Wonderful, Compounded

About fifteen years ago, a friend of mine was reading Frank McCourt's colorful autobiography where, apparently, he recounts an attempt to create the optimal human experience by bringing together two of his favorite things:  going to the movies and drinking ginger ale.  The story goes, I'm told (I haven't read the book myself) that he figured since the movies and ginger ale are both so wonderful, it would be even better to combine the two phenomena into a single experience, so he attempted to open a bottle of ginger ale in the men's room of a movie theater in New York - since the theater didn't have ginger ale, so he was compelled to smuggle this most illicit of drinks into the theater.  The story gets very colorful, because the bottle broke against the sink and created a disaster just as the usher was coming into the bathroom, and so the whole project went down in flames.

But at the time, my friend was struck, reading this account, as to how much this sounded like me - seeking out optimal experiences by combining the ones I like into a single event, no matter how off-center the final product might seem to anyone else.  (I had a similar experience with ouzo in the Athens airport ahead of my departing flight - because ouzo must be drunk in Greece; this occurred about the time that my friend made that association about me, although I don't think she knew this dirty little secret...)  When she told her husband about Frank McCourt's youthful experiment and asked him who it reminded him of, of course his husband also thought of me.

And now, all these years later, as I was trying to get Ian to get ready for bed, it turned out that he was eating hard candy and combining a number of other peak experiences into one in much the same way, and the beauty of the moment was not lost on him:

"This is the life - ain't it?  Sucking on a candy, eating pad Thai, reading a book, while listening to a song..."

The whole is always so much greater than the sum of it's parts - especially when the parts themselves are already really great!

(February 3, 2015)