Mavis and the Wonderful, Delightful, Excellent, Very Good Day
You know the picture book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst? I thought of that book because I had the opposite: a wonderful, delightful, excellent, very good day.
It was Friday, which is always a good day because we go out for Mexican dinner with our son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter nearly every Friday. We go to a small, sweet, family-owned place with great food and a warm, welcoming atmosphere.
In the late afternoon of this day, I decided to have some tea and cookies. My sister was at the house, and she joined me. We drank, munched, and chatted. There were some comfortable silences, too. We drifted into a conversation about our favorite stories from Georgette Heyer books. My sister and I have both read all the books written by Georgette Heyer, multiple times. They’re our “comfort food books.” I’ve described them to others as “Jane Austen Light.” They are set in Regency England, stories of British men and women, with a love story at the center. And they are funny. British humor, understated, surprising, using words we just don’t in the US, like “odious wretch,” and “a diamond of the first water.” Similar to a Rom-Com, the progression is:
Boy meets girl (man meets woman).
The boy and girl are unimpressed by or actively dislike each other.
Slowly, they discover they are in love.
There is some kind of misunderstanding or crisis.
They work it out.
Happy ending.
Predictable, but fun, often surprising, and funny.
My sister and I talked about some of the funniest scenes and our favorite characters. I often had to wipe tears of laughter from my face. Basically, we geeked out about Georgette Heyer books. As I said that afternoon, who else could we ever have this conversation with? No one! Hardly anyone has even heard of Georgette Heyer. How lucky are we to have each other?
Each week, when we go to the Mexican restaurant, I give my granddaughter a special minuscule set of colored pencils and blank books that I keep in my purse as a special activity just for those times. This day, I switched to a bigger purse and wondered if we could find another activity she could do—so she’d have more than one option. She loves stickers—who doesn’t? So, we bought some stickers and a small blank page notebook, which I put in my new purse to give her at dinner that night.
Lately, I have gotten into stickers, too. I bought two grown-up sticker books. I write in a journal most mornings, and now I have fun adding stickers to the pages. I get a kick out of flipping through the books and deciding which sticker catches my eye. Recently, I have started drawing around the stickers, making them part of a picture with drawn-in details. Like on the page where I put a sticker of a bird in a tree, I drew clouds above it with raindrops falling.
Each week, when we go to the restaurant, I take out the new stickers and notepad and give them to our granddaughter. I showed her photos I had taken of those journal pages and said, “Maybe you’d like to try combining drawing with the stickers like this sometime. It’s fun.” She took the paper and stickers, went to work—play!—with them, and a little later she said, “Look, La-la (that’s what she calls me)!” and held up what she had made. She made an underwater scene with water-creature stickers, drawing the ocean waves, clouds, and even krill by the whale’s mouth.
Oh, my heart.
So that was my wonderful, delightful, excellent, very good day—a delightful conversation with my sister and a loving connection with my granddaughter. Sometimes there are big events that make your day awesome, and sometimes it’s the small stuff. How grateful to God I am for days like this, for beloved family and friends, for moments that fill my heart with joy. What evidence of God’s love.
Sure, I have, we all have, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. AND we have wonderful, delightful, excellent, very good days. Through it all, Jesus is with us, in us, and we are in him. God is love. God loves you.
My sticker picture
My granddaughter’s sticker picture
PS How about you? What makes your heart fill with joy? What constitutes a wonderful, delightful, excellent, very good day for you?