I have come up with another new word--“piffer.”  A piffer is a writer who creates books or movies with emotionally-manipulative feel-good endings that rarely (if ever) occur in real life.  Case in point is the movie Pay It Forward, about a young man who starts a chain reaction of good deeds by asking people to pass on a good deed done to them by doing something for someone else. 

The message came across loud and clear, but then the movie was ruined for me when the young man who started the good deeds dies.  How likely is it that hundreds of people would simultaneously show up at the same time on the family’s doorstep, all holding candles, all recipients of good deeds that sprang from the original good deed?  Did someone organize this and call everyone?  If so, who kept track of the good deeds that had been done so they knew who to call?  Was there someone who went to Costco and bought a case of all the same candles and handed them out?  What about the person who was just passing through town and was the recipient of a good deed?  Did they make a special trip back for the funeral?  How did all these people track their passed-along good deed back to the person who set up the first domino?   If there is ever going to be a time where we are shown all the effects of our good deeds, it won’t be in this life.  For me that scene weakened the movie instead of strengthening it.

These types of questions come to me when I see a movie or read a book like this.  So I took the first initials of Pay It Forward, PIF, and created the word “piffer” for an author of impossibly romantic/touching/contrived stories that make us leave the theater clutching a wadded up tissue or two or thirty-seven and wondering why our life falls so short by comparison.

There have been many times in my life when I have envisioned a perfect outcome and, likely inspired by one of these movies or books, convinced myself that I could create one of those made-for-TV-movie moments.  I read a book once where a man left cryptic messages for his kids in e-mails to be read after he died.  Of course they figured out everything just the way he had planned and experienced the desired outcome.  I decided to send a cryptic message to all our kids.  I imbedded the combination to our safe in an e-mail story.  In the heading I wrote something like “KEEP THIS FOREVER.”  That way I figured that if we died and they needed to know where the important papers and valuables were, they would have the combination.  I put the key words in boldface.  The words turn, left, right, pass by, and all the right numbers were all in this e-mail and the emboldened words read in sequence would open the safe.  I congratulated myself on my cleverness, that I had written what sounded like a normal e-mail with the combination clearly laid out.

We don’t open the safe very often, so neither of us had the combination memorized.  Years later when we had misplaced the paper with the combination on it, I told my husband not to worry, that I had sent an e-mail to all the kids with the combination in it.  I put out the word to the kids, but lo and behold, none of the six of them had saved that e-mail.  That is real life.

I also don’t enjoy the movies or books where the person who dies sets up a series of events or tasks their loved ones must perform in order for someone to gain their inheritance, find a family treasure, or learn a lesson.  In the books and movies, the people always do exactly what the deceased thought they would do.  I don’t know about you, but my kids don’t always do exactly what I want them to do while I am alive, and I don’t entertain any fantasy that they will do exactly what I want them to do after I have departed this life.

Perhaps I am just jealous that before my first husband died, he didn’t pen a series of letters to guide me through the grieving process, giving them to a trusted friend to mail on a certain schedule.  The closest I came was getting a summons for his arrest a few months after he died because he had apparently received a speeding ticket a few days before he died, and it had never been paid.  I sent back a letter to the powers that be telling them I had also put him on my list of “wanted people” and told them he’d had a change of address.  I then listed the name and address of the memorial park.  The good news is that I didn’t get any more correspondence regarding his unpaid speeding ticket.

Making Magic Moments

I once did some research through a friend of mine who was a travel agent and found out the returning flight information for a guy I had been dating who was coming back from a visit with his parents.  My plan was to surprise him at the airport and invite him over for a romantic dinner.  I surprised him all right.  This was back in the days when they let you wait at the gate.  As I waited, dressed to the nines, I noticed another woman about my age and wondered if she, too, was waiting for her boyfriend.  The answer, of course, because you can see this one coming a mile away, is that we were both waiting for the same man.  That’s how my happily-ever-after moments usually turn out, as comic material for my novels.

My husband, who is a family therapist, says that most of our troubles in life come from unmet expectations.  We can trace many arguments, disappointments, discouragements from the difference between what we expected and what we got.  In the midst of those letdowns, however, once in a while we get the perfect made-for-TV moments.  We must not fail to savor those moments when they come.  They should be all the more precious because they are so rare.

I could go on for many moons about all the ways that life and people did not meet my expectations, but every once in a while, I have been blessed with events that delivered in spades.  I want to share some of them with you.

Gathering the Family

One that comes to mind is my son Scott’s 17th birthday party.  We were living in Florida.  I was a single parent.  My family all lived in Utah and Idaho.  Scott had remarked to me shortly before his birthday that sometimes it felt like I was his only family member, because we lived so far away from my family and the family of his father who had died when he was a baby.  In addition, because my second marriage had ended in divorce, we no longer had the association of most of those family members.  I wanted so badly to show him that he did have family.  I got out index cards and wrote down experiences Scott had shared with various family members over the years.  Then I called people in the ward and explained to them.  “You are invited to Scott’s birthday party.  You are Uncle Joe, and you will read this experience and Scott has to guess who you are.”  I had all his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins represented.  I did my best to find people in the right age group and who looked as much as possible like the people they were supposed to represent. 

My purpose had been to show Scott that though our family was far away, they still loved him and had been part of his life.  What I didn’t count on was that the party illustrated something else, that we also had the love and support of our ward family.  Although there had been a couple of last-minute substitutions, every part was covered.  Our home was happily crowded with “family” that evening.  We found it rather humorous that one of the reassignments ended up with twin cousins one of which was blue-eyed and blond and the other was from Haiti with colorful beads threaded in her dreadlocks.  They were fraternal twins, after all, so they didn’t have to look alike.

The elderly brother that I had asked to read a poem written to Scott by his great-grandfather had taken ill a few days before the event.  I called his wife to let him off the hook and told her that I understood that he would not be able to make it to the party.  She told me he insisted on coming.  They wheeled him in and in a shaky voice, Brother Lang read the poem Great Grandpa George had written about playing bear with a little three-year-old.  I can still picture the hug Scott gave him afterwards.

As I sat amidst the paper plates and party leftovers, I reflected that this one of those rare times that not only had the party turned out as I had hoped, but that it had exceeded my expectations.

Brother Lang died the following week.  Scott drew a special picture for his family, illustrating some of the things the youth had learned about this war hero and recipient of the Purple Heart.  Brother Lang had parachuted across the generation gap with our youth and had made a special trip for my son.

For Scott’s 18th birthday, we didn’t do anything special.  We had breakfast at the House of Pancakes and talked about how there was no way we could outdo his 17th birthday party.

Starved for Romance

In the book You’re Lucky You’re Funny about the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray Romano said that his real-life wife sometimes complained because he said all the right things to his television wife and not to her, that his apologies to his fictional wife were more heartfelt than the ones she received.  His defense was that in real life he didn’t have writers.

As women we have had our romantic expectations fed by hunky onscreen men working from carefully-crafted scripts.  In reality, most men don’t look like Pierce Brosnan (although my husband is just as handsome), and they don’t produce unending bouquets of flowers and come out with heartfelt romantic speeches on cue.  That is why you have to cherish the romance you receive. 

One evening my husband Thom and I were seated on a couple of logs watching one of our breathtaking Kona sunsets.  In his professorial way, he told me it was the summer solstice and pointed out the location of the sun in relation to the Captain Cook monument across the bay and the direction it would start to move from then on.  Then he said that he thought it was significant that we got married on December 21, which is beginning of the winter solstice, because when he married me, that was the day his days ceased to be long and empty and started to become shorter.  Unscripted.  Unrehearsed.  Unforgettable.

Unscripted Humor

This weekend we have company.  Thom’s aunt and uncle are here.  When they called and said they were on our island, the only thing I could truly remember about Aunt Carolyn is that she is the one who gave birth in the bedroom at my mother-in-law’s home, with Thom’s mother delivering her baby boy, Steve.  Over lunch yesterday I asked her to share that story with me, as I had only heard my mother-in-law’s Reader’s Digest version.  My favorite part was how she told me that they told my husband, who would have been about nine or ten at the time, to go outside and look for the doctor and show him which house to come to.  Within a few minutes, Thom organized all the neighborhood kids and sent kids on bikes to all surrounding intersections to help flag down the doctor as he approached.  Thom is currently a Red Cross Disaster Mental Health Specialist.  Obviously he began honing his skills for taking charge in an emergency at a young age. 

After the kids got involved, apparently many of them wanted to see the baby.  Thom asked his mother’s permission, and to thank the kids for their help, they were allowed to look at the baby.  Carolyn said there were “about eighty-seven of them.”  I asked Thom about it and he said it was just like something out of the movies.  Line up single file, in the front door, look at the baby, no touching, out the back door.  (Thom probably charged them each a dime.  His entrepreneurial skills were honed at a young age as well.)

We may not have many moments in life that we can recall where our expectations have been met or exceeded.  Search your memory banks.  They are there.  Remember to write them down when they happen, not only so that they are there for posterity but so that you can take them out and savor the memory on those days when two women show up at the airport to greet one man.