Friend #23 - Connie

Sometimes a girl just wants to see a movie.  And sometimes, particularly if you are single, no one is available to go with you. 

This was my plight a few weeks ago.  So what did I do?  I went by myself!  Only I arrived WAY too early and found myself sitting on the bench outside the theater.  The hallway was virtually empty.  I tried playing on my phone but the wifi connection was bad.  So I sighed, leaned back into the wall and entertained myself by watching people passing by.

I’d been sitting there for about fifteen minutes when I saw an older woman, in her seventies, coming towards me in a bright pink tshirt that said, “Be Happy”.  As she was walking past the recycling bin, she read the sign aloud:  “Recycle your glasses”.  She then moved her hand to the spectacles on her face and said, “But I like mine!” 

I giggled and she smiled at me.  “I know what they meant,” she said. 

“I know…but I would have thought that, too.”

The woman walked up to where I was sitting.  “I like you,” she said.  She reached into her pocket and said, “Here, you get a happy face.”

I reached out to see what she was going to give me and she dropped a clear rock, the kind used in modern flower vases, with a happy face sticker stuck on top.  As soon as the object was placed in my hand, I could feel warmth creep up my arm and suddenly I was grinning from ear to ear.  I loved it!  And that’s how I met Connie. 

Actually…that’s how a lot of people meet Connie.  If you live in Mesa, you may have run into her already. 

But five years ago, she found she wasn’t all that happy.  She’d had a stroke and in the process, broke her foot in the fall.  The stroke forced her to give up her job as a teacher, which she didn’t realize was a key part of her identity.  The broken foot put her in a wheelchair.  For a while, people would stop to help her when she was in the wheelchair but when she started getting around on her own again, she found that people were less willing to give of their time, and she became…well…depressed. 

Connie started doing research on how to be happy and what she found was that happiness is a choice.  Sure, there are a lot of other things that go into it.  The simple act of smiling releases a chemical in the brain that causes you to be happier.  Being positive is another one of traits truly happy people exhibit.  But Connie also realized that a true simple connection, even a small one, can make a huge impact in people’s lives.  So she began handing out her happy faces wherever she went.  She doesn’t judge.  She always asks first and mostly, people take them with a smile.

And as I was talking to her, I realized that while Connie is handing out smiley faces, I’m making new friends.  They are two different styles of connecting with people…but, hopefully, they produce the same result.  This experiment was started to make me feel better about my life but nowadays, all I care about is the happiness of other people.  Connie said, “If you can make people happy, you can change the world.”  It’s a bold statement.  But what if she’s right?

Connie often takes her dog to the dog park.  One day, she was walking into the park with her dog just as she had so many times.  She had only been there for a few minutes when a man approached her.  He had been sitting off to the side, alone, thinking of committing suicide.  He asked God to send him a sign and lifted his eyes to see Connie, coming over the hill in her ‘Be Happy’ tshirt.  The light caught the letters and made them glow.  The man hugged her, told her she had just saved his life.  She told me the story with tears brimming up in her eyes. 

That’s the power of being happy. 

And the best part is she is not perfect.  She openly admitted that there are old ruts in her brain that are so deep she has trouble redirecting those negative thoughts.  When she was a child, her family believed education was wasted on girls.  Girls were supposed to grow up and be good wives to their husbands.  But Connie had always been smart.  In fact, she was so smart that she was awarded a college scholarship that resulted in a huge debate among Connie’s family members about whether or not her parents should let her go. 

No one in her family had ever attended college.  All of these years later, Connie remembers her parents coming into her bedroom.  She vividly remembers her father telling her that they were going to let her take the scholarship and then shaking his finger at her he said,  “But don’t you let it make you uppidy.”  And all her life, Connie has shunned accolades and advancement.  Why?  Because of her deep-seeded fear of being uppidy.  Well, it’s actually her deep-seeded fear of disappointing her father…but that’s been more than fifty years ago.  The world has changed, yet the rut in her brain runs deep.

None of us is perfect.  No one has happy thoughts all the time.  It’s actually the unhappy ones that make us human, but Connie is a true testament of what one woman can do with a little determination.  She sponsors a “happy” club at Cortez High School because she once read there is an overwhelming amount of depression among high school students.  She’s made a difference in a lot of people’s lives, one smile at a time.  I can personally attest that when she dropped her “happy” rock into my hand, it made me feel special.  And loved.  And fortunate that I have an outlet to share with the world about one ordinary woman who has decided to make her mark on the world through the goodness and purity of simply being happy.