The Pursuit of Happiness

I have strings of Tibetan prayer flags in my backyard. They’ve been hanging there for years, chains of square foot meditations in blue, yellow, red, green, and white, each color representing a person in my life who I pray for several times a day. White is reserved for people who have asked for prayers, or who I know are going through trying circumstances.

A Baptist friend – yes, I have a friend – admonishes me for consorting with pagans every time she sees them, but I shake her off. When I see blue, I see my kid, red is the Boss, and so on. Over time, the flags fade and separate from the string and flutter to the ground. I take these flags and drop into my fire pit, watch them burn and go skyward. Then I hang a new flag to replace the one that went to heaven.

I have no idea if my prayers make the slightest difference. The city of Lhasa, which sits in a river basin at the foot of the Himalayas, is surrounded by millions of prayer flags – every street and intersection emotes prayer and color – and they haven’t stopped the Chinese from enslaving the Tibetans or owning every business in town. Yet the Tibetans continue to hang them, continue to pray.

My mother, a chain-smoking alcoholic who spent $100,000 playing bingo in the last year of her life, was a big proponent of prayer. When I was a kid, we’d occasionally see a bum panhandling. Ma would invariably direct me to “give him a nickel and say, ‘God bless you.’ He might be Jesus in disguise. Think about it. Jesus might be watching you.”

G.K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown, once wrote that saying “my country, right or wrong!” made as much sense as saying “my mother, drunk or sober!” I’m not sure what I can do about our country, but my mother eventually sobered up, and I am grateful to her for teaching me how to see people.

And in her memory, I will fly a flag for our President. Every day I’ll pray, “Please, Lord, straighten that sorry son of bitch up.”