“Have a nice day” has replaced “This is a stickup” as the most frequently spoken four-word sentence in the American language.
Give a waitress a tip and she says, “Have a nice day.” “Have a nice day,” advises the cabdriver collecting his fare. Say, “Fill her up” to the gas pumper and he replies, “Have a nice day.” The other morning after I had paid the bakery woman for a coffee cake and been urged to have a nice day, I asked, “Where do I get one?”
“What?” asked she.
“A nice day,” said I.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You just advised me to have a nice day. The idea appeals to me. I wonder if you know where I can get one.”
The baker had come out of his oven and was watching as if he expected to hear, “This is a stickup.”
“This dude making trouble out here?” he asked.
“Have a nice day,” I told him, departing.
I went to Cromley & Swotts. (“Everything for the man who can afford anything. Bumbershoots, stuffed elephants, decorated rooms and silver barstools our specialties.”)
“May I help you?” asked the clerk.
“I’d like to see something in a nice day.”
“Right this way,” he said, entering the Day department and taking a gray, windy day off the rack. “Our standard model,” he said. “It has seven bills in the morning mail, a two-hour breakdown in the subway, a traffic ticket, a fresh spaghetti-sauce stain on the necktie and a notice that your auto insurance has been canceled.”
“You don’t understand. I said I wanted a nice day.”
He was miffed. “Our days,” he said, “are the nicest in the trade. This is only an average day, I’ll admit, but it is one of the nicest average days made and the wind and grayness are very high quality.”
“I’d rather have something with sunshine in it and no bills at all.”
He said he had just the thing. It was dazzling. “Isn’t that sunshine splendidly woven?” he asked. “And look. Not a bill anywhere in it.”
“I like it.”
“You’ve seen nothing yet,” he went on. “Look, it has a trip to the ball park where the home team loses by a score of 12 to 1. The air conditioning at home breaks down and when you get back it is 110 degrees in your house and the telephone is ringing and—beautiful detailed workmanship here—your children are calling for you to wire $75 immediately.”
“It’s a nice enough day,” I said. “But not really a nice day. What do you have with flowers in it and a luscious fat check nobody had been expecting and a smile from a charming woman?”
“Our special,” he said, taking down a day embroidered with wild roses and popcorn. “It comes complete with this remarkably lovely woman in this quite exclusive restaurant and a luncheon bill for $68. And here is a delightful surprise. At the bus stop outside the restaurant door, as you leave you run into your wife.”
“And I suppose, to cap it off, the dog is run over by a truck just at dinnertime,” I said.
“Nothing that elegant,” he demurred. “The cat comes in with a dead bird in its jaws.”
It wasn’t my idea of a nice day. “For one thing, there isn’t any music,” I complained.
“Music,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so? Look at this.” He took down a lovely quiet Saturday. Delicious breakfast. Strains of Haydn on the phonograph wafted through the morning. “And in the afternoon,” he said, “notice the children coming to visit with their electric trumpets, amplified drums and brand-new rock records.”
The whole lower half of the day pulsated with thunderous blare and roar. “Note the magnificent headache with which it ends,” he urged, “right after the magnificent quarrel with the neighbors.”
“Don’t you have just an ordinary, nice, quiet day?”
“Something with a funeral, perhaps?”
“Nice! Nice! I want a nice day! Not a nice day for a funeral! What kind of junk are you trying to sell here?”
The manager appeared with armed men in uniform. “Is there some problem?”
“He doesn’t like our nice-day selection,” said the clerk.
“Really?” said the manager. “Was there something particular you had in mind?”
“Just a plain, ordinary, sweet, uneventful, serene, inexpensive, old-fashioned nice day with no bills, no dead birds and a victory for the home team.”
The manager smiled through veils of contempt. “They don’t make them anymore,” he said. “Can we show you something in a stuffed elephant?”
I walked out. “Have a nice day,” said the manager.
Hand an American a problem and he immediately takes it to court. Half the population over the age of thirty is at law because it lacks the ingenuity to solve such humdrum problems as how to live with somebody who snores or dislikes your taste in television, and how to divide up the dishes, the children, the house and the jewelry before plodding on into middle age. As a result, these people are often well advanced toward senility before the law has straightened out their problems for them. Everybody knows some aging bankrupt who got that way because he and his former wife didn’t think they could solve the problem of what to do on Saturday night without hiring lawyers.
—The Courts of First Resort
Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
—Honestly
One development in the American pursuit of happiness is the feelgood movement. The country is swarming with swamis from Asia, quacks from California and evangelists of sexual joy, narcotic paradise, communal contentment and dining ecstasy. My misgivings about feelgoodness are heightened by the origins of its preachers. Asia, California and the psychological sciences do not have an impressive record at making people feel good. In Asia nobody has felt good for centuries.
The feelgoodists are heretics who have turned the pursuit of happiness into a search for the endless smile, the total serenity, the complete fulfillment of self, the supreme orgasm and the perfect doughnut. Society becomes a service station to supply fuel and spark plugs for easy motoring from womb to tomb. Just thinking about it makes you feel bad.
—The Pursuit of Unhappiness