The perfect moment

Have you ever had a perfect moment? I think I've had several, each one more perfect than the last, reveling to me that the "perfect moment" would pale next to the coming perfect moment.

When I was in second grade, my perfect moment came when my best friend Sarah Bolan invited me to spend the night with her. All the 7-year-old longings of being best friends and having it known culminated in that invitation and although it was 40 years ago, I remember playing under the apple trees in her yard, seeing her horses and knowing that my best friendship was reciprocated.

Willa Cather once wrote, "Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they most nearly produced happiness . . ."

Perhaps Willa only had one of those places, but I've had several.

Another one that comes to mind was graduate school at the University of South Carolina. I was still under 30 and studying journalism with a handful of graduate students who were passionate about writing.

My best friend, Janine, was from Oxford, England and had once traveled to the top of Mt. Kilamanjaro for Christmas Eve. I also hung out with Pamela, who actually lived in my neighborhood and was always ready to stop what she was doing to meet me for a walk and discussion of deep things, important things -- like philosophy and which professors were dating which students, what we thought of religion, how it felt to lose a child, what was the easiest way to get As in our courses and more. She knew the actor, Mark Harmon, who had just finished filming the Presidio, and it was cool to hear her talk about "Maaaark" with a barely discernible "r" in her posh British accent.

Then there was the lovely Morman guy who I had a secret crush on (pity he was married) and was the only one who joined me in striving for perfect grades on every assignment. He was in my study group and I loved, admired and was envious of him all mixed up together.

Some of us used to meet for chicken Caesar salads and drink cheap wine at obscure little restaurants in downtown Columbia. It felt like a group of writers meeting at a cafe in Paris in the 1920s -- all so young, having no idea they would one day become great.

One night Janine called us all up because her Air Force, globe-trotting American husband was in town and she wanted to have a party. That was the first time I had curry and all kinds of lovely dishes from around the world. I think the husband and I were the only Americans and it was a wonderful evening of trying new foods, listening to a mish mash of languages and talking to people who knew things and cared about the same things I did.

I felt strangely alive among these students from Europe and China and the U.S., all of us with the common bond of mass communication. I never wanted it to end and in a way it didn't -- because it will always be with me and it changed me in small, indiscernable ways -- but permanently.

Of course, there have been many more significant moments and places -- my six years in Japan, the day I got my daughter from China, my first kiss, but those things are supposed to produce happiness. It's expected. It's those other moments and seasons when you almost didn't even know you were happy; you have to look back to realize that now you are missing the ingredients that, mixed together, most nearly produced happiness.

Willa Cather realized that it's hard to anticipate what will comprise your perfect moment, but one thing you can be sure of, you will have at least one and you will remember it forever.

Cather writes,"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame."

Have you had your perfect moment yet? I hope so. Please comment and share, what was a moment that most nearly produced happiness for you.