I stopped listening to This American Life for a few years.  My then-husband asserted that the host of the radio show cheated on a friend of his.  He expressed outrage that I would patronize such a scoundrel.  He insisted that his Republican family values dictated that cheaters should be disdained.  I clicked off the radio if he entered the room during the broadcast.

In the last five years, I’ve gotten into the program again.  I like Ira Glass.  I enjoy his voice and his insight.  He and his team present intriguing anecdotes of people who could be my next door neighbors.  I feel a sense of commonality with what they experience and how they react.   

The show plays twice each weekend on my local public radio station.  This week’s episode explored delight.  Delight!  How can anyone not enjoy an entire hour in which people describe events during which they have experienced such a delicious emotion? 

As I drove home from a grocery run to Lodi, I waited for my second listen to Act II: The Squeals on the Bus with particular eagerness.  A five-year-old’s enthusiasm for his first trip on that iconic yellow vehicle?  Sign me up.  I heard the wonder and excitement in his voice with a little bit of envy though.  What wouldn’t I give to luxuriate in the delirium of such anticipation!

Then I came around the curve of Brannan Island Road in front of the home of my friends Judy and Skip, and beheld one of the visions which make Delta life so fabulous.  I pulled my car as far against the brush as I could safely maneuver.  I glanced in my rear view mirror as I groped for my phone, the only camera at hand.  I snapped, and filmed, and grinned.  In the background, my radio kept playing and little Cole squealed, “Is that my bus?  Is that my bus?” 

I’m with you, kid.  I’m with you.

It’s the third day of the eighty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.