Making Life Rosy

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/November 28, 1910

“Unhappiness is a crime,” says Mrs. Hodgson Burnett. “Light the pink lamp and everything will be rosy.” 

That’s a pretty idea about the pink lamp. I wish I had one right here on my desk this minute.

It’s the only lamp to have in the family, when you come right down to it.

But once in a while, Mrs. Burnett, don’t you have a mood when you want to yank the pink shade off the lamp and look at yourself, and your clothes, and your friends, and your books, and your life as it is, without the shade casting a rosy glow over it all? 

I do. I have one right now. 

And it’s all about a woman with a Mona Lisa smile. 

She smiles so continuously, my Mona Lisa friend; sometimes I do wish she’d cry a little or get mad or slam a door or do something really human—just for a change.

I told her my troubles a few minutes ago—bad idea telling your troubles. People never want to hear them, anyway. Now, what I wanted when I told my troubles was not advice and not consolation. I didn’t want to be consoled; I wanted sympathy. 

I wanted my friend to lean across the table and say to me: “Why, your poor soul, what an awful time you are having. How on earth do you stand it at all?” And I would have cried into my coffee cup a second or two, and lo, the whole thing would have passed away like snow before the sunshine—I’d have cried away all my miseries and been ready to laugh all the rest of the day.

What did my friend really do? 

She smiled her Mona Lisa smile and said: “Why do you trouble your heart? These things are all unreal. Why grieve yourself over them at all?” And I felt like throwing the sugar bowl at her head, just to show her that there really was something real in the world besides her theories.

The smile and the rosy shade and the philosophy are the finest things in the world; but, oh, what a relief it is to get good and mad once in a while, say so, and be done with it. 

I’d rather a friend of mine would quarrel with me like a fishwife than smile when she felt like saying something that really wouldn’t look well in print.

There’s nothing in the world so delightful as the woman who smiles—when her heart is in the smile. 

When it isn’t. do you know anything very much more irritating?