Learning to Speak Joy

A former language teacher’s struggle for fluency

It’s my middle name.

Not a punchline to a joke, but legally. Karen Joy Brown, or Karen Joy Ketner as it appeared on my 1971 birth certificate from Abington, Pennsylvania, fifty years before my first name became synonymous with dangerously entitled white women.

I struggle to imagine my incredibly conservative Philadelphia and Amish farm country born parents taking the stiff paper of the official certificate in hand, looking deeply into each other’s exhausted and wonder-filled eyes to unanimously agree on the rather free-spirited choice.

It’s true that my mother’s college roommate’s name was Hope, with a sister named Faith, which recalls a strong biblical reference to the three things that remain– faith, hope, and love. Even if love wins out as the “the greatest of these,” it would have taken a full-blown hippie couple from Los Angeles or San Francisco to name their child that.

Was Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World playing in the waiting room where my father paced in his Navy-issued quilted coat, pulling cigarette after cigarette out of the blue, crinkling True pack at the bottom of one of its deep pockets? If it was, did he hum along, mumbling some of the outrageous lyrics in spite of himself? I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the war, make sweet love to you.

I wonder if the sheer shock from discovering that he now had three daughters rather than the shy, adorable four-year-old close-lipped smiling in the photo in his wallet and the strapping, baby boy he expected to welcome one day into the Semper Fi crew of officers he saw once a month on reserve duty. Twins, I picture him saying out loud in a drawn-out exhale of white smoke before crushing the stub into yet another butt piled in the silver ashtray next to an orange naugahyde couch.

It’s not a stretch to picture the cute combination of Kimberly and Karen coming to mind upon seeing two impossibly small, sweet-potato babies nestled into the crook of my mother’s tired arms under her tousled, strawberry-blond bob as she smiled distractedly coming out of a twilight-sleep daze. Slightly modern names, but nothing too unexpected.

If Marcia Ann was first, and then Kimberly Beth, why Karen Joy? Did they see something special in the runt that went straight into an incubator to keep her feathery four pounds warm enough to live through the next day, to get strong enough to take to the bottle’s formula and return to her womb companion in a double bassinet?

How would they have known about the child-like wonder and silliness that remain in my 54 year old, silvering-fox self after the challenges of divorce, raising a foster-adopted daughter, and surviving decades of a public education teachers’ poverty wages through Covid, wildfires, and the stillborn dreams of a middle-aged singer songwriter?

I strongly consider the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy that gave me permission to laugh uncontrollably for ten minutes straight at the dinner table, unintentionally snorting milk out my nose because of some word uttered by Kim with just the right inflection to make me lose my five- year-old shit.

Once the word joy gets recorded in a Vital Statistics document associated with your personhood, what other path is possible besides learning to fling your arms wildly, beating your own chest while singing High ho silverware, Tonto lost his underwear poolside for your older swim team buddies daring you to do it for a package of Swedish Fish from the snack bar?

I mostly question when the bubbly adjective started to settle and lose its fizz. An 8mm home film projector like the one my father bought to show the footage he recorded on the playground or at softball games rattles like a sewing machine in my mind with its comforting, rhythmic ticking. He loved replaying the clip where I slipped down the backyard slide and landed with a bounce on my diaper-padded butt, blue and red plastic reels spinning forwards then backwards in a hilarious feat of modern technology.

But my frames show a boisterous, curious, fun-loving girl practicing how to simmer down to please the patriarchy. How to lower her voice to a reasonable level, to shrivel in shame for asking what about me? when her mother took her sister shopping without her at Boscov’s to get a new pair of Jordache jeans. Or not even cry when she hit her knee on the coffee table so hard she saw stars, hoping to impress her father.

On the celluloid strip running in my mind, I see a little girl in awe of the natural world, of movement; of blue eyeshadow and her mother’s kelly-green velour robe that made her feel like a movie star when she put it on, hem dragging behind in a glorious train. With an impotent series of switch clicks, I try to stop at the precise moment she traded all that in for a little attention and praise in exchange for becoming pathologically helpful and swallowing any unacceptable feeling, need, or want that might cause trouble.

Was it in high school when the move to Silicon Valley with its python pressures squeezed any of the scant remaining love from her parents’ marriage to death? When bottomless glasses of scotch in front of the TV became the religious litany required to keep her father on the Highway 280 hamster wheel to Memorex and back to Almaden? Was it because she saw no other choice but to commit to her own military mission, keeping watch over the simmering arguments before they turned into hideous scuffles in the narrow, tract home hallway, ending in the pitiful image of her mother pinned to a wall by the throat in the furry pink robe from last year’s Christmas?

Joy became something solemn and serious inside her then. The film’s plot shifts, and scene after scene at the local evangelical megachurch take precedence. She kneels, sings, lifts her hands in worship, pours over testaments in the early hours before class. She accepts her boyfriend’s challenge to go on a mission trip to Mexico, and discovers a love of language learning and singing in a culture that values family and togetherness in a way she longs for in an unconscious ache.

Thank God for the delicious new words, and for singing. Joy settles quietly there, happy to have found room again in the narrow confines allowed inside its teenage host. It understands that in order to survive there, it must prove to be useful. To be inspirational and uplifting for others. No more climbing willow trees to play clarinet for the birds, no more whirling on the wide front lawn until falling down in a giggling, dizzy haze.

Joy wonders then, will it ever get to spread its arms wide and howl again? Will it always have to serve some greater solemn, practical purpose in whatever years that may be left?

I flip the imaginary projector’s power switch and let it cool in the dark of this morning’s 5:30am writing ritual on my computer. It took a long time to dig up that canister from the heart’s warehouse, but now I remember where it all started. How I lost my namesake. How I forgot the language of joy in the grammar rules of necessity and pain. How finally, during the last years of teaching high school Spanish, I started to remember. How I found the courage to live up to the unwitting blessing given in my middle name.

Enjoy 16 pocket-sized poems bringing small but certain happiness based on merchandise from a middle-aged shopgirl’s year working at the Luminarium gift shop. “A Luminous Year,” by Karen Joy Brown.