (the slightest) to 10, and places it in what she calls her mental Grudge Cabinet.
I might try out her recommendations. But instead of filling my cabinet with grudges, I’m filling it with funny stories.
I learned the importance of this from my mother, who is never happier than when she can tell a funny tale on herself. Her eyes were dancing one day after a trip to the post office.
“The clerk had a sticker next to his window,” she said, “and the whole time he was counting out stamps for me, I kept wondering what it meant.”
“What sticker?” I asked her.
“It said, ‘Ask about our henway.’ So I finally did. I asked, ‘What’s a henway?’ And the man answered, ‘Oh, 8 or 9 pounds.’”
But my mother was still mystified. “Eight or nine pounds of WHAT?”
“Of hen!”
The clerk got a big laugh out of this. But my mother’s laugh was even bigger!
There was a time in my life when I wasn’t writing these columns. The newspaper that first carried them had gone out of business, so there I was, “between newspapers.”
During that time, one of my friends asked me, “Isn’t it at least a relief not having to meet that weekly deadline all the time?”
“No,” I replied. “Because when I don’t have to find something ‘light’ every week, it turns out that nothing light ever happens.”
It turns out that whether it’s four-leaf clovers, grudges or funny stories, you find whatever you’re looking for.
I’m happiest when I’m looking On The Lighter Side.
