I’m an optimist (and you should be too)

It takes real courage to be an optimist. Especially these days. But I’m determined. I going to do it for my daughter — the new bride — whose new independence is like a giant wave in what seemed like an endless sea of childhood. How quickly time passed.

How much of it I wasted doing inconsequential things.

Ah. But raising a child. That’s a significant accomplishment — even if it did feel like I was shoehorning motherhood in around the task of making a living. I had help, of course.

My husband — a world-class father — also dashed and scrambled to do what had to be done and still have time to laugh and play with his daughter. He always made time.

Leo Tolstoy’s take in “Anna Karenina“is wrong.

All happy families are not alike. Each one has to find a unique formula for getting through the crap of the modern world without getting too dirty.

A way to stay strong and clean for each other.

The lucky ones reach this point: The day when you have to think up a good toast for your kid’s wedding.

Then try to deliver it without blubbering.

Live long and prosper. Let the force be with you.

Above all, be a cockeyed optimist. Popular culture gives us timeless images that can be unintentionally funny and oddly appropriate.

There’s the 1958 movie version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “South Pacific“

in which nurse Nellie Forbush — unwoke and unenlightened — sings about being “A Cockeyed Optimist” in the middle of World War II.

“When the sky is a bright canary yellow, I forget every cloud I’ve ever seen . . .”

Our skies are usually so blue that a few clouds are welcome. But you get the idea.

I’ve loved that movie since I was a little girl and watched it in the kind of fancy movie theater you don’t see much anymore.

When my daughter was a little girl, we used to watch it with the kind of videocassette player you don’t see much anymore.

Years later, she told me later she always thought Nellie was singing about a “cockeyed octopus.”

Last year, as we were beginning the plans for the wedding of the century, I bought her a big serving platter with a stylized image of an octopus. It’s on her kitchen wall now.

In the house where she will find her own way to cut through the crap of daily life and hold onto something good and pure.

I dare to be an optimist for the sake of the hopes and dreams she and her husband will carry into their new life together. I do it for the children they may have.

They should not inherit a worn-out world.

The generations that came before did plenty to mess things up. To fill remote corners of the ocean with plastic. To fill the atmosphere with poison gases. To fill armies with children and hearts with hatred. To fill the halls of power with hollowed-out men and women. But still.

Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth on Facebook and Twitter. Despite our carnival-mirror politics. Despite popular culture that glorifies violence, cruelty and depravity.

Despite all that, I will not succumb to the opiate of pessimism.

Why?

Because those same generations produced granola-chewing environmentalists and peace-niks. Because that vapid popular culture also produced Ken Burns, whose series on the Vietnam War shows that we have been here before. Right here.

We have been lied to and deceived by our leaders.

We have been deeply divided as a society.

The current president isn’t the first to call free speech unpatriotic. Tricky Dick did it, too.

But we survived. We endured. Along the way, freedom expanded. Compassion grew.

That breathtaking aspiration in our Constitution to “form a more perfect union” was manifest in civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, rights for those with disabilities, environmental protection, species protections and even rights for (some) farm animals.

So this is my toast to the newlyweds. The cockeyed octopuses are correct: It’s a crazy, beautiful world.

Have the courage to enjoy it.