“where Yalta reproduces those skiffs 
on a soft threshing 
coast of pineapple waves”
– Barbara Guest, East of Omsk

On a summer day in 2021, on a shore by an ocean, a bird stole a French fry from the plate of a two-year-old. Squeals, laughter, a chase. The bird won. The witness, nonetheless, confirms that the idiom “happier than a bird with a fry” is accurate.

In 1926, reflecting on the industrial revolution and its byproducts, philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russel claimed that

“For the first time in history, it is now possible […] to create a world where everybody shall have a reasonable chance of happiness.”

Physical evil, he believed, could be reduced with democracy. Disease and chronic ill-health, with science, which could also, with organization, “feed and house the whole population of the world, not luxuriously, but sufficiently to prevent great suffering.”

A reasonable chance of happiness.

Over the next century, his predictions were fulfilled, in a way and to a certain degree; the world today abounds with science, democracy, and organizations. Collabs, coops, startups, limited liability corporations, corner stores selling fudge. Sugar, drugs, and “happy” hours, local pubs and, and free global shipping with doorstep delivery. And health, life, auto insurance, and retirement plans; stocks, bonds, savings, and real estate, and, just in case, cash.

For the first time in history, more people are dying from eating too much than too little; heart diseases, diabetes, high cholesterol. More are dying from old age—alone, in homes whose mortgages they finally paid off—than infectious diseases. Or violence; war, terrorism, roadkill, crime kill less than half the number of people who die by committing suicide.

Still, that happiness, so reasonable, like that retirement, shimmers, somewhere distant, like a mirage of water, on a very hot, dry day… Ninety-five years ago, Bertrand Russel had warned: “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

Leisure and Health, or A Summer Day: An Instruction Manual

One shore, by an ocean, if possible. If not, a fistful of sand and some imagination,

French fries; ice cream later,

Red buckets, green shovels. Blue hats—to be lost, promptly, or gusted out to sea,

Sandcastles. Or abstract mounds, trenches, holes in which to empty the vast expanse of blue; one bucket, two …

Birds,

and to be barefoot and the waves and two sets of little feet, following, trusting, chasing that pesky runaway bird, that French fry thief,

and an old lady, caramel-skinned, selling mangoes and ankle bracelets.