Positive Is More Emphatic Than Negative

We had a nice time visiting the two younger grandchildren out of state for their August birthdays.

The younger one, our only granddaughter who was six this past week, this story happened last year. The little boy type doll we gave her that when you squeezed it, it talked. She told me his name and I did not know how to spell it from what she said. It sounded like a Japanese name and so I asked again. She took it over to me and said “Grammie, here is the label, see how it is spelled.” So on the little tag/label, I could see for myself, how this doll was named. She knew in her brilliant mind that is so much older in intelligence than six, how to help Grammie know its name.

My friend and physician assistant Dennis H. Myers told me once long ago, that when things seem bad or one is sad about something to remember from a  song “ you gotta accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr. In-between.” This is and was the name of a popular song way back when I was a ten year old. It was very popular because it stressed being positive over being negative.

This song was written with music by Harold Arlen and words by Johnny Mercer in 1944. It was sort of you might say a psychological message to us in the World War Two years. It was also used in a movie called Here Come the Waves. The Waves were the Navy Branch for women in the service. I had a step cousin who joined the Waves then and everyone thought her so brave for being a Wave. I use to brag about her to my friends, that I had a relative in the Navy’s division of the service. It was rare that we really knew a female who was in the armed forces.

It is a nice slant on psychological sayings, we can find on the Internet about everything there is to see on these sites. Many people post a saying every day from these sites to read and to start the day off with.

Mom always said “if you cannot say something nice, say nothing at all.” Dad use to say, “Today is great, tomorrow will be greater and the future will be even better.” He really believed it and he tried hard to adhere to it because he had some bad financial luck many years earlier and things did not get too much better for a long time. He truly lived by this philosophy, until the minute he passed on.

The accentuate the positive song was used in a movie starring Bing Crosby, a singer/actor and his costar Betty Hutton and an actor popular then in 1945 named Sonny Tufts. It was a pleasant movie mentioned above.

It is a nice line to remember all the time if we get stressed out by something happening to us or something unpleasant said to us or if we are just not feeling up to par some days due to health problems or financial problems or anything else.

When people ballroom dance and get extremely caught up in it and if they are doing competition dancing, they sometimes are so affected with the winning desire, they begin to get negative about their accomplishments or their thinking there are no accomplishments. If they have a good coach teaching them, she or he will try to lift the spirits of the student by saying this is not life threatening, this is just for fun.

There is a saying I read on one of these saying sites. “May you find beauty in life and enjoy many smiles today and most importantly, keep smiling. Life is a beautiful thing and there is so much to see.”

When we first ballroom danced, sometimes it is difficult to figure out which foot you are using. The teachers all have this remark, “use your other left foot.” This would break the ice if you were new and if you were a seasoned dancer and you still were unsure even then, everyone smiled.

There is still in these troubled times, reasons to smile, to be happy and to accentuate the positive. As the old joke goes, the person says, I feel happy, I just looked in the obituary column and I know I am still here, because my name was not there. Someone I know had a tiff with his dad. His dad was hospitalized and an uncle told him, to go see his Dad because you never know what can happen.  This was forty-eight years ago, long before people could look up illnesses on the Internet or buy medical information books to become informed of illnesses. He went and his dad smiled and said to him “it is almost good that I got sick, because you came to see me and that makes me happy.” Everything was now accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative for the both of them. He was glad he came to see his Dad, because he passed on a week later.

I saw a commercial on August eighteenth that was advertising Christmas. Usually on TV, they have items they call specials for Christmas in September. Now it is continuing on to August and September whereas years ago, it was started on the day after Thanksgiving. Now it is September and August and some may like it, others may think it too soon. However, at the December holiday times, people are usually more positive than negative with the holidays approaching. There is a dance saying “hard times require furious dancing.” I guess the word furious in this means serious, not so much furious which means besides yourself or bent out of shape. You sure do not want to be bent out of shape when you dance or even be besides yourself. You do not want to be bent out of shape in your mind or attitude either. You need not get furious, just think happy thoughts.

Let us just think of accentuate all our positives and remember in medical language, it is better for a test to be negative than positive. In life, positive is better and it is positively wonderful to be positive.

I knew a young woman whose Mom and Dad had married in what then was called “an arranged marriage.” It seemed the grandmother of the bride knew the grandmother of the groom and she got the two together and it was not what we called in my time as a blind date. The two met, engaged within a month and married within two more months with a huge wedding of about everybody in the town where they lived. Anyone could come to the wedding, they only needed to dress up modestly, and no low cut dresses for the lady guests and jackets and ties for the men.  The bride and groom it seemed never ‘touched’ before the official ceremony and most of the time, it was said that they learned to love each other. Most of them had many children and they seemed to be compatible and I hear in some religions it may be a feature.

This woman I knew whose parents came together this way were completely devoted to their one and only daughter. They loved her with a passion and at that time, it was a miracle she was born because the mother wore braces on her legs and had suffered from a debilitating illness in those days, it was unbelievable that she had been born and so the love the couple had for this only child was lovely and unusual in the 1930’s.

Unfortunately when she was sixteen, she passed away from an error in an operation and the grief that one has when an only child or when there are ten children is a horror of sadness. This mother and father had just moved into a gorgeous home in a fine neighborhood so this young child could have the benefit of excellent neighborhood schools and environment.

This sadness was unexpected and was an error on the part of the hospital equipment. They had her beauty and lovely soul for a short sixteen years. In fact her burial was on her 16th birthday. Sadness enveloped all her friends and family and even strangers.

The mom was devastated as was the dad. They took every picture they had of her from being a baby to her last school picture and had them enlarged into gallery size portraits and they framed them like they were going to be shown in a museum.

I went there to give my condolences to her folks and the home was overwhelmed to celebrate her life.

The mom and I cried and I told her many anecdotes about her child since I was her best friend. It seemed to soothe the mom a bit and even I was calmed a bit for an hour or so. I loved her and she me as a friend and I have never forgot her. I remember her on every Thanksgiving eve because that is when she passed on, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday.

What everyone stated to her parents and her grandmother accentuated comments in the positive, there was no negative to say about her. She was a sweet girl, always had something nice to say and she was not an envious person. She had what we all had in those days in that neighborhood was almost the same. A funny thing happened; we both were going to the same junior prom. We both shopped with our moms on separate shopping trips for the dress.

It was our first long and fancy dress and when we talked about our recent purchases, we found out that she and I had chosen the same color, called champagne, a light tan color and we both had chosen taffeta and chiffon for the material. The necklines were very similar and we both had shopped on different days at different stores.

Now days people get mad when they see the same type dress at the same affair being worn by people they know or do not know. We thought it cute and thought it showed we had the same taste.

This is a nice memory for me and it is almost 63 years ago this Thanksgiving day in 2013.

Though her life was sadly shortened, she lived it to the fullest for a teen in those days where we did not have a lot of exciting possessions, but we sure loved what we were fortunate to have. She always accentuated the positive and she rarely was negative until the day of the operation that claimed her life when she told her Mom she did not want to go through with it and her mom convinced her to do it because it would not be good for her health. Oddly, the operation took her short years.

She left a legacy of friends and of course parents who loved her.

We accentuated the positive and even though the positive was not in her future, her presence had been happy. Whenever I see a tan colored dress, even though there is no chiffon or taffeta attached to it, I remember Sylvia who was a joy of a friend and a devoted daughter to her handicapped mom and her loving dad.

The quality of her teen life could be emulated by our today’s teens who often do not accentuate the positive and who dream of unbelievable wishes and desires. Of course there are more teens that are like Sylvia and Elita who that someday know everything they wanted will come to them because they are hardworking, intelligent and decent.

So try to always as an adult, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and hopefully all positive happenings will be yours in between.